Power strip maintenance - Date moved!
Posted (April 9th, 2007 at 3:35 pm PST) by KellyOn Saturday we experienced the failure of a power strip:
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/04/07/downtime-for-several-servers/
Or so we thought! Turns out, that specific circuit has an open neutral. On Friday, April 13th Thursday, April 12th, at 9pm, we are going to be performing quick maintenance to fix this problem. Luckly, we likely will not have to turn off any servers to do this. There is one circuit we will need to turn off to work on the broken one, but it is feeding a rack of servers with redundant power supplies! If all goes well, you, the Happy DreamHost Masses, will not notice any downtime.
If the wiring is not how we think it is, however, we will need to turn off two extra circuits feeding these servers:
avalon burbank catalina cognac deblume euclid forint grizabella heaven jake jalapa jawbreaker mufasa nwtekno ocean pippo sawdust sawtelle scar temple venice yoda
Some of those are dedicated servers, others are database servers. If we do need to cut power to these, the downtime will be approximately 1 hour.
We will be sure to have ominous sounding music queued up for doing this on Friday the 13th.
–
Due to a scheduling SNAFU on our part we need to move this maintenance window UP one day to Thursday, April 12th at 9pm. Again, we believe we will not need to actually turn off any servers in this window, it is a “just in case” thing.
Update 9:32pm 4-12 by JamesH: This is effecting a few more servers than we thought, but should be done with shortly. We’ll post as soon as we have more news.
Update 10:15pm by Kelly: This is obviously taking longer than anticipated. The box was in worse condition than originally thought, but could not be determined until we opened it up. We are pulling fresh wire right now to the boxes. ETA is now 11:30pm-midnight.
Update 10:42pm by Kelly: The juice is flowing again, we are now working on getting everyones service restored!
Update 12:05am 4-13 by JamesH: I just got word that all servers are up and working. I apologize for the outage.
112 Responses to “Power strip maintenance - Date moved!”
The comments in general on this blog are almost as bad as digg.
Maybe they should add thumbs up/thumbs down buttons so we can burry flamers?
It will never happen, but it’s a funny thought.
@Ben
No these are much much more complicated than the power strips which most people know. They have special ports which allow the admins to remote reboot servers, they monitor power draw, etc. They are basically mini computers for a special purpose. They are not just like plugging a new one into the wall and switching over the plugs.
@Tom
Wow. Thats awesome…but you still plug stuff in them? or is this a completely different kind of power strip? If its not thats really awesome.Thanks for helping me understand. One more question kinda… so if i were to buy one of these strips and plug my computer into it, I would be able to look how much power my computer is useing and a bunch of other stats?
Thats really cool…
I still love dreamhost…only host i have used though 
@Ben - yes, you could tell how much power you’re using, but expect to pay $600+ for the ability to do so…
Yea, slap one of these puppies behind your desk
Note you’ll need a 30 amp circuit and twist-lock outlet to plug these bad boys in
http://www.foilhat.org/powerstrip1.jpg
shown with your average run of the mill office chair for comparison (yea, we’re cheap in our NOC… no Aerons :()
I have a suggestion dreamhost. Start CPM ads on this blog. You could potentially earn millions. I am accessing this blog atleast twice a day nowadays, and I am sure your other 399,999 customers as well!
@Jayson: they could, and the they would loose a lot of customers who are sick of web ads and want to see real professionalism from the people they hire to host their websites….
Ads dont bug me.. Unless theyre loud or popups. Google ads dont bug me
The reason why I moved to Dreamhost was because my previous web host was constantly having problems with downtime and now this happens? I already lost a lot of site traffic and readers coz of my previous downtime. I hope this won’t take long. 
They’re usually pretty quick. I love dreamhost =D
My site is still inaccessible and I still haven’t gotten a reply from the support staff.
@Bill, no, I can’t access your site. Additionally, all my sites are throwing 500 internal server errors… pathetic
What is happening? Downtime every day?
@Bill - can’t access your site either. how long is this downtime gonna take? and how come no one is answering the emails I sent to the support staff?
I’m having the same issues with my 3 sites hosted at DreamHost, down time yesterday, downtime today! and the power grid thing is scheduled for 4 days from now, so that should not be it
I only had downtime today, several minutes ago.
Same here almost every day for me its really starting to annoy me its really not good enough!! my login for FTP is brisk.dreamhost.com does that mean my server is called Brisk? in which case it is not on the list above
I’d say transfer to my server, but I dont want you ruining my uptime!
that should have said 99.30% uptime
Strange one of my site is working while other two are down. And few minutes before all were down.
