Problems with networking (No really this time)
Posted (October 1st, 2006 at 9:29 am PST) by jordanWe are currently having some problems this morning with a switch and are trying to move machines off of that switch right now. Downtime includes customers on servers cerriots, hernod , rossmore , oxnard , arrow. We apologize for the trouble and hope to have the switch replaced asap.
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We have moved the servers in the affected rack to knew switches in other racks temporarily while we get a new switch in place. We are working on recovery efforts now on servers which may be down. The list of affected servers is:
Arrow, mel, caesar, herod, alondra, overland, rossmore, oxnards, cerritos, selma, nala, demeter, jarvis. This is a mix of 3 MySQL servers and the rest webservers.
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Sorry about no timestamp before, it’s 12:36 Pacific time (-0800? I never could keep track of daylight savings time.)
We have completely replaced the switch and are working on getting the servers back online. All networking cables are back in their regularly scheduled switch ports.
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Wierdness is afoot. The servers are still exhibiting the same problems, we have even moved two of them into our new datacenter and it’s the same deal. It’s only specific servers in half of one of our racks.
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As of 1700 Pacific time (GMT-0800 or so, 5PM), we think the issues with this rack are behind us. We moved some machines to new hardware and this seems to have fixed the problems. We will be looking in to this more on monday, and doing some extensive testing on that hardware to make sure it was the root cause of the problem.
129 Responses to “Problems with networking (No really this time)”
Jetfax, this is what usually happens when there is downtime (atleast for me), welp atleast DH are honest enough to acknolwedge it.. altough my site today has a downtime of more then 2 hours already..
What about people on caesar? All my daomins seem to be down..
my domains have been down for two hours on alonda also
Mine have been on and off all day (caesar), off for the past few hours though. Support keeps telling me everythings fine though 
All my servers are down, too, and I can’t bring the CP up to submit a report, so it’s definitely not just those servers.
Correction to my above post, 2 of my servers eventually came up but are slow, 2 are unreachable, along with the CP. Neither of them are on the servers listed as having problems.
My sites have been down too - how do you check to see what server(s) your sites are on?
Yep.
The load on cerritos has been flucuating for sometime now. Sometimes the load is ~2, which customer support said was normal, and sometimes it would spike to ~5 or ~7. I knew something was going to happen eventually — because my site would get extremely slow at times. I thought there was someone on cerritos running a poorly written script, but I’m glad DH has identified the issue. All we can do now is wait.
If I hear one more person say anything to the effect of “well, at least their honest” about X hours of downtime, I will seriously freak out. This is total BS, I have been waiting for 6 months for DH to get it together, mainly becuase they have a year’s worth of my money which I seriously doubt they will give back. I depend on this service to read my mail, as do three customers of mine. The past year’s deterioration of service is extreme, it’s frustrating for me and embarrassing when I have to explain to my customers why their mail is down again. Time to look elsewhere for (semi-)reliable mail hosting.
My sites are on Selma, and i have problems since about 5 days 
Still waiting …
David, have you even tried getting a refund, or would that interfere with your crying schedule?
If your site was actually important, and you really thought DH was that bad, a few months of payments wouldn’t get in the way of moving on with your life… if you had one.
knew switch?
so it’s a knetworking problem? I never knew it had a silent k!
Wow, this is incredible, do they not have any redundant equipment in this place. I can not believe how many outages I am taking. Guys do you have any formal procedures for anything. Maybe I should send you one of my ITIL books, for you to read. You guys need to step back a bit an look at the whole infrastructure and design a plan to remedy all know weak points. Maybe you are not charging enough for services, I get the feeling you are taking shortcuts to save money.
Sorry but this is starting to make a lot of us look foolish to our clients.
Yes, they are charging less for a less redundant service. THIS IS HOW SHARED HOSTING WORKS.
I hope that you’ll fix it soon cause my server goes down every 30 minutes.
this really sucks guys every week i get down times! i’m abotu to relaunch one of my sites and now i have to deal with this crap ! Please get it back up soon !
i’m on ceasar and it’s been acting out since last night and since this morning its completly inaccesible.
anyone know a reliable host, i plan to leave dreamhost.
“All we need is just a little patience”
- Patience (G’nR) -
But I can’t. I didn’t even have a week in peace!
