The Network is Still Bad
Posted (September 12th, 2006 at 11:45 am PST) by JoshAside from early indications that the router hardware swap was successful last night it seems today that things are depressingly close to the way they were before.
While core01 is running on all new hardware (except power cables and power supply) it was not upgraded. Unfortunately while configuring the new chassis with the Sup720 supervisor and improved blades and extra “high speed” fan tray, we ran into a problem.
The router complained that the power supplies we have (1300W, 27amp) are not “compatible” with the new fan tray. This isn’t to say that they can’t power it, just that somewhere a version or model number is incompatible.
We already knew that we’d need 2500W to power the new supervisor and fan tray, and we’d spoken to cisco techs about running our two 1300W power supplies in cumulative mode for now which basically makes them output 2600W worth of power. They said that should work fine. We spoke to our Cisco network engineer yesterday and he said it should work fine. Cisco’s documentation clearly says:
With insertion of equal-wattage power supplies in cumulative mode:
The system power is the combined power capability of both supplies.
So, it definitely seems that it’s a false limitation somewhere that would be solved by getting two 2500W powersupplies. These are already on their way and scheduled to arrive tomorrow.
The upshot of this is we’ll be having another network maintenance window tomorrow, September 13th, at 10pm PDT.
(Just to get everybody on the same page.. essentially ALL performance and stability problems experienced over the last months have been due to these internal network problems. High web and mail server loads are due to the lag they’re getting when NFS mounting the file system from our file servers. This causes slow/flakey performance across the board. It’s actually not a matter of overloaded servers or anything like that, it’s all this very weird network problem that has had us and Cisco stumped. We’ve now completely replaced all the related physical networking gear and it’s still happening. Cisco support and network consultants have been unable to find any problems with our configuration or hardware and have no explanation as to why things are still behaving like they are. So we’re now upgrading the core routers to be 8 times more powerful.)
Also, we’ve decided to start allowing comments on this blog.. remember the note at the top though: Posting in the comments here WILL NOT help you get your problem resolved faster.
We hope it will at least help foster some better communication related to events we post here.
194 Responses to “The Network is Still Bad”
Thanks for the update. I hope this gets sorted soon!
We’re all rooting for ya to get these problems fixed once and for all - thanks for keeping us updated.
It’s pretty rough when even “THE guys” (CISCO) gives you inaccurate information. Hopefully this last bit of work will finally stabilize the network, and then you all can spend your time yelling at CISCO and posting entertaining blogs about it.
Let’s hope all the troubles will be gone soon!
How long do you expect the network to be down tomorrow?
Don’t you just love technology when it presents a problem that is difficult to nail down?
I’ve just redesigned my site and it went live a few days ago. Very bad timing for this to be happening as I’m promoting the site and hoping to get visitors… They will no doubt be put off by the slowness.
Also have an event scheduled for the 23rd, where visitors to my site will be able to listen to a live broadcast preview of my new album tracks. While that’s on a separate server entirely, I still need to get my visitors to it.
Let’s hope all goes well with this next bit of maintenance!
Wow, and I thought I had problems with Tech support for my little computers at home. I guess it goes to show that even businesses get crappy advice just like the little guys in the home market.
I hope you guys can get this sorted out soon. Fortunately my websites and my clients’ websites have not suffered too much with all of this mess. Thank you!
Thanks for keeping us updated, I do appreciate it.
Your openness about the problem is appreciated, along with the quick response time to support issues.
Thanks!
Good luck getting that sorted, and I really appreciate you guys giving such detailed updates on server problems; most other hosts would have left me in the dark, until the slowness got fixed, if it ever did. I only signed up last Friday and was a bit worried about the speed, so in a way I’m actually glad that it’s hardware problems 
Just here to give my support & thanks as well. I know you guys wouldn’t have wished for any of these problems to ensue in a million years! It’s a shame, but I’m confident you’ll pull through and I for one will stick it out. Thanks for all your late nights and consistent communication. xo
It’s great to have good information about the updates and maintenance and all that, but I think it would be better if you could provide some kind of an announcement list for the critical stuff. That is downtime and that kind of information.
I have to say I’d expect more from CISCO, but nevermind. However technology is all about learning. The chances are you won’t make the same mistake twice! I have to say that although the recent problems have been a bit annoying, it’s countered by the consistent blog updates. I feel better when I know “what” is wrong rather than finding out “something” is broken.
The frequent updates are very very useful and also assume that we have technical knowledge which is good
Really comprehensive explanation. In the few past days I was sending mails to support, at least once a day. They were always very patient explaining me what the problems are. I’m glad you have such good communication with your clients. Just keep up the good work, and of course get the job done 
Amazing. More issues with dreamhost service. It’s been months of shit service. Why don’t you winners spend less time writing your blog posts and spend more time fixing the network. This is the worst hosting experience I’ve ever had. These troubles won’t go away, the problem is the DH staff has over sold and is completely incompetent. Thanks for the great service. YEAH - Can’t wait til my contract expires.
Well, contrary to JP’s carping, I don’t have plans to ditch y’all anytime soon. I frankly find your service, in every other way, exemplary and I am actually grateful that you are being so open about these internal netowork issues — transparency like this feels like a luxury.
Good luck with this next network maintenance!
THIS IS 100% DREAMHOST’S FAULT
Passing the bucket is not a professional response to a problem. Like any other project/business/institution, DH should have had a protocol in place should a down-time problem arise. It’s called risk management. Since reasonable problems can occur, I patiently waited after the Monday maintenance to redirect my customers - almost a week delay! The result is that this morning, Tuesday, I lost 3 business opportunities because DH led me to trust that my website would be up and running after their Monday upgrade/maintenance. Today, Tuesday, it took 2 hours for DH to respond to my SITE DOWN notice and I received no accountability. Accountability means to shoulder responsibility with actions from discounts, credits to financial, service offers. I have been told there is no timeframe for my website to be UP. I regret paying 1 year in advance since I have no leverage.
I am deeply disappointed with DH and actively seeking an alternative and requesting a full refund. Hosting.com has a 99.9% Up-time guarantee and I will try and verify this.
This will sound like a cliche, but my brother lives down in Austin, TX. I’m also pretty sure he has almost every Cisco certification available. He’s one of the few guys in the US with enough certifications to route Internet traffic all over the world, That is in fact what he does for a living. He might be able to find the problem if you wish to contact him.
I appreciate you guys and the problems you have had. I have been a customer for over four years and have always been happy with your service. These bumps in the road have not shaken my confidence. I also have total confidence in CISCO and I know they will come through eventually. I have a large amount of CISCO gear here and, while there have been occasional problems that have popped up, the service has been very good. Let me know if you want me to ask some of my CCIE friends to look into things for you.
Evidently some customers don’t actually pay attention to the explanation and just like to gripe with no real foundation in reality.
Here’s hoping you get these things fixed. And configuring the PSs like this will give you a little more redundancy as either one will be able to handle things on its own should the other fail.
Thanks DreamHost for keeping us in the loop. It certainly makes me feel better knowing that you know there is a problem (though I can’t say that it has affected me much)
It would have been nice if Dreamhost had said from the beginning that the router upgrade wasn’t completed as planned. It seems a bit strange to have said that everything was fine and then later say that things weren’t done the way they were supposed to have been.
what’s in a name?
Communication is all. If I see a spinning “ajax loading” symbol I wonder WTF is going on …. if I see an update here, I *shrug* and just know that we all have problems.
Good luck guys. You have my sympathy, and my continued custom. Just remember that the negative feedback is the one that shouts loudest :o)
Please do try and find space to keep us updated … and hey! find a way to help out us old (Brit) geezers who can’t convert PST to GMT to BST ;o)
Come on guys, crack those Cisco routers open and SOLDER!!
You’ll be the happy cisco-router-soldering-crew from then on 
Thanks for the updates, and good luck resolving them… Things like this make me feel very happy customer
ROCK ON!
In spite of all the problems, I think you guys are doing one hell of a job. Being fair to the users and not hiding problems is exactly what I was looking for in a hosting company. Good luck with all your work, it’s really appreciated.
Thanks for keeping us in the loop. You guys are 10 times better than Woolnet. It often took days just ot get a responmse or find out what was up. With you guys I at least get a response in an hour or two. Many times quicker. Thanks again for keeping us updated.
I have to agree with cricket on this one. I can understand if you have problems–it happens to the best of us–but you should feel lucky to have the customers who haven’t left you yet. Some kind of discount/rebate/whatever would be one way to express your gratitude for our faith in you. And keep up with the updates! It’s quite clear that the problem you are having now has been going on for awhile, so it would have been helpful to know earlier on that you were aware of it. Probably would have saved you a few support tickets, too.
I understand your frustration and appreciate your hard work at tackling the problem. Having said that though, I can’t wait to much longer to have stable websites. I have lost customers, search engine rankings, link exchanges have been pulled, and lost I dont know how much money. If things are not resolved soon then no matter how much I like dreamhost I will be forced to move to another host.
Anonymous @ 1:13 pm
Being fair to the users and not hiding problems is exactly what I was looking for in a hosting company.
I like the whole not-hiding-problems thing, too, but where do you see fairness to users? Customer A and customer B pay the same for services, but customer B, whose email is down or uselessly slow for many days per month, or whose website is inaccessible too often, etc. is getting far less for his money. And while it’s true that 99.999% uptime costs (and should cost) more than $9.95/month, I’d guess it’s also true (all evidence here to the contrary - this is a temporary phenomenon) that there’s not really a market for an “only works half the time” web service. I’d consider what’s being delivered to customer B to be worth nothing, rather than five bucks a month.
So, I see the openess, but where’s the fairness? Or did you mean “being fair to the users by not hiding problems”? In which case, um, never mind.
Dreamhost having problems? Wow, this is unusual…..
