Yet more DreamHost central database maintenance

We will once again be performing more maintenance on the dreamhost central database beginning Monday, March 27 2007 at 22:00:00 PDT. Downtime window is 6 hours, expected downtime within that window is 4 hours. This will take the following services offline:

DreamHost Webpanel
DreamHost-provided Webmail

All other mail services will remain online, including pop3, imap, and smtp, only the DreamHost webmail install will be offline. Customer sites and databases will also function as normal.

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53 Responses to “Yet more DreamHost central database maintenance”

  1. Gene Steinberg Says:

    It’s about time you folks got around to getting a little work done again :)

    Peace,
    Gene

  2. Hillarie Says:

    Yippee, more downtime! I shouldn’t be complaining, since I was too cheap to get a dedicated server, but that’s not the point. Well, It’s good that you are actually warning us, unlike some hosts.

  3. Hillarie Says:

    Well, according to that, I’ll be asleep, so it’s not a big deal.

  4. Some User Says:

    But not everyone is from your timezone :P

  5. Ben Says:

    idk is this one going to make the panel load faster?…i liked the old one better…they haven’t done anything for a while though, i have the RSS feed and check it everyday

  6. Gene Steinberg Says:

    I prefer the new control panel, particularly since they enlarged the type size for those of us who are over 19 :)

    Some Under: Listen whenever they do maintenance, it’ll be in someone’s time zone. So what do you do?

    Peace,
    Gene

  7. dupola Says:

    oh my god,i’m very angry to it.

  8. Gene Steinberg Says:

    dupola: We all need to let off a little steam.

    Peace,
    Gene

  9. why Says:

    Gene - dupola COULD be kidding. Not everyone is a raving maniac. Some rave, some are maniacs.

  10. Jay Says:

    Glad to see people commenting again. I was starting to fall asleep. Come on DH, you could have given a week’s notice vs four days! You know, so more people can start complaining BEFORE the downtime actually happens!

  11. tony rudak Says:

    Hello Guys,
    After checking your Dreamhost service status page, I notice that “We will once again be performing more maintenance on the dreamhost central database beginning Monday, March 27 2007 at 22:00:00 PDT. Downtime window is 6 hours, expected downtime within that window is 4 hours. This will take the following services offline:

    DreamHost Webpanel
    DreamHost-provided Webmail

    All other mail services will remain online, including pop3, imap, and smtp, only the DreamHost webmail install will be offline. Customer sites and databases will also function as normal.”

    That said, I’ve noticed that it’s taking upwards of 60 seconds to execute and render my web site’s index page. This is not acceptable. Is there something you’re not telling us about?

    Whilst your hosting services came highly recommended, I am beginning to wonder if I have made the right choice with Dreamhost.

    I welcome your comments on this matter at your earliest convenience.

  12. Gene Steinberg Says:

    tony: I see what you mean. I’ve been waiting and waiting and your site’s not loading. Have you sent a customer support ticket? This is clearly something that needs to be checked, to see what’s going wrong.

    I see, however, that it’s still a placeholder site, or at least the one linked to your name.

    Peace,
    Gene

  13. Christoph Dollis Says:

    Hey, thanks, I was just scratching my head trying to understand why I couldn’t update my SquirrelMail custom login page.

    Have a happy and successful maintenance session!

  14. Josh Says:

    Well dreamhost has only been down a couple of times since I signed up with them and i have never had a problem.

    It’s good they are fixing things before they are broken though :P.

  15. wonder Says:

    Webmail wasn’t taking attachments earlier today - perhaps this is related?

  16. word Says:

    wonder,

    I was having similar difficulties… pop works fine, however.

  17. why Says:

    Christoph - You seemed to miss that this is SCHEDULED for 3/27. If you look at a calendar today you’ll see that it’s 3/22 or maybe 3/23 - thus this will happen in four days.

    If you’re having troubles now, your machine is so fast it’s already processing the maintenance window or something else is messed up and you need to report it to support for remediation.

  18. Maciek Says:

    I am happy with any downtime as soon as it provides new features or better quality of service! :)

  19. Tad Askew Says:

    I’m just happy to be a DreamHost customer. The juxtaposition of the words ‘Dream’ and ‘Host’ makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, and when I sing it out loud, the clouds part and the sun shines in. And all this for under 8 bucks a month!

