Sporadic brief network outages.
Posted (March 6th, 2007 at 3:35 pm PST) by jeremyUpdated: We believe we’ve figured out the cause of these brief outages and are implementing a permanent fix right now. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the issues, but we’re fairly certain that we’ve worked out the issue.
We’ve encountered a few brief network outages today (lasting 1-5 minutes each). We have a few leads and are currently looking into the problem. We’ll post more information as it becomes available.
Happy DreamHost Networking Team!
137 Responses to “Sporadic brief network outages.”
WHEN WEBMAIL GOES DOWN IT MAKES ME VERY UNHAPPY. COME ON DREAMHOST GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!!!!!
I’m assuming this is effecting email as well? My website seems to be fine, my email is nowhere near being a living thing right now.
I totally agree. It negatively affects our business when we cannot access email.
Keep us posted
NO EMAIL
TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE
this is TWO MAJOR FUCKUPS WITHIN A WEEK
GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER OR I GOTTA GO ELSWHERE
THERES NO ‘GOOD VALUE’ IN SHIT THAT DOESNT WORK
Sites up and down for a week. One client threatening to cancel. No answers from DH, just apologies. This is getting very old.
My Dreamhost website has been completely down for over 30 minutes - not my idea of brief…..
Email is down for all of my customers. Awesome!
Email is down.
Yeah. Our email has been down for almost an hour. Ugh.
I host several sites with you and reccomend you to others. I’ve had enought of this downtime. This happens way too often. I’m done reccomending you and will soon leave to find reliable hosting.
No email, but hey we got a spiffed up new web panel! (when you can get to it that is)
This is IMHO a demonstration of exactly why DH will never be reliable from an uptime standpoint. Look at where their focus is: not on network redundancy, not on procedures to recover from a power outage but rather on more eye candy.
So bl00dy frustrating! Will switch from DH soon, too flippin’ unreliable…
DITTO here….e-mail outages are nasty….I’m taking flack from users that do not understand that it isn’t me!!!
Our company email is up and running fine but my personal email is unreachable. That’s okay. I much prefer that to the other way around. I can live with not getting LiveJournal announcements and ZOMG AMAZING! stock offer offers for a while.
Not again. Say it ain’t so.
Severity = Medium
are you kidding me, not being able to get email for only one user should be your highest severity level.
Email down here as well. Please fix asap. This is effecting business operations.
it is really hard to justify using this host for business when it keeps going down… I didn’t care so much when it was just my blog but I’ve been putting client sites under my account and now they want answers. I tell them to go to dreamhoststatus.com and they say… “what does this have to do with me? I want it working now!” Oh how I wish I could just get a fat pipe running to my apartment……
This is way lame.
I can’t do business b/c of things like this and it costs me money.
People affected should get comped the downtime.
SEVERITY LEVEL SHOULD BE HIGH! My business runs on email.
can anyone recommend a better place? even if it costs a little more…this is total and complete bullshit..
My boss doesn’t complain when my personal email goes down, so I’m not mad or worried. Kinda sucks since I was in a hot and heavy exchange w/my girlfriend that got interupted; but actually it was a good excuse to switch to a phone (and that’s what I get yelled at by the boss for doing).
Ive been with you guys for a long time & love you lots -and a appreciate the low cost - but when mail is down randomly like this, its paralyzing. Especially when I am awaiting a response from a client who says they’ve already sent their mail. This seems to be happening a bit more than sporadically at the moment. please please get your shit together….
No mail here either and a traceroute to my mail server stops at ge1-L3.dreamhost.com [4.78.192.66].
I am tired of the sporadic service as well. Please get your act together or I’ll have to leave you as well. Reliability in hosting and email in paramount. Please let us know what actions you plan on taking to correct your poor service in the future or else I will leave and demand my money back.
My main sites are up as well, although I am rather enjoying being email free. By all means take at a minimum another 13 minutes to fix things!!
