To Dreamhost… I love you guys (in a manly sort of way, of course) but perception is 9/10ths of reality. If I can’t access my website it’s your fault, if I can, I rule. Nobody’s perfect. You’re all right by me.

To Jeremy: Believe me we know that any system change, even ones that seem very minor, can cause unexpected problems. We are only very slowly migrating to Apache 2 currently even as we get chastised by some customers wondering why we’re using technology from the last century (ie Apache 1). We must balance the need for ever-enhanced functionality along with the demands of system stability. Each web host has to balance their priorities in the way they feel best serves their customer base in the long-term.

To Paulo: Pair provides a very good service and we have always had and continue to have a lot of respect for them. Their hosting plans are not the same as ours, of course. I would like to do what I can to reassure you about our service so I would appreciate it if you could submit yet another support message asking to be directed to me. Someone will pass it along to me and I can look into your specific situation.

And, by the way, folks who have “critical” systems will tell you that changes introduce potential flaws so, yes, making these kinds of changes do have the POTENTIAL to cause downtime (there is a good reason many people are running with old versions of Apache)

Support doesn’t care nor does customer service care that I have lost integrity with my current clients. Despite pointing out my obvious frustrations in my support requests I have not been reassured that these outages are behind us, given a small refund for the month, or anything a respectable business would provide their customers when they continue to provide sub-par service.

My posting here is not a ploy to get my problems solved. It is to try and start a dialog with people outside of support and vent frustrations from my perspective as a customer. When my web sites (and client web sites) are down and I come to a newly redesigned status page it does not make me feel good.

Do you want me to forward you all of the support emails I have? The damn traceroutes I had to perform per the request of support who took over 10 hours to respond to any of my requests?

Frankly during a major outage the discussion boards are of not much help. When you are paying for the most expensive shared hosting plan DH offers, experience random downtimes since the account was opened, then 4 major outages in one week without much reassurance that the problems are going to be fixed long term, things just don’t sit right for people paying way to much for what is turning into shoddy uptime and less than stellar help.

In 6+ years are Pair Networks I had less than 5 hours of downtime. Combines. 2 of that was due to my server being migrated to a new facility. I am paying the same at DH as I did with Pair.

I’m not doubting the validity of what is being reported here. The problem is with perception. Most service issues do not affect the majority of users but to you, as a user, ANY service outage is a major problem. A big part of our support team’s job is to try to figure out the scope of a reported problem so it can be addressed properly. I recommended the discussion boards because they are an already public place where a community of our own users has been helping people identify and even resolve problems for awhile. It makes the most sense to concentrate this activity into as few spots as possible so everyone gets the most out of it. I assume you’re all not commenting here just for the fun of it!

We’re not merely looking for pats on the back in these comments, but rather related information that may help address issues or help identify if we are working on the right kinds of improvements. I have been reading the comments related to downtime posted here but without more specific information (like a proper support request would provide) or more details there is not much that can be done about it. You may assume that if you are experiencing a service problem that all of our customers are as well, but that is very rarely the case.

It would be most useful to us if you would submit a support request detailing the outages you have seen so we can work to resolve them. If you have previously submitted a request and have not gotten a satisfactory response, I apologize for that and ask that you submit again mentioning that you did not get a satisfactory response before.

Thanks for your input - it should be noted that this is a big improvement over the previous outage advisory page - it’s also good to see improvements being communicated.

I’ve had an account for just under a year and I’ve noticed that stability and reliability have taken a big nose dive over the last month. I’ve experienced more outages in the last few weeks than in the prior number of months. I’ve just noted that yet another outage occurred due to a configuration screw-up with one of the storage systems.

I think dreamhost would benefit from taking on board some of the feedback this website now gives, rather than simply suggesting we complain or comment elsewhere.

Regarding the outages you may have experienced, you can get more information from other customers of ours on our public customer discussion boards. By talking to others you can figure out if the problem is something specific to your service or something that is affecting a larger number of people. We always must focus our efforts on the more general issues first and sometimes that means a more specific issue may not be addressed as quickly as we would like. Also any extra information you can include with your support request is going to be helpful in addressing the problem as quickly as possible.

I’m taking the time to respond to your comments here to make it clear that we do read them and to mention again that posting here is not likely to help your problems get resolved any faster.

Lot’s of people rely on DH for their businesses (like I myself) and 4 major outages in one month is ridiculous. Support doesn’t seem to care and nothing is being done on the customer service front to help ease these frustrations. If DH is spending time playing with WordPress instead of fixing its infrastructure you are going to lose a lot of business.