DreamHost central database maintenance
We will be performing maintenance on our central database beginning next Tuesday night at 10PM PST (Tue Mar 6 22:00:00 PST 2007). The downtime window for this maintenance is 4 hours, expected downtime within that window is 2 hours.
This will take the DreamHost Webpanel offline entirely. All other services will remain up as normal.
.
February 27th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
<cryptic>
…it’s on its way…!
</cryptic>
- Jeff @ DreamHost
February 27th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
We only get a single week of notice? This is disgusting! I expect 15 weeks of notice in case I need to create email addresses or something. I want all my money back!
February 27th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Hopefully this downtime will be worthwhile!
February 27th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
The odds are, people aren’t going to read this, then they will blame you guys and say that you “didn’t warn us” about the downtime. Hellooooo, RSS feed!
February 27th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
“…it’s on its way…!”
You’re such a tease, Jeff.
February 27th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Oh and by the way. Someone needs to learn how to spell maintenance, mikeh!
February 27th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
haha
February 27th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Maybe it’s time to upgrade to Firefox 2 to get spell checking.
February 27th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
man! this sux! just switched to DH in Dec 2006. what a big mistake!
I love all these posts in support of DH on this blog. I guess you guys are ok with your site and email being down/sporadic for several days…. well, not me.
customer =
February 27th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
Noel: This maintenance won’t bring your site and email down or sporadic. It just affects the panel.
February 27th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
Perhaps while the CP is down, they can make it 2007.
“Attention to details”…that’s what gives me confidence (or not) with the “larger” issues. I’ve only called it out to them–3 times.
February 27th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
I hope this fixes the ultra slow web panel for good!
Make it so!
February 27th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
I saw this after getting home from work and was afraid it was tonight at 10! I started to panic!
glad you do this a week out, I have never had a host give so much bandwidth and storage for such an incredibly low price.. I’m guessing other people will comment on how its oversold, but seriously, how many of you are using 2tb of bandwidth and over even 75GB of storage???
February 27th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
You can use php to make your date always correct. Don’t know if this will show but it will be like so:
© 1996 -
February 27th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
Are you kidding me! I just got finished with reading the comments from the posts this weekend. I’ll never see the light of day at this rate. But I’ll second the slowness (of my connection to the panel?).
February 27th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Hillarie: It’s on the RSS feed. This way I found out.
I agree, the panel is very slow due to the a monster mass of queries queing in the database interface. I hope they fix it for good
February 27th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Gee, when it rains it pours doesn’t it?
Is this going to be an ongoing situation where there are incremental upgrades affecting user access? I know our site has been affected since Feb 20th without us doing anything site modifications on our end.
We’ve still suffer from intermittent blank page errors from before the power episode, and then wham, we’re onto the next outage (albeit minor) almost straight away.
-Tim&Lin
February 27th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
My server is already down from the planned maintenance next week, I intend to lose business and maybe even money, my customers are sure to be unhappy because they have to deal with me, my site is irreplaceable, oh, and does blogging cause male pattern baldness too?
February 27th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
…Jeez, all this for an outage which ONLY takes down the panel.dreamhost.com… I’d hate to see what would happen if say, the Garland building was going to *gasp shock* shut the power off and bring down EVERYONE’s website, but with plenty of advance warning so those running $1500/min websites could, say, get some temporary hosting offsite and change their DNS so they could continue making money…
February 28th, 2007 at 12:12 am
please say this means the installation of AWStats
February 28th, 2007 at 12:36 am
I was in the process of installing the MediaWiki. After spending an hour on another project, I wanted to finish the configuration. Unfortunately, I kept getting an error. This blogpost makes me suspect that my one-click install may have gone wrong somewhere, so I’ll deleted everything related to the wiki and give it another go when you guys are finished with the “maintenence”.
February 28th, 2007 at 12:45 am
Im hoping for something good, wooottttt!!!!!!!
February 28th, 2007 at 2:17 am
Rid.icolo.us! I want to be advised 467 years before.. And what if “next Tuesday night at 10PM PST (Tue Mar 6 22:00:00 PST 2007)” i’ve just planned a massive dDos against panel.dreamhost.com? Wo refund me? I want money back x 10 times!!!