    Databases, connectivity and IMAP be damned. Uptime is overrated. I need downtime; I need it now and I need it often. Downtime is when I can make friends, catch a baseball game, and stand in the unemployment line.

    Dream on, my cosmic feathered friends, patch those routers, crimp those cables, and bounce those databases. To you I owe my multi-dimensional existence.

  20. ttancm Says:

    Everytime any post is made on this site someone complains about their site loading slow, so as a public service I just thought that I would point out that this is shared hosting, and rather than there being some drastic hardware problem or fault with dreamhost staff, it is much more likely that someone on the same server (or database server) as you is using a large percent of the resources and it would thus be better to actually file a support ticket from the control panel rather than write vague complaints here.

  21. Elira Says:

    Hope its fixed by now…..

    some times it sucks

  22. NoSetup.org Says:

    Ok… and what about the servers down? some of my website are down for more than one day!!! and dreamhoststatus doesn’t said anything…

  23. GAndrel Says:

    Am I missing something? In my calendar March 27 is in Thursday. But I’m in Central Europe time zone. ;)

  24. Hirvine Says:

    @Gandrel, PDT means Pacific Daylight Time. Which is a Time zone for our fellow americans. PDT time zone is UTC - 7 hours. In Europe (we) live in CET timezone. CET as Central European Time (and CEST (S from Summer) in the summer). CET is UTC + 1 hour. So let’s look to the date again.
    Monday, March 27 2007 at 22:00:00 PDT
    + 8 hours (first +7 hours to be at UTC and +1 to get to CET), we get
    Tuesday, March 28 2007 at 6:00:00 CET

    Don’t like the calculation? Just post a post at dreamhost and check the date and time. Use the difference in hours from the date at the page with your time to calculate.

  25. Hirvine Says:

    Oh, yikes you right, sorry for double posting. How noob of me. :P

  26. Marcello Says:

    Whatever time zone, Monday is Monday and March 27 is Tuesday.
    So, dear Dreamhost, could you please tell us if maintenance is expected for Monday or Tuesday?

  27. THE WAAAAAAAAMBULANCE Says:

    If the retard that’s spamming Bluehost had actually researched them, he wouldn’t have moved there. Then again, all spammers are scumbags, so anyone that follows their advice deserves what they get.

    I’m also still amazed at the number of people that can’t tell the difference between the comments area of a blog and the support section of the control panel.

  28. d Says:

    grrr :( i hate downtime it makes me wanna go on a rampage

  29. adam Says:

    i personally love dreamhost. in the 10 years that i’ve been playing with websites and such i’ve found them to be the best host. BUT… you know what would be really cool? i think it would rock if dreamhost could notify us of these outages by sending us an email! i tend to only check this “blog” when i’ve got a problem, not before.

    the lack of a notification email is right in line with continental airlines failing to notify me (by any method) that they canceled one of my flights 24 hours in advance! (it happened in mid february of this year.)

    so… c’mon all you folks in any sort of service industry - step up and be proactive. i didn’t give you my email address for nothing.

  30. Matt Van Dusen Says:

    @d: This is not downtime for your site.

    @adam: You can actually use software such as ReBlog or Planet on your server to read not only the DH Status Feed, but any feed you want! If you don’t feel like installing the software on your server, you can use one of the many RSS-to-email providors online (just search Google to find one that suits you); most are even free.

  31. Ori Says:

    Can’t open our zangief domain remotely using Dreamweaver - says FTP connection can’t be made. Is there an open problem ticket?

  32. Mousee Says:

    @chan0chan - you’re right. It sounds like Bluehost has full day outages more frequently than most other hosts.
    (reference: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/70611 )
    Also, I feel sorry for your clients. Shared hosting is no place to run a business that depends on the host’s uptime.
    Get real, get a clue, and stop fucking over your clients. Good-bye!

    @adam - this webstatus page was designed to announce outages, especially in the case that one of the main DreamHost services went out (like in the instance of the long power outage last month), in which case you wouldn’t even be ABLE to receive an announcement email because DH’s mailservers would be down too!
    If you can’t set something up to check on outages occasionally, of which Matt has given you a few examples, then maybe you should consider moving on to another host that provides such services? I’m unaware of any personally, in the shared hosting business that is, but there may be some host out there that does. But personally I haven’t found it all too difficult myself, despite never having had any need for it in the past, to setup an RSS feed within FireFox.
    I use the ‘Sage’ plug-in in case you’re interested. ;)

  33. yao Says:

    Then, when it’s going to be the manteinance, monday or tuesday?

