Planned Power Outage

Um, that sucks.

sucks, but I’m glad we found out in advance!

Didn’t you guys buy UPS gear for the core routers/switches?

I would have hoped that the nameservers would at least be unaffected by this so that there might be time to move to an alternate server temporarily, but I’m assuming that’s not the case?

Can we maybe find out WHICH servers will be affected so that we can notify our clients?

All of them will be affected

And I was just telling my users today that my site was going to be up and available unless my ISP did something dumb.

I gotta go with Kreig. Z. a mirror data center would be a great idea. If you can’t get too far from LA, at least get on the other side of the San Andreas. Bakersfield, Lancaster/Palmdale, Barstow. Even Riverside, San Bernadino, San Diego would work.

shit

I love DreamHost and hate to complain, but I have to admit its a bit embarrassing that a hosting company of your size doesn’t even have redundant nameservers outside of their single data center.

I mean just buy 1 server in the most boring landlocked midwest state and let it at least serve dns and dreamhomestatus.com throughout outages.

Let me know if you’d like help setting it up.

What you don’t have a mirror site somewhere else ? Come on guys these down times are a joke!

@ KriegZ: They’re doing us a favor, taking that eyesore you call a Web site offline.

@Will: Are you illiterate or just stupid? The note from the building manager says they need to replace a cable on the UPS.

@kevin: As the post clearly states, ALL services are going down. Can’t you people read? Or are you in such a hurry to say something stupid, you don’t read through the entire question?

@Bill: I’m sure there are plenty of shared Web hosts with redundant datacenters out there. I’m also sure they cost a hell of a lot more than $8 per month. And again, I actually think DH is doing the world a favor by removing the FrontPage special you call a Web site. Minimalism isn’t avant-garde when it looks like you just didn’t try.

@Brendan: Again, learn how to read and you won’t look like a fool. The problem is with the building’s power equipment, not its telecommunications. They have to replace a high-cycle trunk power line. You’re suggesting they should have two of those?

@Mike: Try this: “I’m such a money-grubbing ass I charged you an arm and a leg for discount hosting. That caught up with me. It’s my fault for not explaining that yes, even — especially! — on the Internet, you get what you pay for.”

@michael schurter: For most customers, that wouldn’t make a difference. For those who have purchased a second hosting plan outside the DH network for emergencies, it would. So there’s some validity to asking the question, “Why do I have to use DH’s nameservers? Why can’t I use my own / my registrar’s nameservers? I think I have the answer, and it’s twofold: It’s a lot easier on DH to manage your services if they control the nameservers. In this case, even if they had their own nameservers outside the network, there’s no way they could change the records for all the Web sites people would want to move elsewhere and still concentrate on all the other tech support requests they get. That’s why they don’t have redundant nameservers outside the network and why they don’t let you use your own nameservers.

@john: I’m assuming you’ve seen a 404 error before. They’ll get the Web browser’s generic 404 error. If you want to see what it looks like, unplug your Internet connection and try visiting your site.

@Chad: See previous answers. If you spent $80 on hosting instead of $8, you wouldn’t have these problems.

Chad, just a thought, since you’re being snarky … a 404 error? A 404 error comes from a working server. Since the whole of DreamHost is going out, what’s going to be left to present a 404?

And supposing you pull out the modem cable, now what’s going to generate a 404? After all, there’s no server around to send you one.

I think you meant a time out page. A time out page does not have an HTTP status code … think about it. (The only exception would be if the timeout occurred upstream and beyond a proxy server, and the proxy server might return a status code, but, generally, this will not be the case for anyone. Goodness knows what code you’d get for that… I’d have to go look through the list.)

Doug,

Not all servers have to go down (1 out of 3 data centers). However all connectivity does (that means all 3 data centers are no longer internet connected).

Thus, it’s equivalent to a multiple data center, host wide outage. Why have 3 data centers when 1 going down locks out all three? Each data center should have a redundant link and the lack of redundant DNS (so that DNS updates can still be made) is also highly dubious.

I cannot understand why you’re abusing people for questioning why there is no redundancy (so at least the other two data centers aren’t impacted)?

Personally, I like the KriegZ and Bill websites. KriegZ’s gallery has some very good stuff. Bill’s wiki has a tonne of content and appears to use the same wiki engine as wikipedia, making it a familiar and easy to navigate site. What’s wrong with either of these websites?

Doug, if your website is so cool, why aren’t you linking to it?

I’m also curious what you think of this guy’s website: http://www.useit.com/

:-p

I just wanted to say that actually ns2.dreamhost.com and this site are kept on a completely unrelated network, at a fourth data center, in San Francisco.

So, nameservice and this site (though not blog.dreamhost.com or anything else) will still work during the outage. If you’d like to point your dns records, etc, to a temporary outside server of your own for the duration of the outage and still keep your nameservers as ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2.dreamhost.com, and ns3.dreamhost.com, that should be fine. Also, you can update your whois records to point to any other nameserver right now if you’d prefer!

I guess this would be my first real long outage since I got Dreamhost. I don’t think it’s that bad - shit happens.
Keep on the good work Dreamhost!

If your website needs 100% uptime, buy hosting from a company that can do just that. It’s not rocket science.

Deal with it.

It’s not something they have control over or can prevent in their current situation.

3 Hours, though? I doubt that. With something on a time deadline such as this I’d expect a nascar pit crew on this piece of cable.

And it’s entirely in your control to switch to a host who can give you that 100% uptime you want. :>

Honestly… this isn’t that bad. I’d rather have them announce it and fix it in 3 hours, than not doing anything and coming to the conclusion *something* broke *somewhere* and they need about a week to figure out what it is. ;P [they = datacenter people, not DH]

If you don’t like the services provided by dreamhost then why don’t you just switch hosts? Seriously, if your mechanic doesn’t do a good job on you car, you switch mechanics right? It isn’t like anyone is forcing you to have dreamhost be your host. And as far as your ‘clients’, you should have them on a 100% uptime guarantee server if you are so worried about their sites.

We just transferred to DH from Lunar Pages a few weeks ago. I am in shock…in my 3+ years with LP, not once did the site go down for multiple hours (or even an hour)…and they offer hosting at $7 a month…

I don’t believe in complaining…here is some constructive feedback for the DH folks:

Learn from this and ensure that it does not happen again. Regardless of cost or effort, do not neglect your duty to your customers…this means taking stock of what you have and what you may lose. Lastly, remember that you can do 100 things right and just one thing wrong, and it is what you do wrong that your customers and potential customers will remember.

This is strike one…

Hopefully, the world will go, and we will all be alive after this. We might even have a good time. This is the time to tell someone you love them!

Hanan: that seems a bit over the top - surely all we need to know is that PST is eight hours adrift of GMT? It seems reasonable to assume that we (the customers) know what time zone we are in.

It is a bit annoying that these outages take place during the day for those of us in Europe, but that’s just the inevitable price we pay for signing up for cheap US hosting …

Please if anyone can honestly say that this is going to cost them more then … say, $100USD; maybe you should reconsider how much you spend on your hosting plan.
If a 3 hour outage, that starts for me at 3AM; is such a traumatic event for your site/business, maybe you should consider finding a new host that will charge you $169USD a month with an iron-clad guarantee of uptime. losing you as a neighbor on my shared server would be no significant loss to me.

Thanks for the update DH, you’ve always given me good value!

Peter

i love everyone who is giving these bright ideas, 1 thing you forgot whos paying for it

keep that in mind next time before you try to make smart ass comments to dreamhost, dont you think they have thought of that already?

Marcos Pinto, lol if the power center goes off line, what else do you think will go off line… duh

@Doug
“Minimalism isn’t avant-garde when it looks like you just didn’t try.”

While you’re being a huge asshole, thats one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in blog comments. I’m definitely using it myself.

As far as redundant nameservers go: they would help with poorly configured mail servers that give up to soon when domains cease to exist. I also suggested dreamhoststatus.com be mirrored somewhere so we can get updates in case something goes wrong, and I still think thats a great idea.