Nice work, dreamguys!
February 28th, 2007 at 2:35 am
Thanks for sorting this problem out
February 28th, 2007 at 3:08 am
will this also fix my incredibly slow loading site? im on 56k and its loading slower then it normally does… and believe me… i know slower then dialup -_-
February 28th, 2007 at 3:39 am
My site is very very slow again.
This is terrible.
I think start my money gone trash. And I lose my visitors. Dont come again saw my site is slow.
I’m on 10Mbit/s and its loading slower then it normally does…
February 28th, 2007 at 4:19 am
The load on the server (welchs) I’m on is always between 10 and 60! This is not right, and I’m happy that I can’t see the load on the mysql server. I’ve been waiting over 10 minutes for my Gallery site to load, and then I got an error (it always takes long, between 10s and several minutes)! !!!! And just this morning the disk was full again which also lead to errors. No No No! I’m happy I signed up using a promo code so I just paid $22 for this terrible hosting. I won’t renew my account if this stays this way.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:25 am
Anyone know if control panel is already out?
February 28th, 2007 at 4:27 am
I just recently renewed and upgraded my business hosting plan with another company and today I ordered a plan upgrade for my VPS - both companies provide a far better service and I’m happy to upgrade an renew my accounts if the services provided are good. Here at DH the support is nice and all, but the servers are slow and if this stays this way I’ll not renew, as noted above.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:33 am
What time is 22:00 PST in GMT ?
February 28th, 2007 at 4:37 am
Already know:
Corresponding UTC (GMT):
Thursday, March 1, 2007 at 06:00:00
February 28th, 2007 at 4:49 am
Whatever it was, it seems to be not working now.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:51 am
Firefox tabs for DH “Control” Panel site and all domains hosted with DH:
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
(etc..)
Beware - rant follows.
I’m not so sure I can do this too much more. I really like DH but this level of downtime is becoming unacceptible for anything but a “hobby” site. I understand the whole “ya get whatchya pay for” and all, but DH itself seems to be run more like a hobby site than any sort of business; at this point I’d be happy for 30 days of uniterrupted service. I understand it costs money to “keep the pumps manned” but when there’s known problems and/or maintenance occurring, someone should be monitoring far more often for this level of failure.
I can only say that DH service is rapidly degrading to the point where it’s actually not even living up to its relatively inexpensive price. “Occasional downtime” has, unfortunately, progressed into “moderately unreliable”.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:54 am
Man, some people will complain about anything.
How is the PANEL, not everyone’s sites, being down for 2 hours, at most 4, going to be a hardship?
It’s not going to affect your service, it’s not going to destroy your readership. Get a grip.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:54 am
Any updates? Webpanel still seems to be down.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:55 am
Duh - I should read. It’s next week. Well, the panel is down anywaay. Maybe they got an early start
February 28th, 2007 at 4:59 am
The panel is down. So where do we report it if there’s no other “official” way to contact Dreamhost? :p
February 28th, 2007 at 4:59 am
i can not access my account panel on dreamhost.com,
always say ” can not find the page ….
February 28th, 2007 at 5:01 am
did they go a week early? Web panel is down now…… What next?
February 28th, 2007 at 5:04 am
I see that too.. my webmail is down, and I cannot access the web panel..? c’mon guys
February 28th, 2007 at 5:09 am
I am very pleased with Dreamhost. My last hosting company upgraded their servers and PHP and Mysql and everything without notifying me at all. When i called them on they said in the contract they can do what they want to the servers when they wanted to. My site at the time was not PHP5 compatable and it blew up and they wouldn’t downgrade until I could get it updated. Dreamhost has done alot to help us and for those complaining suck it. Go with the other providers that just have their way with customers. Every support ticket I sent them has been greeted with great help.
Go Dreamhost and yes Fix the panel
and maybe clean it up with stuff that is no longer in use 
Give Formosa some chocolates for me also so she stays nice for me
February 28th, 2007 at 5:18 am
BEST SENTENCE IVE READ SO FAR:
“I think start my money gone trash”
February 28th, 2007 at 5:30 am
@simon jessy We only get a single week of notice? This is disgusting! I expect 15 weeks of notice in case I need to create email addresses or something. I want all my money back!