Ditto to Cricket and Brandy. I’m paying for shared hosting, therefore I expect short downtimes. On the other hand, I do expect fair compensation for extraordinary loss of business. Just as you lose business when your website is down, so do we lose business ($$$) when ours is down. I love the panel admin, extra features, and 24/7 email support (except for the time it takes to respond), but the uptime has really screwed the pooch since I’ve been a member. Fortunately, I haven’t been one for long, so I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.
I’m just glad I’m not in your situation. Best of luck.
I have to say, I’ve been very tolerant of all the technical issues over the last few months but it’s seeming more and more like dreamhost is simply counting on the good will of their customers. At this point, I’d really like a refund or a credit for a month of service! This has gone on long enoug that I’ve actually been pricing hosting plans at other companies.
Even though it’s depressing to log into bloglines and see 7 new posts from Dreamhost status, I can grit my teeth and say this feed is better than having nothing. I don’t know if every host has the same problems and you’re just transparent or if these issues are unique to you, but this status site (especially now that it’s two way) means that I’ll suck it up for the next two months and believe that improvement is on the way.
That said, I’m with those above - some sort of compensation is definitely due. I’m getting awfully embarassed everytime I send out another client-wide e-mail advising them of downtime. Most are understanding, some… not so much. Rightly or wrongly, I’ve made a bit of my professional reputation dependent on you.
I have to agree with Cricket and Brandy too, although the service offers a great deal to make it attractive, it has been practically useless for me for months, it is terribly terribly unreliable, at almost any given time I can’t access either a website or my email. I feel some sort of extension on my hosting or a partial refund would be fitting to make up for the repeated inconveniences.
I agree with most of the rest:
* I’m hosted by you
* I understand that there will be downtime
* I understand that there will be long streaks of issues and sub-par performance simply because you don’t make everything you run and in fact glue a lot of different things together
* I’m patient even with this long streak of issues because you’re being honest and telling me what’s going on
* When this is over, I would appreciate a small discount as a token of appreciation for staying with the company “through thick and thin” and for accepting performance degradations even though I paid for something different
Thanks for the transparency and keeping us updated, I cannot overstate how much this helps.
I agree the service has been in sucksville over the last month, esp compared to what it was earlier this year, but wonder what plan ‘cricket’ is on? Paying so much for hosting? I have yet to beat the deal DH gives but I guess that is somewhat moot if most of the services are not usable.
Also, my sites are borderline worthless, esp any php/mysql driven stuff so upgrade that sh*t anytime day or night! Cant sell my goods if you cant see the page!
This is killing me. I used to host my own email, but moved it to dreamhost because friends and family wanted to use it too. “No more downtime, no more problems!” I promised. Then the same with my web server, photo server, etc. “No more downtime, faster downloads, no more problems!” I again promised. Sure, I symphatize about the Cisco bullshit. I understand computers, so I understand downtime. The people relying on me, however, don’t - they just see me as not delivering a promised service. Anything is okay for a day or two… less for a week or two… this has been more than a month. arg.
This is one outage too many. Everybody has a bad day now and then, but you guys seem to have one after another. Worse, you seem totally unprepared for perfectly predictable contingencies, like your building power going out. Being “open” and “communicative” doesn’t make up for that.
I had intended to start looking for a new provider in a few months, when my 1-year renewal was almost used up. But I can’t wait any longer — I need a provider who knows what they’re doing.
While yes there have been some issues lately, this has been the only major probelm I have seen from DH in the more then a year I have been with them. There has been some small hour outages here and there, but they are always resolved quickly, or already being worked on by the time I learn of them and bring it to thier attention. I switched to DH after being with a webhost who cost more and even had a 99.9% uptime statement, but that was almost never true. On top of that, if there was any down time, they would never tell me why.
I am happy with what they do, and I haven’t seen a single reason to leave them. If just running because of one problem, well every host will have problem at some point, so good luck finding one that can ever make you happy.
I was with HostRocket for nearly 6 years before I moved over here to Dreamhost, and all the people complaining should just can it. HostRocket, while they started out well, had started to run into problems and were beginning to overcrowd their servers. My website started going down around noon everyday with no explanation. I knew it was down because I couldn’t get any sites on my server to load up. I mailed 5 times asking for help, asking for ANY answer, even a “we looked into it” but every time I did they just sent me a “seems to be working fine to me, we’re sorry for inconvenience” form letter. In fact, in my 6 years there, I never got an explanation of what the problem was. And that might not mean much to the slower folks in the crowd, us developers and techs GREATLY appreciate knowning the why.
Moreover, DH did not at all shrug responsibility, and I’ve been on DH for a few months now. The downtime has been NOWHERE NEAR bad enough to warrant a refund, or even an apology for that matter. Hell, your refund is the tons of money they’re spending to not only fix, but upgrade their routing services.
Thanks for the answers and the stellar service. Even with the routing problems I’ve had better uptimes and far better customer service than with other services from “better” hosting companies, including dedicated services.
DON’T WORRY! BE HAPPY!!!!
I for one think Dreamhost is doing a good job. I’ve searched many hosting services, and none out there give me a better bang for my buck than Dreamhost. If you are hosting a site that you expect to be up 24/7/365 then your best bet is to buy some rackspace and use your own hardware or go through The Planet to rent a dedicated server. However I’m more than happy with some downtime, because it’s not the end of the world. Worse, if you are running a web based business that you make a living on, why the hell are you using shared hosting? If what I hosted provided revenue to me, I would be a lot more careful about where my data was hosted. I’d also ensure redundancy because no hosting providor is safe.
What I respect about Dreamhost is they are being upfront about every issue. They don’t try to hide issues, they don’t try to pretend they don’t exist, and they even admit to screwing up when they do. What happens when your DSL line goes down? You speak to somebody in India who pretends like it’s your fault, and forces you to clear your cache and cookies three times and reboot. Then, you get a trouble ticket. However you have no idea who’s working the ticket or where it went, or even if you will get a response back.
Hey, if you can offer what Dreamhost offers, at the same price, with better uptime and promise faster service, then you got one hell of a business model. Start up a hosting company, and compete with Dreamhost!
My opinion is that DH have a clue, as in cluetrain, and are doing their level best to host as well and as inexpensively as possible. Admittedly, my opinion is in large part influenced by comparing my own experience with their very frank communication.
I’m not sure what all these calls for refunds are about. As I see it (as a DH customer for a year or so) we customers are all in this together. So they give everyone a free year, and then have to raise prices to cover the outlay. In what way are we all better off?
I actually think they will sort this out; and I am still better off letting them worry about it than trying to do this work myself. I’m just hoping the extra hardware cost doesn’t drive them out of business so I need to re-host again.
Presumably they scheduled their down-time to match their own data on overall system load to inconvenience the least number of sites. Not real convenient for me in my timezone, but I don’t know where other sites have their heavy traffic periods and the world doesn’t revolve around me and my sites.
Good luck DH, and DH customers.
Not really interested in the tec-talk, I want a system that functions. FIX IT
those of you threatening to leave, just leave already. You’re threats are not going to make anyone work faster all because you threaten to leave. They have to wait for the part to come in to begin with and if you can’t want then just leave please!!!
Complainging here to get a refund will more then likely be met with laughter, this is not the accounting or sales department blog. It’s a status blog. Instead of taking time to complain, take the time to find the write person to complain to and ask them for your money back. Jeez.
A few weeks ago the check engine light came on, in my car, and it would stall every time I stopped. I spent a good amount of time checking the oil, replacing O2 sensors, etc, trying to find the problem. Anyway, I took the car to a guy I new, who fixed $400 worth of damage. It turned out to be a domino effect; one problem causing another, all starting with a blown vacuum hose.
The moral of the story:
I could have just sat there and bitched about my car having problems just like some of you guys are about the servers, but you know what? Sometimes things just break, deal with it.
And at least dreamhost has a check engine light (dreamhoststatus.com) 
Dreamhost is a joke. My little sister is a better network admin. I mean, who upgrades rails and doesn’t test. Welcome to unix admin 101 DH.
I should have canceled before the 90-day money back period. If my site isn’t down, its slow. If it’s not slow, they’ve decided to upgrade rails
without testing. All I read about are hardware problems. I run over 300 Linux and Solaris boxes and rarely have hardware problems. We
have many large netapp installs too without problems. Think about it. Amazing!
Thank you guys for getting around to fixing it. I know you’re probably being bombarded with obnoxious comments at the moment. I do have to say I am slightly disappointed in how this turned out, our site has been horribly laggy for quite some time, and we’re losing members. Once it gets fixed, I hope to recitify this situation, but notwithstanding, it seems this problem has taken quite a chunk out of the overall productivity of our site. Thank you for listening to my obnoxious speel, and please try to avoid such an issue in the future.
Thank you,
Josh
As I understand, one of there routers are having issues. That is fine but in my experience there should be two core routers for the Dreamhost servers. One as a main and the other as a backup. Cisco contains all this functionality and from what I understnad most major companies go the dual core router route. Why does Dreamhost only use one?
Well, guys… I keep my fingers crossed for all of you working there.
I was working with many systems… and I know how difficult it can be, when … it is difficult.
So, I am sending you a good wibe… and I have got only one question to ask:
HOW COULD I HELP, ASSIST YOU?
Friendly greetings,
Tamas
Budapest, Hungary
I’ve had my site(s) hosted with DreamHost for close to two years now, and for the most part, the service has been decent.
Now I must state the obvious, since EVERYONE who is b*tching seems to be missing it:
NOBODY who has written a comment on this blog entry knows all, or even much of what’s going on behind the lines leading to DreamHost’s servers. You don’t know that it’s “100% DH’s fault”, or that Cisco is to blame. Without working at one of the higher levels inside the company, you don’t have one clue what’s wrong. I don’t care what kind of certifications and diplomas you’ve got, you simply DO NOT KNOW the, or really any, answers.
