Major DNS DOS attack
Posted (April 8th, 2007 at 1:29 am PST) by micahWe are currently experiencing intermittent DNS outages on all of our nameservers, this is causing problems with sites and email functioning properly.
We think it might be the DNS load balancers we’ve recently installed but haven’t determined that for sure yet. More information will be posted as we have it.
Our apologies for the inconvenience this causes.
UPDATE (2007-04-08 03:20 PDT): It appears we are the victims of an Easter DOS attack against our nameservers, we have an admin at the datacenter and our network expert onhand to deal with it. Hopefully things will be back to normal shortly.
UPDATE (2007-04-08 04:54 PDT): We seem to have isolated and resolved the DoS attack for the moment. All of our DNS servers have been resolving domains correctly and without pause for the past 20 minutes now so it appears that this nasty episode is behind us. We’ll be mopping up and fixing servers that might’ve crashed or otherwise gone wonky in the interim. Again, our sincerest apologies for all the downtime.
Happy DreamHost Does-Not-Sleep Team!
329 Responses to “Major DNS DOS attack”
YAY FINALLY!
Stop being happy - and just fix the problem.
“causing possible site and email downtime”
Well it’s not just possible. They really are down !!!
Severity: Medium ???
I’d be more prone to say Severity … HIGH !!!!! .. all my sites are currently down …
What gets a severity High … ? ( don’t get me wrong as well I love my service from Dreamhost … )
Well, at least it’s in the dead of night.
We think it might be the DNS load balancers we’ve recently installed
Infant mortality, or configuration loop on update?
how can this issue be “medium severity” when all (my) sites are down for more than an hour already..? DH is having troubles a little too often lately, do I have to consider switching?
Yes! Actually, i work for a webhosting company, so i know Sites and MAIL are the most important products that a webhosting company offers, so… Severity = MEDIUM ? i don’t think so…
P.S. Yes I love dreamhost too.
my sites on melrose are down too.
hope you guys are able to fix this soon.
Honestly.
All my sites are down too and it’s Sunday afternoon here :-(…
Guys, hope you get it back up asap….great service otherwise…
It would also be great if you could enlighten us on the actual cause
of the problem and how you ‘actually’ fix it so we can learn from it
as it’ll be a valuable lesson, atleast for me being IT consultant myself..
Severity medium? Sites are unreachable and that’s a medium? What’s a high? when the one-click installer for my super-groovy hit counter isn’t working?
Another day. Another problem. More downtime.
Site and Email is down here as well … Please fix ASAP! Happy Easter and God Bless to everyone!
yes all my websites in dreamhost are down also … please fix it asap as every hour makes me lose $$$$ as my customers buy worldwide .. !!
Its in peak time for me (Australia). $10 for the first year - its acceptable. But now I run a business from my website, and for what it costs its totally not worth the constant downtime and slowness. Tomorrow…I change to another host.
This bullshit is weekly now… How about we meet here every week and play fucking D&D while our sites are down? Dibs on DM.
“Well, at least it’s in the dead of night.” [Ravan]
here it’s 17:41 already….
north america is really nombrillistic… no offense…
its like all those planned down times “in the middle of the night” in the middle of my afternoon… the peak times for my site…
i cant receive and send email either and all my sites are down.
i hope you can fix it soon. good luck! and may god bless you!
Wow, dreamhost is the worst hosting I’ve ever had.
When I joined last month I thought it was the best; I think I’ll switch as soon as possible.
What does it take for severity to be considered HIGH? A terrorist attack??
My sites on razzle are down and I really need to be working on them. It may be the dead of night in some places, but in others it definitely isn’t. The web never sleeps.
If sites were merely “unreachable”, as in DNS resolving, but pages not loading, that would be “medium”.
DNS not resolving is definitely severe. Very severe. If nameservers are not on at least two separate networks, it’s not set up right….
You know, it’s probably not a good idea to hide Easter Eggs anywhere near the load balancers. Might want to include that in the Happy Dreamhost procedure manuals for anyone new. Just sayin’.
THIS IS INSANE!@!!!!!!!!@!@!@!@!@@ NOT ONLY YOU DRAG THE WEBSITES THAT YOU HOST DOWN BUT NOW ALL MAIL THAT I OUTSOURCED BC YOU GUYS SUCK IS UNREACHABLE ALSO!!!!!!!!
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU!!!!!!
My sites on Grant are unreachable too. Notice this was only posted 17 minutes ago though. Hoping they haven’t been down too long & will be back up soon!
If I try to reach my website directly by IP address, it shows an http_server error. This doesn’t seem just a DNS problem to me.
I love the f***ing personal touch that you can’t find anywhere else but send ALL of your techs and the managment to “redundancy for dummies” class TONIGHT!@!!!!!
“Well, at least it’s in the dead of night.”
Not for those of us in Europe, Ravan. Here it’s almost 11am and I had scheduled this morning to work on my site.
@Davide - most servers are running numerous domains. If you connect by IP address, the server won’t know which site to load, which I’d expect to generate some kind of error.
Ah well, I wondered where my site had gone to! Thank God for Dreamhoststatus.com… or someone within the company… =/
Davide; I think the reason that you can\’t reach them by IP is cos there are lots of sites per IP so it doesn\’t know which one you want unless you have the domain name in the request.
I too wish this counted as High severity, but I\’m not going to engage Caps lock over it!
DREAMHOST SHOULD BE RESPONDING TO THIS, not sitting back and merely reading comments - DH owe it to their loyal customers (I’ve been with them for 10 years) to give a response and explain…
1. Why this is a ‘Medium severity’
2. When they aim for a resolution
3. Why downtime is most common that uptime with DH recently
4. When they will employ a professional outsourced datacenter management team??
Plz be quick , plz work hard. We all support you.
Just let our children be online again soon.
Thank you.
ALL MY SITES ARE DOWN. I really cannot afford all this downtime. They have been down for over an hour in the peak time of the week, and when I check the status in the dreamhost panel it says they are all up and running when it is obvious they are not. May have to consider changing host 
so, uh, the secondary DNS… that’s ALSO down? in fact, don’t we have 3 different DNS servers with DreamHost… isn’t that supposed to provide redundancy??? Come on my granny could plan your network better…
Yeah not dead of the night middle of the day in Europe, love dreamhost but I cant make money if people cant get on my sites and this is the 3rd time an 30 days or so!!!!!!!! begining to get a little concerened guys, already had to get a back up hosting service, now seriously considering using it as my main hosting account!!!!!!
jon:
this is a major outage that affects all services regardles if they are hosted with DH or not. I moved all my critical mail to rackspace bc the clowns at DH can’t get their act together. But since they move their http://www. ip’s all the time i was forced to leave the dns hosting here.
well i am moving them as we speak.
DH is great for off site backup, that’s about it
@Les and Jon - You’re right.
This is a severe problem, the only way I can access even this site is by manually entering the IP (which I had to dig up in support requests) into my hosts file. My sites are down, even after I’ve added its IP into my hosts file (presumably because of the DNS timeouts).
Please fix this ASAP it’s not late night everywhere. This is the worst problem dreamhost have had since I’ve been here and you’ve had quite a few.
Hate to jump on the bandwagon…but this does seem to happen a little too often lately. It’s not only bad for your customers and their sites, it’s bad for my name as I have sent many a customer your way……
I can understand a yearly outage…but this is too much.
Please get this taken care of.
peace,
Yeah, I started using montastic website monitor. It sends me an email when my site goes down. I’ve gotten far too many emails. I like DH but this downtime is making me feel like Ryan C.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’m just using DH to develop between work and home and then I actually run my web apps on my company’s intranet so it’ll actually be up when I need it. Downtime and business don’t mix.
“Not for those of us in Europe, Ravan. Here it’s almost 11am and I had scheduled this morning to work on my site.”
Same here. On a holiday weekend, too. Massive pain in the neck…
Medium severity? As far as I can see, everything hosted on Dreamhost is down except this site and the http://www.dreamhost.com main site. All the others, including discussion board, wiki, control panel, are ALL DOWN.
Fix it quickly plz!!! It’s late night in North America but peak time in Asia!!! Thank you!!!
I also experienced FTP login error just now. 20 minutes ago it was okay.
