Clarifications on this site
Thank you all for the comments! We appreciate the praise for the design but the praise really should go to Wordpress and the great selection of templates available. This is just an ‘off-the-shelf’ template customized a little bit.
We have also seen some confusion about how this website will be used and what you, as a reader, need to do to keep up with it.
First, this website fully replaces the previous status.dreamhost.com page. All previous issues have been resolved and have not been migrated into this interface. All future posts will go into this interface and only here. This is hosted off of our main network to ensure you will always have access to it. There are potential failures of our system that are beyond our control, such as the Los Angeles power outage 6 months ago, and building in fault tolerance is the best way to handle the unforseen.
Second, this new version of the website was partially spurred by customer requests for us to publish more information about changes we make to our servers, software, and network. We typically only send out official system announcements about major changes that are likely to affect a large pool of our customers. Also, we have only posted outages to the previous Emergency Status Page that would adversely affect your ability as a customer to access our primary method of contact (our announcement system). This website will now take over that Emergency Status Page role as well as provide a way for those of you interested in more information about system changes to hear about them. We expect a lot more information to be posted here than we have ever previously made available. It may take some time for us to fully integrate this new site into our procedures but that is the goal!
How does this thing work?
All posts will show up on this main page as well as in the main RSS feed. You do NOT need to click around the categories to see if there is something hidden under one of them. Also, the categories themselves are hierarchical and any ‘higher’ category automatically includes anything ‘below’ it. The hierarchy is visually demonstrated by the indenting of the category names and their positions.
The categories and their associated RSS feeds are provided as a convenience for those of you who do not want to see the information posted here in its entirety. For instance, you may want to see all of the ‘System Outages’ posts, but only the ‘Email Changes’ under the ‘System Changes’ category. To accomplish that you would subscribe to the ‘System Outages’ rss feed (which includes all of the categories below it!), and the ‘Email Changes’ rss feed. You could also just keep bookmarks of those category pages and check them regularly. The categories and associated rss feeds are set up in a hierarchy to provide you with as much flexibility in fine-tuning your information access as possible.
The current layout of categories is not set in stone. We may make changes in the future based on your feedback. The whole point of this website is to provide you with the information you want most as conveniently as possible.
If you have additional questions post them in the comments, and I will address them for you.
.
April 17th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I know I’ve been one of the people pointing out that the old systems weren’t being used the way they used to. The lack of info in increase in downtime was disheartening.
I am VERY happy to see this new system. I would much rather hear “we’re going to install something and it may cause downtime” than have my sites go down and not know what’s going on or get a response for days, just to hear it was a security fix gone funky.
Again, much praise to the whole DH team!111!!!
April 17th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
HAY THAT’S AWESOME!!1
now get my site back online.
April 17th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Excellent. Great to see the improved outage website. After all, it’s important to have a fully functioning Wordpress powered outage site - so we have something to read when our own sites suffer yet another outage.
Don’t get me wrong - Wordpress is good, more details, better.. However a bit more time spent diagnosing why the recent spate of outages have become so frequent and less time making the outage page “pretty” might come across better.
April 17th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
now would be nice
April 17th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Hello,
Firstly, A power outage is far from an excuse, we are all paying costumers and we expect no less than an operation UPS system. It is a basic standart around the world regarding Data-Centers.
Secondly, does a DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) plan exists in case of a disaster?
April 17th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
I have to agree. It’s nice to have this status page, but the outages lately have been extremely frustrated…especially from a new customer. I’ve had my sites down 3 times over the last 3 weeks! Fix the problem and quit giving lame answers like todays “the server was rebooted”!
April 17th, 2006 at 6:13 pm
QFT.
Get on it, fellas. Another customer here about to walk…
April 17th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
Um, what’s the deal? My site is still down. Not good as I’m pushing some serious PR this week and this looks very VERY bad.
April 17th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
I have been a customer for less than a month and am considering leaving. I paid a years up front. This is just not acceptable.
April 17th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
Add me to the list of people with website trouble, though I can confirm that my website is actually up but the database powering my blog is down. Same for you, Bwana. I took a guess that you were running Wordpress and had the readme.html page in your root directory. I could get to that page just fine, but the rest of your site won’t load because the database is down. It looks like the database outage (at least mine) was reported over an hour ago and has already been confirmed (check your panel’s Contact Support tab to see), so hopefully they’ll have the situation resolved soon.
In the meantime, if you’re running a database-heavy site that won’t load, try visiting one of your static HTML pages. If that loads, consider throwing up a temporary static /index.html (and rename any /index.php page you might have) to let your visitors know your host is having database issues.
April 17th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
Uh yeah, put me on the list of sites having problems. It was down a couple minutes ago… now its up again. What is going on here? A note to everyone else, if you haven’t backed up your site and its database then this is a good time to do it… who knows what could happen.
April 17th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
“1 hour 10 mins ago: Outage verified: We are actively looking into resolving it.”
Actively? Really?
These outages are far, far too frequent.
April 17th, 2006 at 7:45 pm
Atleast the downtime gives me a chance to shop for a new host. oh and field emails from my not so happy customers.
April 17th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
Yep, the database my site depends on is out too. Site is down. How come its not reported here or on the announcements page in my panel ?
April 17th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
I was aware of the static/dynamic difference Nick, thanks. It would also help if I could access the panel, but I can’t.
Not a happy customer at the moment.
April 17th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
.
My Dreamhost Mysql database is down right now!!!!!!!!!!!!!
.