I will concede that somewhere along the line, the lack of redundancy could easily fall on DH’s shoulders. But, equipment failure can happen at random, and who’s to say it wouldn’t happen to three systems at once? There’s no guarantee, and this really becomes a case of “you get what you pay for”. DreamHost doesn’t charge much - it’s one of the lowest charges in the industry. It’s a simple business rule that states that less income and fewer profits means less can be spent on equipment. By not only fixing, but actually UPGRADING the system at just about every turn, they’re doing more than most would.
Then again, I can’t say for certain that they actually ARE upgrading anything; they could just be saying that to appease customers. I prefer to think that’s -not- the case, especially since they seem so open in communication.
Someone along the line in here stated that the uptime and server performance hasn’t been an issue and that the rest of us are idiots for even voicing our opinions. I got news for ya, bub - you’re one of the lucky ones who’s purchased services aren’t being affected. My site is completely inaccessible right now, and has been uselessly slow for the better part of a month - but you don’t see me assuming that nobody’s getting any service, do you? Or that I’m the only one?
And to those that are sitting here saying “if you don’t fix it, I’ll up and go to another host I don’t know just to show you!”, you’re… well, unintelligent. If you’re adults, I should think you’d know by now that b*tching gets you nowhere, ESPECIALLY with a company that lets its customers know what’s going on. Instead of sitting here and making pointless threats, how about showing support for them? Again, I can’t say that I know it’s not their fault or that it is; I can only hope that it’s not, and show support for what seems to me to be an outstanding company, especially when you compare their business model to that of any other hosting, or telecommunications company.
-End of Rant-
This is not the first time that happened from DreamHost! It happened too frequently. I have a large readership who are quite frustrated with my inability to post entries because of DreamHost’s failures to take care of the problems.
It is clever of DreamHost not to post their telephone numbers and force the customers to deal with them via emails or “suggestion box”. Frankly, I told someone else that if I expect more problems this week, I’ll simply move to another webhosting.
DreamHost is supposed to be professional and yet, they seemed not to be. It is shameful and travesty. No sane company like Google would let this happen. And DreamHost is hindering MY business of keeping my readers entertained!
For Christ’s sake, do something about it!
R-
Well, I have to admit, I bitched like the best of them about the problems.. just got really annoyed with the speeds of the sites etc.. when you pay for hosting, you do it becuase it’s (supposed) to be up longer and faster than hosting on your own box.
I like Dreamhost, I know you guys are doing your best to sort things out. Good luck with it… I’m sure I see a light at the end of the tunnel.
… as soon as I have the speed… this is my Dream Host.
Cheers.
I know you guys are a Cisco shop, but it might be worth looking into Juniper routers and Force 10/Extreme Networks switches. Good luck with the upgrades though, network ops is the most thankless job in the world but we do appreciate the work.
I believe what is happening is related to this. I can’t prove it, but I think that all internet systems are already showing, or will begin to show, this kind of behaviour.
I don’t agree with previous readers that this doesn’t happen to other companies. I’ve seen it with Google’s ‘Blogger’, with Amazon, with Alta Vista. I’m prepared to bet that all these huge interlinked infrastructures are now starting to behave like this.
My three years with Dreamhost have been for the most part fault-free. Even the best relationships go through tough times. I hope you get it sorted guys.
Esperemos que pronto ya no ocurran mas problemas, tendremos los dedos cruzados por ustedes y por que no se caigan las redes
Es muy buena politica que a pesar de los problemas con la red, sigan tan abiertos a los comentarios de sus usuarios. Muchas otras compañias no dan noticias de lo que pasa y dejan a los usuarios en el limbo.
Tenemos los dedos cruzados y confiamos que estos lios se acaben lo antes posible.
Good luck I hate battling these seemingly endless problems. I had a network cable do something similar to me once, just a thought.
+1 on DH working hard to resolve a difficult problem and doing a great job of keeping people informed. There is nothing worse than dealing with a company that tries to hide issues behind marketing spin, or just doesn;t provide info at all. From the start, I’ve had a pretty good idea of what kind of ride I was in for. Ok, the road was a little rougher than expected, but DH has given straight answers and set honest expectations.
I like dreamhost because of the control I have over the configuration. Most other hosts give you nowhere near the level of control over DNS, etc. that DH does (let alone for ~$10/mo,) If you want enterprise-class uptimes, you need to go to a provider with multiple sites (and pay a lot more).
Thanks for keeping us updated. That’s much better than my last host did. And good luck with all the problems.
I have to say that after the downtime Monday night at 10pm, my WordPress blog was much much much faster to load (compared to the last several weeks). It’s too bad to hear that you don’t think that didn’t actually solve the problem. Thanks for all the frequent, candid, and detailed updates. That and pretty much that alone gives me reason to stick around.
Keep up the good work. I’ve had my sites on dreamhost for a week or so now, and amidst the plethora of network problems my uptime has been pretty steady. Their dreamhost status posts sound genuine. They could just say “We are experiencing some technical difficulties…all servers will be down this evening.” But instead they feel obligated to explain their problems in detail to their customers. Hope you guys resolve the issues soon! Good luck!
For Gods Sake put more support staff on!
Last week I had a problem that went 26 hours without anyone looking at it, by that time my readers all pissed off and I was able to get into my database and stop the errant querie.
Now it is 8 hours into a problem and there is no answer coming anytime soon.
My site is down I expect aomeone to be on hand to look at it.
The service level needs to improve - considerably.
Thanks for the honesty with the network status but my problems are not related (unless a 500 server error is symptomatic).
Frustrated, I just moved to dreamhost recently and it has been slow and NO support, not a good start.
Thanks for keeping us updated. That’s much better than my last host did. And good luck with all the problems.
Here’s my whois record, this says a lot:
Website Title: 500 read timeout
Record Type: Domain Name
I’d leave a comment but everything is running so slow it might crash the system.
Sad to see you have problmes. Happy to see you get the same level of expertise on tech support that us regular folk do.
Well, thanks for working so hard, I work for a large retailer, we sometimes have inexplicable issues like this, an I know firsthand how frustrating it can be. My sites are performing OK at the moment, but have been flakey, yes flakey is the nice way to say it…
OK. Just a couple of things I don’t understand after reading all theses posts. It seems a couple of you guys have 500,000 XJ7 Space Modulator Routers interconnected through QuasiSpace Interflatulators that your sisters installed.
•Why are you with Dreamhost in the first place?
•Why do you need to wait for your $120 contract to run out before switching if it is going to cost you more than the GNP of Magrathea to be down for 2 days or even a week.
Granted, I don’t have all that stuff and I’m not going to miss out on purchasing prime real estate on Pluto (pity about the demotion) but I, for one, like the fact that I can tell my customers WHY they are down rather than just shruggung my shoulders and saying”Duhno.” I don’t know alot about this stuff but I can glean enough to understand the thrust of what is happening. That to me is invaluable.
I haven’t used ANY service in the last 15 years that hasn’t had this happen at least once. The downtime that is. This is the first time I’ve had an inkling as to why and I have already contacted my clients and let them know what to expect. Funny thing, nobody shouted at me.
If you are planning to have the population of the known universe waiting to listing to your webcast at Stardate 060543.223 then perhaps you need something wiht a bit more redundancy and lower odds of going down at the precice moment of your launch. Perhaps you should launch it through 3 or 4 different hosting companies. Just a thought.
Anyone who is going to lose 10’s of thousands of dollars over this then demand a free month needs to …well… I really have no suggestions for you.
When I read, a few minutes ago, that DH was opening this up to comments - IN THE MIDDLE OF A CRISIS - I thought they were really going off the deep end. Instead of post after post of compaints I read praise upon praise. The few negatives have really appeared to be kids trumping up losses just to lend voice to their pent up angst.
Great job dream host!! I’m with you guys until I have the GNP of Magrathea riding on my site’s daily uptime. By then perhaps, you’ll have multiple redunancy, or maybe a couple of days still won’t matter since I’ll have the other 363 days of GNP sized income!
Dreamhost team, thanks for keeping us in the loop. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the update…. Being a network engineer myself I feel for you guys, obviously Cisco’s docs (and apparently some hardware/software too) aren’t as current as they should be, there is a reason they are THE enterprise solution for networking gear. Hell, the rate at which network speeds and capacity alone has progressed over the past few years would be enough to cause issues. Keep at it everything will get sorted in time (and if not I’ll forward my resume, the climate in Calif beats the nothern midwest anyday!)
To all of the winers… why not put your time to better use and go read up a bit on networking gear, when you can explain in detail and talk intelligently about routing protocols and appreciate the true magic of the gazillions of electrons moving about so that your $9/month website is ‘up’ then come back and complain. Unless of course you have a $85K core router/switch laying about to loan to DH that is.
I signed up for Dreamhost less than a month ago, and Dreamhost seems to have issues every 2 days since then…
I’m not planning on switching, as I love the freedom given on the server, and the the sheer number of features.
I am, however, a bit dissappointed and have had some embarassing moments because of this…
I was conviently scheduled to show my AJAX web application to my boss, the day that your system decided to TOTALLY die (Friday). It was a bit difficult to explain to him why nothing was working, and then suddenly it woruld work.
It tends to be a bad idea to have to say to your boss “well… this usually works; so, umm… imagine that a table showed up there”, and 5 minutes later have a lightbox popup that I requested near the beginning of the meeting….
The project ended up going fine, but I was extremely worried throughout the meeting, when nothing was working 
Just curious if your going to upgrade your Cisco Smartnet Agreements to 4 hour turn around. You pay a slightly higher premium but Cisco will usually bend over backwards to get you parts or upgrade parts by doing a counter to counter shipment.
I am losing ebay sales because my customers cannot see my pictures. GET ON IT
I had dreamhost earlier in the year and then cancelled when I felt that I would need a more powerful server. I came back later on only to come back during severe network issues. However I remembered how good the service was when I was here previously and I chose to remain. I have probably been one of the few that have been minimally affected by the downtime. A few days ago I submitted a ticket that the mysql connection to my database was slow. A few hours later the problem fixed itself. However I got a response back that they had enabled logging for my databases and asked me to provide certain information the next time it occured. They basically suspected it was network issues rather than a problem with the server which considering what was going on they may of been correct.