Can we get the severity level bumped up please.
This is not good enough, i think this is not good enough, will let everyone know when i have found someone to move too
I am not leaving, I enjoy the blog to much! Anyway DH´s site has better colors than the other peoples.
experiencing a *bit* more than “1-5 minutes” of down email here. i echo any sentiments of continuing frustration lately. this is getting bad, guys.
i have a client who’s complained so much about his mail in the past week and a half that I’m setting him up with gmail as a front-end for his dreamhost-hosted domains (see http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Webmail for info). kind of ironic: I was just about to email him the details when my mail went down. thankfully his still seems to be up so I don’t have to defend dreamhost to someone who doesn’t understand the value … but then again, I shouldn’t have to be *grateful* that my client’s email service isn’t down. again. i’m beginning to question the value I get here myself.
I’d be interested in seeing suggestions for people looking to switch hosts! Please post some?
*cries*
I hate using my yahoo address to email my boss. It looks so unprofessional. and I’ve had to do it a lot as of late what with attachments being retarded and servers being down. Please please please hurry to fix this!
ditto this is bullshit
Could you please consider refunding our hosting charges for the relevant months (which would be this month and last month, by my calculations)?
We are currently paying you for a service you are not providing.
I have been with DH for a long, long time, but this is seriously making me think it’s worth the hassle of moving hosts. 
email authentication failing…passwords rejected
I love how DH’s uptime is so great, everyday is perfect and I never have any problems. Oh, and support always gets back to me in 2 hours or under.
Huh?
Oh sorry, I was just dreaming….
Seriously, this is at the point that switching all my customer’s sites and my sites would be LESS WORK than dealing with customer yelling, email/sites not working, and waiting for responses from DH.
I love it when DH FINNNAAAAALLLLLY emails me back and says, “everything works fine on our end”…well yeah, it’s like 40 hours later - maybe somebody fixed the problem TWO DAYS AGO! Morons…….
Whats the Deal? Same shit diff day with dreamhost?
finally working now? jeeeeeeeez, guys this is SO SO uncool
I have hosted my personal sites here for a long time so outages didnt bother me much. Now though, I am hosting business here and I have to agree that these random mail outages are costing us clients. I am a Unix Administrator by trade and at my primary employer mail is our #2 priority only behind total network outages. Sad to say if this does not clear up very soon I will also be leaving.
OH NO! People are dying! My blog was offline for two minutes!
Your smug newsletter that you sent last week was one of the worst pieces of communication i have seen in my life.
You guys need a leader, and some judgment.
good day
You guys are great but your email system is overloaded.
Looks like it’s time for me to run an in-house mail server.
Was way longer than 2 minutes
my sites is down
I am also interested in finding a good alternative host. I have tried a lot of different hosts, and none have been decent so far, except Webfaction. Unfortunately I can’t use them because they limit the number of subdomains you can have.
To the person above who listed Bluehost, I would definitely NOT recommend them. In my experience, their support is horrible and their system is less than stable.
The outages are a few minutes long, but they are occuring over and over again, resulting in major problems.
Great! Not this crap again! Arghhhhhhh!
What is going on dreamhost. This seems to be happening every few weeks now. Please invest in some more support systems. Even for the price this is getting to be too much.
Seriously, I’m just running a few little forums, but they’ve been up and down every ten minutes for what seems like the last month now - if it’s not a heavy load on the webserver, it’s unreachable. If it’s reachable, there’s problems connecting to mysql. I’m lucky I’m not hosting commercial sites, but I’ve recommended DH to a bunch of folks who are, and I’m losing all my credibility!