I just switched over from Blogger to self hosted, and I have never experienced so much down time and lack of accessibility…maintenance has always been done late in the evening for one hour maybe once a month. These uncontrollable downtown is happening everyday…this is just not acceptable…
- VERY ANNOYED CUSTOMER
By the way, I have used several different hosts in the past and never experienced this much downtime…this is really pathetic. I took a chance on dreamhost and so far, the dreams have been nightmares…
you go girlfriend!
@lalagirl: Downtime do occur, and if you think about Dreamhost having (at least) 100eds servers and you have the bad luck to get into a “trouble area” of their network - you may experience more downtime than other Dreamhost customers even.
Though this is not an excuse or a any kind of “defence” on the behalf of Dreamhost, it’s just a “state of fact”. (Notice the quotation marks)
You’ve got a cool blog though, can’t get too much of the pink! :p (and yes, it loaded fine here :)) Get yourself an account at http://host-tracker.com and set a monitor for your website(s) - then you’ll get a broad picture on how your blog is doing.
@Nige: Your site gave a “Site Temporarily Unavailable” message.
same here we’re about to hit 6,000 hits per day and it’s inaccessible for a period of time. also internal server errors showing up on a regular basis.
same here man, btw is reallybored.net your site? how about a link exchange dude, i’ll contact you on your site okay?
———————————————————-
Brian Says:
April 9th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
@Bill, no, I can’t access your site. Additionally, all my sites are throwing 500 internal server errors… pathetic
Readers of my website are getting quite sick of all the downtime. They also report that my site is slower than many other sites they visit.
What’s happened, DreamHost? You used to be the source of no complaints from people on my website, but now all they talk about is how often my site is down or is extremely slow.
Very Unsatisified.
It’s annoying…
My website is down every 5 minutes. I loose a lot of visitors, especially the visitors that came to my website for Easter…
I can’t believe… every webhosting sucks.
Can anybody tell me a reliable web hosting? I have to move from here… it’s disgusting.
my site has now been down for over 7 hours, and no straight answer from “support” either.
Im glad my site is only a car club forum and not a business, as I would have lost an entire days earnings. I wonder what chance there would be of recouping lost earnings from DH if it was?? hmm
One of our sites on DH has been down at least 1-2 hours every night for the past few days. This is well beyond ridiculous. This is blasphemy. This is madness. THIS IS DREAMHOST.
hahhaha at 300 reference. i love that movie. SPARTAAAAANS
Dreamhost is the worst hosting I’ve never had. Since the first day, january 30, my site was down for several times, about 30-40 times or more.
Es una puta mierda pinchada en un palo. Me arrepiento de haberlo contratado.
OK, my server is not on the list
Hope everything is fine.
I love how dreamhost gives me FREE UNLIMITED DOWNTIME! THANKS DREAMHOST!
Re: Ben
What we’re fixing is the wiring to the oulet, not the power strip itself. We already have tried two other power strips in the outlet. It seems a peice of wiring has come loose inside of it, fortunately just the neutral ground. Readings off the meters are showing ~55v potential difference between hot and neutral, versus 120v between hot/ground, which one would expect. Reading is off the wires themselves, so sadly it is not just a bum outlet.
We use NEMA L5-30 plugs and outlets: http://www.twacomm.com/catalog/dept_id_998.htm
is anyone else on riptide having downtime like, right now?
My websites have had lack luster response all day and I’m getting duplicate records in my database. Why dreamhost?! You guys were doing so good since the last major power reset you all did.
I am.
nope, nm, just mysql
Dreamhost es una puta basura.
Dreamhost is a trash hosting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can’t access the web panel to submit a support request. grrr..
Down again!!
i am on kitkat and am down right now.
uggh i fell for the con of young computer hipsters and cheap hosting. and now it’s serving me terribly.
Ditto, site down, panel down. How is one to submit a support request if the only avenue to submit said request goes down, too?
Webmail seems to still be up, though…
loos like i’m back up
Looks like system wide problems right now. I can’t access sites on more than one server.
Panel is up, website is down… how long is this going to take?
I’m pretty smart. A business man type person. For a business, it seems customer satisfaction should always be #1… Without customers it doesn’t matter how much money you charge or make per sale, you won’t get any sales.
So, customers of DreamHost want uptime. We purchase space on servers for hosting websites, many of which are business for us. We expect these to be up all the time (David Letterman wouldn’t be happy if once a week his show just didn’t air).
It seems like there should be a thing called a BACKUP SERVER. A 2nd server that gets the exact same info as the first, so if the first goes down, or needs to be taken down, the 2nd one works and everything is fine.