After reading the comments on here, I have to agree with B Taylor: Who pays $20/month or less for hosting (as 99% of you are doing, including me) and then uses it to host some uber critical website??
Ok, for those of you that have strictly business accounts or dedicated boxes and have downtime, that sucks. You’re actually paying a decent amount of money and shouldn’t be having this kind of downtime at that price. But for the rest of us, geez… what do you expect for hosting that’s under $20 per month??
Obviously DH hasn’t done everything right (someone asked about why there’s no backup core router, which I’m wondering about too… Is there REALLY a single point of failure there??), but so far they’ve proven to learn from their mistakes (many) in the past, so why shouldn’t this be any different (right DH?
Anyway, I hope you guys are able to get this current batch of problems fixed and able to focus on equally important tasks (like proper UPS/Generator backups). Guess it’s time to kick some Cisco butt and find someone who can help you get out of this hole.
So long and thanks for all the fish, err… updates.
that is the funniest thing I have read all day, thank you. You made my day and put a smile on my face as I feel the same way as what you wrote. I only wished that more people here had the same views that you have.
I wanted to tell the DH staff that I think they are doing a fantastic job and I give them all my support. I have personally been in the hot seat as a network engineer and know the pains of downtime, frustration, crabby customers and of course hardware failures. Of course I also know what it’s like to get bad or poor support from the vendors that you depend on (Cisco in this case). I am still a relatively new customer here as my site has been hosted here for only 5 months or so now but the fact that DH takes the time out of he their day to tell me what is going on proves to me they are all about customer service.
Some of you other guys have shown support, I think this is great as only us techs know how thankless our jobs can really be and a simple thank you goes a long way. Hell if I knew how to do it I’d send the DH guys some free coffee and pizza just because they are in the office late at night doing the work that needs to be done and not doing what the rest of us are doing right now .. sitting on our ass’s without nothing better to do then read these comments.
For the guys who are crabby or just plain rude … “give me a refund”, “DH is down again, what else is new”, “my family photo site is down and I can’t see a picture of my sister’s dog for a whole week and the world is going to end”. All I can tell you is grow a pair, go to school and get your CCIE then you will be able to do one of two things. Provide the solution or know to shut the hell up because you know these things happen. My only wish is that the DH staff really don’t take your comments to heart as you really are the minority here. If you want 5 nines (99.999%) uptime … take out a bank loan or rob an armored truck and go dedicated with your own box. If you want to leave .. that’s fine by me as I would gladly pay your monthly bill just to not read your complaining.
Right now I am starting up a new home based company and looked for an inexpensive host that provides me with service. I don’t mean the service that my web site is running .. but the type of service that they will inform me when they expect it to not work and let me know why it’s not working. How many times have you called the phone company, cable company, or anyone else only to hear “We’ll look into it, call us in a week if we don’t call you”. If you think your web blog, family pictures taken on vacation or even a real life business where you depend on your site to provide for your family is more important then the service you feel you are getting then go out and buy a dedicated box. Sure go for it .. I mean you’ll only have to sell blood to pay the support contract. Right leg for half the space you get here. I think bandwidth charges are measured in how many kidney’s you can donate.
I’m willing to stay on the low cost of things knowing full well that I’m not getting 5 nines. I also know that if I need 5 nines I’ll be spending allot more money then what I have here. You guys who are complaining are forgetting one big important thing here. You need to be re-educated on the price it costs for the expectations you have. For the price I am paying for the service I’m getting I’ll be happy with a 97 or 98% uptime. It’s all about education and realistic expectations. For this reason I’m a happy customer. I am educated in knowing that I won’t get even close to 5 nines for the price I’m paying and I am educated enough to know that I can’t afford true 5 nine service. I am intelligent enough to know that I am getting 150% more service then what I am paying for and I am a very happy and grateful customer.
You complain that a support ticket takes a day to answer ? Do you even know how much money a support contract with the phone or cable company costs to get a tech onsite within the same day let alone the same week?? Are you even paying 1% of that cost here? You don’t have to have a secret decoder ring to know the answer is NO. I would much rather sit here knowing what the problem is, that it’s being worked on and things are being upgraded not just fixed. For the price I am paying for hosting .. you’d be hard pressed in convincing me to be anything other then 100000% satisfied because I know for me to get anything better I’d have to have a second full time job just for the down payment.
-= DREAM HOST =-
Keep up the great work!! I wish you all the luck in solving your problems and as only 1 other person has posted so far; What can I do to help you? The only slight issue I have right now is I regret I have to find a hosting provider that can give me access to a MS SQL database for my ERP software instead of having it hosted here.
You have my full support and my continuing business for as long as I need hosting or until I win the lotto and can afford a dedicated server with it’s own built in flux-capacitor hehe.
-= everyone else =-
Show some support for DH guys. Educated yourself in knowing they are offering us more here on this blog then 90% of the other companies would even if you did pay the big bucks. You have 4 options that I can see:
1. show some love and support
2. jump ship and don’t look back
3. get a backup host if your life depends on it and change the DNS to the backup server
4. continue to bash one of the better hosting companies out there and show everyone who is educated how much of a sad case you are for whining like a little school girl because you promised 100% uptime to your grandmother that she can see pictures of your pet fish any time or day of the week
I’m pulling the plug on dreamhost, I’ll be moving my web sites shortly.
Thanks Dreamhost for the fabulous and detailed updates — they go a long way in helping to calm a nerve wracked situation. We’ve been happy Dreamhosters since ‘99 and your level of support remains outstanding. Patiently awaiting the fix
Just wanted to say “Thanks” to the Dreamhost team. It’s refreshing to have a host that tries to communicate and let the users know what is going on behind the scenes. Much better than “We know there is a problem and are working to resolve it”, which is the very best that my old host would ever say when they had issues.
I’ve been with you guys for YEARS, and this past 6 months have been CRAP! But, I am being patient…and understanding, but it’s growing very thin.
Please get it sorted. QUICKLY!!
I have to say, I have been with Dreamhost for only 3 weeks now so all I know is speed issues. Yes, my site is heavily php driven and contains a lot of content using Drupal. However, I knew this could not be all on our side. I DO have to say I am very impressed with the openiness and rapid response of the DH team. I especially like the status page. I do hope that the issues do get resolved within the next few days as I can not keep telling my users and sponsor that it is going to be fixed on this day and then it doesn’t. I believe if it weren’t for the status page and the DH team being honest about what was going on I would of been screaming in this comment. But I too understand these types of problems and I am pulling for you guys to get it fixed permanently. As far as the price is concerned, I almost wouldn’t mind paying a bit much more for speed and reliability in a hosting plan.
How is it that every time my website is down, the dreamhost.com and dreamhoststatus.com websites are up and running just fine? I’m glad that you have redundancy for your own servers but not for your customers?
Just wanted to thank DH for the detailed updates here. I’ve been a DH customer for many years as well and know they’ll get things worked out.
I am glad that they have this site to update us… Hope site will be up soon…
first of all, i’ve expected this problem to be over with, I have already been shopping around for other hosting services. dreamhost has alot of customers (lots of money) so instead of buying two 1300W power supplys (2600W) to cover a (2500) load, that is a very fine slack. You have the money, I would expect you to buy two 5000W powersupplies and that will be the end of the problem.
I demand some kind of money back because i have lost money from all of this down time. have you ever heard of BACKUPS FOR BACKUPS?? I think you should invest in that because if you dont, you will start losing customers (money) because you are too cheap and you get what you pay for, cheap reliability.
This is also a nightmare because I am trying to get on the search engines and i KNOW for a fact that google, yahoo and msn tried to index my website while your server was down every day last summer from the results that got indexed (a domain name with no website). The search engines are the blood of my business and if dreamhost can’t perform, people are going to start switching for reliability, there is no room for error when dealing with down time and the search engines. I had to wait another 2-3 months for those search engines to come back and index the site and i THOUGHT i was safe and set to get indexed but DREAMHOST IS DOWN AGAIN and if the search engines come by my site again and it is down, i WILL switch hosting services. That is another reason I demand a free year of service because of all this risk, time and money wasted from earlier in the summer when my site didn’t get any traffic for a few months because the search engines didn’t get to my site because it was down.
i would HIGHLY RECOMMEND that dreamhost invest in a better technology, NOT JUST THE BARE MINIMUMS EITHER! Because obviously this isn’t working at all. DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO MAKE DREAMHOST A 100% UPTIME HOSTING SERVICE! - NOT TEMPORARLY SOLVING THE PROBLEMS UNTIL SERVICE WHILE KNOWING IT WILL GO OVER CAPACITY SOON (2600w covering 2500w usage is near full capacity with barly any leeway, you should just get a 5000w and you KNOW you have plenty of capacity.)
“How is it that every time my website is down, the dreamhost.com and dreamhoststatus.com websites
are up and running just fine? I’m glad that you have redundancy for your own servers but not for
your customers?”
If you dont remember, the status page was down the other day and dreamhost told everybody that it is hosted elsewhere. no hosting company hosts on its own servers. they have dedicated rackspace at a different location for security. use some common sense before opening your mouth next time.
- DreamHost, you guys are doing great. i work for Network Solutions and i know how tough it can get. I appreicate the updates and the honesty and cant wait for everything to start working.
heck a 1300W Cisco powersupply costs $70 bucks on ebay, why couldn’t you just get 3 instead of the BARE minimum to hold capacity. Jeeze, that is one cheap budget you got there. If you had 3 of them, you would have an extra 56% free capacity but with just your current 2 you have just a measly 4% of extra capacity - NO WONDER THINGS WILL CRASH!
a 1300W Cisco powersupply costs $70 bucks on ebay, why couldn’t you just get 3 instead of the BARE minimum to hold capacity. Jeeze, that is one cheap budget you got there. If you had 3 of them, you would have an extra 56% free capacity but with just your current 2 you have just a measly 4% of extra capacity - NO WONDER THINGS WILL CRASH!
