Sep 15
3:18 am
Starburst hopefully more stable!
Posted (September 15th, 2006 at 3:18 am PST) by KellyJust a quick note that I think I found what was causing starburst to crash over and over. Someone was illegally distributing copyrighted files in a very sneaky fashion, and causing apache to eat a -lot- of ram. At first (second, third…) glance it looked like the usual large amounts of -shared- ram that our stuff uses constantly. Two nights of banging my head against the server later I realized it wasn’t shared ram, when stopping that apache instance freed up 3.5 gigs of ram!
Either way, I think this server is ready to rock and roll. I will continue to monitor it for the next few hours, but the memory usage on it has bottomed out so I think we’re clear.
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September 15th, 2006 at 4:46 am
I switched to http://www.jaguarpc.com/
They have awesome plans and they don’t use 1 http server attached to 80 file servers trying to serve the websites of 1200 people. Dreamhost is just a greedy company.
September 15th, 2006 at 5:07 am
Boy, was he angry.
I wonder what adjective he’ll be after using Plesk.
September 15th, 2006 at 5:23 am
Bye!!
September 15th, 2006 at 5:34 am
I’M MADE, IN TOTAL I’ve been with dreamhost for 80 days, if you add up the seconds of downtime I’ve had I’ve had 14 days down.
I think I’m going ot leave to theplanet.com
September 15th, 2006 at 5:35 am
MAD**
September 15th, 2006 at 5:55 am
Thanks for the info. Stupid illegal distributers. Thanks for all y our hard work.
September 15th, 2006 at 6:22 am
Re: Angry
>I switched to http://www.jaguarpc.com/
>They have awesome plans and they don’t use 1 http server attached to 80 file servers trying to serve the websites of 1200 >people. Dreamhost is just a greedy company.
You’re kidding. Awesome plans? I use over 100 gigs per week here at DH. All that, for less than $10 a month. If I took my stuff to that company you mention, I’d have to pay a whole lot more.
September 15th, 2006 at 6:24 am
Sneezy says: “I wonder what adjective he’ll be after using Plesk.”
Rueful? Scarred? Twitching?
All of the above…?
I’m constantly astounded by the level of bitchiness the people posting here seem to have. Bitch, bitch, bitch, whine, bitch… don’t you people have something better to do? Like signing up for other hosting providers and thus leaving the rest of us alone?
September 15th, 2006 at 6:48 am
Do you really believe ‘100% Network Uptime Guarantee’? Not me…
Good luck DH in problem solving and thanks for keeping us posted. I really apreciate that!
September 15th, 2006 at 7:35 am
Cheers DH for the info.
since moveing to DH i have saved so much money. B4 i was with 1&1 and it was costing me $50 to $60 per month.
in bandwith bills. Plus the $20 hosting cost.
Peace out DH
James Weston /.
September 15th, 2006 at 7:40 am
Instead of doing some fingerpointing I would appreciate getting things fixed. I appreciate it a lot that we stay informed but my site is down for an entire day already.
Thanks in advance for solving the problems,
Claudio
September 15th, 2006 at 7:43 am
Too late! Switched to hostforweb.com. If you’d fixed the problems a couple days earlier, I would have stuck with dreamhost out of pure laziness.
September 15th, 2006 at 7:57 am
All these people saying they are leaving or have left.. so what .. what you doing back here posting.. enjoy your life and get over it - I know we & DH will.
hostforweb spammer - I have to laugh at you.
Compare:
hostforweb: Basic (Type: Linux) - 3000 MB space, 125 GB bandwidth for $9.95/mo
Dreamhost: Crazy Domain Insane (Type: Linux) - 20 GB space, 1000 GB bandwidth for $7.95/mo
Uptime & rating:
hostforwed: hostforweb.com average uptime is 99.976% (rank #1159 on our directory)
Dreamhost: dreamhost.com average uptime is 99.978% (rank #1031 on our directory)
There have been 30 positive votes for Hostforweb and 4 negative. And overall company rank on our directory is #126
There have been 32 positive votes for Dreamhost and 15 negative. And overall company rank on our directory is #11
Speak for itself.. :p
courtesy of http://www.vistainter.com/reviews/
September 15th, 2006 at 8:00 am
FYI: My site is hosted on .bechamelwasher (I have no idea which machine hosts my database) and everything is currently very spotty today still …
September 15th, 2006 at 8:00 am
Actually JaguarPC.com is a really great company pending you don’t use over their bandwidth allotment. Get a VPS plan and you get an option to have a small pipe rather than have a bandwidth limit. However don’t get the cheapest plan. Go at least the next notch up. I moved to Dreamhost to them then back but I still recommend JaguarPC.com for VPS and Dedicated server plans and Dreamhost for shared hosting plans.