@ everyone regarding the nameservers:

ns1 and ns3 are hosted locally and will be down. ns2 is colocated up near san francisco and will be up!

The maintenance is important, we must be comprehensive.

Thanks for the update. This is my first time with a paid host and I have no complaints what so ever. Its nice to be able to know these things so I can pass it along to my users, some of which happen to be on at that time. So again thanks for the update

Patrick, why not just run the core routers off of Lead-acid batteries and not hook them up to any building circuits?

Who the hell needs their website available from 12-4am PST on a SUNDAY

I mean it isn’t like they’re going “hey we’re going to shut everything down wednesday afternoon”. this is the most convenient time to do something like this. a non business day at the early AM. what are you people hosting that you need your site up right then?

Here’s an idea. Perhaps be a little pro-active like DH and inform your clients that your site will be offline due to building maintenance at the hosting company.

Bottom line (and going along with many of the posts already). If your site/email is SO important at 3am that you have to bitch and complain about such shotty service from an $8/mth. plan, then PLEASE do everyone else a favor and switch hosts.

It’s easy. Painless. And you’ll stop bitching at DH for what seems to be a poor decision on your end for choosing one of the cheapest plans around for such an IMPORTANT and LIFE ALTERING website such as your own.

roman - Can’t run a whole data center but it could run the network gear so at least the other facilities would have network access.

Dreamhost really should send out an email to all it’s core customers…so we can let our customers know when they start screaming. You know not everyone will read this entry, and will post dreamhost hate entries during the entire downtime!

@Trista: You can sign up for emergency notices via the control panel. RTFM before posing nonsense.

@DreamHosters Josh and Patrick: Thanks for the advanced warning (I have been able to notify my clients, all of whom stand to lose very little business so early on a Sunday morning. Good thing none of them are selling Viagra or Meth). And thanks for your measured and useful responses.

OH… In case those don’t get point 2 above….

A Dedicated Server Provider has a disaster recovery plan for ANY issue that would cause outtages…… ie. Your Bank!!

However, for “small” issues like this, you’ve probably seen the “under scheduled maintenance” message… ie. Your Bank!!

As has been mentioned a couple of times now, we do have a secondary network location specifically for our secondary name server and for this status site. If you have a website that absolutely must stay up, you also have time to move it.

Regarding our three data centers all going down at once. The current setup is not intended for data center redundancy. That is not the goal. It’s most efficient for us at the moment to funnel all of the network traffic through our main core routers and send it over private network links to the other two data centers (one of which is actually in the same building). We have only been spreading into other data centers at all due to constraints being put on us by our providers. They do what they need to do and we in turn do what we need to do.

As for moving to the midwest goes… Having a data center where none of us live or work would not ultimately provide you with a better service. There are hosting companies that have their servers in other parts of the country if you are the kind of person that worries about things like California falling into the ocean.

Some notes about the building itself… This is not our building and we do not manage it. It’s flattering to hear that some of you might think that but we are actually a relatively small company (around 50 employees) and we do not own or maintain an entire office building. This building is home to lots of companies and several data centers. The building provides redundant UPS and Generator power for all of its tenants. We have not been allowed to install our own UPS or power equipment. They haven’t give us the clearance to do that yet and we will do that as soon as it is possible. Note that even if our core routers stayed up all of our servers would still be down, so that alone wouldn’t have made much of a difference in this case. A silver lining on this dark cloud is that the building is taking proactive steps to improve its less than perfect power setup. This emergency maintenance is a direct result of them bringing in more experienced bulding engineers and doing an audit of the electrical system. Ultimately this will improve things long-term.

Some of you have previously suggested (and I’m sure will again) that we move our entire operation out of this building. That option has been under heavy consideration for a long while now but has not yet been the most appealing choice for us. The variables are always changing though, and we will be keeping a very close eye on how this outage is handled.

Having a complete mirror of all of our equipment and your data (this is the most important part!) in another building as well as the multiple gigabits of necessary bandwidth waiting around to serve it all would have allowed us to move all of your live websites over to the backup and completely avoid any downtime in a situation like this, but that would also be essentially like running two hosting companies and would cost us nearly twice as much (some savings would be possible, obviously). That level of service is just not feasible at the price level we provide.

If there was any way we could have feasibly avoided this downtime, we would have. We appreciate all the comments and criticisms. Keep ‘em coming!

@Doug: Kudos to a level-headed and explict response to all the ad hominem cruft. I’ve been with Dreamhost since, perhaps, the beginning. Uptime has been very good overall, tho I can understand how someone who only looks at a week or two or a month or three might get the impression DH uptime is poor. It’s not, and for the price there’s an amazing amount services and support.

I just can’t believe that your customers are talking about their customers and your business like it is your business to support their customers. How can I get in on this deal where people to pay me for a service I don’t provide? Sounds like easy money.

Anyway, I just came here cuz my emails, all of them, briefly did not connect and I thought there was more trouble from yesterday. Didn’t know it was a building power line issue. Sucks, sure; but not as much as the guys who have to fix it cuz that’s fairly serious - yes, there are electricians in my family so I know what hazzards exists, as well as the wisdom of taking it all offline during repair.

Redundancy? Oh - you mean like having a second building, second pipe, and twice the staff? Yeah, that’d keep the sites up… as well as the price.

@Brad Anna Nicole Smith’s death is the #3 event since August ‘05?? I’d rather stick with DH and have downtime for a legitimate reason than my site be slow for the day b/c of that.

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/nui/news/index.html

@Josh, @Patrick & @Dallas, thank you very much for informing us so loyally. This is what I need at most. Now I’m better understanding all the behind-the-scene matter

I’ll be partying @ that time eastern. Wooott

.. (sorry, my keyboard is faulty) … I won’t care about this break of service although some of my websites are located at GMT+1. I understand your reasons for not to invest in another totally independent data center and would even maybe give you right. Duplicating all your material resources and thus significantly increase the employee pool will move your company to another class with other constraints, other rates and, I’m afraid, something globally more weighty to manage. I’m personally happy with today choices. Of course i know (like anyway I’ve alway known) that if I need total security and very-close-to 100% up time for some site, it’s up to me to move them (or backup) in an appropriate hosting service and be ready to pay the supplement fees it would be needed.

So thank you again. Keep doing your good work and of course enjoying life

@Peter: California is 8 hours *behind* GMT, so the outage is actually 07.15 - 12.00 on Sunday our time. A daytime outage is annoying, but as I said earlier, it’s the quid pro quo for using a cheap US service rather than a much more expensive European one …

@Doug: I feel sorry for you…it’s clear from your posts that you’re a miserable human being.

Guess what? Everyone is entitled to an opinion…

Seems like you need some lessons on civility and a self-help book for your inner angst.

Go out, get some air, and have a good weekend.

Dallas, thank you for your post and the sincere follow-up–it helps to shed light on the circumstance…

@Marcus: The way most data centers are wired, the order of the power is from the grid, into a massive control switch, into the UPS, into the center. The control switch detects if the power is lost from the grid and will then automatically power on the generators if there’s a failure on the grid while the UPS keeps power going from its batteries.

This means however that if the UPS goes down, power is down. There are ways to be able to do the wiring so that if the UPS goes down, the whole system doesn’t go down, but that’s obviously not been done in this case. Either way though, adding a generator wouldn’t help because the generators are not connected directly to the center. They’re connected to the control switch, which is then connected to the UPS. Also, you can’t just connect the generator directly to the center anyway. You’ve GOT to filter the power or else you’re gonna blow up servers (generator power is VERY dirty and inconsistent… even grid power needs to be filtered because there can be problems there too…).

The point is that sorry, can’t work. Not possible with the way the Garland building’s power system is designed.

Stop freaking out. Would you rather have your site fried or go down for a couple hours? I’d rather have it go down for a few hours. Even though they do have backups that may take longer to get done then the total down time.