Can’t establish connection –> @ Sun Apr 08 17:06:41 2007 (11004-100)
The requested name is valid and was found in the database, but it does not have the correct associated data being resolved for.
Please solve or explain as I’ve a work to be uploaded.
If you still want to check your site is there, do this, 
from shell account:
telnet x.x.x.x 80
Trying x.x.x.x…
Connected to x.x.x.x.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
GET / HTTP/1.1
host: http://www.yourdomain.com
(Press return twice here)
then you should be able to see the output..
This would just be a quick check.. it worked for my site…
“well i am moving them as we speak.”
Already moved. Will restore my site on the new hosting tonight and point the domain towards it tomorrow.
Cya Dreamhost
As all the sites are down because of this DNA problem, I do not agree that the severity is considered medium only. While dreamhost is providing so many bandwidth and spaces to users, why don’t you use another extra space to provide a backup page when the main one is down ?! Such that our sites can run continuously without a long down time to wait for your fix.
I have my sites on the “Clamato” server and it seems to have slow loading at times, but not completely shut down yet. *knocks on wood and glass table and….* heh!
i know a few other customers who don’t even have their sites working. I hope it gets fixed soon. I’ve loved the service so far. So here’s me crossing my fingers.
Damn. Hate to say it but mine was up a few minutes ago, but now it’s joined a site I manage (www.dslrusers.com) and is in deadsville. Other sites I manage at Dreamhost are down too and I was just gonna start working on a new one too. Bugger.
What if we weren’t to use DNS with Dreamhost? Instead use http://www.zoneedit.com/ for example? Dreamhost’s problems are *generally* DNS related, so if we weren’t using theirs, perhaps problem solved?
Still waiting for DH to respond to our comments? Don’t pretend you’re not reading them….
Pacer is also down.
Please stop being happy and reconsider it to high severity, websites are down :S
How many sites are affected? Mine was broken down.
melrose is down……..please say it will be fixed in an hour or two. or does DNS mean the whole thing has to propogate……time to back up and move…..???
As other people have said, I feel very insulted that all my sites and mail being down is considered medium.
Seriously? Any other time I wouldn’t care quite so much, but I HAVE to get a website up by tonight or I risk a very important university grade.
Please get things up and running as soon as possible.
why don’ t you back everything up to wherever this status site is? i’d pay double a month for that!
Hmm, I just got hosting here… Was a good deal, so I can not complain… but I hope this is not a common thing. Other than this issue, I really like the service. But please, get us back online! I really want to get some work done.
Been with DreamHost for a year, on the whole they are VERY GOOD. However, today is a very bad day. Even ‘http://www.dreamhost.com/’ fails to respond. Agree with others, severity of the problem is certainly NOT medium.
Hi!
Is this where I say ‘my site is down, too’? ‘Cause I’m feeling left out.
In sunny Trondheim it’s a pretty Sunday afternoon while the poor DH guys in California are troubleshooting in the middle of the night. Time to go skiing!!
Let me know when it’s time to hit the ‘Panic’ button and run around like a chicken with its head chopped off.
All of my sites down, can’t get email. I’d say this would be a high severe situation. Would appreciate a quick fix. We’ll be looking elsewhere if this kind of thing keeps happening.
“Let me know when it’s time to hit the ‘Panic’ button and run around like a chicken with its head chopped off.”
I already did. As the work has to be uploaded within hours.
Ok, is late, i have to sleep, i hope in a few MINUTES my site get back!
Why the hell the 3 NS servers are down at the same time? who planned your net? f*cking BOFH!
UGH.. This is happening WAY too much.. I have 12 sites with dreamhost. Been with them for years but their service CONTINUES to get worse with each year.. I want my email! I’m conducting bussiness (yes, at this late hour).. I can’t get anything done and whoever at dreamhost thinks this is a MEDIUM problem obviously doesn’t depend on his site for an income.. I wish it wasn’t such a hassle to swich hosting companies.. UGH..
if you want to enter their site and cp while their dns is down, put this in /etc/hosts.
66.33.201.141 http://www.dreamhost.com
66.33.201.141 dreamhost.com
66.201.54.111 http://www.dreamhoststatus.com
66.201.54.111 dreamhoststatus.com
66.33.201.130 panel.dreamhost.com
Ok, is late, i have to sleep, i hope in a few HAPPY MINUTES my site get back!
Why the hell the 3 NS servers are down at the same time? who planned your net? f*cking BOFH!
OH! and, we, your HAPPY Costumers, demanded a Happy explanation!
kind regards…
Not again?! This is about the 5th or 6th time in the last few months that my sites are down (and my *email* - which is much more important to me). I’m seriously considering changing hosts. Get it together guys.
Severity High now, updated message, seems a denial of service attack
Long time customer. Almost at the breaking point. My site has been down 2 out of the last 3 days. I could do a better job with my cable modem at home.
well its high now…
cant wait till it comes back up gotta get to work…
I’ve been with you for less than a month and my sites have suffered 3 complete outages to date. And all of them lasted for hours.
It really sucks. You know?
I won’t be renewing with you. Thank god I used that coupon code and I’m not paying the full price…
Actually if the whiners spent the time to actually *think* about the issue rather than mindless complaininig, a dDoS seemed a high likely cause, and the update just confirms that.
Personally I’m sticking with DH.
Down again. I understand that no host, especially with cheapo shared hosting, is going to be up all the time. But a complete collapse of DNS… oh dear. And it’s now late morning here in the sunny UK.
I’m not really interested in the Zettabytes of bandwidth I’m supposedly allocated (since I don’t believe it’s really available anyway) but I am interested in my websites actually being available for viewing on the Interwebs. Please fix this. It’s making the little baby Jesus cry.
Nasty DOS attack - at least they now know that the cause is external, and can attempt to combat it. Distributed DNS servers aren’t going to help in this case, I would say…
why me…
whenever i try to update things or make some changes on websites the hosting wether goes down or they bloody migrate data centers or do backups etc.. and its not just with dreamhost.. I guess its just my luck
[quote]seems a denial of service attack[/quote]
Always a WAYY too easy excuse, don’t believe that for a second…why is their network not protected against such attacks!?!?
My apologies for the early “medium” classification. There was no remote indication of a DDOS, only upon checking the load balancers directly (which were trying, unsuccesfully, to block the attack themselves) was I able to better assess the situation.
It is obviously a much more serious issue than I originally indicated. Rest assured we’re doing everything we can to pinpoint and nullify the attackers.
Ian: “It’s making the little baby Jesus cry.”
LMAO!!!!
And how seasonally appropriate!
I’m from Taiwan. I’ve been losing my sites one by one and now none of them can be accessed. I can’t even get here without a proxy agent. My DH panel and SSH still work, while nothing else does. I tried to ping my domains and the messages are all “unknow host xxxx.com”. What’s going on?
This is 1 of the 2 times i’ve had downtime with dreamhost. And if you read the update, it’s a DoS attack, it’s not their fault, someone is attacking the server. This can happen to any hosting service mind you.
“Actually if the whiners spent the time to actually *think* about the issue rather than mindless complaininig, a dDoS seemed a high likely cause, and the update just confirms that.”
Yay, everything’s forgiven! Poor old Dreamhost.
Sorry, downtime is still downtime.
Thats one hell of a dos attack to take down 3 servers on a network your size ?
I thought NS2.dreamhost.com should be off-net? Why is it impacted also? Don’t tell me they are all at the same datacentre?
[quote]whiners[/quote]
Whiners? Complaining about a service that we’re paying for is unavailable on a major scale? Go find yourself a toilet and flush your head down it, then rethink your description of us trying to get a service…that no doubt you’re also hosting with…back online.
I still don’t believe a DoS attack, how could that possible take down multiple name servers, particularly if they’re setup professionally and on separate networks!?
-> s better hosting company
*Searching for a better hosting company*
*10101010101…*
*Windows Vista Founded 1 result*
-> show
*Result 1: GoDaddy*
*No more results founded*
-> WTF?
*”WTF%” isn’t recognisable like any intern or extern Windows Vista command.
*FATAL ERROR: The operation was completed successfully.
Is there any way to find out what IP my site is on so I can put it in my hosts file?
> I thought NS2.dreamhost.com should be off-net? Why is it impacted also? Don’t tell me they are all at the same datacentre?
