I’m totally with you: I agree with everything you say, and you actually said it a whole lot better than I did. And, in fairness, a lot of people on this page did actually read the message, and some of them acknowledge that their lives won’t end if their announcement lists are down for a few hours (that’s you, nes). Good for them. The others will get theirs, too, one day when they neglect to read a STOP sign or a “Caution: High Voltage” warning. You can’t save everybody.

An earlier quote you made missed an important word:

“Discussion list E-mail will not be lost…”

You chopped it off at “E-mail will not be lost”

According to the message, this outage does not affect non list email services.

The problem we have is that we’ve scared a bunch of sheep instead of shooting the wolf.

“I’m gonna miss mail.” - You didn’t READ the message.

Antony -

Don’t get me wrong. I love dreamhost. My stuff here is important but not so important that an hour here or there a week/month is going to kill me (as long as it luckily doesn’t happen when I really need something).

I do think that the reporting is a good thing. BUT I also think that underreporting (which I believe is happening now) is the reason why there are so many people whining on these comments. There seems to be a lot of “down” for very little notification on this site. I don’t think half of the complaints are really server down problems. Maybe servers with problems, but not “Down”. The problem is from outside it’s hard to tell the difference.

I love dreamhost. I’m not going anywhere, I’m prepaid for a long time.

I really don’t want to encourage DH to try to be quiet about things but people aren’t READING the notifications and seeing that this particular outage has NOTHING to do with WEBMAIL or PERSONAL EMAIL - JUST MAILING LISTS HOSTED BY DH. Communication takes both an Author (DH) and Reader (us). And it’s up to US to actually READ the content instead of just bitching “my webmail will be down”.

Sorry for the yelling. It’s just frustrating. I like the communication, but we (all) need to be better consumers of that information.

And Dreamhost: you’re never losing me. I’ll stick with you (until you get bought by MSN). Just don’t spend my $9 a month all in one go.

If they didn’t tell us half the stuff they do, then there would be an abundance of rumors. This site and its content is the light in the darkness for DH Customers. We WANT to know what is going on and what is to come, whether it affects us or not.

The frustration is that on all of these comments the questions are quite often TOTALLY UNRELATED to the post. DH posts - Garbage can full and people ask “Is this why I can’t get my mail?” or “My site’s down.” or “Does this affect server coke?” and “How do I know what server I’m on?”

Sorry, and maybe it’s just that I’ve gotten tired answering the questions and RECOMMEND that people *READ* and visit the forums at http://discussion.dreamhost.com The answers to all of these OVER ASKED QUESTIONS are already there? Don’t waste your time asking them and waiting on someone to bother to respond when the answers are already out there!

(Note, this rant isn’t at you Gabriel, it’s at many people that think the comment system here is actually an official way to get support or an appropriate place to have a conversation about issues.

Kevin -

One advantage to doing the update at the time they have scheduled is that they have full support and alert employees to cover if something were to go wrong. When you do these kinds of things at “off hours” sometimes things just don’t go well at all. It’s important to note that this is “MAILING LISTS” only and not general email usage. That’s where much of the confusion would come in.

DH - if you read this -

Quit warning us - we’re not taking these upgrades very well because we all assume everything’s going to go to hell in a handbasket and we’re quite sure that no matter how hard/fast/right you do it, somehow a site hosted on GoDaddy is going to go down because of it. We just don’t get the relationships and you’re scaring the hell out of everyone. Just do the upgrade and then apologize for it afterwards so that people can know there’s a reason that things aren’t working.

Sometimes scheduling is the mistake.