  34. Nick Says:

    Can you people not read?

    “Monday, March 27 2007 at 22:00:00 PDT”

    ie, Monday at 10pm (Pacific time zone) or Tuesday at 1am (Eastern time zone)

  35. Marcello Says:

    @Nick Please read previous comments and check your calendar to verify wether March 27 is Monday or not.

  36. THE WAAAAAAAAMBULANCE Says:

    Give it up chan0chan — you’re nothing more than a spamming dirtbag that trying to push a host that’s worse than the one you just left. Idiot.

  37. michael Says:

    chan0chan, what is your domain name?

  38. michael Says:

    Just a note, these database maintenance windows have all been to upgrade the hardware of some of our many internal databases. There are lots of things in the world to get mad about, but us upgrading our db servers really isn’t one of them.

  39. Eric N. Says:

    Well, I’d rather you guys do this right now, rather than during the week.

    Please keep us posted. I hope my site comes back to life soon.

    EN

  40. Matt Van Dusen Says:

    I would assume this outage would actually be Monday the 26th, considering all the other central database upgrades have been on Monday nights.

    @Eric N.: Your blog of pet pictures is back online. Perhaps you confused the words “blog” and “support”. Easy to do, from what we can perceive about your grasp of the English language from said blog.

    @michael: Very true, I only get upset when everything dies for no particular reason. No other host that I know of would have fixed my .htaccess for me, back when I pulled a stupid in there with a 301 redirect. Damn infinite loops…

  41. Gene Steinberg Says:

    Matt: I’ve made a couple of stupid mistakes that got me offline.

    But here’s a piece of advice for WordPress users who have installed the WP-Cache plug-in. Sometimes the cache becomes corrupted, and your site is replaced with an “Internal Server Error.” Best thing to do is not to go into your WP Dashboard Options to fix this, but to go directly to the Cache folder, in your wp-content folder, and manually delete all the cache files inside. You’d be surprised how often that step fixes things.

    As a precaution, I’ve started doing that at least once a week, and more often if the site on which I run WordPress, http://www.macnightowl.com, is particularly busy (as it is more and more these days, thank heavens!).

    Now there is a WP-Cache 2.1.1 update that might possibly improve on such matters.

    Peace,
    Gene

  42. Angry Dog Says:

    Liberal application of a sledgehammer can also do wonders for these downtime issues. Believe me, once you’ve smashed your hard drive into a thousand little pieces, terrorized the neighbor’s cat with your mouse, dropped your old CRT monitor off an overpass just to watch it explode ..well, lets just say a bit of downtime will cease to be a concern for you. Try it - if nothing else, it’s bound to be therapeutic.

  43. Tsubasa Says:

    You stated you would be doing maintenence on Monday march 27th 2007.

    March 27th is a Tuesday.

  44. Mack Says:

    What a great company. Probably the only one that published important information in advance, just so customers can bitch/whine/moan/groan before anything actually happens.

    Crap people, they are working on stuff and giving advance notice of it. WTF do you want?

  45. Gene Steinberg Says:

    Some people are never satisfied, Mack. If DreamHost reports a problem, they blame them for having the problem. If they don’t report, they get blamed anyway.

    At least they try to let us know. Lots of other hosts hide such information in locations not easily found.

    Peace,
    Gene

  46. Chris Says:

    now my site is down imageturf.com

  47. Tim Says:

    The PANEL is down right now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Arg, I’m trying to setup a client who just purchased an account this morning.

  48. Gene Steinberg Says:

    For several minutes, it appears DreamHost’s databases went down for one reason or another — although the ones I use seem OK now.

    Peace,
    Gene

  49. Duron Says:

    Well in my timezone it’s lunchtime. I hope that the announcement will be updated so we stay informed.

    Peace,
    Duron

  50. Eliade Says:

    I can’t connect to webpanel at all
    it always timeout :(

  51. Zoraki Koca Says:

    be updated so we stay informed.

    Dane

  52. Bahamut Says:

    Great job done! Dreamhost is the best hosting you can find!

  53. kurtlar vadisi pusu 30.bölüm Says:

    thanks a lot…s

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