Nope, It’s in a different data center, but it’s being targeted as well.
I was running traceroutes to all three servers earlier, and seeing about 90% packet loss. Somebody is using a pretty big botnet
ping http://www.mysite.com - hopefully you’re PC has cached the dns entry, so will give you an IP, it obviously won’t get a reply though,but should state the IP before it tries.
Zitun, if you give me your domain name(s) I can give you the IP address(es)
Who cares if the severity is high or not. The thing is they are doing what they can to fix it. Stop complaining people.
Er doh, you had it as your site for your name’s URL. your IP is:
208.113.160.174 zitunlog.net
Yea, my sites started having issues last night and now they are completely down. It’s all coinciding with the start of my new community for Day of Defeat and WoW. Great combination I know. 
Hope it’s resolved soon, I was seeing great numbers for traffic and users!
I didn’t realize it was a DoS attack. I guess you can’t really blame DH for this, blame whatever asshole is doing the attack.
SHeeh, only been a customer for what, 3 or 4 days … makes me wonder if we didn’t wander into the wrong service if you’re such a target.
Could someone kindly tell me the IP for http://www.medsteadmassive.co.uk? Thanks
is there any way you can give us a time scale or least keep us informed of where you are at with the issue?
@Sandon: I needn’t my site’s IP, it was Jon who asked about it.
208.113.153.135 http://www.medsteadmassive.co.uk
208.113.153.135 medsteadmassive.co.uk
yah, all of my sites are down as well. here’s to a speedy recovery, and many sleepy clickers.
@Zitun, oh yeah whups, It is 4AM here so I am a bit out of it, d’oh.
This is just becoming a joke, dreamhost is down more than up, I know it’s cheap but if it’s down every month what use is it?
Can’t say oficially but things are looking up, ns1 isn’t getting as much packetloss now and it has been 80+ms for the few blips it has been working but for a while was responding at normal latency to my home DSL 9ms ( and getting much less packetloss now)
Lol, dreamhost has trouble and suddenly everyone’s a DR expert 
dear dreamhost people, if you can afford it, everyone’s better off without these wankers.
OTOH, the abuse of “Happy ” is getting on my nerves
This doesn’t happen too often, and it is a large scale DOS attack.
While annoying, its understandable. An hour and a half so far, it shouldn’t take much longer I hope.
How can you stop DOS attacks anyway?
@Sandon, live in Spain is beatiful, here is 1PM
PD: My first comment was only ironizing. I love Vista&Dreamhost
Be patient guys.. This is internet.. Of course there’ll be breakdown.. It’s human-made not god-made..
I’m sure they’re doing their best..
May it be easy..
oh, ick.
I just got a domain on here four days ago. Got my work on the site done yesterday. Woke up to find everything DoS’ed xD
I hate these idiots >
yay, I got a response from ns1 for the first time in 3 hours, packetloss is still decreasing so it is definitely looking up.
Well I’m glad this notice got put up, I was getting really annoyed at the downtime, especially becuase it was so random and so sudden, but then I saw that numerous other sites hosted here were down too, and even dreamhost.com is down, so I guess it was ok. I hope the happy dreamhost does-not-sleep team gets it fixed in time to get some sleep before easter, thanks for all the hard work you guys put in for us, I, at least, appreciate it.
It’s not the “dead of the night” here either! It’s the middle of the day! Happy Easter my arse!
…and I hate forgetting about less than…
Guess this isn’t something you can totally proof against, and thanks for getting on to it so quick.
Good luck!
Thanks for the update. My site is unreachable as well
Keep up the good work guys!!!
For what you charge, i can take downtime — especially when its not your fault.
I love dreamhost!!
DoS? Fun.
Ok, awful that you should be attacked. But why is it that these outages always appear midday (European time) on weekends and holidays when a lot of people finally have time to work on their site.
Arrgh! Gosh I wish I could go to Russia or wherever these idiots come from and give them a piece of my mind!! Did they try to extort you and you wouldn’t pay up, or what happened?
Cordelia@ http://www.vikingprincess.net (Currently DOWN!!)
What makes you think that they read these comments at all? I wouldn’t.
@Ash Hall Says:
April 8th, 2007 at 1:57 am
DREAMHOST SHOULD BE RESPONDING TO THIS, not sitting back and merely reading comments - DH owe it to their loyal customers (I’ve been with them for 10 years) to give a response and explain…
1. Why this is a ‘Medium severity’
2. When they aim for a resolution
3. Why downtime is most common that uptime with DH recently
4. When they will employ a professional outsourced datacenter management team??
Crap, crap, crappity crap. WHY does this stuff ALWAYS end up happening at the worst possible times for me? >_
Dreamhost is cheap, but it costs too much to worry about my websites being down.
Time to switch webhosting companies
Yay, we’re back 
ns1.dreamhost.com:
round-trip min/avg/max = 179.8/183.2/200.4 ms
0% packet loss with me.
ns2 and ns3 are unresolvable, though…
maybe i need another rest. guys, please fix this now.
i’m back up again - thanx DH
Good luck and sorry that there are such boring people out there. From sunny daytime (and patient) UK.
Damn. Smiley lost me the rest of my comment!
What I said was– six-minute response and fixing time for an individual downtime is great, but this? Not so much.
Why is the network vulnerable to these wankers? And why, oh why, is it always with the worst possible timing for me? I was trying to upload! X_X
Purchased Mediatemple a couple of days ago. Good riddance DH.
You lot as always the same, full of excuses, and full of shit. My online businesses are crumbling thanks to you. Show some professionalism for a change, instead of designing yet another dumb arse “funny” photo for your livin-it-up home page. How about actually trying to run a business, instead of a joke shop.
Hurry Please, All My Sites Are Down
You lot are always the same, full of excuses, and full of shit. My online businesses are crumbling thanks to you. Show some professionalism for a change, instead of designing yet another dumb arse “funny” photo for your livin-it-up home page. How about actually trying to run a business, instead of a joke shop.
Enjoy your Easter Sunday for a sunny daytime UK, hope email comes online soon!
I’d just like to remind everyone its hardly DH’s fault for being attacked. If you blame them for this, then go stick your head in a hole.
Yes that is my best insult.
Yes, shut up and get on with something else why dreamhost do their best.
This doesn’t affect the databases right? The php databases? If Iose any shit from this…I swear. If daily backups are scheduled on the FTP then things can at least go back up right when the DNS is fixed?
I’ve been a long time customer too, and I’m really happy with the service! People don’t know how much work it is to actually keep things running smoothly. To all those people who are complaining; if you don’t like DH then go somewhere else! Go and find another host that gives you the same service with the same price-tag.
I wish the DH team a very happy Easter! (with lots of sleep afterwards…)
I seem to be back up… But it is very SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW !
I think the downtime was only about an hour, so well done to have fixed it that fast.
Hope you are working on redundancy and fall-back.
Cordelia@ http://www.vikingprincess.net (
Another major system problem………….:(:(:(
My finger is on the hunt for a new host methinks. C’mon Dreamhost, sort your selves out ASAP!!
Talking of which, I think its been resolved…
Yep, be patient, I hope that this will be solved as soon as possible. Un saludo desde Hellín, España.
[quote]Shut your whining. Dreamhost’s services are great, stop getting your knickers in a twist over a little bit of downtime. [/quote]
On the contrary, you shut up - if it weren’t for our whining, who’s to say this problem would have even been resolved. The ’status’ of this issue was initially ‘Medium’, until we started *whining*.
Go do some more Petshopgirl Reviews….
Thanks for the work.But My site is unreachable as well .
Good luck!
Well, having moved all my sites over to Dreamhost about 2 weeks ago, i have very quickly learned that you get what you pay for in this life. My sites are now the slowest on the net and thats if they connect at all frist time round, this is the second time in two weeks they have been down completely for hours at a time.
I am very disappointed but have no real complaints seeing as it has cost me so little moneywise, but i am going to change webhosts today and it may cost me a lot more but i need reassurance that all my sites are gonna work properly.
Its true what they say, you pay peanuts - you get monkeys.
If scheduled FTP backups are done daily, there is no chance of data loss right? RIGHT? DNS does not affect the sctual data right? Dreamhost is not making me feel very good about their security right now.