September 15th, 2006 at 8:02 am
“angry”: I switched *from* JaguarPC *to* DreamHost. JaguarPC was decent, and I wish them all the best, but I do not believe for a second that you’ll be happier there, current DH status included.
September 15th, 2006 at 8:11 am
Nice job fixing this one - lame that there are still customers taking advantage of our shared resources. Do you guys run any kind of “process tamer” that prevents/throttles CPU or RAM hogs?
We run one of those on our servers (not ones like PeopleSoft, but any shared web servers) and it’s been pretty helpful.
September 15th, 2006 at 8:18 am
you guys are horrible, can’e wait for you to go out of business
September 15th, 2006 at 8:50 am
Had my doubts, but glad I stuck it out.
Thank you for the updates which were way mo than what others may have offered.
September 15th, 2006 at 9:10 am
Could the same thing be happening on fletcher and therefore cauing my MT 3.2 updates to be throttled?
I’m happy with DH, cheep and very helpful! I love being told what’s happening on this site.
Thanks DH
September 15th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Look at dotable.com. It’s from the guys that made httpme.com, and dotable has been _really_ for me so far.
September 15th, 2006 at 9:28 am
Yes, I really can’t wait to see what he’s got to say after using Plesk…
September 15th, 2006 at 9:36 am
Thanks for staying on top of it.
I almost had to bail but you resolved things before I got around to switching.
Being a sys adm can really suck at times. I can relate.
September 15th, 2006 at 9:54 am
Loren, you scottish? lol
September 15th, 2006 at 10:07 am
Headed to http://hosting.aplus.net/unixhosting.html
Price is reasonable, and they at least credit back for down time, instead of just pretend to care.
Well correction, I will be gone once the servers here are stable enough for me to get my data off of…
September 15th, 2006 at 10:11 am
Do you want a cookie?
September 15th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Yes, rasin oatmeal please. I can eat it while I wait for my site to come back up. :p
September 15th, 2006 at 11:28 am
Whike the sites I managed did not really have big problems during these days, now I see speed improvements evrywhere.
What that I like more are these updates. It’s not commons to see a company that does admit their problem. Both for personal sites and for business peojects (personal or of my customers) I’ll stick to Dreamhost.
Thanks to the Dreamhost staff for all their work, here it’s really apreciated!
September 15th, 2006 at 11:29 am
like watching grass grow
September 15th, 2006 at 11:30 am
I’m new here, just signed up a few days ago, but I have to say after going thru a few other hosts, this is the first time I’ve seen so much open, clear explanation of what problems are being dealt with. Other hosts would go down or be ’spotty’ without a hint of why or any kind of apology whatsoever. I’m very impressed by your willingness to keep everyone as informed as possible.
Hardware inevetibly goes bad on occasion, and hardware problems can be particularly difficult to pinpoint, especially with a setup as huge as DH must be (I’d love to see a pic of your server room). There’s not a host on the planet that’s impervious to manufacturer defects and whatnot. Anybody that expects a perfect host needs to take a moment and think about how difficult it is to keep even a smallish network up and running full time.
We all want a perfect, rock solid host, especially those of us who are also hosting our clients’ websites. In the mean time, it’s good to know I’ll be able to give them an explanation if things go wonky. I researched hosts for a long time before I decided on this one, mostly due to the overwhelming number of recommendations I got on various forums. I think I made the right choice.
September 15th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Glad to see things are getting back to normal–especially webmail, which was really the vital thing for me. While I still think some kind of rebate/discount thing would be fair–the opportunity to upgrade to more space at a lower cost than non-current-members, maybe?–I don’t plan on leaving.
Off topic: What’s more annoying than people who bitch and moan? People who bitch and moan about people who bitch and moan.
But you can’t expect much else from comments on a blog like this.