For the love of piss, this is really starting to get to me. I still have not moved my actual business account over because I consistently have my inbox fill up with MySQL errors from my web forums.
hey guys ;
what’s happening there ?
solve that problem
I’m running my domain email through Google. Never down; 99.99% perfect SPAM filtering and a slick interface (vs. Squirrel Mail). Nuff said
When will people realize that if your going to run a business site that requires 99% uptime to go elsewhere? The old saying is true. You get what you pay for.
this reminds me of the summer of 2006. I cant wait to see what’s going to happen this summer. bummer
You know, the good thing about this is that the servers are finally not overloaded and the scripts load fast because people can’t reach them.
why why why its hepend all the time mails problems and web dowen
Yay, I’m up agan! For the most part I have really liked DH’s service. I wouldn’t mind paying a couple more bucks a month if that would help you guys keep things better maintained.
With all due respect, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
- Happy Not-a-Paid-Shill DreamHost Fan Customer Team
Connection seems to be back up again for everyone, server is overloaded again !!!!
@number-six:
I’m fairly sure the guy who redesigns the web panel and the guys who admin the network (and address stability and outages) are NOT the same people, and thus these two features are not mutually exclusive.
Hey if you guys at dreamhost need help let me know… i assist for free
DH sucks…
we’re back! back with another one of those block rockin’ beats!
Check out 1and1.com - I mirrored my main domain there last Friday night and changed DNS so that Monday morning I had email again! Sorry you guys are still suffering here.. my website was never offline, but days of no email forced me to mirror the site to survive long enough to see if they can get this cleared up! If it gets back to normal, all I have to do is change the DNS again, wait for replication and all will be well.. if it doesn’t get going pretty soon, I can move the rest of my stuff to the other site and give this up for dead!
For those advocating GMail, are you aware that there are massive privacy concerns about it? Specifically, because Google retains and analyses all of your outgoing AND incoming email, which means that this even affects people who write to you, not just you (who has at least accepted their terms of service)? Not too good if (a) you ever get sued, (b) you ever get prosecuted for a crime, (c) Google ever turns evil, (d) you are generally concerned about your privacy anyway.
As for Dreamhost and the refund question - frankly, I pay a monthly fee to have a service up for the WHOLE month. When it is down intermittently, I think the whole month’s fee should be refunded, not some fraction of it.
@Sabrejack says:
“I’m fairly sure the guy who redesigns the web panel and the guys who admin the network (and address stability and outages) are NOT the same people, and thus these two features are not mutually exclusive.”
I expect you’re correct, but given the fact that resources are always limited, where DH puts those resources (a new skin for the panel!, a new one-click install!, more joke writers for the newsletter!) is telling don’t you think?
I would rather have a robust network than a pretty panel. Perhaps you would prefer different.
So what happened to the email during the outage? I sent a test message (from elsewhere) during the outage and it never arrived… Am I making a mistake using you guys for work-related email?
Agree with Jessica - don’t go near BlueHost / HostMonster (same company), they couldn’t organize a blowjob in a whorehouse. I just came from there, and despite all the recent problems at DH, I would never go back. I used to be with phpwebhosting.com once upon a time, and I’m thinking if I never should have left them in the first place after nearly four years.
My site has had MySQL problems since the original outage (off and on). I am constantly getting SQL errors from my web forums, and it’s starting to get frustrating.
P.S. Im on munchies….
yeah this is AWESOME! Thanks for the good blogging everyone. Its far more amusing than the actual WORK related email that I suddenly NEED to access.
Oh well, in the meantime have a good read of my brotherinlaws blog from Japan… http://www.dakota.asadachi.org
what else, oh… you can buy some guitars from us…www.guyjeanmusic.com
just dont email us directly…cause we cant respond right now.
ps. i love you guys…have a nice day.
You guys have to offer another plan for customer like me that cannot afford to lose email during work hours EST. I don´t want to have to move all my email accounts again… So I´m giving you the benefit of my laziness.. but if you don´t fix this soon issue quick, it was good doing business with you, or at least for a while.
This is TWICE in the same day! AND just less than a week ago I had to have another account which I have set to forward mail to THIS one reconfigured - because the darned mail kept bouncing - and going around in a loop! It gummed up THEIR mail server until we found out what it was - some DreamHost DNS problems.