As a couple of people have mentioned, it clearly would have been possible to wire up the building in such a way as to be able to direct power around the UPS systems for such situations like this. That apparently was not done when the building was built though, and here we are now.

We have made the decision to stay at our building so far and we have to deal with the ramifications of that. We do have a small presence at another facility and have been preparing ourselves for a more complete transition to there or another location, should that become a necessity. Rest assured that we are not just sitting around waiting for something bad to happen.

Thanks for the heads up, I understand that it’s not your fault and will warn the users of my site.

Small thing: Would it be possible to get times in GMT+0, it’s a bit of a pain translating times twice over to find when that is for me.

DH- could you post a step by step way ( if possible) to have a nameserver for my domains point any request for the sites to another host page that can say “site down for maintenance 11pm til 4am ” while this repair is happening? I know that was a lame way of asking but I am weak on the jargon due to lack of knowledge. My point is instead of complaining about the downtime, could you let me know a way that requests for my site will get a placeholder page instead of a server not responding message? or can you have your master name server point to a generic page like that? thanks!

Dreamhost: “Nice! *All* of our customer’s sites are going to go down”
Dreamhost: “Sweet!”

Yes, that must have been the talk around the office.

I have multiple dedicated boxes costing more than 200 times what dreamhost charges per month. Yet I still use dreamhost for certain applications. It is what it is.

Yes, downtime sucks. That’s a given. Hopefully it will be brief.

I still love you, dreamhost.

No comment on the rest of the fluff, but what I don’t get is why everyone assumes that EVERY DH customer is at the $8/mo plan. Some of us pay more than that, you know.

and for ppl who dont know yet

read http://blog.dreamhost.com/2007/02/23/read-this-now/

that will explain dns 2 being off site and dreamhoststatus.com being off site

That was just a fantastic read.

I’m sure DH could compensate all the wingers by sending out a Prozac script.

Just remeber to take them with water people, I cannot stress that enough.

Then after that perhaps you can inform the massess of your experience by filling out your WordPress blog. The three people that read it - your grandmother, mother & horribly disfigured and morbidly obese wife - can be informed of your decision to control your depression with good, wholesome drugs.

It is quite comical that the people who have kicked up the biggest stink about this affair use such a vuloptuous hosting plan to host blogs.

Quit your bitching and dry your eyes, princesses.

I’ve only been on DH for 2 weeks and I’m wrapped with the service compared to my old host. Finding out about future downtime and being able to adjust accordingly is fantastic. Thankyou DH staff.

As much as this is a possible inconvenience, the timing is perfect. I have seen some slow downs and a few issues here and there but I must say that my stay at DH has been extremely pleasant. Another HUGE factor for me is the fact that the backups are done hourly and retrievable by the individual without having to ask for support. I feel confident that DH has put alot of thought into this business and I trust their decisions. Thanks for the updates guys and keep up the good work.

Doug, you’re a dumbass. A 404 is NOT the same thing as a non connectable server.

Which timeframe is it according to german / local time ?

Sunday morning, February 25th, at 12:01AM PST

Is it -7 hours?

Der Lotse: PST is current at -8 hour from GMT.

I don’t know how Josh can send a newsletter for this month that is better than these comments. I’ll be here reading more comments (if I’m not asleep like a normal person), since DH promises this site will still be up. Right? Too bad DH only charges $10 for this entertainment. I’m feeling guilty for being cheap. A 90 minute movie, or 6+ hours of chaos and comments.

Oh snap, Thanks man!

Guys I have been with DH 2 years plus, DH is run by humans with real brains and personal interest, not just a money making enterprise that doesn’t give a shit about you. DH is the ‘people’s’ hosting company that affords the web to many of us that otherwise will be locked out by high costs. Every customers is part of DH, many companies out there hate DH for being so competitive, we should show our full support of DH when things are not perfect, that’s when it is needed.
Lets give our DH guys a full thanks for the service so far (ok not perfect but more than good enough) and let them know that we are appreciating what they are trying to do for all of us. Anyone that’s moaning and does not seem to want to understand the whole issue talked about above can always find the exit door to somewhere more creative and efficient.

@Charlie: This blog is available as an RSS feed, so anyone can get info without DH needing to send e-mails to people who might not want them. And Jakob Nielsen’s looks (or that his site looks “bad”) don’t have anything to do with usability. Too many people think a site needs to look pretty for it to be usable.

As long as all the e-mails received during the outage will be delivered after it, this is a non-issue for me. Thanks for the heads-up, DH.

geez.

All the people that are complaining on these pages are dumbasses that don’t know squat about datacenters, how the internet works, what a UPS is etc…
I Love these pages… great entertainment…

If you don’t know what you are talking about, you’d better STFU and stop making fools of yourselves. It’s just a little outage, not the end of the world !!!!

JEEEEEEZ!

The server is already slow

Paul - It certainly looks like some of us could use religion.

This is not such a big deal. For the price of the service, a few outages here and there are to be expected. During my day job, we pay $1,500+ per month for colocation at a Tier 2 hosting center, and even they have had scheduled outages (to replace the UPS).

Sure an outage is not ideal, but the timing isn’t too bad, even to me (I’m in GMT+2). The world will continue spinning.. calm down people.

haha @ Darth vader

A question on “where else to go”?

I have been with DH for about 3 months. I moved here after being with Servage for 5 days (3 of which they were down and wouldnt refund my 1yr subscription). I picked DH after seeing it recommended in a few postings.

In the short time i have been with DH i have seen numerous outages and unbelievably bad network performance - email down for 6 hours at a time (twice in one week and not sure if email lost or not??), page refreshes approaching a minute (due to being on overloaded mysql server that i had to complain about for over a week before being moved to one that worked).

All this being said… i do like what i DO get with DH… lots of space, unlimited domains, shell access, etc

and i guess the bottom line REALLY is you do get what you pay for….

so, the question becomes… where else??

… DH’s $10/mo is pretty frickin cheap.. BUT.. i don’t actually need it to be that cheap… but on the other hand i don’t really want to pay $100/mo or more for dedicated hosting… but there must be some suggestions for a company that provides something approaching at least 99.9% uptime (DH won’t tell me there numbers… but suspect slight less than than 99%) with shared hostig that costs more than DH… i would gladly pay double or triple to make sure i get my email and to be able to access my sites faster and more reliably.

lol.. before DH and Servage i ran my sites off a dual-processor intel server connected through my home ISP cable account. I ran my router, cable modem and the server off a UPS. The server was too loud for my apt so i drilled holes in the wall, put server in big ass tupperware bin and stuck it out on my balcony. It ran there for 4 years in temps ranging from -30 to +40C (i added a few blankets and fans to the tupperware bin). It finally died due to, i think faulty power supply - and my business partner telling me we really needed to be with a “real” hosting company….

… BUT.. in that 4 years i am pretty sure i would have been running around 99.9% uptime (which, for the mathematically challenged is about 9 hours of downtime a year)

If anything reading all this has made me want to go with DH even more, outages are bad boohoo, 3 hours is nothing compared to DH’s average solid uptime. This has made me see really who runs DH, Dallas seems to be the slightly more professional (sorry doug) person dealing with the situ, whilst doug is quite obviously the customer relations man.
I think its great that you’re actually telling the customers about the outage and not just going down without warning like most hosts do.

All your power cable are belong to us. ;^)

To all the haters out there…

I pay $19/month (Code Monster at 50% off) for my service here at DH. No, I don’t expect 100% uptime, simply because what I pay doesn’t reflect the fact that I should expect that. Did you sign a SLA when you set up with DreamHost? I sure as hell didn’t, and I reserve no right to complain when the service goes down.

For you stupid people out there, an SLA is a ‘Service Level Agreement’. It essentially says that a certain percentage of downtime is acceptable in a certain timespan (usually 99.9% uptime, server and network). If that agreement is breached, I get some of my MRE (monthly recurring expense, i.e. what I pay) back.

