Web Server “selma” Died (UPDATE)
Posted (October 4th, 2006 at 2:54 pm PST) by micahThe server “selma” crashed pretty hard over an hour ago and all attempts at reviving it have failed. We’re currently swapping in new hardware for it and everything should be up and running again shortly.
UPDATE 10/6/2006 6:00am PDT (GMT-8:00) Selma server is having problems with some of the Apache processes not running properly. If you have domains hosted on this server some may work and others may not. We are working to correct this problem as quickly as possible. Please check back later for further updates on the situation. I apologize for the inconvenience.
46 Responses to “Web Server “selma” Died (UPDATE)”
Is this what has been bringing down the others?
everything i own is on selma. please tell me backups are ok. i really need to hear it.
down on all domains here. worried now for what has been lost, if anything. 
Is it just that while most Hosting Co’s stay quiet,Dreamhost actually admit the problems they have, or does DH just in a constant state of disasters?
If you have one server you have one problem per year. If you have 1000 servers, you have 1000 problems per year. A machine dying and being moved over to new hardware within the hour is not a disaster. It is definitely a problem, but it is not a disaster since all the tools were in place to quickly resolve the problem.
“A machine dying and being moved over to new hardware within the hour is not a disaster.”
The announcement wasn’t made until after the server had crashed “over an hour”… and that was over an hour ago. Under an hour is not a disaster but going on 3+ without resolution STILL is a problem.
Selma has been poorly for a little while, it would seem. Days with patchy subversion operation have not been the least bit amusing.
New hardware will be nice.
Actually - this is the 3rd move to new hardware in the last 4 days.
Do we have any idea when subversion repositories will be running again?
selma is not responsive again - last load was > 180
Yup, down again here…. GEEEEEZUS
My stuff on selma seems to be back up. Yay!
I dont know about you guys but this is probably the blog I enjoy the most. Well actually I enjoy reading the comments, the disasters that happen to everyone, sites down, control panel issues, database crashes and all the rest. And mostly the epic duels between the righteous pro-dreamhosters and the evil anti-dreamhosters. Let the battle continue, the blood and tears be spiled as long as the ground shall take them!
Najdofr:
Ha Ha Ha! I *know* a few of those “pro-dreamhosters” you mentioned, and they are not particularly “righteous” (and I suspect most of the “anti-dreamhosters” are not particulary “evil”!) The battles do rage on occasionlly though, and sometimes they begin to take on “epic” proportions! 
Its true that selma was in the rack that had switch problems and was moved as part of the solution to that (was also moved back). It is true that selma’s hardware failed today and need to be moved to new hardware. This is definitely a frustrating turn of events for users on selma. Its not a disaster though becuase files were not lost, admins were immediately on the scene to fix the problem, a status update was posted explaining what happened, and everything was back up and working fairly quickly.
This is an example of a problem being dealt with correctly.
thanks michael.
I still have a site that isn’t up though.
my frontpage web wasn’t copied (again) on failover #4 this evening.
So things aren’t up yet for everyone.
p153.net
Just mentioning this because a few of you have shown concern over DH backups…
With any host, regardless of whether they keep backups, you should ALWAYS keep your own backups. You’ll probably never find a host, even with backups, that will take responsibility for data loss.
If it’s important… back it up. There’s really no excuse not to.
/agree with Najdorf. I’m only using Dreamhost for a media file repository (i.e. stuff that could conceivably eat up all the allocated bandwidth on my dedicated server), which is extremely non-critical. Even when things are down, I always have these blog entries (with comments now!) to keep me amused…:-) Bravo!
down again, wtf????
Still dead. Not even responding to pings.
my sites down for 4 days.
maybe time to go anohter hosting provider??
down again, amazing 
When I try to transfer a file greater than 10k, my FTP client reply this:
452 Transfer aborted. No space left on device
??? again ??? status ??? anything ???
Is Annie down too? I can access my webmail but not my site.
your site has been down for four days? mine has been down for 15 and I’ve sick of it, I’m moving
murat, your site has been down for 4 days? Is that why you have postings in your forums for the last 4 days? Or is that not the site linked to in your name and you just looking to spam your site to generate traffic?
If you’ve been down for 4-15 days and still don’t have an official word on the issue, then I’d call you crazy for not changing hosts. I’d probably change if I were down for 2 days or more, unless there was a good explanation about an anomaly of a situation.