Gawd.
No, we’d all prefer a robust network… I suppose I just expect DreamHost is not like ordinary ultra-tight-profit companies, and would actually hire as many admins as they needed to do the job well regardless of what other resources are being expended (web designers or panel developers, for example.)
@ Sabrejack Says:
“No, we’d all prefer a robust network… I suppose I just expect DreamHost is not like ordinary ultra-tight-profit companies, and would actually hire as many admins as they needed to do the job well regardless of what other resources are being expended (web designers or panel developers, for example.)”
Ummm, if they had enough competent people to design and maintain a robust network don’t you think they’d _have_ a robust network?
I can’t access my site at all. Downtime for the past week has been utterly pathetic. What’s up?
I’m pinging both my website and database servers. Both are erratically going up and down. It’s so frustrating especially if your in the middle of a post. Since joining Dreamhost, network performance was never that great to begin with, now these outages makes them unbearable. I still remember the last summer’s power outage. I hope Dreamhost addresses this issue because lots of people are upset.
I wanted to switch services back in 2006 when there were so many outages I was just shocked. It has been fine since then unless I wasnt made aware of an outage or two.
Problem is I havent found another company that would be any better. You can, of course, host it yourself.
If you had a tiny company, Id say use Yahoo Business or something.
I need IMAP and not may services offer it.
Also, I would pay 5x more $ if there could be 99.9% uptime.
For those of you “new” to this kind of scenario at dreamhost (new customers), get used to it.
I’ve been using dreamhost for more than two years (initially bought the 2year package for cheaper service), and I have to report that this is par for the course - i.e., routine outages in service. They are the rule, not the exception. There is usually some major meltdown with some aspect of the service (mostly EMAIL/network with occaisional database outages, typically not the web hosting) about once per month, sometimes more.
If it wasn’t for the huge pain and time requirement of switching all my crap over to another service, I would have bailed out months and months ago. For now, I just live it with it and try to smile each time the service goes out. The price/storage ratio and flexible features are no longer an incentive for us to stay, only the major effort of relocating; plus, for a long time, I kept hoping it would be the “last time” - but about 25 times later, I’ve just come to accept it as the M.O. at Dreamhost.
Now, anytime there is a serious problelm, we all just automatically assume it is the lastest outage at Dreamhost, and the status page has always confirmed it (it has never been anything else in over two years of regular outages). Nothing has improved in all that time, but the apologies have always flowed easily - along with reports of frequent hardware replacements, feature upgrades, storage increases, etc.. I’d much rather see a freeze put on EVERYTHING else and a focus of all time/attention on RELIABILITY until it is finally established. It has been the #1 issue plaguing us ever since starting our dreamhost service. It is exceedingly frustrating, especially for business purposes.
By the way… rather than seeing the “employee owned” photos of sailing, parties and clowning around, I’d feel much better (on my way to confirm the latest outage) to visit the dreamhost page and see photos of employees fixing servers and WORKING HARD to solve all of these problems. It really sends the wrong message to long-time customers who have dealt with this time and time again (like salt in the wounds) - i.e. MAJOR recurring problems happening all the time at dreamhost; meanwhile, the staff is using our money to go out and “live it up,” while failing to improve anything in what we’re paying for. Those photos were a really poor marketing decision. They’re insulting.
Anyway… after two years of this, my suggestion to everyone is to simply get used to it or just pack up and move on.
I have only one of my websites here… and for the past two weeks at least once a day I have to re-insert my email into Apple’s “Mail” program, probably because the mail server is down. I bet when I move all my other sites over, with another 4 emails, I’ll get to do it even more.
I just signed up, and I’m nervous so far. But by the looks of things, you guys have a TON of customers, since most will NEVER post here, and nearly 100 have in less than an hour. So, that’s a LOT of money coming in.