Now that being said… I do have a dedicated server in the Dallas InfoMart (big honkin’ datacenter that puts the Garland Building to shame) that is for my *mission critical* sites and applications. I pay ~$300 / month for it. And guess what? It comes with a SLA. 99.9% uptime, on both the server and network with 2 hour tech support response time. And I’ve never had to use it, because the service is that damn good.

Like has been said… You get what you pay for. If DH is ‘down’ too much for you to deal with, get another provider.

If you’re like me and just need a place to host pictures and random crap like that for friends and family, DH is perfect.

Keep on rockin’ it, DreamHost!

a SLA with 99% and $300 pm ? and we are the stupid people ? thats more than 3 and half days downtime.

Haha, this Doug kid needs to find a good forum or something. I didn’t know it was even possible to troll in a wordpress blog’s comments.

I’m fairly sure that Doug doesn’t work for Dreamhost…

@Jeff C., @Peter: Seriously, with morons like Sam around, the fun is being taken right out of trolling these comments.

@screwloose45: I’m an innovator. We’re creating a movement, from the ground up — a movement of people who provide anti-customer disservice, who make the tightwad whiners who think their asses should be kissed for $8 understand that while DH would never tell them to go fornicate themselves, we will. We’re not communists, we’re not capitalists, we’re not socialists. We’re realists. It’s DreahostStatus Fight Club!

@Dan, @ttancm: Welcome to the revolution, brothers! The first rule of DreamhostStatus Fight Club is, we don’t talk about DreamhostStatus Fight Club …

Oh yeah, my most important forum is hosted by 1and1 in Germany. It’s never been down in the eight months I’ve had it. However, it costs twice as much for half as many features. Like loads of people have said before, you get what you pay for.

Yeah this sucks, but I don’t think anyone is going to be up 3am-9am (PST or EST) on a Sunday for the downtime to matter so much.

On the other hand, I would hope that a company that is generally highly regarded by its customer base would make any and all effort to appease the people providing their paychecks. (Which in all fairness they do about 70% of the time)

What about investing in your customers for the long term?

At least by:

A. Updating your STUPID wiki if you’re not gonna provide support for the options you offer.
B. Making it a top priority to keep your servers online or have a backup plan, even if God decided to unleash hell upon them.
C. Reassuring your customers that you love us too by being responsive to our varying concerns (that are brought up numerous times at all hours of the day — if you’re customers are up til 4am, you should be too)
D. Focusing on what matters. I personally don’t need any more hard drive space thank you.

I’m not complaining about the downtime here. It’s not an issue for me.

I do however care about the quality of customer service that has been deteriorating in recent months for whatever reasons — For example: I’m tired of sending support tickets that go unanswered for days at a time.

I get what I pay for right?

Is that to say that Dreamhost is crap service since I got it so “cheap”?

Just answer yes or no.

If the answer is “no” then by all means get your sh*t together DH.

I’m patient enough.

Thanks otherwise DH.

Guys.

D.H. is one of the better hosts on the market. I’ve been with them for 2 years (Linkspub.com) and probably will be with them alot more.

Ok, so there’s a little bit of downtime. But that’s not in their hands. The building is getting some maintenance done.

Hey, I look at it this way - I’d much rather have the ample warning about the sites/mail going down, and why, than see everything gone one morning with a post here on dreamhoststatus showing the charred remains of that floor of the building due to a ground fault on one leg of three phase power that would run through cables that thick (208V 250A maybe?) Even if Dreamhost had a say in this downtime, and they chose it themselves for this particular moment, I’d still say “bravo” for informing everyone of the impending outage and why, instead of just coming back and a few days later saying, “Oh, that.. we had a power issue. It’s fixed.”

I’ve been with Dreamhost since 2002 (and on Dreambooks since 1998) and my biggest problem over the years is that Josh won’t leave his wife for me. Of course Josh has never met me, but still…

3 hrs downtime? Feh! I think I just wasted that reading these comments.

Still there’s no downtime? lol
I’ve already made a announcement in my website.
BUT… IT DOES NOT HAVE DOWN TIME ??? Agrrrrrr

been with them a month, this only downtime i know of cant really complain.. switching from 1and1 to DH was really nice, considering my 1a1 was on a server with 700 other sites, and i only got 20mb of php memory… with dh i get 90

Well that’s a relief, I THOUGHT I had another month before my domain expired XD

My Sites have started going down. Received Downtime reports from Siteuptime.com Just now. So for next 3-4 hours we need to wait.

日啊

This is pretty damn annoying. I’m in the middle of writing a post on Wordpress and hit a button that freezes the post window and therefore makes it so I can’t even copy the post to redo later.

SEND EMAILS ABOUT THIS STUFF!

Come on man. Only reason I even am here is because I can’t access my sites. I do however check my email everyday. RSS feed or not I don’t use it that much and really have no need to. Then I come here and find out this may take 4-5 hours? I had a lot to do and right now was the only time I could do it. If I would have gotten an e-mail to let me know I would be out getting drunk right now instead of being pissed off. Now it is too late to go out and I’m sitting here like a chump.

HDstatus.com is hosted somewhere else

It’s 6.27 Sunday evening here (Australia)… not good.

Have a whinge guys…

My site will be down also, but there’s not a lot I can do about it.

Simple solution, if you
re not happy, move to some other supplier…

You guys have an awesome service - I still feel like I’m getting away with something when I pay my bill as cheap as it is. Keep up the good work.

this sucks so much. over 4 hours is just ridiculous. i could understand an hour, but now you guys are pulling a “1and1″ on me.

hmmm…..I wonder how many sites went down right now….

Not flaming DH, just curious.

Well its understandable you guys have trouble sometimes also but i have to agree with the comments other people said you guys need some kind of backup center that mirrors all the sites you host and at least keeps the LATEST update online. Cause really im sure you guys make bank off us anyways.

It would be cool if DH had a webcam of the server room. Does this mean lights in the server room go dark too? Or are the two electrical lines separate?

I didn’t find this in advance but I’m glad it’s posted. I use dreamhost with another host as a failover so I’m good to go. Would have liked an e-mail though. Good time to give the server’s cache a nice flush though.

The people I’m laughing at are those who equate their hosting provider’s building with buildings such as hospitals, nuclear reactors, air traffic control, and the like. If you want a website with redundant EVERYTHING (power, OC-3, phone, water, gas, and frickin’ HELIPAD), have fun paying the thousands of dollar bills every MONTH. Yes, my server here is unable to connect to my hosted site on baht.dreamhost.com. However, I’m going to bed, instead of wasting time COMPLAINING ABOUT MY $8/month HOST!!!!!!!!

Yes, DreamHost has made some interesting fubars over time time I’ve been with them, including a 4 month old issue with my .snapshots. However, I wouldn’t deal with any other hosting company. My mother was with SimpleHost for a few years, and their tech support was completely unreachable, the servers were slow (whois.sc reported over 1500 sites on her server alone), and even though they technically gave you unlimited space on their server, they gave you squat for bandwidth, and you weren’t allowed to store any media files (or even plain txt files). Crap company, rejoiced the day I brought her over to DH (which, coincidently, uses the same account my site does thanks to the EXCEEDINGLY GENEROUS allocations of disk and bandwidth.)

DreamHost rocks, especially the employees who are faithful to alerting their customers. Here’s to your repeated all-nighters, guys. I hope my 8 bucks this month goes to the “keep us Happy Dreamhost-all-nighters-crew” fund. Basically, beer, cokes, and various forms of sugar.

I am Doug. I am retarted. I like insulting people who seem to have even a little bit of more common-sense than I do. Wait, that’s everyone. Re-phrase, “I like insulting other people”. Oh, and I am retarted. Did I already say that? Oh yeah, I did. Wait, I also cannot read so I do not know what I wrote. Crap, I can write buy not read? Yes, I must be retarted. Yes, I must be Doug.