Why can’t DreamHost do something like this?? I referred my brother here, and I was about to start referring customers (I have 4,000 current web-site hosted customers), but I’m not so sure anymore. It’s 11:30 in the morning and my site is down, and I know for a fact customers are looking at it, or trying to at least, since they’re sending emails and calling me.
Would anyone else in their right mind run a business without a backup??
Up again. Very poor performance. Panel was up and is up.
Andrew - If you were smart, you’d hire a better site designer.
Yo, my site is down !
way down
each page takes 60 seconds to load !
madness
spare me !
My site is up but slow and NO EMAIL. And I can’t get into the web panel.
@mi SPA: As of the time I’m writing this, your site is very, very fast.
Did you file a support ticket about your problems?
In fact, to the rest of you with issues: Why aren’t you taking those problems to the proper place so you can get help? The Comments section here may be OK for venting, but you aren’t going to get solutions here, unless they relate to the specific problem being mentioned by DreamHost’s staff.
Think about it.
Peace,
Gene
HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP! My emails are lost in cyberspace and I need them today. The last email I received was April 3rd, it’s the 10th, HELP ME WITH THIS PLEASE FOR HEAVENS SAKES!!!
Wow, My website is like never down. I have been here for 60 days only about 1 1/2 hour downtime…I think thats really good….Btw I am on silk
Thanks people for learning me something about this “power strips”
You get what you paid for, for most of us that’s $22.40 with a $97 discount on L1. Anything less than 40 dollars a year is great for me.
a lot of error 500, and now “IPS Driver Error” bahhhhhhhh
i dont know what to do, everyday we have a lot of erros, and now we got this IPS driver error.
the suport:
“…Oh, it looks like you temporarily exceeded the allotted memory limit for
your user seganet…A good way to fix that problem is to create a new
user…”
Gene,
yes, my site is running fine. It was my emails that’s coming in/out slow at that moment. I posted here only because I can’t even get into my web panel to report my issue.
Anyway, my problem is resolved now
This is bad! I can not access my site!
I’m not sure why everyone is complaining. I have had so little down time it’s crazy. I’m not sure how they keep my server up even while doing upgrades/updates… I’ve been with dreamhost for just about a year on pringle. I am so far, very happy with dreamhost.
If your not happy, transfer hosts… simple.
I agree with animehawk
@Gene Steinberg
It might seem fast to you since you know, you use safari on a mac.
This implies you’re waiting for the browser to stop beachballing.
@i love deamhost: Sorry you’ve got it wrong. I seldom see beachballing on any of my Mac software, and my standard browser is Firefox, which I recommend to everyone, regardless of their platform of choice.
Peace,
Gene
Firefox > Every other browser Heheh
I recommend GNU Emacs, it works on more platforms than Firefox and renders webpages consistently across all platforms.
slow like hell
@Carlos: WHAT is slow like hell?
@i love dreamhost: Not on the Mac.
Peace,
Gene
Are just all my blogs down due to this maintenance?
Wise move changing from Friday 13th to Thursday 12th - actioning this maintenance on Friday 13th is just asking for trouble imho.
Woof.
okay i just got like a 15 minute downtime again and this time i took a screenshot of the errors…
http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r97/MyGothicHeart/fixit.jpg
i’m not complaining, dreamhost kicks ass, but hopefully stuff like this won’t happen again in the future.
my blog’s down as well
my site is not down, but its even worse than down !
45 seconds for the index page to load, normally, it only takes 0.5 seconds
My site is also down. I´m on Rootbeer server and suddenly it just stop from working… wake up guys and do something about!
In the last 18 days I’ve monitored my site with host-tracker, I’ve had 98.03% uptime. For shared hosting, that’s really not too bad. I had an account with SimpleHost, and when they weren’t threatening to close my account (apparently “unlimited disk” didn’t actually mean unlimited disk), they were denying any downtime that might have happened, even through my sites were down more than they were up.
Not only that, but I swear they had 1 person working support/admin. I always interacted with the same person, and checks on whois.sc would show over 1000 domains - ON THE SAME SERVER! That would explain why it was soooo slow all the time, no?
My site is still down. This is the second day
“FREE UNLIMITED DOWNTIME!” — that’s pretty funny.
Hmm, There’s too many problems with Dreamhost recently. :-s
Damn, I was just visiting the site to look at rates for moving my servers over to DreamHost… I guess I will wait it out until the power problem is fixed and see about converting then. I need a dedicated server soon though. What other hosts are out there?
Rick,
I knwo a couple people with good prices. Fire me an email and I might be able to hook you up ( thspimpolds AT gmail DOT com )
1pm Central time and I cannot login to the admin panel at all. I have seen this multiple times of the last week.
this reply is to notify that, Tom, the person above me is a scam, do NOT trust him !