I’ve been with you guys for about 10 years now–since about the beginning.
This is the first time you’ve truly had horrid service. This entire year that is.
And yes, having knowledge of networks, I understand you’ve got issues, but with what..1-2 million customers, the least you can do is have redundancy. I have it on my home network, 4 times no less. 2 core routers is a must. And 85K isn’t much to ask to get decent service to your customers. Afterall, you’ve got a lot of customers paying $ for hosting. And for 85K, you’d better get a kick butt router.
Just my two cents. I agree with earlier compliments AND complaints. Communication has been helpful, but patience is wearing thin. There comes a time in any professional services relationship where, no matter what the reasons, it ain’t working out anymore, and ties have to be cut. I think many of your customers are dangerously close to this possibility right now. I count myself as one. Thank you for all your updates, and I’m sorry (as a former computer geek who understands the torment of seemingly impossible combinations and permutations of problems), for all your troubles, but please, fix this once and for all, and soon.
Keep fighting the fight! Just so you know though I have lost good chunk of money already today.
I was blinded by huge amounts of bandwidth and storage for pocket change. How do they do it? It’s almost too good to be true. Shame on me . . .
the idiots who are complianing that they are losing business should understand that you gotta have a backup, problems on dreamhost is rare, this is the first actual bump i have felt on dreamhost and im just bummed that i can not read my emails. but the world is still spinning. I have a client who paid 800 dollars for a web hosting for a whole year and their service goes down 3 times per day, at times where we get high loads. so be happy you have a webhost that goes down 1% of the time.
to all of those that are complaining, go sodomize your self with a retractable bataan.
I hope you manage to fix the problems real soon. I love dreamhost’s concept and I really hope it could be back to normal. Changing to another host would be sad.
Offtopic: Anyone else notice that these last few comments are all bold?
Thank you for enabling comments here. I hope you can get the problems resolved quickly. If not, hiring an uber-Cisco-consultant (or several) would probably pay for itself several times over by helping client retention and your reputation.
hang in there, guys (and gals). you are without a doubt the best hosting isp the world has ever seen. it’s not just panel, your support staff are top notch and your open attitude to sharing the “real situation” with your clients will earn you long time respect, support and loyalty from your ever growing client base.
overcome this short term challenges and conquer the world!
p.s. looks like the close-bold tag worked. You’re welcome.
I’ve had your service for the last 6 years and have quite a number of sites hosted through you. I’m a customer that is here to stay and has been referring customers even in the wake of the last three months because I believe in the company. I like the features, I like the service, and I like the fact that you care enough to tell us what is going on.
I have no doubt you’ll take care of us and when you do I have about 175 people that will be truly greatful.
Please keep us posted so I can continue to pass the information on!
Doing a good job, but I think some re-fund is in order(for almost a week of slowness/downtime we should get an extra week on everyones plan/month)… but I am not completly pissed because it seems like my box is nearest to the main ‘good’ routers online. My site loads kinda decent but its nothing big… http://www.rage-network.com
Just letting you guys know that we appreciate the updates and hardwork. Keep it up!
Just because a company says 99.9% uptime does not mean it’s going to be up all the time. This is something I keep in mind all the time. Just be glad that all your servers are not on Windows as you would be going through constant updates, restarts, crashes, and the long list of problems will go on forever with windows servers.
I believe that Dreamhost has done a good job. They just won’t help me complie or get my custom php working but they do say upfront it is not supported so this is understandable. Maybe an increase with upload to clients when downloading from our websites will be pretty cool or a way to throttle the amount of bandwith a site or certain types of files get up/down would be nice. I would love to use but they say it is a security risk to they provide an alternative which is something you may never find anywhere else from any host.
The facts are every webhost has downtime some longer than others even if they do have a 99.9% uptime guarantee or 99.999999999999% guarntee. Things happen that will cause downtime, explosions, server crashes, we are lucky to have a host that actually moves or replaces new hardware as soon as possible. Some webhosts restrict you in so many ways MySQL size, etc.
Maybe a way to change options for our sites php.ini file would be pretty cool and direct editing of of our DNS zone files (notepad style) would be some good additions.
I like dreamhost very good
The sad truth is I had more reliability running my mail server on a lousy old Linux box on my home netwotk than I’ve had with Dreamhost.
just unplug it and plug it back in
Thanks Josh and Dreamhost for keeping us up to date I’ve gone through 5 hosts for my site, and you have been the best by far. Hope you get the problem fixed, in the meantime i have alerted our members of the problem, and they understand.
Good luck on the problem, and keep me posted. Seems like Cisco has turned into a big linksys router =) both dont work worth beans!
I have to say, I really appreciate this blog. How many ISPs do you know that would post something like, “the backup generators are on fire” to their blog? No, normally things just break and you don’t hear about it. Of course it would be better if things didn’t break in the first place. It’s been 3 good years so far. I’m not concerned.
What a nightmare.
That’s right they are honest with us. Something you may never find in a host anywhere. They let us know about something before they do something normally way in advance so we can at least prepare or let people know.
That is something I like
If you are running a business that relies upon a website then where is your backup plan? Even with 99.99% uptime you will still get some downtime. I have my PC at home setup so that if my main server goes down, i can point it to a temp site explaining what is happening. No big loss there.
Personally I am happy with what DH are doing. I’ve been with many hosts and so far DH is the best one for communication and price.
It seems as thoe it got worse then how it was right before the upgrade….Hope it gets resolved! Dreamhost rocked for a year and this year I guess it got more busy with the more awesome deals …
I’m definitely not happy that my site is down, but how can I really complain when with all the referrals I have made, DH is actually paying me to host with them? If you want solid uptime, go with a company like Server Matrix or RackSpace. You’ll pay $100/month. In my experience with the hosting world, you get what you pay for.
The cute blog snippets are not real transparency.
It would take guts to give customers a real view into your systems so we could stop speculating about how little redundancy you have, or whether the network is well or poorly designed. You might get useful feedback. Crowdsource your netowork ops! yay!
Thankyou for the update DH, although some of the problems lately have been annoying to say the least I am happy in the knowledge that you guys are working hard to rectify the problems. It appears your Cisco engineer could do with a kick in the behind.
I was may be 14. My father was a photographer and he thought me a lot.
One day he gave me the full equipment and told me to go to an event where he was invited to take photos. I panicked. He told me: “I know you are concerned. I love and trust you. I know you will do your best.”
Many years later, when I was working in a Distress Centre in Canada one night I picked up the phone: an old man told me that he had his gun in his hands, and wanted to kill himself. I panicked a bit, and waved to the manager to come to me. I wrote to him on a paper: “The guy wants to kill himself! Help!” He looked at me, had put his hand on my shoulder, and told me: “I know you are concerned. I know you and trust you. I know you will do your best.”
Several years later I was called to a home birth, as a male “doula” (doula is the person who assists the woman in labor - mostly emotionally – with her or his presence). I was living nearby. So, I arrived very quickly. Soon I realized, that the baby is to come out, into the water of the tub. I called the midwife. She was on her way, but still fare away. I panicked. She told me: “I know you are concerned. I love and trust you. I know you will do your best.”
I learnt by the trust and support of these people: when life puts me in a challenge… the best I can get is emotional support.
So, all of you at Dream Host!
“I know you are concerned. I believe in you and trust you. I know you will do your best.”
Thank you.
Tamas
p.s.
I have put this text with photos at http://www.koosfoto.hu/dreamhost
I was may be 14. My father was a photographer and he thought me a lot.
One day he gave me the full equipment and told me to go to an event where he was invited to take photos. I panicked. He told me: “I know you are concerned. I love and trust you. I know you will do your best.”
Many years later, when I was working in a Distress Centre in Canada one night I picked up the phone: an old man told me that he had his gun in his hands, and wanted to kill himself. I panicked a bit, and waved to the manager to come to me. I wrote to him on a paper: “The guy wants to kill himself! Help!” He looked at me, had put his hand on my shoulder, and told me: “I know you are concerned. I know you and trust you. I know you will do your best.”
Several years later I was called to a home birth, as a male “doula” (doula is the person who assists the woman in labor - mostly emotionally – with her or his presence). I was living nearby. So, I arrived very quickly. Soon I realized, that the baby is to come out, into the water of the tub. I called the midwife. She was on her way, but still fare away. I panicked. She told me: “I know you are concerned. I love and trust you. I know you will do your best.”
I learnt by the trust and support of these people: when life puts me in a challenge… the best I can get is emotional support.
So, all of you at Dream Host!
“I know you are concerned. I believe in you and trust you. I know you will do your best.”
Thank you.
Tamas
p.s.
I have put this text with photos at my site under the folder “dreamhost”
At least DH let us know what was happened ASAP and allow any one to write a comment.
Where you can find another provider like DH? So, let’s wait….
What kind of shit is that? http://www.koosfoto.hu/dreamhost
To Christopher:
This isn’t meant to be rude at all, so don’t take it the wrong way. If you’re going to demonstrate a site to someone, consider setting up a local test server on your own computer. That way it can never be down.
Jon
Isn’t a Goth site tragic even when it’s up?
I have been a happy DH customer for 2.5 years. They’ve always been responsive with support emails and have helped me through things that I had no clue about it. Though I have been frustrated with the way things have been the last month, I do understand that things like this happen. I just wish they had a better protocol for when something like this happens. Most of my sites are running fine; it’s just the store site that takes 20+ seconds to load up. I do have my store on another hosting server and it takes
OK…I have NO idea what happened to the rest of my comment! But this is what I typed…
I do have my store on another hosting server and it takes
Uggh!! this is frustrating!!!