OMG! My site and e-mail is down!!! People are DYING HERE!!!!

Hmm, it’s 7.45 on a Sunday morning. Somehow I don’t think many people are gonna miss this.

No, I am the real Doug. I am more retarted. No wait, am I really the real Doug? I don’t know. Crap, my actual website is dougv.com/ No wait, no wait. I’m retarted. Lets insult everyone else. Me retarted. Muhahaha. 404-errors for everyone…..me retarted.

This is made of loss.

Wow, there’s a lot of friendly and intelligent people posting here.

Owait…

FWIW: I use Dreamhost for all my personal websites. My *company* happens to use the same building in downtown LA that Dreamhost does. So I am doubly screwed this time. Not only are all my silly personal sites offline right now, but my 200-employee, publicly-traded, multi-million dollar company is *also* completely hosed right now. The Dreamhost kids are correct: The massive data center in downtown LA gave everyone about 36 hours notice of this and it is honestly not anyone’s “fault”.

It would have been nice to send out an email to all your customers so those of us who do not check the status page when everythign is up and running would have been able to warn users that the site would be down.

Well, I can say as a Network Architect and Engineer for 8+ years for 3 F500 Companies and a avid developer both professionally and personally, I do understand the “shit happens thing”. I must also say that I have always had 1-3 hours windows for maintenance, but I am really happy with the Interface design and support response that Dream Host has for us.
There is know doubt that I would rather have someone tell me what is really goign on instead of feeding me full of total crap. I am sure there is a little grap feeding as this is the way of the world, but I think it is minimal. When I decide I need uptime or DIE, I will either go with a DH package that guarantees it or find someone who will, that has an SLA which says 100% uptime.
Other than that I agree, go pay $485 a month for a package with Rack Space then you have purchased the right to bitch and moan. Until then get your panties out of your ass crack.

Yes I am from Texas

Reminds me of the book Freakonomics:

If DH’s incentive for consistent service were monetary, we’d all be happy that our sites went down because we’re all getting paid back for the downtime.

The “you get what you pay for” reasoning is a slap to the face to all of us, regardless of the price-level– because acknowledging this means acknowledging that we’re cheap bastards for even doing business with DH.

I’m not upset that there’s no redundant server. Servers fail, empires fall, etc.

However, from a customer relation standpoint, I’m upset that there’s no clear metrics on down/uptime for hosting packages…if you’re so sure of the price points, you need to quantify what that guarantees. Likewise, there needs to be compensation for falling short of these metrics for different price points. This way, we’d all have our fingers crossed that DH goes down.

@OutofOrder
No, the comments are in mountain time (GMT -7), but it may take til 4 am pacific time (GMT -8)

For those who complain on no warning, get a clue and start using RSS for this blog.

Here, take this

http//www.dreamhoststatus.com/feed/

while none of your sites are working, you guys should go check out baby dayliner, pretty dope guy, good music too. my favorite song is critics pass away.

http://www.babydayliner.com/

This is crap. All you apologists out there, just cos DH is cheap doesn’t mean that it should be shit service. They are taking and making money, they aren’t hosting people out of the kindness of their hearts. I appreciate that sometimes there will be downtime, but to have *planned downtime* and not send out an email is shit. We get that bloody email every month where the guy goes on about how much money he’s making off us, so how hard would it be to give us decent warning instead. Making a blog post that most people won’t read doesn’t cut it.

Also, how on earth did they end up with a setup of three data centres where one going down will take the other two offline? And isn’t it ironic that the reason they have to power down is because of a problem with a UPS?

Sort it out dreamhost… an email warning would have been fine.

This is funny to read.

I agree that my sites being down for 4 hours, are frustrating, specially when I live on GMT…
Anyway, at least we have feedback.

I remember some hosting companies replying like:
It works fine on our end, or we are working on it, be patient.
Even less, a better network and datacenter management is requested…
If I were to turn off my company servers for 4 hours, I would probably be shoot to death…

Perhaps you may afford buying some thousand hamsters for this occasions…
That would more funny to see, than all this comments…

Let the fireworks commence!

HWAAA MY SITE b DOWN EHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BLEEBLEEBLEEBEELBEEELBELE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

on an interesting note i have some other hosting sites with ipower.com and they all seem to be down too (including their company support site) and they’re probably in the same building. i wonder if there’s a list anywhere of all the companies in that center???

12:01:00 a.m. Sunday February 25, 2007 in US/Pacific converts to
07:01:00 p.m. Sunday February 25, 2007 in Australia/NSW

04:01:00 a.m. Sunday February 25, 2007 in US/Pacific converts to
11:01:00 p.m. Sunday February 25, 2007 in Australia/NSW

My server is down now.
I knew
I hope … would you please add GMT time in official news?
Because I couldn’t image what o’clock that is in Japan.

>日日本人 Says:
>February 25th, 2007 at 12:43 am
His message is not Japanese but Chinese.

Am I the only one here who doesn’t mind the outage at all?

oh guys…. I’m stupid. I’ve read the original time a few days a ago… not the update. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Well for those of us not in the USA, THIS IS SUNDAY MORNING!
Prime time for working on my site!

Arrrgh! (Being a project manager I know that this kind of rubbish happens on a regular basis…)
But aren’t you now big enough to have a MIRROR or some kind of BACKUP?

I figured with everyone else ranting in here I just had to add my comments. Personally I was one of those that discovered this problem at the time of arrival, panicked, shelled into all three dreamhost accounts I have access to (which are in different data centers and on different servers) and then remembered the dreamhoststatus site which alleviated quite a bit of my sudden onset of anxiety. The behavior of the citizens posting in here is disturbing, people take such liberty from their anonymity to berate others over the littlest things as if they feel a need for entitlement. One thing I find increasingly disturbing is the mention several times about declaring everyone paying $8 a month, of which none of the three accounts I access are in this block. Also, performing a simple shell in each of the /home directories across all the servers listed in the ‘df’ there are many many customers listed in there which even at $8 a month could afford the proper equipment to avoid things like this. That being said, I hold no ill will towards dreamhost and having been in a management position for hosting before and still in a minor role now as support, I understand you cannot plan for every emergency and several times you are at the mercy of outside forces. Recently we experienced an issue with Embarq (what was Sprint) where, although we paid heavily for a block of dedicated IP addresses and had for quite a while (owned and configured for almost 2 years now), they decided to switch our addresses to a completely new address block without giving us any notification and took our entire hosting down. Granted it was a small term hosting company and we did have some redundancy, but none of that helps if they switch all of your statics in the matter of a few hours so that even cross-town redundant hosts are reassigned. Either way, I realize my opinion may not count for much but I agree with one point made by ‘Charlie’ early on regarding Doug, who has proclaimed himself the voice of some sort of anti-customer revolution. He chastises several others while many of his comments are fallible at best. Despite Doug’s idiotic ramblings, some of his message is well intended for the audience here, though his delivery wreaks of the intelligence of a middle schooler. Dreamhost provides a bargain service for many of its customers and even high priced and more thoroughly thought out providers experience difficulties and the people of this forum should be a little more understanding about this difficulty and consolidate their comments to suggestions or remarks that are of a favorable purpose rather than ranting and idle mumblings that serve no purpose at all to help the situation. I feel a little abashed that Dreamhost did not have measures in affect to allow their unaffected data centers still provide operational service, but such is life and as I read this veritable forum I was embarrassed by the stream of useless conversation people felt necessary to post here. If you are unhappy with your service, the best way to communicate that with dreamhost is to cancel, flat out, posting in here will most likely not render any benefit except to make you feel better about yourself. To those in the group with Doug, I feel sorry that you feel the need to defend something so adamantly, that you feel it is your right and privilege to post and respond here when all you do is increase the useless content on this page. If a Dreamhost employee were to read and post in this forum, how much would a typical user looking for answers have to scroll and parse through before they could identify an important lead. I guess I now am suffering from the same affliction as those I deplore on this posting, and I don’t intend to put myself up on a soapbox, but alas so it seems I have degraded myself to this cause. After reading over the more than 250 comments at the time of this writing I could do little more than feel anger and frustration about the waste of time. I know, maybe I should just click away and find some functioning site to entertain me, why bother conceiving such an article to retort against those that I am now shaming myself to mimic. I can be almost certain no one here will read this and feel enlightened, but I guess I’m hoping for that one soul that will recognize the logic of my post and learn something by it. Many of the above postings are just more examples of the litter now accumulating on the internet by self-righteous zealots that proclaim themselves party to one favor or another and though speaking in a literate tone may grant them a certain ability to preach to their followers, it is little more than discarded flyers and banners that litter our internet superhighway much as real world refuse clutters and litters our real world streets. I don’t pretend to be an expert on anything, I have some knowledge and experience from both sides of the fence on these issues however and felt as an avid dreamhost customer and supporter it is also my right to respond to all this idle rhetoric I find here. Please people, use the internet as a communication medium, that is the idea and to make progress, that is the intention. Posting relentless and useless comments across the web does not gain you some status except amongst your fellow posting peers, but it serves little real purpose to any cause and is otherwise a waste of everyones time. If you feel you have something important to comment and add, feel free to post, but before you idly mouth off about someone else’s post and extend the long list of trash compiling on the internet and wasting everyone’s bandwidth, think twice, I implore you.