Add cornelius to the list of servers.
I’m on caesar and this has been happening for awhile now. I recall having down time a few months ago?
CAESAR CAESAR CAESAR CAESAR CAESAR CAESAR CAESAR CAESAR!
Et tu Caesar?
So, your big fix lasted, what? All of a few weeks. Your honesty no longer carries much weight.
Let’s get personal, shall we? I’m shopping around projects, using my website as a #$%@! CALLING CARD. You make me look stupid when someone can’t access it. I already am forced to use my GMAIL account for business correspondance because I can’t trust the email address linke to my site. I’m trying to brand myself, and you’re E- and A-ffecting that brand.
Move to a $@#@!% cave in N.D. already and MAKE IT WORK!
MAKE IT WORK!
MAKE IT WORK!
MAKE IT WORK!
ARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!
My 4 websites have been down almost the whole day. This service sucks… 
By the way, i have 20 websites hosted here at widexs in the netherlands for 10 years now. And one simple account at dreamhost. I’ve got more problems with these 4 little sites at dreamhost in a few months, than with my 20 big websites at widexs in 10 years! Go figure. i’m leaving to at the end of the year.
how do you find out what dreamhost servers (server name) your site is hosted on?
I’m happy at the moment all websites are up but it s..s really. I thought that DH is on eof the better hostings but it looks like that I’m wrong…
@Faizal,
I think you’re comparing two different things, Widexs is OK but to expensive, remember the price you’re paying for a DH account for one year (its the same you pay for 2.5 GB hosting a month)
Please can you put a timestamp on any updates.
It makes reading the status a lot easier
i thought DH was nice im on cerritos and now for the past few days it’s running so slow and now my site has been down about all day i think when my year is up im moven some where else also.
My site keeps going down on herod.
This is really frustrating.. will we be receiving credits for downtime?
Liquid Web look promising.
? ? ? ? ?
Rossmore still down. Service has been flakey lately. Hours of downtime is what I left my previous provider for and unfortunately now I have the same issue with DH.. Hope you guys get it back up soon
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!! get my website back up! I have almost no downtime but the last 2 days my website has been down! PLEASE get your shit together and fix all these fucken problems PLEASE!! My clients are mad at me now.
Come on, please get things sorted out. Oxnard is screwed as well and all my hosting is buggered.
We are on Herod? and we have been down a good portion of the day again. We are running a business and I have patients that are getting upset. Service has been up / down and overall slow for past week. What is going on?
Oh, my god! I keep getting emails from DH , told me the problem had been resolved, but my site is still DOWN !!!! DOWN !!!
Me and my group of 7 - 10 people busted our humps all day and a good piece of the evening yesterday promoting my web portal (www.portodiao.com), which is hosted with DH. Not just that, but all of the sites/blogs that are part of it are members as well. Now, I wake up today and all of them tell me “Porto Diao is down!”
After that excrutiating day yesterday promoting the portal now you’re gonna tell me my new visitors can’t access it nor any of the members in it? This is crap… I’m getting a headache as I type this….
how much longer is downtime going to be? im getting stressed now lol
DreamHost is by far the best host I’ve ever been with.
I just wish they can get themselves together a bit.
I’ve never seen so many people complain about a host.. http://www.ipowerweb.com check out that one, too. I personally use http://www.shieldhost.com …
Another one: http://www.canaca.com/virtual.html — also a company I use for my other site.
Naughty dreamhost. Stop getting Linksys switches or whatever you’ve been buying lately. Go back to something proven, like cisco. heh.
is it just me or does it seem like the cerritos server goes down for hours on end atleast every other week….. lottts of downtime and im beginning to wonder if this is the best place for my well trafficked sites. reliability is an issue and with the web you expect web sites to always be available.
thanks Frederick shieldhost looks nice 87$ bucks for a year a free domain for life i think im fxing to get that lol
oxnard is down again
it is 4:46 pm Central time
my servers have been down on and off for weeks now.
this is getting to be very expensive for me.
I’ve been here for 2 years and ive had no downtime other than the system-wide issues that come up from time to time. I get the impression everyone bends the truth a bit here.
@Mike, you talk about redundancy of servers. You are asking for a duplicate of every single machine in the entire data center? You (surely) must realise that this would be double the cost to you. You are paying for cheap, shared hosting. You are not paying for guaranteed uptime
All domains for me on Selma are complete non-responsive. Have been since shortly after this item was posted.