Just leave man just leave
February 28th, 2007 at 5:37 am
Weird, it has been behaving as normal for me; my website has been snappy and the panel has been accessible.
February 28th, 2007 at 5:59 am
Anyone else on nesbitt or Mysql server droopy notice their site is running REALLY slow??
February 28th, 2007 at 9:48 am
@dani: You clearly do not know Simon Jessey… as I’m almost positive that was extreme sarcasm. I could taste the sarcasm it was so thick. I don’t know anyone who preaches Dreamhost more than Simon Jessey.
I found nothing wrong with the admin panel, except the fact that it takes a while to set up shell users. But I know how things can go awry with databases. Especially when you’ve got hundreds of transactions going on, and hundreds of people accessing them at the same time. So do what you need to do. So far, all of these outages have not affected me. And I’m thankful for it. Give Frappe some more caffeine so she can stay up! ;^)
February 28th, 2007 at 9:54 am
# dani Says:
February 28th, 2007 at 5:30 am
@simon jessy We only get a single week of notice? This is disgusting! I expect 15 weeks of notice in case I need to create email addresses or something. I want all my money back!
Just leave man just leave
———————————–
I guess Simon *should* have put the tag at the beginning of that post ;-). Then again, given the typical comments on this blog, I can see how dani might have missed his intended humor!
Ha Ha!
February 28th, 2007 at 9:56 am
the WordPress software filtered the “sarcasm” tag out of my comment above
..at any rate, he was kidding!
February 28th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
the panel still says “hmm.” at first I thought someone really hax0r3d the host. lol. Then I read the notice.
in regards to maintenance periods, I have been with other hosts that upgrade crap without notice and if my db gets hosed or scripts break, they would blame it on the scripts instead of recognizing that upgrading PHP or Mysql might have an effect. So far my support experience with DreamHost is far better than some “powerweb” provider because DreamHost support aren’t a bunch of inexperienced kids.
February 28th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Your web panel is down - a little early. And the error page says “humm.” ? Are you joking? Where’s the nearest cliff…
February 28th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
The clue level around here is so amazingly low.
February 28th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
@rlparker I guess Simon *should* have put the tag at the beginning of that post
. Then again, given the typical comments on this blog, I can see how dani might have missed his intended humor! 
Ha Ha!
ya i think he should all im reading is text how in the world am i supposed to know someone is joking, think about it, after all the complaining i have read here i have all the right to assume hes complaining also
February 28th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
@paul The clue level around here is so amazingly low.
funny you say that paul, ignorant much?
February 28th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Just to whip everyone into a frenzy of excitement about this maintenance, the new server that’s being deployed is a Dual Dual Core Opteron server with 32GB of ram and a 14 disk SAS RAID 10 disk array.
February 28th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
For god’s sake dreamhost staff, *please* turn off comments for these status posts, they’re unnecessary and keep encouraging people to attempt to contant you for support issues here, instead of the correct way. Oh and the new color-coding of the posts is very Media Temple.
February 28th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
justme: I guess thats what happens when we take over their datacenter space and noc.
March 1st, 2007 at 12:43 am
Great… now not only is my website down… but the panel is down as well. Can we keep outages down to 1 at a time please?
March 1st, 2007 at 12:53 am
All of my sites are down as well, except for one (a non-.com domain site). They were down when I went to sleep last night, and still down 4 hours after waking up this morning.
A down-time of something close to 20 hours in the past week — that’s third-world service.
March 1st, 2007 at 1:04 am
heheh Yeah, my sites work but email has been down for 3+ hours. Yep this week has pretty much sucked big time. I have taken a lot of ahem unhappy comments from some of my clients. Why is it when you recommend something to people it is your fault when it doesn’t work? I hate that. Oh well, I guess it can only get better from here no?
March 1st, 2007 at 4:07 am
when is email going to work again???
March 1st, 2007 at 4:13 am
I don’t care if the panel is down but my website is down too. This is the 2nd bullshit post by Dreamhost in 2 weeks. The previous one went along the lines of “DNS stuff going on, your websites won’t be affected” and guess what the websites were down for >12 hours. Now it’s “only panel down, your websites won’t be affected”. And guess what? Website down again! GJ.