April 17th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
…And soon as I post the above reply, the panel page comes back…
April 17th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
looks like I’m not the only blogger with sql database problem.
sigh.
April 17th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
w00t, my db’s back online. Hope it stays that way
April 17th, 2006 at 8:11 pm
I have been a customer for a little over a week, and this is the 2nd outage I have experienced. As stated several times above, my databases are not working. It’s been almost an hour of downtime…
Unhappy customer +1
April 17th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
You might want to consider that the bookmark instruction at the top of the page will bookmark an entry and not the website top if just viewing an entry. That could potentially confuse some folks who bookmarked an archive entry and thought they were getting the latest entry.
April 17th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
All fixed here for me. See you same time next week, guys?
April 17th, 2006 at 8:54 pm
my mysql database is down now too. no message anywhere. ?
April 17th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
until they acknowledge servers are actually down? Who’s sleeping on the job? This is ridiculous.
April 17th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
I love the idea of publishing InterMapper graphics of servers… probably never happen though. We use it to monitor our colocations - it’s (for a better term) da-bomb. Uptime, outage tracking, alerts, and so much other goodness… built on a mac and ported to windows for you whiners…
April 17th, 2006 at 9:41 pm
Oh, and just to be clear - I don’t work for DH… I just pay them to host my sites (most of the time
)
April 17th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
Oh man, today was brutal. First thing Monday morning and every single client site is down. All 19 of them. OUCH!
I am very good at soothing clients and explaining that “sometimes, even the best Bentley gets a flat tire”, but I could tell they are NOT buying it. This is simply too much downtime. It’s got to be fixed. Moving is so so painful, but I’m at the verge of having to do it. Please Dreamhost, don’t make me leave.
April 17th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
I’ve been a customer for years now, and have never experienced better service than with Dreamhost. I agree the outages have been frequent of late, but DH has never let me down in the long run.
April 18th, 2006 at 2:44 am
so that’s why my DB not working at the other day…
I have to reset the setting…
now It goes fine…
btw yeah… DH is down all the time… what’s wrong actually?
I’ve been sign up month a go… got 2 downtime in a month…
April 18th, 2006 at 6:11 am
my site is STILL not working!
April 18th, 2006 at 7:39 am
[off-topic]
Kim, I just went to your website and was able to browse it just fine.
April 18th, 2006 at 9:32 am
This is why I love DreamHost. They recognize that there’s a need to improve communication AND THEY DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Has there been unusually high downtime lately? Yes. Are some people PO’d and going to switch to another host? Probably. But that’s okay. Because the faithful among us will be able to read this frequently (hopefully) updated blog and see exactly what’s going on. I challenge you to find another host that will do that.
April 18th, 2006 at 9:37 am
My site is down. The last test at 1 hour ago…
April 18th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
woot all my stuff is back online.
up until last night no one had truly helped
me at all, then someone finally explained
a little bit about what was going on.
i don’t want to get everyone confused, my
problems had nothign to do witht he power
outages, it was all about other users on
the same server (probably stupid script
kiddies) getting DDOS’d like every day.
best of luck to everyone
April 18th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
p.s. the font aliasing on this blog really hurts my eyes
April 18th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
This is why I love DreamHost, too. When my last host had trouble, I’d submit a support ticket, then I’d wait a few hours or a few days only to get a response like “You must be going crazy. It works fine for us.” or “Our logs show that nobody has tried to access the page, so your firewall must be blocking you.” Then after another day or two, it would magically start working again. The last time my site went down, they said, “You must have given your password away because someone with a Kuwait IP address has deleted most of your files.” So, I told them to not renew me and switched to DreamHost. Shortly thereafter, I got a series of emails from my old host saying 1) We were severly hacked. 2) We’re working on restoring backup files. 3) We’ve gone bankrupt. 4) We’ve been bought out. 5) Welcome to your new host. Sorry we can’t recover any files from your old host. Talk to them about that.
So DreamHost, thank you for communicating!! (And not telling me I’m some crazy, firewall-blocked, password-giver-outer.)
April 18th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Down again. 4 times in 3 weeks. This SUCKS!
April 18th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
This is infuriating. First time customer, two weeks in and we’ve had so many extended outages I can’t even believe it.
For the record we are on the “fletcher” server I believe.
April 18th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
Recently (over the past few days, aside from the obvious downtime) my site has been EXTREMELY slow to access. I mean, it takes minutes to load 3 images at times. I am on a decent connection, and all other websites work normally. I would assume bad routing, but the main dreamhost site will go through relatively quickly. Is there a known explanation for this? Should I file a support ticket or something? I really want to get this speed issue resolved.
I love the idea of this blog, and I’m hoping it helps resolve lots of issues… and I’m confident that it will.
April 19th, 2006 at 1:20 am
For some of you voicing your 2 cents about reliability: This doesn’t apply to you.
For those of you who are trying to send a message here to administrators about problems. DON’T DO IT HERE. There is a WEB PANEL with a SUPPORT SECTION for things like that.
Secondly. Guys… if this is such an offsite blog, shouldn’t you be using external nameservers as well?
You know, just in case? :).
(Note: If all three of your nameservers are in totally unique datacenters and preferably states as well, then ignore this comment.)
April 19th, 2006 at 9:50 am
All of you that are having problems, please submit a support ticket. What is being written here WILL NOT help your problem get resolved faster.
And to Jason, we do plan to change the nameservers for this domain at some point. Our secondary nameserver is geographically separated from the primary and tertiary but for full fault tolerance we should remove our own systems from the equation as much as possible!
I’m closing the comments on this post now!