Wierd, I can ssh to alondra ok, but can’t access any files hosted on my domain. My root domain seems to work ok (www.oaps.org), but maybe it is cached at my browser or something.
Oxnard is still out on a limb - H-E-L-P
Timestamp please.
Matthew,
I, for one, am not bending any truth. My sites have been down for about 5 hours today. I figure I’ve lost , well nevermind, way too much money. They are still down now.
Bending the truth. pitoooey!
My oxnard server is back up again now. 5:38 pm CST. Hope it sticks.
Scratch “real big”. If you have any site, regardless of size, that you expect reasonable uptime on, don’t trust dreamhost. I host 6 sites that all get very small amounts of traffic, with no CPU intensive apps, and I have still had miserable uptime since this whole mess started in July. I am past the point where “we’re sorry” has any effect on me - the fact that Dreamhost acknowledges their repeated incompetence and does nothing to compensate their customers is unacceptable.
All my sites of selma have been down since this morning… I recently promoted my site heavily and this is not good for new visitors to see that my site doesn’t even work…
Selma is still down as of 6:51 est.
i wish cerritos would come back online
Just curious, which servers were moved to the new datacenter?
Selma appears to be working for now…
Naughty dreamhost. Stop getting Linksys switches or whatever you’ve been buying lately. Go back to something proven, like cisco. heh.
Extra heh since linksys is a division of cisco
Anonymous
(thanks Frederick shieldhost looks nice 87$ bucks for a year a free domain for life i think im fxing to get that lol)
Here we go again with people from other hosting companies advertising here. How good they are and sh.t. Compare and see. If its that bad why you still here? Is it the few $$$$ that DH charges you?
There frustrated Joe like myself so there giving other hosts out there from pure frustration. Dreamhost has a lot of features for the price but if your site is down a lot what good is it.
Let me say, off the bat, that I’m sorry for everyone that is having trouble. Personally my site, on kroner, has been up almost 100% of the time except when they replaced the core router.
Just as someone who is reading comments, could you guys post your websites? No offence, but it really takes credibility away from your complaint if we can’t click the link and see for ourselves that the site is indeed down.
I know you guys work hard Dreamhost. Problems will be gone soon, and it will be like it was 2 years ago.
My site is working now! Thanks Dreamhost!
I’m seeing a lot of the described issues on Foothill now as well - my sites, which were loading fine a few minutes ago (I’ve been working on them), are suddenly not responding any more. Connecting to the server using SSH is also slow - I’ll get a login, and then a password a few minutes later, then the greeting message a few minutes after that.
I know you guys are working hard at getting this back up quickly, hopefully it’s not too much of a problem. Thanks for your hard work.
10 minutes later and Foothill seems fine again. Maybe it was unrelated, but it was definitely slow/nearly unacceptable during that time.
Still, cheers guys.
What I find funny is the number of people screaming and crying on these comments and crying about how much Dreamhost sucks, but who don’t seem to have a problem keeping their Dreamhost affiliate links on their site. I guess Dreamhost isn’t bad enough that they feel it would be wrong to get other people to give them money to use it.
Also the sheer number of people who say “my site is my business calling card!” or something similar and they have an absolute shit site about monkeys playing video games or something.
I’ve have 2 shared hosting accounts and 3 websites hosted at 1and1 for the past 2-3 years and can’t remember a single downtime on either of them.
Since I’ve gotten an account at dreamhost it’s been down 4 times that I know of and it’s only been a week.
Very unhappy with the service.
1and1 support sucks and when they do respond to support issues they lie and deceive.
Dreamhost support is good and tells the truth
1and1 uptime is GREAT
Dreamhost uptime is crap
On the burns server.
My sites on oxnard are up again & loading swiftly so looks like the problem is solved, hopefully for good.
ttancm shut the fuck up! Obviuosly your website didn’t go down asswipe!
Will you all stop bitching about the service already!
I would like to see you all get a hosting company running and try to keep this many websites and servers running. They’ve been honest, now give them a break! Constantly posting you’re gonna move to a new service and that you’re looking for something else is not going to solve anything.
Dreamhost, you’re doing well. Let’s hope that all these little bugs are worked out in the future so we can shut these idiots up.