Well if there’s one thing that DreamHost does very reliably - it’s going down on a weekly basis. For the last YEAR, it’s everything from email blacking out, sites not being found, the web panel not coming up or even functioning sometimes, FTP not recognizing logins, etc etc etc etc etc etc.
Glad we’re getting what we pay for here.
@Mitch
Just FYI… I’ve been with DH for almost 2 years now, but 5 months ago I got an account at MT and moved my personal site over there and was planning on moving everything else over after a bit…
I’ve since canceled my MT account and moved everything back to DH. The downtimes at DH suck, but there’s two things I know:
1) My support requests WILL get answered within a day or so…
2) ALL of my email will come into my box (spam or not).
With MT, neither of those were true…
Since the big breakdown last time, I have moved my DNS services elsewhere. I don’t get affected by things like this. But my hosting stays with Dreamhost, they’re good.
@Casey There are daily backups but this is only effecting DNS resolution so it shouldn’t effect any of your databases once the name servers are responding again and your site is resolving again.
It appears sites are starting to become reachable again. I haven’t noticed any slowness as Cordelia describes but it does appear that the initial connection and response takes a tad longer than usual.
Be patient. You get what ur paying for. Don’t expect for 99.99% of the uptime for $7@2TB of b/w. If you want 99.99% then change ur provider. May be you need to pay like $30??
FTP, SFTP, SSH, Telnet: All work flawlessly right now. Feel free to back up your own shit.
i dont know whats more annoying, these crazy christians that attacked the servers or these cry babies yappin about their “emails” and their websites. Give DH a break.
still down … 
half o my sites r not working (on Kitkat)
@cal -> Amen
Can’t say that I know of a any web host that gives their customers a podium to bitch and moan. Dreamhost has my respect,
Just want to add my words of support to the guys who are working away trying to fix things. We can’t expect 100% up-time with the price we pay (particularly with all the things we get with the package). I’ve been with other hosts who haven’t even kept a status blog. At least we’re kept up-to-date. I survived the big DoS attacks on DALnet a few years ago - I can cope if my site is down for a few days.
And if you’re complaining because you need your site for a business or other then you really really shouldn’t be on a shared host.
Thanks to the guys who are working their butts off in the middle of their night to solve the problem.
The whining.
P.S. It’s the Mormon Extremists.
@cal Says:
April 8th, 2007 at 3:31 am
i dont know whats more annoying, these crazy christians that attacked the servers or these cry babies yappin about their “emails” and their websites. Give DH a break.
I’ve tried to use ping to find my blog’s ip, and am having no luck. Is there anyone still reading who can find the ip for shinyhappyjennifer.com? Thanks.
Sorry Dreamhost, this is absolutely unacceptable . I’ve waited you out for quite some time now but I’m sick of it. Learn to manage your servers and I’ll come back. Until then, sayanora.
Please assign separate ip address for dreamhoststatus website.
This way it will be possible to see status page even when dns server is down.
thanks.
Good luck finding better hosts, this is probably my 10th hoster.. Best of them all!
I’ve tried to ping to find my site’s IP with no luck. Is there someone still on here who can find the IP for shinyhappyjennifer.com? Thanks so much!
I feel sorry for the DH guys. They have worked so hard over the years to build loyal customer base. I “was” one of them and they have been great but over the last one year or so, life seems to be very tough for them. I am sure alot of the boys are gals are looking for alternatives now. I personally gave them a good deal of benefit of the doubt but its over for me. I am outta here. Good luck to everyone.
PS…my website is ok but my mail is down and that means DH is choking with their great love and Happy customers smiley faces. Thanks for everything since 2002 or probably 2003. Its been great. Time to move on.
Si algun castellano me lee: Madre del amor hermoso, como se pican estos anglais, no pasan ni una xD
@Rachel
how about registerfly ?
XD
Nesa, sure ? ns1 unreachable from Europe…
be patient!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What are you on about Christians attacking dreamhost? That’s ridiculous!
It’s either a disgruntled customer or ex-employee, or a blackmailer.
Cordelia @ http://www.vikingprincess.net NOW UP!
shinyhappyjennifer.com = 208.113.192.30
Courtesy of http://whois.domaintools.com/shinyhappyjennifer.com
—
Jennifer Says:
April 8th, 2007 at 3:36 am
I’ve tried to ping to find my site’s IP with no luck. Is there someone still on here who can find the IP for shinyhappyjennifer.com? Thanks so much!
We switched to you folks because our previous host had so many outages. Now we’ve had more outages with you in a year than we had with them in five! We realize there are no guarantees in life or on the internet but, holy smokes, this is damned inconvenient.
One of my domains have just started working. Nice.
All of my sites are down. Please fixy.
dreamhost.com is down too…
Yep, one of my sites (and it’s email) is still unreachable, but one of my other ones is fine now.
At least I know it’s not a problem my end.
Strange…
hmm.. seems like Touareg is down to.
DOS attacks are real lame… get a life
DH you guys have a great service and i hope it’s back real soon.
Happy holliday
2 Nick
I think it’s still down but down but some isps have a higher ttl on their dns servers so it may be still up for some people.
nslookup dreamhost.com
;; reply from unexpected source: 70.84.160.11#53, expected 70.84.161.11#53
;; Warning: ID mismatch: expected ID 7623, got 10885
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
(from a server @ Theplanet TX)
oh come on people. major DOS attack can hit any host at any time. the guys are there and dealing with it which is much more than some hosts do especially on what is a major holiday weekend for at least two major religions. i know some of you have businesses, but as someone who works IT in e-commerce, this can hit any host and there’s nothing to do but get the IT guys there and some time to get it stopped.
chill out … at least the guys here answer support tickets and actually work at fixing issues. my first host (very reputable when I first signed on with them) stopped answering any support tix and stopped fixing most problems in any kind of timely matter. if your site was down, it would be a minimum of a day to two days before they got to it. and they never explained why stuff had gone down.
chill out. geez.
Im totally down :-( all my sites
This is getting REALLY old.
“What are you on about Christians attacking dreamhost? That’s ridiculous!
It’s either a disgruntled customer or ex-employee, or a blackmailer. ”
Its says DoS not DDoS….
My site is reachable again, keep up the good work, guys at DH!
Page generation (phpbb forum) takes from 5 to 20 seconds though, so I hope You’ll solve that as well. Yesterday it was 1/100 of above intervals.
My sites are all dead in the water. Just when I had a deadline. That happens in two hours time… *sigh*
final straw…i’m moving on my May renewal
i was always happy with the service, especially customer help etc, but how many times have the servers been down in the last few months…too many to count.
thanks and bye
Y’all think your constant refreshing is helping? That has the same mechanics as a DoS.
My sites seem to be back up
Yay! My site is back up! Thanks!!!!
ack! and just now I’ve switched BACK my DNS service to ns*.dreamhost.com from zoneedit, since dreamhost finally have DNS servers in separate datacenters (not to mention many unannounced IP address changes which made for continuous manual updates on zoneedit).
all name servers are responding to pings and queries now, this might be resolved.
my site is now up
I’m bringing DNS managing back to Namecheap
thankyou. xxxx
morgan Says:
here it’s 17:41 already….
north america is really nombrillistic… no offense…
congratulations on misspelling a big word. did you forget about south america being in the western hemisphere, also?
NOT ONE OF YOU MOANING BASTARDS IS GOING TO LEAVE DREAMHOST — SO GIVE THEM A BREAK!!!!
NONE OF YOU WILL EVER FIND THE AMOUNT OF BANDWIDTH AND STORAGE YOU GET WITH DH.
YOU WILL TAKE THE LITTLE DOWNTIME EACH MONTH, BECAUSE YOU KNOW THAT DH OFFERS THE MOST FOR THE MONEY — IF YOU COULD REALLY JUST SWITCH HOSTS, YOU WOULD HAVE DONE IT ALREADY!!! SO SHUT THE FUCK UP.
THIS ISNT EVEN DH FAULT — ITS AN ATTACK.
AND YOU IDIOTS ABOUT LOSING MONEY — YOUR LOSING $10 AT MOST, WITH YOUR SHITTY ADSENSE ACCOUNT. IF YOU WERE A REAL BUSSINESS, AND MAKING BIG BUCKS YOU WOULD HAVE YOUR OWN DEDICATED HOST.
