Today, Dreamhost decided to add a captcha system at the server usage web page, so no more automated adjustment of CPU/Memory settings is possible.
It's quite obvious that Dreamhost noticed there were some tools around there using smart decisions on server usage, and that wasn't helping their incomes, and adding this human-detection system was the easiest way to stop those tools. In my opinion, there are other solutions, like avoiding changing settings with certain frecuency, or even offering an API to use Vserver calls funcionality.
That captcha it's not that hard to defeat with some programming, as the text always appear in the same location, same number of chars, no rotation,... but it's not a matter of defeating the captcha to run again the scripts, it's a matter of wasting the time to do it, as changing the captcha format or design it's just a matter of a few lines of code and minutes. So Dreamhost in any case would readapt their captcha to avoid any circumvention of it.
Dreamhost must consider his customers are not happy with wasting resources (and serious money) and nor are happy with offering nasty "500 Internal Server Error" to their visitors.
But as always, we'll have to take what Dreamhost allows us and let us do.
The good news it's vpsreboot still works, no captcha (yet).
Time to create other tools...
That sucks Antonio… as I told you, maybe we could talk to them instead of just posting it over here, what do you think? I’ve already seen a few 500 Internal Server Error messages since vpsadjust stopped working…
Rafael, I know the feeling, but I’m hopeless as for sure they are not going to change the captcha.
And another user of vpsadjust already complained at support and got nothing.
I even submitted a suggestion to add API support to that page so they could control the number of requests and allow us to automate our PS configuration, but strangely my suggestion is gone. I dont know if it ever really got registered, as that page hardly works in my browsers.
My DH PS panel doesn’t seem to have that captcha. Did they they it off?
Hey! Mine neither and I just ran vpsadjust again and it works!!
Then… what’s going on here?
By the way… thank you very much Decio!
I love this graph (and the dollars I’m saving!):
Bah! Captcha is back!
Hi!
They add captha to your panel when they detect the trick. If you sign up today and don’t cheat, they wont add the captcha. Yes, sometimes they do think.
Yeah, I agree it’s a pretty fair system… although I don’t agree with the concept of “cheating”, I don’t think what vpsadjust did was cheating, just “smart usage”
Forget about Dreamhost PS or you’ll get more and more poor each day.
Rent a dedicated server! You can get one cheaper than the PS. Just search in for unmanaged servers in German as I did, or in the UK.
Thanks for the tip IB, I will!