First, anyone that signs up with a host that is spammed here, on a competitor’s website, is a fool and deserves the worst. Every host mentioned here has as many or problems as DH.
Second, anyone whining about losing business, which THEY chose to put on a single shared hosting plan, are getting what they deserve. Hopefully, when your clients dump you, they will choose someone that values their business more than the price of a single cheap shared hosting plan. Ever hear of failover DNS?
Seriously, when you people throw your little tantrums here, you’re making yourselves look bad–not Dreamhost.
I’m on hillhurst and since yesterday I can’t really upload… A few bytes go up and then the transfer gets stuck. It’s not only frustrating but really bad for business - I’m trying to upload a preview for a client and I’m pulling my hair out slowly but surely.
I used to be hosted on ord a few days ago, now it seems I’m on malt, and though that machine hasn’t been mentioned, there’s been a weird on and off since yesterday, I guess it has something to do with this problem.
All my sites on malt are down as well!
This is happening too often now. I really hope you guys manage to pull things together and get this sorted out. I’ve only just launched my new site and it has spent more time down than up!
I used to be a Communitech fan… And the beginning of the end was like this…
I love DH, but this is not serious.
I am moving out.
what’s happening
0% access to alpha-release demo of my e-commerce store, CMS, web-FTP and MySQL database. In addition to my current 8+ hour downtime outage, I’ve had 6 outages for my three domains and webmail since I signed up in June of this year. This is ridiculous. The amount of time spent typing blog entries that reiterate poor server administration could be better spent improving server response.It’s just a forum to remind users how much Dreamhost screws up.
All my websites on Warhead are also down it is almost an hour now. Too bad. I was with Godaddy earlier with not a single second of downtime.
im never think bout move from dreamhost…..
just hoping…….
everyting is back to normal, just like last year…….
My site is down too, I don’t know what server it’s on… but I don’t like this
Actually Mike, some of my sites have been down, but unlike you morons whining here I can read (and type, “Obviuosly”) and I know that this isn’t the place to complain about it.
If you run a business site, which you depend on for your full income, on a single shared hosting account, you are a moron.
If you complain about it in a place the company states very clearly that they will not respond, you are a moron.
If you bitch and whine and threaten to leave in public, over and over while still hoping to get money from an affiliate program for a discount towards hosting that you swear “sucks” or that you will soon be leaving anyway, you are either a moron, or a disreputable ass who has no compunctions about sending his readers/viewers/clients to a webhost that you yourself think “sucks” and/or aren’t planning on doing business with anymore or both.
So bite me Mike you anonymous little coward. If you are so upset then leave. I doubt anyone will miss you. And at least have the courage to post your website if you are going to throw temper tantrums in public, so that those ever so “important clients” can see what type of a jackass the downtime saved them from dealing with.
My site was down too (Saltine).. My users always complaining.. You should write to index page “Downtime %99″ 
It’s normal having problems but it’s not normal having problems everyday..
Please keep Uptime %99..
I’m not so patient..
CHEEKY server is down.
If you guys need to charge more each month, in order to prevent this from occurring so often, then charge more.
ttancm… well said.
I’m surprised the admins even left this comment feature active…
And I too chuckle at all the people who claim to be losing money - like they’re going to be compensated any more than the actual downtime prorated against the $9 they’ll pay this month.
I see no uptime promisses in any terms… if you came expecting such, then you assumed. And I’d love to break down that word for you.
First time I see people happy with their downtime… It’s one thing to dislike idiots who blow things way out of proportion and another to act like it’s okay and a giggly happy thing that downtimes like these happen…
Kudos to what ttancm said … seriously, Crybabies can now please leave the forum.
rOb
stimpy’s dead too
bluehost /’nuff said
It wouldn’t be so bad if DH was upfront about the realities of using their service. If you know going into it that the service sucks then the inevitable outages don’t come as such a surprise. Lunarpages doesn’t have anywhere near the number of problems that DH does. I’m not just talking about the web server outages. On numerous occasions someone at DH was ‘tweaking’ a config file somewhere (e.g. mail) and I lose service. The place seems to be run by techs with the experience level of college students. Not everyone is paying $9 a month. I paid $960 for the year.
shit ! i am worried i just bought a plan from DH by paying one year of payment ! and these comments are disturbing !
catbert MYSQL server just went offline 10 minutes ago - seems catbert has been having some minor problems lately - they get to it right away, but all my sites use MYSQL and if it goes down, the site is essentially offline. Im cool with it though - as if id wanna go through the headache of moving my 15 websites to another host - don’t even get me started on moving over 40 gigs of content - no thanks, I wish those people plugging alternate servers would STFU already and DIAF - if you don’t like Dreamhost, then F*** OFF and move there already.