Oh, I was wondering what happened, I vaguely remember being warned. I like how that it affected http://www.dreamhost.com as well, Gives a good feeling of “we are all having to suffer through this together”.

I really really wish this was sent to my damn e-mail so I could have sent out notices.

*sigh*

Dreamhost is awesome, but this is like shutting down the internets.

ops i just lost control of all my sites yet again, ! be aware ! my sites are alive and out there & without control !

Well, thanks for the explanation. Right now all my sites and email are down so I guess this is the reason. I’ll check in some hours. At least is sunday!

please just tell me ho i have to give mi credit card information to to make my site alive again

This sucks big time and I can complain all I want. Clearly Doug is a Dreamhost whore who can’t stand anyone’s opinions let alone his miserable life. And to those who think he’s a genius — I feel sorry for you too. This guy’s just a trash talking numbskull asking for attention. And trust me, he’ll be asking for more after this.

So guys, keep complaining and don’t mind Doug. Funny that DH is welcoming comments AND criticisms and they can’t. And they’re not even part of DH! Ha!

Just wait, they have to bring all of the servers back up again. There is an unwritten rule, don’t disturb a well-running server unless you have to. It may sound superstitious, but I’ll bet that not everything comes back up the way it should and there will be a few bugs to close.

Yeah,

My customers usually only shop in the middle of the night too. I’m launching a new site and was planning to split the traffic between the site and a blog. DH will host the site and I guess I’ll host the blog at 1&1USA so between the 2 hosts, I’ll always be up…….or is it always down?

When DH gets back up I’ll look for the button that says send me “emergency outage updates” cause I didn’t get the heads up on this one.

Anyway, gotta give thumbs up to DH for such cheap bandwidth. But I prolly will start thinking more about mirrors…

insominac

This sucks.

@Spasmo - If you meant me, sorry, when I get in that writing mode, words spill out and the submit button is usually clicked before I recognize my failure to format Can’t believe in the time it took me to post that though there are at least another 100 comments….

Amazing, simply amazing. In my 3+ years of webhosting experience with 3-4 different hosts, i have not seen as much downtime as i have seen with DH in my FIRST WEEK here. Atleast you guys do have the 97 day money back guarantee. Gives me enough time to find a host that knows what UPS stands for. Thanks.

Mooooooooooooooove…………

Wow.

I had no idea DH would be down, as my friend hosts my site for me, but if what people say is true about the lack of e-mail notification, I’m sure she didn’t know about the downtime, either.

Please e-mail your customers regarding downtime. If you can send a bill, you can send a courtesy notice.

not good situation! i am has some project on the dreamhost! its all down! I would like to be of the damage done! ! ! and he has since dropped Sites clients, and they gave me the show!

Half the people he complaining that they are going to move, wont.

Stop stop your crying, you get this service for cheap enough, expect some downtime here and there.

Grow up kids.

Well I’ve had great luck with you guys here at DH.. every on bitching about the service… trust me theres a lot worse out there, i can suggest several hosts where you’ll have down time on a daily basis, and no warnings what so ever.. geeze

The best suggestion I’ve see here, I will agree with… is there any way you guys can set the “official” responses in a different color, so we don’t all have to read through a bunch of #$@& to find something useful

Thanks DH

@Grey Hodge: Well… in this case 4 hours, but should be an announce by e-mail. I didn’t see the announce and I didn’t know what happened until I seen here. But was to late to announce my visitors about down time.

oh man, Garland Building what will you do next!

How time left to my site is up?

I never received notification of this outage.

In fact I live in the UK and when I woke up this morning if found that my site wasn’t working. And do you want to know something IT DOESNT BOTHER ME. I mean these guys are providing us with a service that to be frank is better than most. I am a UK customer using a US host because they are so much better. Yes last year there were a few problems but so far they have done great at not allowing it to happen. Give em a break and let them do their jobs. It’s not like they were the ones that made the line be replaced **** happens and its not forever. :D

hmm nevermind should be about two hours now

Steve are you running short of OS x servers? Donate few to DH so that there is no downtime

very bad timing for Europe. it is 10 am to 1 pm

Matt

Small Orange is $10 a month for 25GB transfer. There’s no way that can compare to +2500GB transfer for the same amount of dinero.

Oh, and Steve Jobs, that’s funny, but nice to see you posting here. And I absolutely LOVE your work!

Holy shit you people are fucking whiny.

I highly doubt that any of you guys will choose dreamhost as something that is incredibly important… No I am not saying dreamhost is bad, but if your running something important, like a online business that gets heavy traffic, or something similar, you should be using at least a VPS or dedicated server….

I bought 1and1 web hosting and holy shit they limit you to 20MB of PHP memory, have retarded technical support, and many more stuff I could complain about.

I only been with dreamhost for 5 weeks now, and this has been the only downtime I have had.

Also I don’t mean your family pictures or whatever you have hosted isn’t important, but it isn’t like your data is gone forever.

If your gonna run a business, don’t be a cheap fucking jew and buy shared hosting and expect 100% uptime, thats just fucking retarded.

PS.
Get a different hobby… Play a game, like World of Warcraft -.- browse 4chan.org, go outside, walk your dog, play with your cat….

Its just 3 hours…

(also to the people saying games are for kids, shut the fuck up)

Brian, get the fuck over it and buy a dedicated server or VPS if your making so much money, dumb fuck.

I deal with cheapskates like many of the poster in here daily. You think that your ten cents entitles you to complain whenever something goes wrong. The sun will be up soon. Put on a jacket and go watch it rise. DH has an effective N+1. If downtime is so scary, why not N+1 yourself. Your problem is relying on others to “just be perfect. ” Go to some other hosting site and set up a second site for redundancy.

You know, if you had already upgraded to Windows Vista you wouldn’t have these problems. Vista is a magical entity and doesn’t require power to run, it zaps it directly from all the users connected to it, draining the life force directly from the user to power the components rather than monolithic power transformers! Just a little touch we thought would better our empire… errr… humanity!

300 is a magic number

is, tu tb de España eh! xD

Llevamos asi desde las 7 de la madrugada aprox. es una verguenza.

@Doug - Though you might like to know your site is down.

@Everyone else - Great post keep up the good work.