September 15th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Personally, I’m thrilled with the level of support that DH gives as well as the fact that they try their best to keep everyone informed about any issues with the servers.
My previous host had the means to keep people informed, but chose not to do so.
September 15th, 2006 at 11:56 am
Just want to chime in and say that I am finally noticing a dramatic improvement across all of my sites hosted with DH. I only hope that the light of the end of the tunnel is here to stay. Thanks for all your hard work to everyone @ Dreamhost.
September 15th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Good job. Things are back to normal. Thanks for the hard work in fixing stuff AND being honest when stuff is busted !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
September 15th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
yes, yes yes… back and forth between complainers and apologists. I absolutely love the guys at DH also and kudos for the open status RSS they give, BUT, I have been loving them while my business deteriorated all summer due to months of problems. And to those who respond back with comments like “well leave then.. Bye..” well, it’s not that easy. Some of us have many and large databases and code heavy sites. Can’t just keep flipping hosts on a whim. And yes, I’ve got a backup host I’m now forced into paying for to redirect traffic to during these outages. But that doesn’t work effective either because of the 8-12 hour latency with DNS switching over and then back again. My sites get back up lately fine, then the extreme slowness comes back or complete inaccessiblity (while other DH sites on different servers load fine)
I applaud the DH effort and openness, but with no phone support (36 hours was how long my last callback took) and problems with consistent symptoms taking months to fix some of us have been legitimately exasperated.
Also, I plead with some of you to keep the juvenile and off-topic posts to yourselves and keep this board clean with technical or business related topic posts only. For goodness sakes already….
September 15th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
I’m getting tired of this. I’m the only “tech guy” in a small company of about 100 employees. I’m the POC for email, website, and network stuff. For over a month now I’ve been telling my boss and coworkers “they’re working on it” and “it looks like they’ve got it fixed now” just to have our email go tits up again. I’ve been happy with DH until a few weeks ago, but if this goes on much longer, I’m jumping ship, too.
September 15th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
Chill out, man - Rome wasn’t built in a day. Give them a few more weeks and they might get somewhere… : )
September 15th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Firstly, I adore DH. It’s the only service that I’ve had that keeps me up to date on what the heck is going on.
I own my own company (FNS Net) and work for another company (National Security & Door) full-time as their network administrator…
so secondly, I can relate to Getting Fed Up when he says he tired of telling his boss the email will be working from now on just for it to bail again… NS&D relies a lot on email when communicating with clients, and I hear about it whenever it’s not working. But I can relate to DH too… it’s all to easy to blame DH and say they are :greedy: or that they just arn’t good enough.. but I assume that sometime soon, they will get everything working just fine.
I have siteuptime.com checking my site perodically throughout the day, and it did drop service twice yesterday and once today… (and one more time right now, which is why I’m here).. but I’ll hold out hope for a while longer to see if this pans out.
Matthew
FNSNetwork
.gonzo Server
September 15th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
Overall, it really has been a bumpy ride lately at DH. Lots of downtime..it seems the status page is always updated with something going wrong… but I still have to stay im sticking with dreamhost and I’m glad about it. The plans are still unbeatable, and I love the web panel and customer support. I see why people are leaving, though, and I really think both sides of the people flaming have valid points. Hope things become more stable like they used to be. I’ll be here.
September 15th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
I’ve been trying to leave a comment, but I left one before with a couple links in it and now they’re marked as spam.
They never were before.
Your error message says to contact the blog admin by email, but there is no blog admin email provided. It also says that the blog admin will be able to immediately approved the incorrectly block comments… but no such incorrectly blocked comments have been approved.
What gives? And what’s your blog admin’s email?
September 15th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
Dreamhost is simply one of the best web providers there has ever been. Until now, their servers have seldom failed. I will, and plan to, stay with dreamhost, but I really do think it’s unfair that our websites/email have been left crippled for the last two weeks. Because of this, I have lost hundreds of dollars in loss of productivity. I think it’s only fair that dreamhost offer us some sort of refund, or maybe a couple months of free service.
September 15th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
The way I see it is…every host is bound to have some kind of problems sooner or later. I’ve been with several different hosts over a period of eight years, and DH has been, by far, the best. I’ve never had any problems with any of the guys (and gals- if you’re there) in tech support.