If the only time you can promote another site is on an outage blog on your competitor’s website, then that’s pretty low to begin with - sad really. Makes me wonder what other unethical business practises they also employ.
# ehlo loco Says:
October 2nd, 2006 at 8:11 am
bluehost /’nuff said
Bluehost? ’nuff said indeed… actually maybe there isn’t.. lets take a quick peek shall we?
Bluehost: Host 6 Domains On 1 Account (WOW!) - are they for real? OMFG!! 6 domains? I can’t BELIEVE it! I think Dreamhost allows UNLIMITED ACCOUNTS on their L3 packages and higher.
Bluehost: Disk Storage (NOW MORE!) 50 GB - now more? Lets see, since I started Dreamhost I am now at 72 GB space and still growing.. if I was with Bluehost - id be at.. wait for it…. 50 GB! STILL! Not really a deal there either.
Bluehost: Gigs of Site Transfer (NOW MORE!) 999 GB/mo - Yeah so? been with Dreamhost for 6 months and now have 2100 GB/month transfer and I still don’t use more than 10% of it yet… oh and its still growing at 16GB/week….
Ok ’nuff said…
Not to mention, with Bluehost you must deal with severe CPU restrictions. If Dreamhost is a problem, Bluehost is not the answer. Spend a few weeks on their forums and you’ll see. People can’t even back up their WordPress database without getting temp suspended for CPU usage.
ttancm, I guess not all of us are as fortunate as you that when we feel like starting a business we can just shell out the money for dedicated servers and dedicated connections with servers being located all over the world so that we know we don’t go down. Must be nice!
But for EVERYONE else who has to take the path of using a hosting service that preaches 99.9% uptime and great service and all that noise, ie MOST of us, will think that this is a stupid thing to have to be arguing about since dreamhost should get their shit together and stop messing around with their servers. People are right this is making me look stupid to my clients, whats the deal? Do we get a refund if we paid a year in advance?
OH wait, ttancm, I know you don’t need a refund because, again unlike anyone else, you feel its ok just to throw out a few dollars here and there, you know, just forget about the money and go on. Fortunate situation you find yourself in, glad you think its great to use that as a standing point to criticize people.
@Al3xand3r, no one is happy about downtime, but the response is all out of proportion and it’s annoying.
@All
The most expensive plan with DH is still a damn sight cheaper than dedicated hosting, which is what most of these people seem to be expecting, and it pretty clearly states all over the DH website that the plans are SHARED HOSTING. Regardless of all these comments about “such and such never gave me these problems” (if so why the hell did they leave I wonder), all shared hosting has downtime. I have hosted with GoDaddy, which is cheaper than here but I had just as much downtime except they don’t treat their customers very nicely IF they respond at all. Maybe one of the many, many other hosting companies being shilled here really is as perfect as these people claim, but honestly if they are, why are they still “wasting their time” here?
I run mostly goof-off sites here, and the work-related sites I run are supplementary income. If they ever begin generating enough income (and eating enough bandwidth/processor power) to justify dedicated hosting I’ll switch them over, but honestly if anyone here is basing their business site and their entire income on shared hosting, they are making a mistake. It’s not Dreamhost’s job to teach their customers about webhosting and what type of services are required for what. They provide a service, customers pay for it. If the customer is unhappy they have the freedom to change to a different service, but crying about it here, and insulting attacking the DH people and other users because they can’t access their site is wrong and annoying for those people who come here to try to get actual information (although to be honest, I’m sure I am wasting people’s time here as well).
The other thing is that a lot of the time these people’s sites aren’t actually even down, because I can access their sites through the links in their names (the ones who don’t post anonymous) here within 2 mins. of a lot of their comments. People don’t seem to realize how the Internet works and that sometimes the problem isn’t actually at DH but somewhere between their ISP and DH. This happens a lot to me here (in Japan) because the ISPs here don’t have the infrastructure to support all their customers so during busy hours you get a lot of failed connections.