@Dreamhost - Think about hiring Doug - He needs a good home

Just to remind a few of you, there are many of us at DH that pay for business plans ,ie a lot more than $8 pm, and serve other countries and timezones in other parts of the world (yes there is life outside of your 52 states, turn off fox and on to pbs and you can see the other humans that live on the planet) . So downtime is important on a sunday at 3.00am your time an at least a generic “opps this site is temp out of action etc etc” for all DH dns sites would be just one minor fix to this situation.What ever happened to he educated view of network design that says never have one single point of failure,come on DH less wank wank wank monthly newsletters and better BASIC design

Art

Whistling the theme song to Jeopardy…

…or maybe the some elevator music like in The Blues Brothers when they went to pay the taxes?

Could we get a timeout page with elevator music like that when the servers are down?

Well, 3 hours of downtime on a sunday with advance notice maybe isn’t so bad..

However, I was NOT e-mailed in advanced.
And yeah, I singed up for those e-mails, using both my primary (on-site) and an off-site address.
So having to find out about it by the sites not being accessible just sucks.

I don’t have “clients”, but a friend who’s on my account who has his own domain names and pretty much uses e-mail only. He’s a journalist, so just sending and getting messages is fairly important to him. There were some problems with e-mail as it is, this week, and now everything is down. That sucks.

As for people chanting “it’s only $8 a month so suck it” - B.S.
Like most users I don’t use nearly a percent of all that wonderful traffic and diskspace. The reason I’m using a shared host is precisely because I’d expect it to be in a professionally run data center. Otherwise, I could just run a server at home on my ADSL line.

The fact that this “Garland” building doesn’t have a second set of powerlines run through the building and doesn’t allow customers to provide their own generators means it’s NOT a profesionally run data center.

Not every data center has airtight security with keycard access and 24/7 guards, halon firesupressants etc. Fair enough. But (especially these days) a data center is defined by its power supply. Companies are buying up very unattractive lots of land, based solely on the fact that power companies plans indicate there are some megawatts left there.

It’s not like, oh, I dunno, dreamhost hasn’t had some embarassing power failures before.

“You get what you pay for” is B.S. — you’re supposed to a) get more (otherwise you should do it yourself, no economies of scale) b) get at least the minimum expected level of service, that, yes, these days even for crappy shared hosting includes being hosted in a datacenter that has backup power. Fitness for purpose, that sort of thing.

So, I’m pretty disappointed I DID NOT get any e-mail notice of this. I’ll probably be looking out for some better e-mail hosting for my friend’s business, even though I might stay here myself.

I suppose for me it helps that I just added another friend’s site (who does actually use some traffic) from a competitor. His reaction was “it’s ONLY 4 hours of downtime? sweet!”. So, sucking less than fuitad is what dreamhost has gotten to. Another blow to the brand name.

Hey dreamhost!!

Enough first DNS zone problem then all sites are down.. What is happining? REALLY ENOUGH!! I am looking for a new Host…

I don’t expect 100% uptime, and I appreciate that Dreamhost is so open about system outages and why they happen. That sets them apart from many other ISPs.

However, what I still don’t understand:

* How can it be that a UPS, of all things, is a single point of failure? If they can’t be serviced independently, what’s the point of having them?

* If Dreamhost has an unaffected nameserver, would it have been so difficult to just serve a simple error page saying “Coming back soon” for all customer sites, instead of just disappearing from the net? Come on, you had two days.

* Also, I think that for something as grave as a system-wide outage, all customers should be notified by email regardless of their control panel settings. I’m sure no one would complain that they’re being spammed.

And to the people who think that the whole world is fast asleep at 1am PST… um, actually I can’t think of any response that wouldn’t insult MY intelligence.

wouter : if your dear journalist friend needs email service, he can get it easily at gmail.

“Next time you have a planned outage, e-mail your goddamn customers!!!!! ”

Can’t agree more. I would have heard about this a few days ago - instead of trying to update my blog ON MY BIRTHDAY and finding it out of action

I’m one step closer to switching to MediaTemple now….

3stripe: I switched to MediaTemple then switched right back… I found 2 minute downtime periods 12 times a day consistently

DreamHost.com is running again…

Um. Pathetic! We’re supposed to recommend you guys to people and you have a single point of failure!

Not impressed. At All. Sort it out.

In DreamHosts’ defense:

You guys have no clue as to the severity of the power issue at Alchemy. If the cable had grounded, anyone in the room would have been liquefied by 60,000A from the distribution. There is no way the Garland building could have approached this any differently (other than install the cable differently, but that’s a whole separate topic). They couldn’t even TOUCH the cable for fear of grounding and instant death. The only way to repair this was to shut off power to the entire building, then replace the cable.

guys, it happens..
so there is no point to argue here.

at the end of the day, there will be always limit for the word “perfect”.
please give productive and constructive comments instead of destructive, this might help you in the future
leave this disgusting mock, curse, and other silly comments

im just another unhappy customer like you.. yet i believe they try they best

Hey guys!
what time is it in PST now? My site is still down

Dreamhost rocks you guys. Simmer the heck down.

PST = UTC/GMT/Zulu - 8 hours, which means 05:13 AM now.

Ditto what lexey said–but it’s now 7:18 AM CST, which makes it 5:18 AM PST.

Updates? Obviously 3 hours was optimistic. And I have to agree with what others have said about 1) an email letting me know this was happening should have been sent instead of letting me panic when I couldn’t get onto my site or into my blog, and 2) a single point of failure? WTF?!

It is almost 8:30 EST and still no service. I foolishly just moved another client over to dreamhost that is supposed to be live on Monday. I feel like a fool. We have had major issues with email. Another client I moved over has been pissing and moaning all week. I am just waiting for the call this morning. I know it is coming.

The company I work at has a scheduled downtime once a year due to the buildings power being shut off. But our multi billion dollar clients know well in advance of the outage. Our website is co-located so we only experience downtime of some of our services. I just do not understand how a company that had been around for while does not have fail over and redundancy built into there infrastructure.

Yeah, I know you get what you pay for, but I don’t remember ever having these problems 3-5 years ago. Anyone know where where moving our services to this week? I don’t want to have to make a call to all my clients but I may be forced too. This is going to cost me thousands.

Maybee I will give it one more week.

Hi,

It’s now 16:19 (GMT+2) and the emails and customer page are still down. This is really unprofessional to have one point of failure, this is why I don’t just host my website at my house.

“Livin’ it up since 1997″ - For how long?

Regards,
Adriaan

Hope it will be OK soon.

Everything is working again, thanks DH team

I dont think everything is working, as my site is still down, which comes out to 9 hours now. =-(

I dont think everything is working, as my site is still down, which comes out to 9 hours now. Maybe you guys can put me on the server that this blog is on so i can work on my site with the only full free day out of the week i can do it…. =)

My sites worked for an hour and now they are down again. This really is turning into a nightmare.

so I’m a member of Ayumi-hamasaki.net, and seriously. It’s been WAY longer than what you said, Why isn’t it working yet?!

Everything is working for me now !

Maybe they took Doug’s suggestion of powering it with “squirrels on treadmills or with a dinosaur, like they used to do in The Flintstones.” They’re just not keeping them running fast enough. lmao

My site pooped over 12 hours ago. Any word when we might expect to see some sign of life again?

=^..^=

Couldn’t we be notified somehow by Dreamhost by email, before such events? Furthermore, I live in the United Kingdom which is in a different time zone to the US. So the comments made by some that it’s a good opportunity to get a good night’s sleep doesn’t really apply.

@Juan: The purpose of a wiki is to have the COMMUNITY provide support. Of course, if you’re an idiot who knows nothing, you not only can’t contribute anything to the wiki, you probably don’t understand anything is says … such as, oh, where to find the old Knowledge Base, which is linked right from the main page of the wiki … or, maybe not even how to click links. The rest of your rant is just foolish. Dreamhost doesn’t decide, “F*ck it, let’s take the NOC down for the night,” they posted the fact they’re taking the damn thing down (and as follow-up notes, they were all there) and I don’t even know what the hell you are talking about with hard drive space.

@Navjot Singh: Because you touch yourself.