“less than 5 seconds to load up. I’m afraid to go live with the store on DH because I know my customers will not want to wait forever for a page to load up. I just hope and pray that DH will fix these issues really soon!
Just fix it right….so it lasts a good few years before burping again
it’s only a web site. those of you cranking out about your perceptions about what constitutes 9.95 per month of value and customer loss and back-server-room driving should probably make use of this “downtime” to take some of your own. A walk around the lake? Spontaneous love-making? Read a book? Something, anything, else.
thanks DH
Last month wasn’t so good…
I’ll probably stay with DH but might move a site off to another host since it requires more stability.
Anyone have recs?
good luck guys!
I second the Juniper Networks recommendation. Incompatible power supplies? That’s just poor product design. All these software upgrades? There are only 3 versions of Juniper software to choose from at any one time, and all three of them will work the only differences is whether they have the newest features or not.
Nightmare host.
I ran a small hosting business on three little Windows boxes with mail, web and all the bells and whistles.
In four years I was only down for around 2 hours in total including moving the system twice.
Around 4 months ago I moved all my clients to Dreamhost and I now listen to an endless stream of complaints about how bad the service and performance is. Dreamhost has no idea how to run any kind of reliable service. They just don’t understand the concept of uptime. It seems to be just fine to them to have services come and go on a whim. There isn’t any kind of redundancy as far as I can see. it’s just a bunch of made up marketing junk prentending to be a service. I am rating them -1 for all levels of service. The only thing they are good at is taking your money.
Openness is nice and all, but try to phrase it in english. I don’t care about the ZB-750 and the I-94, I care about the bottom line - which is another damn outage. I wouldn’t be surprised if you guys are hemmoraging clients right now.
It’s been good to have eMail that loads in under 5 minutes these past few days, since the past month or so has totally sucked! Alas, the website is totally crash-ola now.
Aaaaand … we’re down again. No DH sites respond to pings or HTTP.
Get well soon, DreamHost.
I am wondering why the host was down just when I was writing a post on my blog. It seems it’s no the time in the notice.
(http://blog.oasisfeng.com is down when I post this comment)
I have to put in my two cents. I have been VERY patient with the downtime experienced with my website and mail the past few months. But this is truly getting ridiculous. I am a freelance designer who makes their living communicating via my website and email. I have lost countless hours of work the past few months because I can’t access my site and my mail. I appreciate you are having technical difficulties, but it’s time to cut the cutesy newsletters and spend some time addressing what seems to be a fundamental problem with the service you are SUPPOSED to be providing.
i know you’re saying not to post problems here, but ftp, webmail and panel are all down for my account, but not for some of my clients on other machines there. my acccount is uneeknet.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Your killin’ me.
At some point while I was in the middle of reading the comments I have lost the ability to access any of the sites on dreamhost… can’t see or log in to my own sites or ftp, or see the sites of any of the people linked in the comments. Is there a downtime right now?
I have two different services through Dreamhost on two different servers (redhot and washington). This is by far the worst hosting experience I’ve had in the 10 years I’ve worked on web sites. My main site (online since 98) has maybe 1 day of downtime per year, but more likely in a year that’s a couple hours a couple times. This is RIDICULOUS. My server’s literally gone down at least once every time I try to use it (randomly once a week or so for the last 3 months) . Thankfully it’s just a backup I use for testing and a small hobby site. I will never ever do business with DH again and can’t wait to write about my horrible experience.
wow this is sad. my site has been down all day and i have no way to at least get my files off so i can put it up somewhere reliable. if there is a problem fix the shit, type about it later.
Mike, you are not alone.
Any idea when the sites will be back up??????
This is terrible timing, and it is costing me money.
ARGH. I’ve been nice about all these problems, but seriously guys this screwed me AGAIN today. It’s the second time in a month that I had a client presentation and went show something online and the damn site was down.
After 6 years with you guys, I’m officially out looking at other hosts. I’m sick and tired of your excuses while I’m sitting around getting screwed.
The web panel is down now as well as my site - I don’t know where else to post this.
Everything appears to be down now, woo hoo! I’m so glad we’re moving all our sites … wish it had happened sooner.
At least for once http://www.dreamhost.com is also down.
I’m guessing the main router is now completely hosed if you’re coming in from pnap.net if anyone else is actually able to get to dreamhost at the moment. We sure can’t.
More downtime. This time, instead of posting trouble reports on the web panel and having them reset out of hand without any attempt at fixing the problem, the panel’s dead too. The status page says nothing about trouble today; the last information posted was 20 hours ago. I know it’s early on the west coast, but somebody needs to wake the hell up.
Whatever. Here we go again. Different day, same crap. TIme to find a functioning host.
Like most everyone else, I’m very happy about the transparency of your problems. It’s nice to be informed and know why you’re having problems, and that you’re working on them.
What’s of course not nice is having a site I can’t depend on. My site’s personal and not earning anyone any money or serving any essential purpose, but I’ve got to say I’ve stopped recommending DreamHost to friends, which I used to do quite regularly. If you were hosting clients sites for me I’d be looking very hard at other providers, if I wasn’t already gone.
I’m curious: how’s your customer retention/acquisition holding up? I’m assuming quite a few have been jumping ship, but maybe most are more patient or loyal than I expect.
[b]Please don’t wait until 10pm PDT, please just pull the old power supply and do it now. :-P[/b]
Panel is down, and all my sites are down. I can’t even ping them.
So why wait until tonight to do the switch. Everything is already offline.
I’m sooo soo sorry that you guys are having all this trouble. It must be hell over there. Just know that there are still some of us customers that love you guys no matter what. I’m losing money too, but it’s not as bad as the hell your c/s people are going through right now I’m sure.
Hang in there!! It will get resolved!
I appreciate the updates and it’s clear you guys are working hard, but this makes something like two months of off-and-on service, which is simply not acceptable. When are you guys going to start offering refunds? Once everything is fixed, are you going to offer some kind of “99% uptime or your month is free” guarantee? You need to do something to convince your customers that you’re serious about making improvements other than make a lot of blog posts.
Anyone have any recommendations on a host that’s similar to DH but, well, works? Please let us know.
Hope you’ve got this stuff resolved soon. I’ve recommended you guys a lot of times over the years, in large part because you’ve been very reliable for me. Until recently, anyway.
I really hope this resolves the lingering network issues. Things have been really awful for a while now, and I’ve been catching a lot of flack (not to mention fielding a lot of “why is my site/mail not working: calls) lately, and I really miss my old, reliable Dreamhost.
Bye Dreamhost.
I’ve been a strong supporter, but the past few months have finally crushed me. I’ve already moved my domains, and once all propogation is complete, I’ll be shutting everything I have with you guys down.
You guys may have a good thing going, and these fixes may resolve your issues, but no matter how cutesy your posts are, or how good you are at communication, at the end of the day I need UPTIME. You have not provided that.
Ok, I’m not a tech (well not a “uber” tech), but I’ve been working with the web since before there was a web. I’d like to think I have quite a good deal of experince with running a business on the web (I’d guess I could be wrong).
You bunch of loosers complaining about “another damn outage” should give your heads a shake. Your paying dirt cheap prices for large bandwidth/server space hosting. If your sites are really that important to you, spend some damn cash and get your own rack somewhere, or even trying a company that charges 29.95 a month for 3 gig of bandwidth. You’ll get fast speeds and consistant up times… but you pay through the nose should you start burning traffic (traffic + product = money ?!?), but its consistant.
I have no complaints, I get what I pay for with Dreamhost, just like I do with the other 10 hosts I do business with.
Anyone know what is really going on with dreamhost right now. These past few weeks have definetly screwed me. I can’t have my site down so often, this is getting rediculous. For a weblog type site its fine but when you are selling product this just doesn’t work.
If anyone has any suggestions on other hosting companies that have alot of the same software options, mysql, zen-cart, php etc, which I am sure there are a bunch please post them here.
its great also when the only means of contact is via the webpanel and you can’t even get there.
thanks
I’ll give you a week to sort this out or I’m taking my 8 domains elsewhere. Kind of ridicuous. shouldn’t take 4 months to fix a technical issue if you have Cisco products.
This could not have come at a worst time. Once again I have a great potential client on the line and my Quicktime streaming server is not working. I’m trying to make a living here. I can’t compete if I’m constantly being cut at the knees.
Your problems make me look like an idiot.
Dear “GuruOfTheWeb”,
What good is their ridiculous, unusable limits when your site isn’t up a good deal of the time?
My cable modem is more reliable.
In spite of the problems, Dreamhost continues to grow.
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/DREAMHOST.COM
Josh — where are you going?
If I wanted free hosting I would have signed up for a free hosting account.
If I wanted a discount, or a rebate, or some special deal, I would have signed up with a discount web host.
But I wanted competent, reliable service.
Come on, guys! You have my money, give me the service. This “transparncy” thing is getting a bit old.
Wow, this really does suck. I’m glad I don’t use DH for anything important (just personal web hosting and receiving email), and that I make enough money through referrals that I don’t actually pay for this service.
Downtime all time? wtf guys? dreamhost = downtime all time! :(((((((((((((((((((
Ievery day I wake up and check my websites, and they are all down. everyday.
What more can one say?
Have to agree with the bajillions of customers above: I love ya’ll, but this is getting bad, guys. I’ve been a customer since 2000-ish and have sent lots of business your way.
I don’t know how you’re doing it, but thankfully, my one site that’s actually major in terms of traffic and exposure has been fairly consistently running. But my other sites are not, and haven’t been, and even though I don’t rely on them for my living right now, this isn’t cool. *Some* sort of recompense would be appropriate.
In the meantime, I know this is a nightmare for you. Good luck!
Eric Miller
http://viennateng.com
http://patternleaf.com
a couple of others …
DH - whatever your previous track record was, the recent as well as current quality/availability of your services is abysmal. As many others, I’ve signed a yearly contract with DH for the provision of various services.