I like DH, I like the fact that they are so transparent with their problems. If people don’t think other places have this many problems they are just wrong. There are problems everywhere, hardware dies regularly when you have this much of it running constantly, other hosts just don’t bother telling their clients about it. Some hosts blatantly lie about problems. I have had hosts tell me that when my site has been restored from an older backup it must have been something I did, even though I hadn’t so much as logged in to an admin account for that site in days. I have had problems here, but DH has always responded quickly (and I live in Japan and am in about as different a timezone as I can be) and when something has gone wrong and it was their fault they have copped to it and apologized. No one guaranteed me 99% uptime and I never expected it, but my uptime has been over 90% and that is with them admitting they had huge problems these past 2-3 months. Other people have had worse downtime, that sucks, no one likes it, but at least be civil and direct your complaints to the appropriate venue (not here).
If you are really all that unhappy, then you should leave, but seriously whining, screaming, crying and cursing here isn’t going to accomplish anything but annoying people. No one will feel sorry for you, and you won’t gain anything by complaining here except having other people complaining with you or disagreeing with you.
Hell, if I ran DH and I had people shilling for other hosting companies on MY company site, I’d terminate their contracts and boot them off.
@Moe,
I don’t “feel its ok just to throw out a few dollars”, I just understand what I need and what I am paying for before I pay for it. And I don’t consider $300 some odd dollars for two years all that bad. If you are trying to make a living off a website and can’t invest that much, I seriously don’t know what you are expecting. Try starting a business in the “real” world with that little capital and maintenance cost, I imagine you will be sorely disappointed.
If you want to run a serious business online, you NEED dedicated hosting. I’m sorry that you didn’t understand that/feel cheated, but them’s the breaks. Be careful how you spend your money next time.
Also as far as I know DH has a 90 day money back guarantee don’t they? 3 months seems like plenty of time to decide you don’t like the service to me.
And finally, where is this (”a hosting service that preaches 99.9% uptime”) uptime guarantee please? A link, a screenshot, some sort of proof. I NEVER saw any uptime guarantee at all when I signed up with DH. The only services I know of that guarantee that kind of uptime cost and arm and a leg. If you know a cheap one, let me know. I’d be more than happy to host a couple of sites with a service like that.
Man I must be really bored today to reply to all this. I haven’t written this much on my own sites in weeks.
Kearny seems to be down, or at least I can’t get to any of my sites there.
I wonder where this dreamhoststatus is hosted, it’s always up.
I agree with ttancm, all these people expecting to be able to start a business with virtually no capital, are totally kidding themselves. Any business needs an initial investment, and in this case it’s in some business-level hosting with uptime guarantees.
George, no idea but perhaps chalmers as that’s where I am and haven’t had any of this so-called downtime.
Also ttancm… your animated favicon is mesmerising
Honestly, does anyone reading these actually think that there is only one server at Dreamhost? Jeff mentioned somewhere that there are now over 600 servers.
@ttancm
Hell, if I ran DH and I had people shilling for other hosting companies on MY company site, I’d terminate their contracts and boot them off.
I disagree…which is partly why I like dreamhost. DH actually could’nt know who is who unless the person did at some point use not post anonymously, used their website and has a static ip. If this gives someone a place to vent, then let them. If they vent enough, they may actually listen to themselves and move on, or realize reading some of these posts that shared hosting is inexpensive, and less reliable, than dedicated. You are on a box with others using your shared server.
I think a small portion of users posting here — who do not post their website — isn’t really with dreamhost. I have even seen on person, who literally just signed up with a new site hours earlier, saying “my site’s been down for days.”
It’s a valuable lesson for those less fortunate and relying on shared hosting for their business and income. I actually do have many site’s at DH in the shared hosting environment. I have 3 accounts using strictly business (some with extra addon’s) and many of the other tiered plans. If a site (or site’s) go down, I am the first to contact my customer(s) and explain what is going on, thanks to actually knowing through these blogs… and I can, in some cases, let them know when they can expect to be back up. If they opt to look for new hosting, I will gladly help them with that. One of the strictly business plans is my own. I host about 25 personal and professional sites on it. I have monitoring on, and still had over 98% uptime for September. Usually I am at 99.9% and sometimes 100%. All of my plans are different and only monitor one or a few sites on each plan (even in certain plans, I am on several different servers.) I have been a customer since September 2003.