@Jim: You can sign up for major service announcements via e-mail at the control panel. Don’t blame DH for the fact you’re too lazy or stupid to read, or understand, the documentation.

@Ryan: Welcome, brother! And remember, everyone fights the first time they come to DreamhostStatus Fight Club!

@Jay: The last thing I want to see is what a bunch of geeks are doing in a room full of servers. There’s a huge difference between Sorority Shower Cam and Plumber’s Crack Hour.

@aaho: They probably just lash you to the top of the short bus to cut down on the drool that needs to be mopped up, don’t they? Learn to read, retard: The cable that needed replacing is on the UPS. Dreamhost can’t have its own UPS system in the building.

@Dangerous: WTF is Austrailian Reggae? “Gonna smoke a croc, mate / Gonna rebel against wallabies, mate?” Take your $8 US (That is, what, $400 million Australian?) per month and host your site on a koala’s ass for all we care about you.

@Saleh: When you finally free your head from your ass, learn to read. I’m not a DH employee. Moron. Practically no one who posts comments here is an employee, you idiot. When DH employees post to the comments (rarely), they identify themselves as such, you stupid mook.

@James [on soapbox]: What an imbecile. You post a novella and accuse me, with all of six posts, of scrolling? And I always find it amusing when retards like you call me stupid or idiotic, but fail to point out a single thing I’ve actually gotten wrong. I’d comment more but your post is nothing more than a rambling, pointless rehash of what far smater, and far more clever, people have said.

@Arnauti: Great. Leave. Goodbye and good riddance. Maybe the strange, moldy cheese smell that occurs every time I go to panel.dreamhost.com will disappear when you go.

@retart: That’s funny stuff!

@Sharjeel Uqaili: Raffi called. He wants his music off your Web site. And after the 30-second load, to another splash page, and 30 seconds of whatever the Hell that pointless Flash was all about, only to be told there’s no content? Yes, your Web site is vital. I am very, very sorry the world was deprived of that piece of crap for any amount of time. We have to have something to show people that says, “Every annoying thing you can do on a Web site is right here. Study it closely, and if you do any of it, dive off the nearest bridge.”

@Dreamy: Learn math, imbecile. 4:56 AM EST = 1:56 AM PST = two hours to go, idiot.

@Homer: So’s yours, beeyotch!

@wouter: There’s the virtual door. Please let it hit you on your real ass as you leave. And on your way down the street, pick up a book on how to parse an RSS feed, then smack yourself in the head with it for not being able to solve your own damn problems of keeping up with the news that, apparently, thousands of other people managed to discover in time.

@WinnieThePoo: That’s “Pooh,” dumbass. Although in your case. …

@Everyone else complaining about not getting e-mailed notices: Why don’t you tards try leaping into the 21st Century and just subscribe to the RSS feed on this site? You can add it to your own site. You can add it to your Google or My Yahoo page. You can add it to FireFox or Internet Explorer. You can run it through an online aggregator such as Bloglines or NewsGator and they’ll e-mail you when it’s updated. Get with the program and stop blaming DH for the fact that you’re lazy and stupid.

@kid: The Force is strong with you!

@ttancm: I’m solidly in camps 4 and 7, too.

@Me: I got my engineering degree from Whatsamatter U (extra credit for people who can name the cartoon that comes from!)

@Blind Freddie: Shows you what the Hell I know. The blog and its RSS feed are it. So, you’d better smack yourself in the head with the book I suggested for wouter, and maybe give me a swift kick in the ass for being a retard, too.

I’m still not getting the delayed mail (new mail is coming through). There should have been a bunch of mail overnight which I still haven’t gotten. Is it lost?

@Doug: Dude how do you live with yourself being such an asshole? And yes I can read and none of the WEB BROWSERS that I use spew out 404’s by themselves you moron. A server sends the 404 to the browser you idiot! How’s it feel to have someone abusing you verbally and treating you like crap, like you have treated the majority of the people here? Oh and yes you are wrong, and since you are so smart I will let you figure that one out… So how about apologizing to the people you insulted and while you are at it Grow Up man, although calling you a man is insulting the rest of the male population.

I was pretty flipped when I first realized some of my sites were down, but the sane comments, and the point made about the serious electrical danger have cooled my jets.

Also, I want to second the comments about earthquakes in the Midwest (and thus, it not necessarily being safer than DH’s current home). If anything, the big one won’t be on San Andreas, it’ll be around Memphis/St. Louis.

Dallas, thank you for posting and going into some detail about the building, and the dilemma posed with the current location. It might sound crazy, but maybe you might want to post this (and similar growth concerns) as a case study for Inc. magazine. All I know is that I’ll take a few hours of occasional downtime over hundreds of people being zapped in downtown LA.

@Paul G: I’m man enough to admit when I’m wrong, and you’re still a stupid c*nt.

@Justin: Did you fart? Because I felt a breeze and it stinks. Oh, no, wait, you’re explaining your stupidity. Yup, pretty much the same thing, I guess.

Doug: You have a lot of nerve ridiculing people for having ugly sites when yours is a piece of crap! And that picture of your Fat arse you see in the mirror everyday is the winner. Oh yeah this one right here:

http://www.dougv.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/09-14-06_1336.jpg

Wahahahaha. Hey have you ever heard of the hair club for men? Or better yet, how about weight watchers??

Those eBay vendor reviews are quite the read. I see you complain about some of them too. You really are just a miserable fat SOB.

I see you are a Mac user. Let me tell you buddy, I know a few Mac users and your sorry fat arse gives them a bad name. So just do us a favor here: If you can’t say something constructive then walk on dog.

Kreig, shut the fuck up. You don’t even know what redundancy entails let alone what it means IF THE WHOLE FUCKING BUILDING HAS TO LOSE POWER HOW IS REDUNDANCY GOING TO HELP YOU STUPID FUCK!?!

I’m so tired of hearing people use that word! “OMFG DO YOU HAVE REDUNDANCY !?! I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS BUT I KNOW IT’S GOOD AND LIKE, I’M NOT A FORTUNE 500 COMPANY AND I DON’T OWN A DEDICATED SERVER BUT I THINK I NEED IT OR SOMETHING.

Shut the hell up.

Greetings,

A pleasant Hello to you all.

I am currently experiencing problems with MYSQL. I am using a html editor which has direct access to the php files on my server.
Retrieving and saving the documents onto the ftp server takes forever and many times the editor times out after 2 minutes of being idle. Has any been experiencing this anomaly?

I can’t access my panel on Taffy, its down again!!!

Dont worry, it may have been planned Panel mantietance

Doug - you are a fucking retard - now go fuck your mother, cos, evey mofo else is!!!

Fucking hillbilly twat - die, you piece of shit!!!!!!

I have too the same problem

Very good . You are doing a great job.
thanks.

Things need to be done, and if it keeps everyone’s sites going in the long run, what difference will three hours make?

nice work.. thankss

I know some peeps are killing DH but hey adleast they keep people informed good or bad
I have been in the biz for along time and their are serious hardcore horror stories

Steel Building Company
http://www.usbuildingsdirect.com/

DH is so inconsistent…

S e r v e r is a lre ady sl ow

It happends, but it did not since february. I’m happy with it

Thanks for the wonderful and useful post!

w o n d e r f u l a n d u s e f u l p o s t !

Thanks for this article. I like your posts

Dreamhost is great!

This is a great site. Thank you, Dreamhost!

They did a fast job, I didn’t have down time

good luke thank you

@DreamHosters Josh and Patrick: Thanks for the advanced warning (I have been able to notify my clients, all of whom stand to lose very little business so early on a Sunday morning. Good thing none of them are selling Viagra or Meth)

thanks

It´s a very interesting post and simple answer of many questions.
Thank you
SEIKO CITIZEN TISSOT

My site is down three hours

I know some peeps are killing DH but hey adleast they keep people informed good or bad
I have been in the biz for along time and their are serious hardcore horror stories .

thankyou ss

thanks