Now’s the time DH - if you can really get back to the previous levels of service within a week AND reimburse your customers - I’m thinking along the lines of two free months of whatever the individuals that have a contract with you OR you reimburse those that want to leave on a pro-rated basis.
I came to DH following the recommendation of a friend of mine. I never mentioned the problems I have had in the last two months at DH until he called me the other day and asked how strongly I’m affected. I told him and also let him know that DH sales informed me upon asking that if I want to go, I can do so anytime, however, the fees paid in advance will be forfeited. My friend offered to reimburse me with his private money, which of course I won’t accept.
So, DH - think about how to set actions to improve the situation, get protocols and redundancies in place so that similar things won’t affect your customer base in the future AND compensate your customers for the problems they had to face.
DO I HAVE TO WAIT FOR MY DNS TO PROPAGATE AGAIN? UGH…
Best of luck with your maintainence. Several people I know have complained about your service, but in the past few months I have to say you’ve been absolutely fantastic. Several of the things that happened were *not* your fault, and that’s what people need to remember. For example, does the generator catching fire mean a bad host? Absolutely not, it means a bad generator.
You are absolutely amazing, and I do hope you get these problems fixed. To anyone that criticizes DH: stop. How can they stop unpredictable issues like this?
I can understand the downtime and network issues becuase of my experience in being part of a hosting company, but what I have a problem with is that there is no automation to help prevent some of these regular problems. If your servers get loaded becaue of problems with NFS, then you deploy a cron script that will run every 2 mins and get the server load (via the ‘uptime’) command, and if it is over a certain number, like 200 (an extreemly high load), then you restart the affected services and kill the loaded processes. The script would keep track of what it does, and if the load doesn’t come down in the next few mins, then it performs a system reboot. All of this happens automatically… When the server comes back up, everything will run fine and dandy for the next few hours till it starts to get loaded again. I would rather have the site down completely for a few minutes at a time to frequently reboot, then to have it unresponsive for hours. I have over 10 accounts hosted with dreamhost on multiple servers, and every server that I am on is affected.
I love the services that dreamhost offers, but my clients want to jump ship, and soon. I can’t hold out much longer… If the NFS problems aren’t resolved soon, then do some things like a script that will automatically reboot the server when it is too loaded.
You know what they say, vote with your dollars. I spend hundreds of dollars with DreamHost every year, and the service is far slower and more unreliable than when I used to host a FreeBSD box on my end of an SDSL line. Yes, they’re working hard, yes we’ll tell you what’s happening, blah blah blah. Actions speak louder than words. Invest to fix the problems. It’s clear you’re well behind the curve of keeping up with the service usage. Also, hire some people who aren’t learning on the job. I’ve been in companies that have grown from $100M to $3B, and it’s clear that people at every level become inappropriate, including top brass. If you don’t know how to fix it, get out of the way and bring in someone who does.. it’s an ego blow, but it’s the only way to survive.
So, back to my initial comment. Seeya DreamHost, I’ll be switching over the next several weeks as I select a new solution and migrate away. It was painful while it lasted. Hope you can fix the problems, but honestly I look at the history and wonder whether you’re learning anything or if the Whack-a-Mole will continue indefinitely.
You know what they say, vote with your dollars. I spend hundreds of dollars with DreamHost every year, and the service is far slower and more unreliable than when I used to host a FreeBSD box on my end of an SDSL line. Yes, they’re working hard, yes we’ll tell you what’s happening, blah blah blah. Actions speak louder than words. Invest to fix the problems. It’s clear you’re well behind the curve of keeping up with the service usage. Also, hire some people who aren’t learning on the job. I’ve been in companies that have grown from $100M to $3B, and it’s clear that people at every level become inappropriate, including top brass. If you don’t know how to fix it, get out of the way and bring in someone who does.. it’s an ego blow, but it’s the only way to survive.
So, back to my initial comment. Seeya DreamHost, I’ll be switching over the next several weeks as I select a new solution and migrate away. It was painful while it lasted. Hope you can fix the problems, but honestly I look at the history and wonder whether you’re learning anything or if the Whack-a-Mole will continue indefinitely.
this has been going on for months.
it is getting absurd.
i can’t do work.
I have been with dreamhost for a little over 1 1/2 years now. Up until about two months ago I had NO complaints about them. So I started moving over my clients sites also… great service, no problems. Them all hell brakes lose and my clients sites and my sites have either been sloooooooooooooooow , or timing out these last two months… I sat back for about two weeks to see what was going on.. still sloooooooooooooow or timing out.
I contacted Dreamhost and requested a call back.. it takes them 24-48 hours to reply to my emails and I NEVER got a call back. What I got was a credit for the call back that I NEVER got. I requested at least three call backs and have YET to get one!
I pay for a service every month and I expect to get some kind of service. I know when I go to a site and it is loading slooooooooow.. I leave. I got Comcast high speed service for a reason.. so I do not have to sit for 15 mins for a page to load! So I know that my visitors are NOT going to sit there and wait for my pages to load for them!
In the last two months I have lost clients and lost MONEY from clients and from my store! I finally took my store down and opened up a membership area. So how is my members going to get in the membership area when my site will NOT load for them! I have gotten many emails about this.. they do not want to pay for membership and NOT be able to get in there to download their items.
I was told if they move my sites and clients sites over to a more stable server I would NOT have no more problems.. I didn’t for about 2 weeks now.. and now all I am getting is sloooooooooooooooooow or timing out again!
I am losing money Dreamhost I really wish that you would get this straighten out so that I can start making money like you are making money from me each month and I am not getting the service!
Yes, they been keeping us updated… and I really do appreciated it … but … How long should we be patient for?
Just tried checking my email and I am getting error after error messages.. just tried checking my domains and I am getting time outs…
I really think we all should get a credit every time we can not get to our sites and our emails. Then when Dreamhost starts losing money.. they will see how it feels and maybe they will get this FIXED once and for all.
While trying to post this all I am getting is TIME OUT messages!
Oh for the love of pete…
Use the comment section for something OTHER than complaining. I would love to see cisco knowledgable people posting commments - and I think there are a few, but I can’t wade through all the “Give me credit, I’m losing money on my $9/month service…” posts.
These guys and gals are working hard to make it work - but if you can’t take the downtime, go pay $200/month at rackspace for zero downtime. I know I get what I pay for, so far Dreamhost has far exceeded my expectations for price and performance. Some downtime is forgivable and is actually expected. I appreciate the honest posts from them so I know what to expect.
Well, I for one have almost given up. I can’t afford a real host. The most reliable shared-hosting I’ve had was with ipowerweb, but they cold ripped me off for $90, so I can’t do business with them.
Dreamshot has lots of potential, I heard it was great for years and years, but now, well, it sucks. I have had nothing but problems.
Trying to update my sites is a joke, I just wait for it to time out, then try again. I can’t imagine what my surfers are experiencing. I am trying to start a commercial venture and basically dreamhosts neverending problems since I came on board are ruining my life, because I have to keep my day job.
I have dealt with 8 of the top shared-hosting plans, every one of them has lied, obfuscated, defrauded, or censored me.
Dreamhost is having a shitty time, but at least they don’t step on my dick as far as content is concerned.
Quote Rich J.: “I would rather have the site down completely for a few minutes at a time to frequently reboot, then to have it unresponsive for hours.”
Ditto buddy, ditto.
Please, please, please get your shit together, whoever’s fault it is, it is YOUR responsibility, oh Dreamhost management.
I WANT TO BELIEVE IN THIS COMPANY, BUT IT’S GETTING PRETTY DIFFICULT.
With the amount of money I have spent joining and leaving shared hosts who blow goats, I could have got a Virtual Private Server for the year. Live and learn. I’m going to wait out dreamhost, I’m sick of moving my sites, and I am basically depressed and don’t even care about the HUNDREDS OF HOURS I have put into my 15 sites, just to have them be slower than dirt, or totally unresponsive over 50% of the time for the last 4 months.
I’m totally despondent and want to cry, frankly.
Is that what passes for customer satisfaction nowadays?
tick tock tick tock, someday it will all be over.
I frankly agree that Dreamhost should be digging into their ever-deepening pockets to refund some of our lost services. There are federal laws about implicit guarantees of serviceability, and I think this fiasco is stretching the limits.
It’s like this; you hire a cheuffer (you lucky bastard!) and 50% of the time you call him for a ride he says “The car is in the shop,” and then you say “Why isn’t it fixed yet?” and the reply is “the mechanic can’t figure out what’s wrong.” (Except in the case of our analog, where Cisco is the mechanic, there IS NO OTHER MECHANIC TO GO TO!) You have paid the cheuffer full price for his yearly retainer up front, and yet he can’t a afford a working car?
Think about how a judge would view that situation after you show him 6 months of receipts receipts for bus fare…the cheuffer woudl owe you at least half, if not all of your money back, for failure to render service.
Really, I think even as it stands we could have a small class-action case for failure to render service. I don’t advocate that at this time, nor do I wish to see such a mess arise, but it really is getting pretty ridiculous.
still waiting for any kind of credit…I feel for you guys, as an IT manager I understand, but really if we handled our business this way we would be done for.
Good Luck, and where my credit!
Andy
As pissed as I am, I really appreciate this first detailed explanation that you’ve given. I do not like unprofessional statements like the router is having a “tummy ache” or “feeling bad” or whatever Sesame Street descriptions you’ve previously given. Please keep us up to date on specifics and not generalities.
Are you guys smoking crack over there? After all of the problems last weekend you do your “upgrade” and the final analysis is… “the network is still bad”? Wow… I was thinking of staying, but
you guys are making me waayyyyyy too nervous. Wow… I also can’t believe Josh has the gall to put this on the dreamhost blog:
“In summary, this blog will stay heavily focused on its original purpose.