When you actually realize that there are hundreds of thousands of customers using dreamhost…you may gain site on how a handful on one or a few servers get discruntled. If they weren’t then it WOULD BE TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. And, at that point you know DH would be hiding something.
I am only piping in to share my story. I am happy at the moment. Don’t hate me for being on servers that aren’t down now. I just want to say, I understand the frustration, but we do have to get into perspective that out of 600 servers, some will go down. Maybe only for a few minutes, maybe for an hour, maybe all together blow up…which means a new box (and more time needed.) That is the reality of shared hosting (and dedicated too, as dedicated servers are not fullproof either.)
Some cannot afford dedicated. I could if I combined all my plans, they account for about $3,000 in hosting a year here, plus an additional $1,200 hosting some emails accounts elsewhere. But, dreamhost currently does not offer dedicated, so I am still using shared.
I wish you all luck, those staying and leaving.
I agree with Barbara S. She makes a good point, acknowledging that Dreamhost has over 600 servers and some will go down. Company’s like this don’t have time to read ALL of these ranting blog posts, nor do they want. I have been a Dreamhost customer for three months and haven’t had any downtime. Don’t blame me for the no downtime but I guess I am just lucky.
ttancm if I had a webhosting company I would like to have a 1000 of you. I could offer crappy service and still get my butt kissed. Welp I pay $36 a month for the business hosting service so wouldn’t you think I should get less downtime. I understand a company can have hardware problems but the last 3 months have been over the pail. But then again I can see why the downtime doesn’t upset you I checked your website out and it’s lame. No offense butif I had a website like yours I wouldn’t care if I had 99% downtime.
Are my sites the only ones which are down right now?!
@Nick, the animated favicon was just something I put up because I never saw one before. This site will make them for you if you’re interested: http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/
@Barbara S, that is what I like about DH as well. I was just trying to say that all of these people complaining ought to realize and be thankful for the fact they are let complain here.
@Andrew, better to have a thousand of yourself since you’re the one who thinks the service sucks but still pays for it, dipshit. I have no problem with the service. And feel free to post your amazing website for everyone to comment on anytime. I assume there’s a reason you hide it.
@Nick, I just used the animated favicon because I never saw one before. You can build one easy at this site: http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/
@Barbara S., that’s one of the things I like about DH as well. I was just (unsuccessfully apparently) trying to point out that the DH people are a lot more lenient than I would be. Also, assuming the second post is the same Barbara S. I was able to open the website linked in your first post just now if that helps you any. Design company, has a message on the top page about being renewed.
@Andrew, better to have a 1000 of yourself since you’re the one who continues to pay for a service you think sucks. And feel free to post your website to prove to us all how awesome you are and how “lame” I am.
Just having some IMAP server droppage for the email and slow response from moe. Other than that, no problems.
It was nice not to have downtime yesterday.
I think when people’s sites are down, they’re going to get cranky and say they’re going to leave DH. I know I was this weekend. But when everything’s running smoothly and there’s been no downtime for at least 24 hours, I tend to go back to the “yay, DreamHost!” state of mind and forget anything bad happened. Because really, I can’t be arsed with moving all of my sites AGAIN. It made me feel better to see you posting about the problems on here, and actually naming my server.
One suggestion, though, is to get rid of that “report a server outage” feature, or fix it. It kept telling me (via email) that there weren’t any problems, when there clearly were. Annoying.
Thank you to everyone who worked on getting things up and running again.
I’m in process of transferring 10 gigabytes of data to the server, and so far it’s been a pain due to outages. However, I can safely say it’s much less time consuming than having a dedicated server, and heck less expensive, even than Valueweb (and God are they rock-bottom in prices for Dedicated).
I am having on-and-off access to my site too, sometimes it works, sometimes it’s off. Very weird. I guess it’s related to this, but my server is not in the list.