I’m neither a DH zealot or iconoclast, but I do love their transparency. That alone buys them a lot of confidence points in the event my sites ever go down.
Three funerals and still waiting for the wedding….
Transparency is good. Functionality is better. The two shouldn’t be multually exclusive.
Necco is having problems!
Mike, its nice to hear DH’s here, even not officially.
I do enjoy reading those posts, its becoming a habbit.
My site is running smoothlly yet, lots of features and space!
Hope DH keep it this way.
we’re running like molasses, five minutes to load a page. at least we haven’t actually gone down this time. Unlike yesterday. And last week. And three days before that. And a few days before that. And on and on for the last few months.
I just want to make a note for people who were worried here (for future references).
“Webserver” itself, the name you see when you log in to ssh and what not, doesn’t have a whole lot of stuff… haxed up linux debian distro(?), apache, mysql (client), sshd, ftpd, crond, and a few other services that makes sure things are running about covers everything that’s on the server. Your files (IE: pretty webpages, saturday night party drunk video, porno, and other stuff you’d rather not the world know about) are all stored in a file cluster in DH’s datacenter; which is then mounted on to the server you’re on. So, in the event of a webserver dying, you’re seeing pretty much just the downtime because services aren’t available; and you probably won’t see data loss in most cases.
Happy hosting
My server (York) is saying it’s out of space and the web panel is dead, so I can’t report it. anyone else seeing this problem? I’m pretty sure it’s not my disk quota either.
Noon on Thursday–Very slow getting to email and sometimes being bumpted off with “IMAP Server unable” coming up. Still working on things?? Don’t know which server I am on, but it has been difficult doing business this morning with very slow response and being bumped off.
Crap. My friend sponsors me at momitchi.kinkiyoshi.net. I can access the site in ftp but when I look it up it’s unavailable. Is it because of this?
There has been a problem with the spunky mail cluster for at least 2 hours yet, surprise surprise, no mention of it on the status page.
Mail has been slow or down all day.
My Company (FNS Net) hosts my 9am-5pm job (NSD) and they are really getting on my case about the email going down all the time. This is really getting to be a problem. I can almost put up with the http going down, but our companies run on email! If this problem doesn’t resolve itself soon, I am going to have to move my company and all it’s clients to another host provider. I have been more than supportive during this “rough patch” of hosting here at DH… but my patience is wearing thin.
Matthew Glennon
# kirke Says:
October 4th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Is it just that while most Hosting Co’s stay quiet,Dreamhost actually admit the problems they have, or does DH just in a constant state of disasters?
If
you
want
it
to
be
perfect
get
two
dedicated
servers
in
different
cities
and
make
it
all
redundant
and
pay
600
a
month
My client is pretty upset that his site is down right now. He paid a couple thousand dollars for this hosting and this is about the third time in the last couple months that his site has gone down. Any actual idea of when this will be fixed? I may have to change hosting providers.
i too, would rather have reliable functionality and access than disk space i’ll never use. while i don’t run a business on what i host with DH (and my plans to do so have been halted until i see better than this), i do run several other things, among which are things that good friends of mine are relying on being available.
sorry, guy, but i don’t think it is unreasonable or even ‘expecting perfection’ for a hosting provider to have serious uptime rather than regular downtime. i could be paying slightly more elsewhere and not have these issues. i went with dreamhost because they were recommended to me by a friend and my experience at that time with using a few domains hosted by them had been highly positive.
that is changing. i wish it weren’t. but it is. i’d like to see that change halted… as it gets a little harder to justify re-uping my subscription next year every time i spent another half+ day explaining to everyone why they can’t get to anything.
Jason Harris - Wow… you pay what… $50 a month for shared hosting and charge a couple thousand dollars to your client?
What city do you live in, I need to advertise there!
Phases - In case you didn’t know, the Level 4 hosting is $63.95 a month for a prepayment two year service. That’s over $1500. So, yeah, I rounded up a bit to “couple thousand.” Add to that, all the work I actually charge him for the site and it’s well over $5k. So, yeah, all of that $5k is worth nothing if the site doesn’t load.
Not that I am using my website for my live site right now. But I was just considering consolidating over to DH…. But the server is down again? or still?….
I guess paying 8$/month for 200MB at my other host may still be worth it then (99.998% uptime over the last 4 years !).
Hope they get it together here at DH.
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