Stroking Josh’s ego. ”
Great way to rub salt in our wounds. After seeing the post on stroking Josh’s ego, and this… I don’t see how I can stay with you guys. I’d say your hosting company is pretty much doomed.
Like so many others before me, I would like to be up front saying that I do appreciate the company transparency here. It’s refreshing to be working with an outfit that is customer-oriented in this respect.
However… as many others have stated, these nearly constant outages are approaching a level of unprofessionalism that make me question why I’m still sticking with you guys. Any other business would have been doing backflips at this point to retain their customers, but the most we’ve been getting is “It’ll be fixed soon!” or “Sorry about that, it’ll never happen again (we hope)!”. That’s not just unprofessional, it’s bad business. You’re coasting on the company loyalty of some of your more rabid devotees, and it shows.
I don’t want a refund. What I DO want is for responsibility to be taken, and for the problems to be fixed correctly the first time. Get some redundancy in your systems, hire some more knowledgeable IT people, SOMETHING. Hosting with you has turned from being a delight in 2002 to being a complete embarrassment in the past several months.
Please, for the sake of your customers, get your act together.
Echo the call for a rebate for the downtime.
If I can find a more reliable host, I’ll eat the $100 or whatever I’m out, and move my stuff.
Is anyone at DreamHost reading these comments?
What’s been frustrating, even after all those scheduled ‘maintenance,’ nobody is assuring smooth sailing.
It has been extremely frustrating as our guild members use the website all day long and are really screaming about it.
I so hope this is fixed soon.
Man, you guys need to stop acting like babies. I’ve had no slow performance and the only downtime has been after most people go to bed.
Refund this, refund that: you’re paying $10 a month for a ridiculous amount of bandwidth, space, features, and unparelled support.
Babies.
To all those who are saying ‘babies, it’s only ten bucks a month’ or ‘what do you expect for ten bucks a month’ - Dreamhost doesn’t say anywhere on their website that they’re a bargain host and to expect shitty service. In fact, I was led to believe that for my ten bucks a month I was getting awesome, first rate service. They brag about it. I don’t see anything that says - “We’re ten bucks a month because we’re down all the time. If you expect more, remember what a bargain we are.” Maybe they should point people to this website to see all the problems they’ve been having.
If you’ve had a great experience, good for you, but the people complaining have experienced some combination (or all) of the following for the last few months: ridiculous downtime, unreachable databases, poor customer service (being told repeatedly that a problem has been fixed when it clearly hasn’t), security problems (I had ADMIN access to ALL databases on one server last week, not just my own), mail that is almost always unreachable. Boohoo, yes, this is a great bargain at ten bucks a month, but if we’re to expect shitty service when we sign up, I’d like Dreamhost to commit to and publicize an SLA - what are we to expect, 85% uptime? I think that’s generous for this month. Your website’s only going to be down 3.5 days out of every month and you will be lucky to get your mail. All for the low price of ten dollars! Who would sign up for that?
I like how everyone who’s tooting DH’s horn has to resort to name-calling. “Idiots”, “babies”, “retards”… How about “annoyed customers paying for service they’re not receiving for close to 2 months”? How’s that one grab ya, Toby?
It is time to go to plan ‘B’. At this point I am ashamed that I recommended you guys to colleagues even at $10 a year.
I did pay the full $100+ because up until this point I was very happy with you guys, and at $100+ I saw it as a great value. I now feel completely ripped off, and I DO think that my plan should at least be extended for 6 months (and counting) if you guys ever get this figured out.
There is no possible way that I can run a site under these lagging conditions and expect any users to stay/wait to accomplish their tasks. I’m waiting to launch and I can not even promote a prelaunch site because the lag is so embarrassing.
Please resolve this, you have so much going for you. This is the absolute core of your business serving up webpages go back to getting that right.
Alright guys/girls I haven’t had any downtime with my site.
Maybe when they have everything up and running smoove they will get all of the features that we requested going to make us happy again.
Managing this large network, giving every such a large amount of space, shell access, and a good control panel, is something you will not find anywhere else. They are not compariable. They are above all other hosts. As I said before just becuase you pay $100 dollars a month doesn’t mean you will be getting your 99.9…% uptime. When there are problems at the datacenter there are problems and everyone has to wait until it gets fixed.
microsoft.com is supposed to be up all the time. Well it’s not
Just be happy that you are recieving service with such great features and stop complaining and wait it out just like all customers will do with any host. Moving will not guarantee a good uptime. If they have a power outage that shorts all of there routers they have to make phone calls and the downtime will be crazy and you won’t know anything about it in advance.
There is no backup plan for loss of internet, through core routers, gateway, shorted circuits, etc.
That’s like trying to get a new $8,000 dollar router in $30 minutes you can’t just go down to the store and pick up a new one. Who knows how many routers, switches dreamhost has probably in the hundreds and no datacenter keeps 100s of backup routers.
So sit back create something new for your websites as all of you should have a local backup webmaster rule #1.
Communication is the key to keep LOYAL customers! Everyone has their hiccups and DH is on top of the world with the most excellent communication in the business. I signed up during the 7 year anniversary sale for one year and now every couple months, I can’t keep track of it anymore, is that by bandwidth and diskspace is morphed into a plan no other hosting company could ever compete with. With this stradegy and the great prices they bring there will be some sort of downtime. WIth these little bumps the grass will be greener! These boys are a team and will not give up!
Keep up the great work and good luck on getting everything smooth again.
Carlo
Canada
ps.
I host 5 sites and have not once been affected by the down time during the last 6 months!! or ever since I’ve been a member for the last 2.5 years
# Crikey Says:
September 13th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
I like how everyone who’s tooting DH’s horn has to resort to name-calling. “Idiots”, “babies”, “retards”… How about “annoyed customers paying for service they’re not receiving for close to 2 months”? How’s that one grab ya, Toby?
Cheap, fast, reliable - pick two.
It works for cars, computers, wives, and (gasp) web hosts.
Sometimes even Cisco farks up - you can have a dozen CCIE’s (look it up if you don’t know what that is) in a room and still have some network glitches.
I look forward to the time DH turns these damn comments off… I keep looking for someone with insight - I only see b****ing and moaning.
Cisco is giving you totally crap support. The new fan trays require more 12V current than the 1300W power supplies can provide.
Here is the section from the Cisco manual:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps708/products_installation_guide_chapter09186a008020e083.html
“You must install a 2500 W or higher capacity power supply when using the Supervisor Engine 32 or the Supervisor Engine 720 and the high-speed fan tray. ”
Any Cisco engineer who told you that the new fan tray can run on a 1300W power supply is incompetent and has clearly never done a Sup720 upgrade with Fan2 or E-Fan tray (you did upgrade to an 6500E chassis didn’t you? Please tell me they didn’t sell you an old 6500 non-E chassis and screwed you there as well!)
Let me know if there’s anything I can help with. I have more experience with Cisco 6500s than I care to admit, and I admire DH and want you guys to succeed. From the sounds of it, Cisco is not providing you with anywhere near the level of support you need.
test
I have to say, it doesn’t seem to be the right time to knock on people who want to complain here. Many of us have our businesses tied to our hosting, and we’ve stuck w/ dreamhost before they expanded so quickly. We have a lot at stake with dreamhost and “get up and leave” already isn’t helpful, nor is it easy to do. Nor do I think that complaining only hurts the situation. It’s obvious Dreamhost grew to big for its britches, and they’re nice people sure, but complaints should always be rendered. Of course I don’t think complainging will make anyone work any faster: it seems like they’re doing the best they can. But if enough comments are rendered it might make a big enough impression on the “higher ups” and let them know that some serious capital needs to be put into hardware, software, and personell upgrades.
Jeremy, I have to thoughtfully disagree. i don’t work with, for, or against DH. I’m just a customer. But I did my homework and I’m tired of people knocking my host.
DH is a discount webhost - they don’t make up time promisses, nor do they make refund promisses. I read the TOS, did you?
#6 DreamHost Webhosting makes no warranties or representations of any kind, whether expressed or implied for the service it is providing. DreamHost Webhosting also disclaims any warranty of merchant-ability or fitness for a particular purpose and will not be responsible for any damages that may be suffered by the Customer, including loss of data resulting from delays, non-deliveries or service interruptions by any cause or errors or omissions of the Customer. Use of any information obtained by way of DreamHost Webhosting is at the Customer’s own risk, and DreamHost Webhosting specifically denies any responsibility for the accuracy or quality of information obtained through its services. Connection speed represents the speed of a connection to and do not represent guarantees of available end to end bandwidth. DreamHost Webhosting expressly limits its damages to the Customer for any non-accessibility time or other down time to the pro-rata monthly charge during the system unavailability.
If I couldn’t afford downtime - or if your customers are angery with you because you made promisses you couldn’t keep - then you have yourself to blame. You save a lot of money and you get a lot of service here, but there is zero up time promisses. They do, however, pro-rate the monthly charge for downtime. But asking for it here is just plain dumb. Submit a ticket - and be nice about it. I may not work for DH - but I am a customer support rep, and I hate mean people.
HostRocket host is very good. You can find a lot of reviews about HostRocket on the website http://www.hothosting.info/en. Also, HostRocket is trusted by many of its customers. Obviously, there can not be a very perfect host, since these hosts are of many different features.
The clients should buy a host which meets their needs perfectly. For example, if a person has some experiences with Linux, he or she may choose the host which supports ssh so that it can achieve its perfect performances. Moreover, the e-shop host users can choose a kind production which could provides more after-services.
Go to http://www.hothosting.info/en and have a look, there must be some suitable methods for you in choosing the right hosts. You will know more about the web hosting!Enjoy!
@Taby : lol
Cisco guys should’ve known better. Even if there is more than enough power for the system, the HSF tray for the Sup720s requires a 2500W or higher PS. This is something hardcoded into the IOS. You have some good reason to push this up through TAC and get a new engineer assigned. I’d raise heck with your sales rep too.