I get similar symptoms… I think I’m on the cheeky server mentioned here but according to this post everything has been fixed anyway so…
Anyone else noticing HUGE changes to their available disk space / transfer quota? Overnight mine is showing 10x disk space (200+ gigabytes storage, growing 1 GB/wk) and 2x the transfer (2.3 TB, growing 16GB/wk). Is DH making a HUGE compensatory effort for recent downtime, or is the Panel busted (just for ocean?)?
This is what it says on mine also
208160 MB Disk (Grows 1000 MB / week)
2390 GB BW per Cycle (Grows 16 GB / week)
Having no problems with my sites, but this IMAP server issue really needs a permanent resolution. It is beyond frustrating attempting to get access to my email.
I don’t mean to be rude, but instead of spending time RE-DESIGNING your site, please just focus more time into actually making things work for your customers. I know there are a bajillion servers, but please, please focus on what’s really important. Please reallocate your resources from marketing over to fixing. I know I’m oversimplifying things, but it’s really gotten out of hand.
I’ve been with DH for quite some time now and it’s coming close to the last straw. I know they’re trying, but everything seems to just be going downhill here at DH. It’s sad. I was a loyal customer. Now, I need to be taking my business elsewhere after so many years.
Errors we regularly experience have mostly been with email:
IMAP dropping connections
Not being able to send/receive emails through POP
Squirrelmail hell - takes much too long to load than necessary. (yes, they’re tidy.)
Missing emails at times
Spam control? Non-existent.
Somebody, just make it work….
Anybody fed up with email constantly being down. My clients are pissed to say the least.
Rex, I couldn’t have said it better myself. I’m moving elsewhere now. I have 26 domains hosted at DH and now need to move because they’re simply unreliable. Does anybody have a suggestion on another hosting company that allows the same freedoms as DH?
Good luck Shannon…
My site http://www.hosting4ev1.com is always available.
DreamHost is annoyingly stable!
Sean Baker, how is giving us features that most of us don’t want or won’t use compensation? I don’t need all this extra crap they are “giving” us. I need my e-mail to work (it doesn’t, I’m back to IMAP server dropping connections which is the same problem they “fixed” a week or so ago) and I need my website and the panel to be up. It took me 5 minutes to get the dreamhost site to cough up the panel this morning and when if finally did I found that they had “given” us one more useless feature (Files Forever) instead of fixing their basic services. I am trying to log on today to download my databases and close up shop and I’m not sure I’ll even be able to do that!
arrrrggg… my mail has been screwy all day! you’re killing me dreamhost!
Onyatai, I wasn’t purporting it as “Wow, great, I’m so happy I stayed with DreamHost”; I asked a question to make sure my Panel wasn’t broken. FWIW, like so many have said before, if you’re on shared hosting for a high-needs sight, much less without having performed backups, then you’re learning this lesson the same way DH is being bashed for learning theirs.
Err.. 200.5 GB of disk space and 2 TB or bandwidth? Did someone accidentally bump an extra key?
WOAH! Just noticed “Files Forever” in the panel now too!
Never mind my above two comments….
HOLY @#$^! THIS WASNT A MISTAKE!
http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html
Nice layout!
I want free shared SSL cert (https for everyone) feature, next.
It shouldn’t be difficult for DreamHost.
Then, we can choose to use free shared certificate or own certificate (paying for own IP).
Shannon… email me: misterhsu [at] gmail (d0t) com
(this comment is surely to be deleted)
Sean Baker, you called it “compensation”. Compensation is extending the contract to make up for downtime, not piling on features that aren’t needed and don’t work. I don’t have a high needs site. I have a site and e-mail and I PAY $140 a year. It is NOT unreasonable to expect to get a product for this money, regardless of how important the site is to anyone else.
Anyway, as I said I am packing up my site (assuming I can access it) and going back to free hosting. It was nice to be able learn and use WordPress, Joomla, and the other software that you can’t fiddle with on a free host, but I can’t even do that anymore when I want to so there is not point in renewing my contract (which expires tomorrow).
The complete lack of compensation (as in extending the contract to make up for times when what we were paying for was completely unusable) and the continued problems mean it would be foolish to gives these people any more money.
Valueweb host is very good. You can find a lot of reviews about Valueweb on the website http://www.hothosting.info/en. Also, Valueweb 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!
I feel it is not just the swich issue. When the website went down , I can still use SSH to the server. I can type in username in SSH, but once I enter password, the SSH will wait for a long time to let me in.