FOR WHAT YOU GIMPS PAY — YOU GET AN AMAZING SERVICE!! SO STOP YOUR STUPID THREATS, AND WAIT FOR THE PROBLEM TO BE FIXED.
Echoing Bob’s comment, I seem to be back up.
While overall, I’m satisfied with the service provided by DreamHost, even enthusiastic considering the cost, these two most recent outages have made me start to explore other options.
It turns out that there is a local Ann Arbor (where I live) web-hosting company with headquarter offices about a ten-minute walk from my house. Cost is a bit more and bandwidth/storage is way way less than DreamHost. But I think I’ll give them a try and see how it works out. I like the idea of being able to knock on their door and say face-to-face, “Dude, my website is down AGAIN?? WTF?”
Well, I’m glad this happens over easter and not during a normal week.
Saves me a bunch of complaints
I am extremely disappointed with dream host, it has been nearly 3 months since I signed up for dream host services and this is the second time they have lost control over things and my sites are down for hours.
IT WORKS AGAIN !!
AS MUCH AS I COUNTED, THE SERVER (at least mine “rexford”) was down for about 2 hours.
Thanks for fixing !
cesar
All of our sites are back. Thank you Dreamhost for working their butts off on Easter to get this resolved. Much appreciated. DOS attacks are unpredicatable and can happen to anybody at any webhost service. All you can ask for is immediate awareness, and hopefully a swift resolution. Dreamhost did both in this case. Thank you.
Nice, it’s back up! Thanks!
My site seems to be back up now, thanks a lot for fixing the problem - at least if it is just for my site!
Thanks for keeping us posted and good to be back up and running again
It is now 5 AM and things are resolved so I am going to bed. Good night everyone.
Thanks for the resolution and the hard work.
Well done. As James mentioned little could be done to prevent this downtime.
Thanks for solving the problem quickly. My website is back online
Site is back up!
I think the DNS severs sensed me just browsing the dedicated server options. Haha. I’ve been told to switch to a dedicated service but I happen to like $19.95/month with more bandwidth and other options than a dedicated host could provide for no less than $300/month.
Thanks again for responding and fixing the issues at hand.
Now I suppose my question is, as I have been thinking of upgrading, if I go to the strictly business plan will that be handled on different servers? I’d like to know if that is more of a semi-dedicated plan? That would be superb.
Well done dreamhost Now I can contiune working with my coursework ^__^
can you please stuff up when it’s not peak time for people in other countries? This has happened twice now and it’s getting annoying. It seems like you don’t want global visitors.
*customers not visitors
@Mason (and others whiners whining back): Sure… if one pays the $7 account, its not much to expect for better service… but when you are one of the people that pay $19.95 for a very big account with lots of hosted stuff… it IS!
Downtime sucks, and sure… I do not have a business to run, but some better service for the bigger price I pay would be cool!
@Businesses on DH: This is shared hosting! What do you expect. Whenever I go into reselling to possible customers of mine, I’d definately concider dedicated hosting. Thats SLA is always better then the stuff we all have had on a shared host like DH.
It also begs to differ if the dedicated services of DH (if any) are on the same DNS as the rest of its sites and servers… then it would be a bit outrages.
Just my two cents (or $19.95)
Everything OK now. Thank you and good night, folks @ DH !
People who are defending Dreamhost have to do so each week as of late… After the first few times maybe you realize that they’re falling down on the job and threatening you’re going to leave and then actually doing it if they don’t get better is the only way to convince them to fix it… But no, you’re like fucking apple-nazis.
I highly appreciate your readyness.
Yes, attack might do happen, and it is good to know, that you are there, and work it all out.
Thanks, and friendly greetings!
Tamas
a happy cutomer of yours (with many domains)
If you’re in Europe (I am too — GMT+3 at the moment), then yes the “overnight” downtimes will be inconvenient as they are in the middle of the day in Europe. That won’t change as if DH needs to do a scheduled downtime (I realize this one isn’t), they will do it when the least number of customers are affected, and that would be overnight US time. If you have a problem with this (certainly understandable), then your best option is to choose a European host that will do downtimes during their “overnight”.
Er…
Won’t it be a peak time sometime in the world no matter when something saffs up?
[quote]Shut your whining. Dreamhost’s services are great, stop getting your knickers in a twist over a little bit of downtime. [/quote]
On the contrary, you shut up - if it weren’t for our whining, who’s to say this problem would have even been resolved. The ’status’ of this issue was initially ‘Medium’, until we started *whining*.
Go do some more Petshopgirl Reviews….
People need to build a bridge and get over it. You shouldn’t be mad at DreamHost because some idiot with no life decided it’d be fun to screw up the DNS servers for them. Get pissed off at whoever decided it’d be a fun idea to mess everything up.
Thanks Dreamhost for all the effort you put in to fix everything!
[quote]Shut your whining. Dreamhost’s services are great, stop getting your knickers in a twist over a little bit of downtime. [/quote]
On the contrary, you shut up - if it weren’t for our whining, who’s to say this problem would have even been resolved. The ’status’ of this issue was initially ‘Medium’, until we started *whining*.
Go do some more Petshopgirl Reviews….
All back up. And in good time, really.
Last time I was with a host that was hit by a DoS attack, I was down from Friday afternoon through to Monday morning.
Thanks for the quick fix. Great job Dreamhost tech people!
Sites are up indeed, but I still cannot access the FTP server.
Anyone else having problems with FTP ?
Ash, don’t tell anyone to shut up, lol. A complaining customer is hated much more than a passive one who lets the person do their job.
(I had a complaining customer today. Yes. I felt an urge to stab them in the face. )
I don’t know if you guys noticed but http://www.dreamhoststatus.com was down during this as well. In fact the only site that seemed unaffected was blog.dreamhost.com for some reason.
Just put my site up with DH yesterday and the next day it is down….disappointing.
I’m on culligan server - would appreciate it fixed asap
My bad - it seems to be fixed now. Well done.
Well Justin. I’m GMT +10 which is more inconvient for down time because it was 7:30-8pm on a Sunday which is a peak time for Aussies. Why would I pay for a european host when the conversion rate of currency to euros is bigger then au dollars?
I’m located in Australia, and have had no access to my web site or any other page on Dreamhost (accept this one) for the last 8 hours. I can’t lodge a complaint because I can’t access the web panel.
Well done for sorting out the DOS - these things happen - nice to see it fixed.
@Sheriden
I’m in AU as well and my site has been working fine (Westnet). May be your ISP has dns problems?
Why do i get the impression that none of the complianers actually have a clue how to setup DNS …
becuase if they did, they would realise that you can add a NS host into the DH DNS, and setup the likes of zoneedit.com (free for 5 domains) or granitecanyon.com (free) for secondary DNS … this way if DH DNS ever goes down again, it will not affect your domain resolving - at least for the short (day or two) term.
JDaus how would one do this?
Thanks Dreamhost for sorting this out quickly. Was going to work on things this morning (UK) but when I found you were having problems I went and enjoyed the sun for a couple of hours. Came back and it’s all fixed. And for those posters who actually made some constructive comments (–, JDaus etc) thanks for the useful hints.
Thanks for your effort.. Sites are up
“I don’t know if you guys noticed but http://www.dreamhoststatus.com was down during this as well. In fact the only site that seemed unaffected was blog.dreamhost.com for some reason.”
—————————–
Yes indeed, I DID notice. I also noticed that we’ve received no explanation whatsoever (or even an honest acknowledgement) of that rather bizarre set of circumstances.
What bloody use is an emergency status site if it goes down in the emergencies? How smart do these guys have to be to isolate a single site for emergency communication? And, if they can’t even do that, what the heck else are they too slow to do?
It’s a little stupid to use dreamhost DNS servers in a emergency site. No use it’s hosted in another datacenter.
so what will happen with our domains that are from registerfly hosted here ?? when my account will be available ??
@mason…you might not ever read this, but you pissed me off, so…
bluehost offer cheaper hosting with admittedly less bandwidth etc, but it’s still high enough for what i need, plus on sign up you get $75 worth of free advertising. plus huge amounts of other services that dreamhost don’t offer…so yes i am going to switch.
and i am earning big bucks selling my product, but when profit margins count, why splash out for a dedicated server.
and you really need to calm down
ps. i like the way you didn’t put your website to you name…
I think Dreamhost act very fast to solve the problems unlike my previous host. Even if my site is down for like 24 hours, I am still happy with it because it takes days to get my site back up on my previous host.