Network redundancy is key - when one server messes up, shouldn’t there be another to keep things going while the first is fixed? I get worried that my customers won’t be able to access my sites and I lose money.
I like money.
I can’t agree with Jason’s “get used to it” post.
I shifted our company accounts to Dreamhost precisely because I’ve been using them for my personal email and webhosting for years and have been impressed with the accessibility and lack of downtime.
I was used to the setup, I’d get a kickback on the reference and I’d have more control over email accounts than most hosted solutions I know will provide so I could actually *administer* rather than simply ride herd on email. Such a deal!
Sadly, it wasn’t a week after I moved our domains that this seemingly-unending series of troubles began.
So I guess my point is that no, these problems are *not* something I’ve experienced as endemic to DH service, which only makes it all the more frustrating sometimes.
I agree the informal-to-the-point-of-folksy monthly newsletter shtick only plays well when things are going well. When they’re not it comes off as smirking and dismissive. But again, the tone hasn’t changed a bit yet its only recently that they’ve begun to strike me that way - which means its the service that’s changed. I’m hoping we’ll be back to the service quality that will allow me to enjoy the monthly write-ups soon.
I wouldn’t want to minimize network outages of any sort, but the ones I’ve seen today were of very short duration, and did not severely hurt the traffic at my sites. After all, even large companies, with their own servers, encounter outages, brief and otherwise. How many times has your bank’s online access been unavailable for hours at a time when they are doing some sort of maintenance?
Despite all the problems that Sunday morning, and the aftermath, my uptime is 98.93%. Obviously that’s a little under the 99% level and not quite at the 99.9% that some hosts claim for their services.
I’d like to see it better. But perfection is not possible.
Peace,
Gene
So far, no server issues on Fairfax, BUT the night’s still young.
Re. Jason
I’ve been here almost 9 years, l and I have seen many “problems” come, and go, during that time. Overall, even with the recent ‘heavier” downtime, I have to rate my reliability experience with DH as “good: to “excellent”.
Right now is a “rough” time, which I believe will pass. It’s all about your needs; if it ’s not working for you, it’s not working.
As with all such things, YMMV ;-).
Anyone who ever had to work with high availability high concentration servers knows this is the rule, not the exception. Problems can arise from anywhere. Upstream providers can get zombie-attacked with some 10G/s joy coming from the pipes, infrastructure might break, server capacity can get clobbered by some user, CPU can get killed by another user, software problems might arise with finger pointing to some other part of the software, RTFMs and “we don’t support that usage” friendly messages.
Even if you have your own dedicated server, you can get funny things sometimes, and sometimes hackers will have their way with your server and then you will understand your mistake when you’ll get a 2-day downtime while you stumble to reupload your stuff and whatnot.
All in all, s*** happens. The only way to get better service is to pay more for less concentration, while everything still stays managed with the same 24/7/365 service. Like I said to my coworkers, we get what we pay for. We don’t pay $500 per month, we got no reason to complain. Service mostly works all the time, that’s cool. Oh, and we are NOT kept in the dark, compared to other servers.
I like to read this blog mostly to laugh at how nasty people can get. All of the typos and bad grammar in the comments are added perks.
Remember kiddies, it’s DreamHost, not Dreamhost. (Look at the page title.) Let’s remember to use proper capitalization.
I must be lucky. I hardly notice any problems, the power outage was the last one and today i couldn’t check my mail for about half an hour (OMG, Whatamahgonnadooooo?) and saw a couple of errors with the db connection. - hitting F5 and pages loaded normally.
Been with DH since about 2002…
And it’s Macworld, not MacWorld 
I was writing for them at the time, and, one day, my editor corrected me.
Anyway, I don’t think any reputable host wants downtime. But this is the only place where you could get real answers from the management, and a place to vent.