What I really like about DH is that they *tell* you when there are problems. Several other hosts won’t even get back to you about anything or they get back to you a week later! How does that help?? lol
I applaud DH in their efforts in what they do, you won’t find great service anywhere else.
Just my two cents.
September 15th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
I too and a full time network admin. If I told my boss a problem woudl take 2-3 months to fix, I would be fired. Dreamhost has longer then that. While I sympathize with thier issues, my business is losing customers becuase of Dreamhost’s issues. My customers drive my business, just like Dreamhosts customers should drive theres. If all I had with them was some silly vanity site, I might feel differently.
I think most of the postive comments through out this have been from Dreamhost empolyee’s, Surely no one would really sing the prasies of a host that has all these issues dating back several months now (I have the trouble ticket log to back that up, not that I would post it here).
As for thier openness, it is like a serial killer that apogolizes everytime he kills someone, but then goes out and kills again. Extreme example, but it gets the point across.
September 15th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
> If all I had with them was some silly vanity site, I might feel differently.
Like This???
September 15th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
I can appreciate that uptime is of great concern to people who rely on it to run a business and it does appear that DH have had some problems of late. However, I still appreciate the fact that DH keep us informed about what’s happening. I don’t expect to have perfect webhosting, … I switched to DH a few weeks back after a horrid experience with my previous host being taken over with little to no communication and changes to services without any notice. Yes I’ve noticed some problems so far at DH, but by keeping customers informed and admitting their failings DH have made a good impression on me.
September 15th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
Dreamhost = good.
September 16th, 2006 at 1:34 am
I cant beleive some of the comments here….
DH posts theres a problem, and what the actual problem was, and that its hopefull fixed. It affects people on one server, yet those that are not happy with their own hosting for whatever reason, use it as a podium to posts comments about how unhappy they are..
After various years with various different webhosts, I have to say Dreamhost is the most up front and communicative of the lot, and most of all they tell us what went wrong, and often how they’re going to prevent it in the future.
I’m sure everyone can appreciate that a lof the problems they have had recently have all been beyond their control. It’s never easy to put a network back together after powercuts take out some of your key hardware.
Dreamhost not only saves me money, but also gives me access to all of the features that are only available in the higher priced hosting accounts in the UK.
September 16th, 2006 at 2:17 am
maybe, if all of you stupid fucks didn’t have horrid blog’s that waste dh bandwith and space- the lot of us who use the internet for business would prosper.
get a fucking livejournal… no one reads your shit (or look at the eyesore that is your site).
September 16th, 2006 at 6:14 am
Maybe all you stupid fucks that use DH for ‘business’ accounts should spend a little more for a host that offers more business-oriented guarantees… no one buys your cheap shit anyhow…
September 16th, 2006 at 11:24 am
It’s almost as if telling people what the problem is and that you’re fixing it makes them more pissed off.
The worst part of the lot is that “99.9%” uptime BS that so many places try to pass off. I’ve been with and known people who worked at lots of reputable hosting services, and if they’re offering that sort of uptime, you beeter believe it’s not on shared hosting. Why? Well because there are too many unknowns when hosting 255 people on a box (depending on how many a given company puts on a box) so uptime is highly dependent on the users NOT doing some shit like this and sapping the ram. Of course, you start to tell me “they could put in locks and redundancy checks and that sort of thing” but there are two problems there, 1.) locks make everyone’s life hell. If your site gets a lot of traffic because of a slashdotting or something like that, you’re locked. Game over. Or say you’re testing a script and you accidentally infinite looped it or some such thing. Better call tech to get it unlocked. And it could lead to company policies that aren’t exactly favorable for customers. The second bit of business is the redundancy and things like that. Companies that actually honor the 99.9% guarantee spend at least hundreds of thousands of dollars and more often it’s up into the millions. They would NOT be charging you $8/month for their services because, as I said before, shared hosting with that sort of redundancy is expensive as hell, and semi-dedicated is a lot easier to pull off.
You people really need to reevaluate your expectations from a shared hosting plan and realize that DH is really pushing one of the best products in tbe business, especially for higher-bandwidth sites. Their policies are very open and customer friendly and they don’t lock out accounts because of their own lack of preparedness. (Like HostRocket did to me when my site got linked for a major event.) Twittery makes a good point. If you’re trying to run a business, invest in it.