March 1st, 2007 at 5:40 am
Damn! The panel is down for more thann 48 hours. What the hell is going on? Anyone do something!
March 1st, 2007 at 5:53 am
too bad that we cant make posting comments only allowed to people who have used a different host before…. i’ve been with 2 other hosting companies already and i can only say that i’m very satiesfied with DH.
March 1st, 2007 at 6:23 am
@Danny - this announcement has nothing to do with your website being down. They are telling us about an outage on the web panel NEXT WEEK.
@Patrick - the web panel has NOT been down for more than 48 hours. I’ve using it in another tab on my browser right now. And again, this announcement is about a planned outage NEXT WEEK.
March 1st, 2007 at 7:05 am
AWESOME upgrade on letting us know severity and if it has been completed. VERY well done DH. Thank you.
March 1st, 2007 at 7:59 am
I’m glad the panel’s getting some work done on it. It’s just 2-4 hours - and only the panel will be down, not your website! I don’t think anyone WORKS on there website 24/7/365
March 1st, 2007 at 8:15 am
@brasscrest-In this case, why the support ask us to refer to this website. Isn’t they refer their problem to this website (Dreamhost is the main cause of this interruption). I cannot log on to their sites. When I posted my enquires to them, they ask me to refer to this web. Is Dreamhost host Forexcapital Mutual FC (www.forexcapital.us) websites?
March 1st, 2007 at 4:57 pm
the web panel looks awesome. nice job guys
March 1st, 2007 at 8:05 pm
Wow, that change certainly surprised me. It’s all new and shiny. A nice improvement over the old skin though.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Down for more than 48 hours.
What’s wrong.
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:02 am
Nice job..
March 2nd, 2007 at 6:51 am
I’m trying to understand if this was a typo or misunderstanding. I’m thinking someone at DH said “next tuesday” meaning this past tuesday and someone who was supposed to blog it though they meant tuesday next week. Hopefully these sorts of mixups don’t happen often.
honest mistake, I understand. But Please let us know what happened here.
March 3rd, 2007 at 5:30 am
Well, my webpanel is down.
Why don’t they freakin announce it on dreamhoststatus.com ?
Error message:
Temporarily Unavailable
“The web panel is temporarily unavailable while we perform maintenance on our database.
[Sources: dreamhost]
Software error:
Can’t call method “query” on an undefined value at /usr/local/ndn/web/dhwebpanel/index.cgi line 63.
For help, please send mail to the webmaster (support@dreamhost.com), giving this error message and the time and date of the error.”
March 3rd, 2007 at 6:14 am
Yeah - looks like the panel is down again
Mine says: “The connection was reset” after about 60 sec. of trying
March 4th, 2007 at 4:22 am
New panel kick ass
Just have to use to it, but it looks simple and nice.
March 5th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Is there anyway that you can make PHPMYADMIN a bit faster it’s tooooo slow
http://www.ps-revolution.com/forum
http://www.psr.cc
March 6th, 2007 at 12:03 am
Can you guys post up the timing in GMT too?
PST is quite confusing for people outside the States, if not SF.. DreamHost is a global leader in hosting but why give only PST… Kindly use GMT too…
Thank you…
May 9th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
yah.. the time pls
July 23rd, 2007 at 6:16 am
everything is ok , i love dreamhost …
July 27th, 2007 at 4:38 am
i love dreamhost
July 27th, 2007 at 4:41 am
thanx to dreamhost …
July 27th, 2007 at 4:46 am
Nice job..
August 6th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Well done Dreamhost. Not much downtime and very little disruption.
September 23rd, 2007 at 3:46 am
again problem
http://www.ailemizinblogu.com
September 23rd, 2007 at 3:47 am
maintenance
http://www.hepimizinblogu.com
October 25th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Great job done! Dreamhost is the best hosting you can find!
November 14th, 2007 at 3:30 am
thank you to dreamhost
November 30th, 2007 at 12:23 am
thx for this article ..!
February 21st, 2008 at 2:53 am
It´s a very interesting post and simple answer of many questions.
Thank you
SEIKO CITIZEN TISSOT