Cheers to Dreamhost.
For people which have many domains with dreamhost:
Look at Status Bandwidth Usage and go down to status per
domain(s). Everything in there show as double. Every domain shows
twice and the second time shows as zero traffic but the first time
shows correctly. I tried to look on the forum and dreamhoststatus page
but noone is saying anything about that there is a problem like this.
NO reply from tech support for 2 days.
Everyone just needs to clam down. It’s not DH’s fault that they are getting attacked,
Is not but when they do not reply at all and if they reply they say situation escalated to Level 2 or 3 or whatever and nothing happens for more than an acceptable timeframe, then no doubt that customers will get agitated. If they managed to have an emergency status which is not updated per an emergency level that fast how in the world they will reply to a support ticket which the emergency status show clearly if your problem is not described in here then submit a ticket. NO excuse for not answering and giving a timeframe. There are so many issues which are not on the forum and not on the emergency status page.
And I just came from Mediatemple TIRED of their unlimited problems with the GRID SERVER. Anyway, at least i have plenty of storage space and much more features than i ever had at mt.
TOO MUCH SPACE when the service is down a lot, no point of having this much disk space in such situation. For what? For the sake of the internet just for storage? No thank you, this could be done on local computer too. If they offer that much they should guarantee the service. DreamHost customer service starts to go crappy as RegisterFly started the lameness and they end up in having the licence revoked. If dreamhost continues this way there will be no future for a long time. CRAP.
Another example. One of my friend domain was hacked and when he reported that and still trying to talk to a tech support representative, for several days, noone is replying to him. NOW that’s messed-up. If they don’t reply to that kind of emergency the heck with …oh well. Pain!
no future? wow i’d really hate for there to be no future because a hosts dns servers was getting attacked.
After browsing through these numerous comments i noticed several mentions of the severity marking, and people being outraged because it was set to ‘medium’ initially. Would it help if it was in bright red text with flashing lights to grab attention? Just because something is marked as ‘medium’ and not ‘high’ does not mean it is not being resolved, it’s just text.
Thanks.. FTP access back to normal now. Site’s up.
Its ok, keep up the goooood work
This is getting bad, I was recommending your hosting service to someone the other day and my site was down, yesterday I was again trying to show him the site and it was down. It was quite embarrassing. As predicted the other guy signed up for hostgator.com
Now the main problem is everytime your servers are down, people go to your competitor like hostgator.com so I won’t be surprised if they were behind this(imagine this, who has the resources to make such an attack).
This is a war, the soon you declare it and polarize everyone, the more advantage you will have to fight it. Its harming your business very badly. We don’t know who the enemy is, you gotta smoke them out.
Try making someone in your company read “The 33 strategies of war” by Robert Greene.
@prashant
‘This is a war, the soon you declare it and polarize everyone’
u mean like the war on terror ? lol ….
btw, keep up the good work DH guys!
Folks, some of you need a reality check. The problem had nothing to do with:
1. Severity marking.
2. DreamHost’s service quality.
3. DreamHost’s network.
A Denial of Service attack can happen to any host or site. Stop blaming the wrong party. The real blame should be attached to the person or persons who initiated the attack from the outside. If found, they should go to jail.
Peace,
Gene
FOLKS,
IF YOU CANNOT PAY MORE THAN TEN BUCKS A MONTH, SHUT UP AND ENJOY.
ELSE
STOP CRYING AND MOVE TO A PROFESSIONAL HOSTING.
And what makes you think what you call a professional host (as opposed to whatever you consider DreamHost to be) is immune to a DOS attack? Just asking.
Peace,
Gene
“u mean like the war on terror ? lol ….”
Yes I mean like war on terror.
And now my website is again inaccessible.
hm, my sites are still unresponsive
my website was always accessible but it’s not much when it can’t access the MySQL server… yeah got fixed but it’s doing it again… probably under attack again now.
Yep, first mySQL databases (Wordpress, Gallery) were not responding, and now it looks like my sites are completely down. Argh. This definitely is not “resolved” at the moment if this is the cause.
ok back now heh
Sites been up and down all day, and i assumed it was because of this, and now its resolved, and site is still up and down.
My site is unaccessible from some locations according to Host-Tracker
1) If you do major, critical business in Europe or Australia, why would you have your hosting in the US, where you know scheduled outages will be in the middle of your day??
2) D0S attacks happen to everyone. Even to big e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay. Believe me, even with thousands of machines and dozens of network admins, a DoS sends them scrambling.
3) If your site is business critical, then securing independent secondary DNS is a very good idea. Vendors like ZoneEdit and GraniteCanyon are out there. Just Google on [free secondary DNS service].
4) You get what you pay for. If you’re running a massive e-tail business, I suggest you hire some admins, buy multiple servers in seperated colos, and do it right.
5) I was with three different hosting providers before Dreamhost, with several domains. For the price I pay here, the support is great, what is provided is great, and I know that my sites and domains will not disappear from the net and their servers for *weeks* at a time.
6) To those of you who say you are leaving, bye, bye. Good luck at finding your perfect service for a cheap price. Even dedicated hosting for $400 a month is cheap.
BTW, how many people here remember the major DNS outage that Microsoft had in 2001?? That wasn’t even DoS! Or how about the DoS attack that hit Joker.com last year? ISPs, eCommerce sites and hosting providers are in a constant war with people who run farms of compromised machines for fun and profit.
Anyway, I have stuff to do today. I’m glad DH is back up. Nice work, less than 5 hours.
yes. we need reverse dns to ban/block those ips who are doing the DoS attacks on our sites. this happened to me from saturday morning till today.
yep me too
Mine was down on redondo, before, but finally it’s up and running (for now)… I can’t decide whether or not my service on dreamhost has been good for the past year+.
Since I joined DH 2 weeks ago (exactly 2 weeks), there has been 3 or 4 times that the site was either slow or was simple down. My sites are still not stable.
I just hope it will become beter in the future.
Dreamhoststatus should be on a different dns server at a different hoster. Try hostgator. Here, use my link :o)
http://www.kqzyfj.com/i3102y1A719PSTWWTXWPRQUQYVQV
And gmail is slow today too. I blame DH
May God poop on you!
@ Raven
1) If you do major, critical business in Europe or Australia, why would you have your hosting in the US, where you know scheduled outages will be in the middle of your day??
Because hosting in Europe costs a shitload because they guarantee over 50% up-time, unlike some hosters I know… :O
2) D0S attacks happen to everyone. Even to big e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay. Believe me, even with thousands of machines and dozens of network admins, a DoS sends them scrambling.
Nope. Never happened to my site. Ever. Yet.
3) If your site is business critical, then securing independent secondary DNS is a very good idea. Vendors like ZoneEdit and GraniteCanyon are out there. Just Google on [free secondary DNS service].
Thanks for the tip
4) You get what you pay for. If you’re running a massive e-tail business, I suggest you hire some admins, buy multiple servers in seperated colos, and do it right.
Nope. I paid for what they advertised. Not for weekly downtime.
5) I was with three different hosting providers before Dreamhost, with several domains. For the price I pay here, the support is great, what is provided is great, and I know that my sites and domains will not disappear from the net and their servers for *weeks* at a time.
I have 4 hosting providers and DH has the best support which doesn’t mean diddly if my sites are down.
6) To those of you who say you are leaving, bye, bye. Good luck at finding your perfect service for a cheap price. Even dedicated hosting for $400 a month is cheap.
n/a
BTW, how many people here remember the major DNS outage that Microsoft had in 2001?? That wasn’t even DoS! Or how about the DoS attack that hit Joker.com last year? ISPs, eCommerce sites and hosting providers are in a constant war with people who run farms of compromised machines for fun and profit.
Are you THAT old?
Anyway, I have stuff to do today. I’m glad DH is back up. Nice work, less than 5 hours.
Nope. Not up yet.
LOL! Mr. Fucked Off wants Dreamhost to show more professionalism.
That’s a riot.
experienced!
this is the best explanation of this problem!congratulations! and thanks!
i say look for the ips and ban them.