When I was doing business with GoDaddy, I had frequent slowdowns and occasional outages too, but the first tier of customer support never seemed to know about such things. You had to ask them to contact someone to figure out what went wrong, and the answers were still general and unhelpful.
Peace,
Gene
Like clockwork! When I really need to rely on Dream Host . . . I can’t!
My site has been down for the past hour. I just checked. It’s still down.
You know, People have unrealistic expectations. I’ve used half a dozen other hosts, and honestly, I’ve never found a host that is significantly better than Dreamhost, and several that were worse. The difference is DH is HONEST about when they have a problem. I’ve never found a host that’s been as honest about issues as Dreamhost. Every other host I’ve used has used the standard raft of excuses, “Must be a routing issue between you and us”, “we didn’t see any down time”, “no one else has mentioned anything, I’ll pass this on to the techs”, and of course the classic no reply. On the other hand DH preemptively tells me when there’s an issue even before I see them (like this, I didn’t even see any email outages today). Hell, one of my PHP scripts was putting an inordinate load on the DB server, and one of their database monkies FIXED IT FOR ME, then emailed me how he fixed it and gave me his personal email if I had questions. Any other host would have suspended my account till _I_ fixed it.
And again folks, when your building management says there’s a CRITICAL PROBLEM with the power supply to the building that must be fixed ASAP or assorted substances will hit the fan, that’s beyond your control. The issues they had after with the router shows they found other issues, and the fact they have been honest and have already started to create secondary data centers after last year’s massive power failures (that affected MOST OF THE CITY) shows to me they’re trying hard. I value an honest, hardworking company over an anonymous bundle of stock photos any day of the week.
Dreamhost, I’m here to stay.
I’m getting like 5kb/s on Zim right now, is that related?
YES! Finally dreamhost is down, I’ve waited all week for my server to go down.
I’m going with grey, name 2 hosts (that are similar in some ways) that keep you THIS updated with RSS and everything about what’s going on…
i completelly agree with Grey Hodge good post, read it people he makes some very good points
“I’m going with grey, name 2 hosts (that are similar in some ways) that keep you THIS updated with RSS and everything about what’s going on…”
MediaTemple and Textdrive.
I’m finally able to access my site, but can’t connect via http://FTP. Gonna do a reboot on this end to see what happens.
My time with Dream Host is up in a month, and I’m now shopping around for something much more reliable.
I can’t afford all this downtime!
It’s MediaTemple reliable? seems like a good alternative. But I wouldn’t like to migrate to another host and find the same problems.
I looked over MediaTemple’s status page, and it does seem as if the problems they have there mirror the ones you have here, such as “MySQL Connection Errors,”"Intermittent Latency,” and so on and so forth.
In fact, I rather suspect that all hosts have problems from time to time. That’s the nature of the beast. If you want to leave one service, you’ll want to make sure you’re not jumping from the fire pan into the fire.
Peace,
Gene
Yes, you are right. We get what we pay for. I need to get used to it.
I installed WordPress and cannot connect to my site via http. Is this due to the outages?
WordPress? It could be an installation issue. Can you put up a temporary index.html page and disable the index.php page in your WordPress folder with some sort of placeholder text and see. If it works, then it’s your WP install.
Peace,
Gene
Any ideas on using the google ap for email?
That to me would seem ideal -my sites almost never go down /don’t rely on ruby or mysql and generally have little traffic - email though pays the bills
Chad, if it’s the site you’ve put here (the one that opens when you click your name) it doesn’t seem to be the correct url, that url is unregistered according to the whois database i checked…
The reason other web hosts don’t have something like this, is because they don’t experience as many difficulties as Dreamhost does. It’s just a fact. Dreamhost has to find a way to keep their clients, and they do it by making “honest” announcements. I’ve been hosting with both Dreamhost and Bluehost, and I’ve NEVER had any downtime with Bluehost. Just saying.