And also, he illegally removed copyright from IPB http://newenglandhdtv.com/
My website is also offline now - it was working until 5 mins ago.
So…my site has been up for the last couple of days, and now suddenly its down today. I’m on the ’smoothie’ server, so I shouldn’t be affected. Should I send an email to support?
I’m down too…every site…
Katie - how do I find out what server I am on?
woohoo, back up! The mighty dream team…
Thank you Dreamhost!
Reading this, and I am having downtime on pez why?
ole painty can pez is down again alright.
My site is working now. Load time could be faster though
mountaindew is down
Site has been down for over 20 minutes now. We usually get about 20 new members every hour so this is hurting us. Not to mention the loss in advertising revenue that only 20 minutes can do. PLEASE please please please go back up ASAP!
“avalon burbank catalina cognac deblume euclid forint grizabella heaven jake jalapa jawbreaker mufasa nwtekno ocean pippo sawdust sawtelle scar temple venice yoda
Some of those are dedicated servers, others are database servers.”
Based on the information above, some of you will have your entire site down, while others will only have problems if they need to access a database on one of the above servers.
If you only use static pages, and you’re server isn’t one of those above then you shouldn’t be suffering from this what-so-ever. If you’re having issues and you don’t meet the info above then you’re issue isn’t being caused by the powerstrip and should make sure to let the support techs know as soon as possible.
Every host has their pros/cons. Stay if you like dreamhost, and leave if you don’t.
My site are not bad these two days.
Hopefully we will have a nice stable weekend
Database server that three of my sites use is down for the third time in three days. 48 minutes and counting this time.
10:20 PM and forint is still down. Just posting to let others know. Unfortunately, when they say “your site will be down,” for me it’s more like your 18 sites will be down.
“Update 10:15pm by Kelly: This is obviously taking longer than anticipated. The box was in worse condition than originally thought, but could not be determined until we opened it up. We are pulling fresh wire right now to the boxes. ETA is now 11:30pm-midnight.”
So that basically means that my site is screwed for about a total of 3.5 to 4 hours. Wow. I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do.
All my sites are down… This makes me wonder, is there any way to spread out sites over several different servers under a single Dreamhost account? I think all my sites are on Burbank… it would be nice if the whole lot of them weren’t affected each time a problem occurs.
attn: jerks my website is still down >:(
I’m up and running again.
Let the quitting continue!
I’m going outside to have a smoke, in celebration
I would love to know why only one of my three sites is not accessible right now. How does that even happen?
(just FYI) Burbank (database server) is still down, both my sites are accessible but can’t connect to the database.
Same here… my discussion forum is down: Can’t connect to MySQL Server throughsocket…
My DB down …
and Burbank is back!
Everyone - whinge more! Seriously, you pay like $100 a YEAR for web hosting, and then complain when your businesses website is down? If your website is that important to you, then you should probably be thinking about spending ~$300, 400 a month on a managed service.
Call me a snob, but I think the Dreamhost guys do an excellent job given their level of overselling. Ironically - it never seems to be the overselling that causes the issues! (It always seems to be the power…).
I don’t suppose any of the whingers have thought that constantly pinging, resfreshing or hosttracking their website might be contributing to outages caused by the increased load these activities will put on the DH infrastructure. Someone mentioned it before and I agree it’s tantamount to running a DoS attack.
If thousands of people are pinging, tracking and refreshing willy-nilly because they think their sites might be down for 20 minutes then it’s affecting us all and it gets right up my nose! If you relaxed a little and didn’t get so obsessive (remember the word “trust”?) then maybe your sites would still be up. Maybe they wouldn’t, but your blood pressure and general mental well being would be much better. Plus you wouldn’t be paying your DSL provider all that money for the extra bandwidth you’re using up checking your site every 15 seconds!
Is there anyone on shared hosting who actually makes a living (or thier millions) out of their website? Maybe you should, as suggested before, get a dedicated server.
They’re going through a bad patch. Looks like they are working hard to fix the problems. If you know better, maybe you should go along and offer to help them out. Otherwise, give ‘em a break!
my sites our down. It had nothing to do with this issue, but I wanted to put it in here to just because I wanted to join the group and whine like the rest of you about a problem that had nothing to do about the issue this post had to do about it. Wow I hope they get it fixed since I whined about it in here instead of turning in a support request in the panel.
all my sites on burton are down. they were down last night and this morning they were still down. hmm
maybe you should spend some money and re-wire it so you can swap out strips because it seems like they go a lot
Good luck
I don’t know what I am talking about. Never dealt with servers, i only have a website for personal use. I am assuming that this is like a power strip?
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