@Jdaus, does dreamhost allow AXFR zonetransfers to all zoneedit/granitecanyon servers?
I was surprised to see even http://www.dreamhoststatus.com not resolving - sneaking in a glue record wouldn’t have hurt.
Bleh. DOS attacks are not that cool. Oh Well. Happy Easter!
Oh and I bet “Medium” is just the default severity and it didn’t get changed during posting.
I’m talk about this in my another posts. Today is one problem. Tomorow another.
Aways have one problem.
I love downtime… (seriously)
Stop complaining, we all get what we paid for (for most of us that was less than 50 bucks a year)
Happy Easter.
Good job!
Now that you resolved the situation i hope youall get a good “days” sleep.
–
All this DNS DOS attacks is really a crappy way of some persons to let us all know they havent grown up yet.
Problem is the attackers of today are not some garage hackers showing their wits in pulling the pants of some poor site owner to boss them about internet security.
The internet attackers of today are driven by economical and political causes. Terrorists and scoundrels. High and low. Bag’em!
@Adrian Says:
“TOO MUCH SPACE when the service is down a lot, no point of having this much disk space in such situation. For what? For the sake of the internet just for storage? No thank you, this could be done on local computer too. If they offer that much they should guarantee the service. DreamHost customer service starts to go crappy as RegisterFly started the lameness and they end up in having the licence revoked. If dreamhost continues this way there will be no future for a long time. CRAP.”
Just because someone provides 40GB+ webspace and 4TB+ bandwidth, that means they *must” guarantee service??? What does what they provide have to do with anything? If I charged $10 for anything, there’s no way in hell I would guarantee anything.
@Everyone:
Blocking IP’s is all well and good, but anybody anywhere can get a new IP address at any time.
I’m not complaining! But isn’t DNS one of the easier things to have off-site redundancy? If so, it sounds like a good idea to me.
Guys -
I appreciate all your hard work, especially on Easter. Running a Hosting operation myself for my day job, I understand the level of committment you need to put forward. My customers are guaranteed 99.9% uptime and pay for it - Dreamost - You have provided excellent service over the year and do it with amazing cost-effectiveness.
Thanks again!
All the people that say that they should protect their network from a DoS attack, explain how you would do that to me. It is almost impossible to protect anything from an attack. I have comcast as my internet, and a couple months ago someone was DoS attacking an AT&T router that I had to go through to get to the internet, the pings were 300 - 400ms and everything was slow for a couple DAYS, and it wasn’t a holiday. So stop whining, it was just your website down for a few hours during easter when everyones eating and not surfing the web. Imagine having your internet down for days and a status report of “it will be fixed sometime between tomorrow and next week” At least DH told us more then that, so stop the whining…
We are glad, that your team fixed the problem.
We go by car to the Budapest-Bamako Rally in 2008. When a problem happens, we have to resolve it on the spot. And we shall.
So, thanks the DreamHost’s team!
The Z1 Team of Budapest-Bamako Rally
Well, I must thank the team at DH for sorting the DoS attack out.
Also, I must say that I was not one of the seemingly many who got all twisted around over the downtime. I’ve been with DH almost a year now, after using two other hosts in the past for my domains, and DH is consistently better than either of the previous hosts, and the cost is nothing to shake a stick at for what you get.
I expect some downtime now and then from a host, nothing is foolproof and things like DoS attacks happen. At the very least, DH was hard at work trying to get it under control instead of sitting around, playing cards and waiting it out. And that’s what I appreciate the most.
Thanks for your hard work, DH. I’m a happy customer and will continue to be for quite a while.
Once again, the “blogsphere” (at least as far as “comments” go) proves itself to be the semi-exclusive domain of the Intarweb “mentally challenged” - the AOL of 2007. Actually, Some of the stuff I’ve read in comments here is even *more* childish and ignorant than the typical AOL’er “spew”,
Discussion forums aplenty exist for those bent on finding a venue to express their cluelessness, yet the *truly clueless* usually prefer the “drive by” approach of commenting on a status blog whether or not their comment has any relevance at all to the post on which they comment. I suspect that DH only allows such pointless venting on this blog as therapy for it’s more feeble-minded customers, or for it’s entertainment value (which is the *best* reason to read these comments!)
DreamHost is still a pretty good value. I have to give them props for being “transparent” about what’s going on and giving people a forum like this one to beef about the service.
Having said that, it’s not like DoS attacks are rare, and DreamHost should be MUCH better prepared for them than they seem to be at this time. How many thousands of sites were down for 4+ hours while they weathered the storm? As long as this kind of thing is possible, it precludes me from relying on DH as my primary hosting provider. No, I’m no expert on DNS. But seems to me this is the internet equivalent of a 6-year-old brat walking up and kicking you in the nuts. It shouldn’t bring everything down for hours. Thank the hackers for exposing a weak spot, and keep up the pressure on DreamHost to architect against such attacks in the future.
Obviously, part of that defense is putting dreamhoststatus.com on multiple distributed nameservers (or whatever) so that a similar attack in the future does not block access to this site.
For the folks who blithely mention how to use other services to provide backup nameservers, I’m sure most of us are putting our energies into our content, as opposed to becoming Unix or DNS experts. (That’s what we’re supposedly paying DreamHost for.) Let’s make a deal that we won’t berate you for not knowing everything there is to know about brain surgery, and you stop giving ‘tude about arcane configuration options. What would be really helpful is a step-by-step in the DreamHost Wiki about how to set up backup nameservers. If it’s really as simple as you make it out to be it shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes for you to create such an entry.
I certainly don’t blame people for complaining here. True, you’re not paying for 99.999% Service Level Agreements and whatnot. But, if you go to McDonalds and there’s a cockroach in your milkshake, the last thing you want to hear is “what do you expect? you should go to a more expensive restaurant if you don’t want roaches.”
Unfortunatly, DNS is a very weak system, protecting it against a DoS attack is nearly impossible.
About the only way to mitigate it is to log the affected IP’s, and ask someone further up the tubes than you are to block them; blocking them yourself is pointless as once the packets get to your firewall, they have already done their job of using up your available bandwidth.
In the c ase of a dDos, even IP blocking will fail, as soon as the hacker notices that some ip’s have been blocked, he’ll stop using those and bring in some more,
As far as I know, dreamhost have multiple (4) nameservers, all on different continents (else eveytime the DH network went down, we would lose every email sent during that window), so even redundancy didn’t help.
So, to carry on the six year old analogy, it was a group of guys, who kicked you in the nuts (even the spare set), and as soon as you got free and ran round the corner, there was another group of guys who started all over again.
Our site was hit with this attack as well. As of right now it is still unavailable. Hopefully Dreamhost will be returning my emails and letting me know what is going on. I am a bit concerned since the last message states that the problem has been resolved.
@TMX
dreamhost has 3 DNS servers, only one of those (ns2) is off-site, it’s hosted at fibernoc (the same datacenter as dreamhoststatus.com) - so, all DNS servers are in California.
In the case of DDOS attacks on DNS, blocking IPs at the firewall usually is pretty effective. DNS DDOSes usually rely on traffic multiplication; you send a million small DNS replies, and you receive a million DNS replies which can be up to 10 times bigger a piece.
The sad part is that http://www.dreamhoststatus.com was also affected by the DDOS. There are some ways to prevent that from happening (e.g. be crafty and use a glue record at the internic, use week-long TTLs for that particular A record so there’s a better chance it’ll be cached, etc.) Unfortunately, if you visit 66.201.54.111 you get a “bad_httpd_conf” error, so changing your bookmarks to IPs won’t work either, you’d have to modify your HOSTS file to get future updates when DNS is down again.
it is not solved !!!
each of the page in my website takes >30 seconds to load, sometimes 50 seconds
Dreamhost fucking sucks.
I was going to complain but global warming gave me frostbitten fingers while I was hunting Easter eggs and I can’t type. This is all your fault DH!