Looking for a new host after 1 month of being here. Dreamhost was a good host 2 years ago, they’re $#%@ now
My site’s been completely dead for nearly 2 hours and support refuses to even respond with an ETA or a confirmation of the problem.
This is incredibly bad customer service, and I’m coming to regret choosing DreamHost.
Ah yes, Bluehost never has a problem.
Except, “updated: 2007-01-12 09:09:11″We’re experiencing high mail filter server loads. Mail may be delayed for over an hour before delivery. This only affects customers who have enabled the Bluehost Mail Filtering solution.”
Tell us another one
Peace,
Gene
Avoid BlueHost (aka HostMonster) like the plague.
I’ve got a VPS from leeware.com for $15/month. I can host unlimited domains and install whatever services I need on it.
I’ll never go back to regular shared again…
That is a seriously wild way to do it. (leeware). If I really wanted to do it all by myself I wouldn’t have considered DH. But if I was looking to run a server that I needed more control over, yeah, it wouldn’t be a bad place to go.
Pay someone to initially configure it and go with it (that’s what I did). After the setup, you’ve got a web panel just like here at dreamhost (except easier to use)
If your email goes down, restart the fucking postfix server..don’t wait on shitty support to do it for you…
# faħmu Says:
March 6th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
With all due respect, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
- Happy Not-a-Paid-Shill DreamHost Fan Customer Team
–Good response, actually I’ll be holding the door open for all your unhappy customers very soon.
Patience, we will have a special offer for people who transfer DH accounts
“You know, People have unrealistic expectations. I’ve used half a dozen other hosts, and honestly, I’ve never found a host that is significantly better than Dreamhost, and several that were worse. The difference is DH is HONEST about when they have a problem.”
–You’ve had really bad luck, from my last 3 companies(5 years) I have seen downtime only from DH.
–Ooh, there was one time, we had to move a server 150 miles to a new house, it went down at 2am, arrived a 4am and was running at 4.30am
–and as for the RSS/Blog and whatever. It’s only needed because servers go up and down like a yoyo.
–Still disagree? What person, even the most inexperienced moron, would think that 2 weeks before Christmas is the time to upgrade e-commerce servers?
There is no defence. It’s beyond belief that these guys are in business.
Hmmm…
http://www.lunarpages.com/special_offer.php ???
I’ve heard bad things about _them_ too, but really, right now, I don’t think anyone could offer a worse service than DH :/
Every single host will have downtime at one time or another. Even if you think they don’t, unless you are monitoring your sites 24/7, you may never know for sure.
Peace,
Gene
customer_no_service: They’re not MY customers. I think you misparsed my sentence.
Signed, *A* happy DreamHost customer.
Lunarpages, taken from a recent posting on their message forums: “Hello
We have been working on webmail since last night and plan to have it up today. During the repair, the mail services will be stopped and restarted resulting in intermitten mail issues. I appologize for this inconvenience.”
What were you saying lili?
Peace,
Gene
*lol @ Gene*
that a month of constantly recurring downtime is a little bit less acceptable than a day?
and that the folk at lunarpages really need a spell-check program 
“What person, even the most inexperienced moron, would think that 2 weeks before Christmas is the time to upgrade e-commerce servers?”
What kind of idiot runs an ecommerce site from an $8/month shared host? These are for small time sites where you’re not going to lose thousands of dollars in a couple hours. If you are making $$$$ per hour, you can afford a managed colocated server. But even then you’d be down during upgrades, maintenance, and power failures that affect 10 million people.
Man, I *WISH* I was a paid schill. Like I said, honesty goes a long way with me.
lili: Since you asked, a few minutes every few days is no big deal. All night and most of a day is a major deal. That Sunday where things were down recently wasn’t fun, but we were all notified about it several days in advance. I put up a notice on my sites about it, and another when we were back up to explain things. Nobody complained. Our stats keep going up so we didn’t lose anything.
Peace,
Gene
I can get any of my websites to work that are stored on a particular server. Others work fine though… WTF???