1.5 days later………….. still having issues………. Any “light” at the end of the tunnel?
it is starting to get funny to see 200 to 300 people getting mad at their hosters… I would be willing to pay more than 12$ a month for hosting, because this currently is shit. serious dark brown unreachable downtime shit. AGAIN :E
So go buy hosting from Germany. Oh yeah, they probably all suck!
umm.. yea all my stuff is gone… nothing up for me at all…. thanx dreamhost…
Every day for the past three days, all the servers, the MySQL databases, and even the panel are unreachable starting around 11:10AM. Today it started at 11:33AM. They are usually down about ten to twenty minutes. This is very unpleasant. Is this the result of this DoS assault?
Oh joy.
Been a great few weeks.
“The server at http://www.jimimorrisonshead.com is taking too long to respond.”
As someone who had their site down for almost a month @ another host, and then had it go down for almost 2 weeks at a time there after–with no explanation ever given, and then with my money stolen as well, I’m quite content with dreamhost.
Not resolved!
One site of mine completely down, all were molasses today… can’t ftp, can’t anything…
Yep, this is no good really. Makes my organization look bad when I tell clients to host with you… Come on, sort it out
I’m really, really getting frustrated with the MySQL servers going down all of the time. My website is a portfolio and I’ve been applying to several companies, showing them my site, only to find out they are getting a database error. I’m pretty sure it isn’t my fault because the SUPPORT site, which is apparently the go-to place to vent this type of frustration, is also down because of MySQL issues. This is starting to remind me of Fuitadnet.
Not resolved. All of my sites are currently down. Have been for 10-30 minutes.
Site, FTP, and Email down…
kozmicavenues.com
tried to submit a ticket, but can’t get to the panel.
This is strange to say the least. This morning all my sites were up and running and now, 4 hours later they are all unreachable… Go figure…
All of my sites are down now, they were up this morning…until approximately 30 mins ago
Wow, these are freaking PHP sites, not rocket science. Time to look into moving all my sites off ASAP.
Hmmm, I seemed to have survived the DOS attack unscathed.
But just now, the entire site is offline.
Wow. This really sucks. Most of my sites are okay now but it would seem the db I have on tiny:venita is having problems. This would happen on a day when I have a big article that just went out last night. How embarrassing.
All of my domains on KARNOV are down. All of my domains on APU are up.
Boom, back up in 5 minutes. Let’s see.
Two web sites down here as well.
Support Panel Still Reads
“Critical Announcement! Please Read!
Widespread DNS issues are currently affecting a large number of domains.
Websites and email might appear inaccessible while we troubleshoot this issue.
You can keep updated at dreamhoststatus.com!
(posted 1 day 8 hours ago) ”
Even though this blog says the issue has been resolved.
I wonder which one it is. Still fixing problems or considered resolved?
Just like Acttupizen said, “back up”.
Two of my websites were down for 20 some minutes.
but are now back up.
Lets hope they manage to stay back up.
Back up! Err… at least mostly… Expect your DB to go up and down periodically, then wait for the next “hardware” failure which seems to happen more often than I would’ve expected.
all 3 of my sites are still down! It states thet the problem is resolved yet I still get:
Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access / on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
yes i still get the same problem. I dont think its resolved atallsince my site is still down and My ftp isnt working or mailor anything.
I’m glad to hear that you were able to isolate the sources!
Fix the dam thing soon. we are loosing business……
Okay guys, seriously, this is enough (you think you know who I’m talking to, but I think you don’t).
DoS attacks are very hard to deal with - and to everyone who keeps saying “you should log and ban their ips!” -> it’s fairly useless. DoS attacks of these magnitudes that take down large web servers (with the most conventional methods) require MANY computers to act out the attack. An attacker would grab ahold of many many computers, or redirect as many users as possible to one computer in an effort or overwhelm and result in DENIAL OF SERVICE. They’re fairly unavoidable, as the best thing you can do is try and recognize them (which is tricky when they look so much like popularity) and put in precautions - which any little script kiddie will find NEW ways to work around. So just get ahold of yourselves, people!
This method aside, crackers and blackhats are always finding new ways to poke at hosters like DH - packet flooding or not, and the fact remains: all you can do is try to prevent and then cope when they get around your precautions!!!
Yes, DH get’s a lot of downs - and YES it’s quite possible that they could be doing more to prevent them, but their speed in resolving issues is usually top notch - and being on another COST EFFECTIVE host would be just as bad if not worse (since they’re so fun to freak out and damage).
Oh yeah, make no mistake - they are pulling out all the stops to get their network stable. Including throttling my main site, due to excessive server usage. I’ve already moved it to another provider, which is BLAZING fast and up all the time, but pricier, but hey - who was I kidding… I knew this day would come, just happens they forced my hand on the issue a bit sooner than later (just renewed for another year 3 weeks ago), oh well, time to move my other 27 domains over to my new host.
Have fun guys - keep in mind DH is NOT hosted in a real datacenter, but an old building retrofitted into a datacenter. That’s why you keep seeing power problems with DH, and another reason why they don’t offer dedicated services anymore (cramming 200 people on a server is more cost effective than charging $150 a month for one server - not to mention the building they are in simply does NOT have the power capacity to provide all that dedicated power - they simply can’t expand.)
Anyways, no hard feelings. Its too bad the staff feel the need to disable sites without warning, I was willing to go and was expecting it soon, but they way they go about it is troublesome.
Enjoy folks. ICQ 8898053
I vote that we rename the comments section to, “The Short Bus,” since it’s packed tight with a bunch of retards.
I love all the idiots who are fine with this shitty downtime service. And to everyone suggesting us complainers should go somewhere else for service, that’s exactly what I did.
Dreamhost Sucks Ass And You Will Find This Is A Constant Issue. I Really Do Hope You’re Content With That.
Dreamhost Fucking Sucks.
Chucko, when we say go somewhere else, we mean stay there. You would have known that if you weren’t retarded.
We already know you’re a whiny little girl — no need to drop by and remind us.
WAAAAAAAAMBULANCE,
just because you sold your soul to NightmareHost for a few measly ‘referral bucks’ does not mean you speak for everyone….Please tell me, waaa, how are you going to continue to make a living when all the peeps remaining with NightmareHost will be other referral whores? Do tell, genius! :p
Typical predictable retard reply: Played out variation of host name? Check. Desperate grasp at referrals-being-relevant-to-anything comment? Check. Absolutely no point made? Check.
Did you actually have anything to say, or did you peak out at whining about nothing?
Referrals have nothing to do with how I make my living. How are you morons making a living by spending every waking minute crying like little girls? Between that and flipping burgers, you must all be billionaires.
Maybe next, you can write a long whiny post about how you’d leave DH if it wasn’t sooooo haaaard to move files, databases, etc… Boo hoo!!! Waaaaa!!!!
Your’e all on drugs…
I would say im a fairly new DH user 243 day to be precise, and in that time there probably 3 major outages, probably at most 72 hrs in total. And yes its annoying when all my site are down, we use dreamhost for our corperate site, email and our intranet so when it goes were screwed till its back up, but when you step back and work it our they have provided a 99.98765% uptime which considering the price were paying and the shear size of there operation is pretty dam good.
At my fomer company we had dedicated server that cost us hundreds of pounds a month to run we had 100% network uptime SLA ’swith the co-lo facilitys but the had exactly the issues and an almost identcal uptime percentage.
Are dreamhost a really cheap good hosting company - yes.
do they issues with how the comuncate with there customers and some of there setup - yes
do they take ther customers suggestions on board and act on them - yes (sometimes)
are they god of the internet and all things technical - no
things break get over it give them a break!!
Please help me i m tring to download site from server but i face this problem
Can’t establish connection –> @ Sun Apr 08 17:06:41 2007 (11004-100)
The requested name is valid and was found in the database, but it does not have the correct associated data being resolved for.
Please solve or explain as I’ve a work to be uploaded.
Erm…Help me please…l miss RuneScape.
Ummm….Everyone bitched while it was down, and was threatening to leave dreamhost while they were being attacked, and had no control over it. But, they brought in their guys to trace the problem down and fix/iptable/pf it, depending on the os that dreamhost uses, and to that guy, you did and awesome job. To the customers, please stay with dreamhost, I don’t think any other provider would ever put up with your amount of bullshit.
All of my sites are down now, they were up this morning…until approximately 30 mins ago
vote that we rename the comments section to, “The Short Bus,” since it’s packed tight with a bunch of retards.
tşk ederim.
yes, my sites and mail on crackerjack are unreachable. please fix soon!