Lost a longtime customer because of the email woes. Patient guy but he’s been pushed too far.
DH, how about less “Living it up” and more “Fixing it up”
Vote with your feet people. If you’re not happy send the message that gets attention.
MPR: And you did file a customer service request, right? If you didn’t, you don’t really expect a response here do you?
Peace,
Gene
Ok Chad… I see you just registered the domain… you will have to give it a little time to propagate.
Some people, no patience, no understanding how these things work…
I LIKE THE WAY YOUR EMO C.E.O. WRITES A CHEEKY F*KING ARTICLE ABOUT OVERSELLING WEB HOSTING WHILE YOU BASTARDS HAPPILY OVERSELL YOURSELVES THE F*K OUT. NOT ONLY ARE YOU MAKING ME LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT TO THE WORLD, BUT YOU’RE MAKING ME LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT TO ALL THE CLIENTS I’VE RECOMMENDED TO YOUR CHEAP SERVICES. F*K YOU GUYS, SERIOUSLY. GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER.
To those of you asking about MediaTemple: they used to be awesome. Since they have launched this new “grid server” technology, they COMPLETELY SUCK. I had put some clients on there this past November, and actually had to move them off again before we launched their site because they were so fed up with the crappy load times and never ending problems. DH and MT are the 2 hosts that have made me look bad!
regarding 1and1.com - they are definitely reliable. i recommend them for clients who have a *really* limited budget and/or an extremely simple site. they have hosting plans that start at $2.99 per month, and they have a really easy to use control panel.
the problems with them:
- you don’t have as much control over your site as you do at dream host. for example, you can’t choose what your usernames, database names, etc. are
- their technology is somewhat dated. they only recently (in the past few months) upgraded to mysql 4. mysql 5 has been out for over a year.
- their webmail program is oversimplified and the spam filtering isn’t great.
i think i am going to move my discussion over to webhostingtalk.com. come join me if you want to find a good alternative to DH!
Hello all!
I have been reading all the mails since the begining of DH problems a few weeks ago. I am not thrilled by what is happening with our host but I am happy by the fact that we are kept informed about the situation.
I do hope that is is just a rough time that will be over soon, but, I am still happy with the service of DH…..trust me, I have been through much worst with other hosts!
Pierre
Re: 1and1.
They limit MySQL databases to 100MB. You have to have a pretty large board to go over that, but it’s a point to consider.
And they have a failing grade at the BBB, which is more significant. Their support is outsourced to, I think, the Philippines, and they can barely understand English let alone provide knowledgeable help to you. Yes, I have experimented with 1and1 as a possible host after having problems at GoDaddy, and opted not to.
I came to DreamHost instead.
Peace,
Gene
Just want to make a redundant post to all the people running companies from virtual shared hosting that you’re all blubbering children if you expect uptime on a network that you don’t live next to and run yourself. Get your own dedicated machine and admin them yourself if you want/expect your own MAGICAL 100% uptime and service. DH is great as far as shared hosting is concerned, but if you’re running a company you’re an ubern00b for complaining about ANYTHING here given DH’s unusually stellar record as far as pleasing their customers is concerned. When you pay 9.95 a month…
well, just cancelled mosso. nice service, but it seems they are having growing pains. i don’t have the time to wait for them to hire more people and work out bugs as their cluster grows in size.
i did switch to media temple’s virtual dedicated server for $150 a month, and so far so good. it seems the virtual server is much better than the grid. still too soon to get excited.
if this doesnt work out, i’ll go back to paying through the nose at verio, at least i’ve only had 3 quickly resolved server problems in 5 years only one site outage.
Now my comments are getting flagged as spam!
Great job done! Dreamhost is the best hosting you can find!
aaaarrrrgh! i love you guys, i really do. but c’mon! my boss is giving me hell for something i can’t control! aaaarrrgh! calgon take me away! please restore our email. pretty please?