Spacey cluster issues

It is now getting into second month of spacey having problems. Isn’t there a permanent fix for that?

All 23 of my sites have been down for 21+ hours this time. This is the 6th time in the last month.

@John Stanton

You might want to try what is suggested here first: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Bad_httpd_conf
Seems someone else on this blog had a similar issue, and fixed it by following the directions there

Thanks for the help guys but we go through this drill every time with a different excuse every time.

I’m on the Spacey cluster too, so I’m impacted.

But let me ask you: Do you really think that having a problem isn’t normal and that reporting it is bad?

As for your problem, that doesn’t sound at all like the one being addressed in this blog.

Peace,
Gene

Hi guys, I’m new here, recently bought a plan and I’d like to know more about the so called Spacey cluster. My website was offline for no more than 5 minutes but the issue seems not to be resolved yet. Has the server experienced several outtages so far? How long has this been going on and how does it affect my website? I got pretty worried about what John Stanton wrote:

“All 23 of my sites have been down for 21+ hours this time. This is the 6th time in the last month.”

Any info is welcome

Well, my cluster is spacey but 18 hous ago (not 1 o 2 hours) my site came down with the “error id: “bad_httpd_conf”. Does anyone know if it may be related? do I have one, or two problems at this time?

Ups, I forgot to tell that the first solution sugested in the wiki (dreamhost’s wiki) didn’t fix it. I contacted support before trying the second.

I guess I’m being affected by this.

What I’ve been seeing for the last 24+ hours is several intermittent outages. Mostly maybe 10 minutes long, but a couple of 20-30 minutes or more - a total downtime of 2 hours or so. Our site’s been down again for the last 10-15 minutes now.

Also it usually seems that the webserver is usually the ONLY thing not working during these outages - webmail/telnet/mysql /panel are all still normal now.

So if you’re seeing a prolonged outage or can’t reach the other services like webmail - maybe you have another problem?

It’s really annoying, but I’m glad to finally have some official notice that there is a problem - I wish it had come much sooner and DH would do more announcements like this.

Next time I won’t delay sending a support request, even if the system comes back up while I’m typing it, as happened twice today.

Our site’s back up, anybody else?

My only issue is that I emailed support yesterday to report the spacey outage and they told me that they had done stuff to the cluster last week and was giving hiccups every now and then but it had been resolved… but now it looks like my report was more pertinent than they may have thought.

I guess I’m just a little turned off by the way that my report was handled - i.e. it’s a past issue that couldn’t possibly be the beginning of something bigger. All that said, I’m still really happy with DH and I suggest it to people all the time.

@dietrite-spacey, yes it is up here too.
There has been official reports since March, but I am not sure about a permanent fix: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/index.php?s=spacey

I’m hoping that the whole thing crashes and burns and is a big swift kick in the pants to get this damn spacey cluster fixed right.
It’s a constant problem and I don’t know how many form support ticket responses I can read.

The problem is fixed now… Let me know if there’s any more problems.
ugh.

-jeff

I am really worried about these outages. My website is online now, but will it be able to provide my clients with the services I inted to? Is there any way to ask for a cluster transference away from Spacey? I would be glad if this is just a momentary problem. I’m not critically affected because I setting up my services these days. However, once everything is online what kind of uptime should I expect?

My sites are all still down Cluster=Spacey, Server=Punch, MySQL=Marmaduke. Opened three tickets on this one:

Message from you (May 6th, 2007 - 09:06:01 / #1860268)
Subject: Websites Down
All my websites are still down after 20 hours with no replies to any
of my support requests. Is anyone there?
userMessage from you (May 5th, 2007 - 14:32:25 / #1859509)
Subject: All My Websites are Down
All my web sites are down again. Please help.
userMessage from you (May 5th, 2007 - 12:37:36 / #1859385)
Subject: All my sites are down
All my websites are down again. Please check it out

The site linked to your signature shows a directory without an index page. Are you sure it’s set up correctly?

Peace,
Gene

@James - ya I hear you there. The issues have not been intermittent as DH staff suggests with the spacey cluster.
More so, it has been regularly experiencing issues every day now for at least the last 2 weeks.

My sites, to repeat myself, are ALL on the spacey cluster (different servers, however), but I have had minimal downtime in the last 2 weeks. Is it possible that there’s another problem affecting some of you folks, either with your particular site or ISP connection?

Peace,
Gene

@Gene, it is not an ISP problem. It is the information from the same host-tracker you use and Internet-seer. And most of the times the web servers are up; it is only the file system that is missing. You can see that Jeff also confirmed that. But unfortunately there’s still no permanent fix,

Gene; that happened after I took your suggestion to resave the domain info (again)

Really getting annoying

This isn’t sporadic. It’s every day for that past 20 days. I have been sending in a trouble ticket every day. Every response was different until the last three days they said it was a problem.

I fixed it myself. I migrated my sites off to a better host provider. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with the children trying to run a business any longer.

Gene Stienberg constantly posts pro-dreamhost fan fiction on dreamhoststatus.com I suggest you totally ignore because he can’t separate his fictional dreamhost from the real dreamhost. Since all he does is read his own pro-dreamhost fan fiction he doesn’t check if his site is up. He only cares if dreamhoststatus.com is up so he can post his latest story.

In the next installment Karl F. discovers a plot by former 420chan customer Kirtaner to INVADE yet another dreamhost hosted mediawiki. Luckily by taking out the server’s connection with an axe he saves the customer from having to restore from backup!

Thanks GENE I LOVE YOUR WORK!

Wow, it really makes you little retards cry if someone posts anything intelligent in your little tantrums.

Instead of crying, you idiots should try slicing your wrists. I will personally guarantee that Dreamhost will never make you little babies cry again if you do.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!! Mommy! Dreamhost made me cry again! Waaaaaaa!

Believe me, they wont move you off the cluster…I have asked for 33 days to be moved and gotten nowhere. My site(s) have gone down for at least an hour for 23 straight days. I have to agree with Mack above, it seems the only way to fix it is to dump DH and move. Ridiculous. Glad their pictures on the homepage show them having a good time, because their paying customers sure arent.

And what did DreamHost tell you about these daily downtimes? Clearly they are NOT normal and not experienced by everyone. As I said, above, before the trolls and impersonators rushed in, my sites are all on the spacey cluster, but on different servers, and they haven’t had these constant downtimes a few folks (who don’t provide links to their sites) are complaining about.

Peace,
Gene

im on spacey, but I haven’t had a lot of downtime. My uptime tracker shows that once a day (sometimes twice) my site goes down for maybe 5 - 10 minutes. Its always happened, and I don’t feel a need to whine and vent about it.

Gene: I think, it depends on what kinda site you run. Your site is just a blog. Others host a forum, where users are coming all the time, while your blog may get 1 hit per day or maybe few extras by posting your link here. Are you sure you havnt experinced any downtime at all? Maybe you have, but you wont notice because you dont have the same visitors as other sites who uses dreamhost for hosting.

Gene: Do you get me ?

OK, here’s some information for you: The site linked to my name has clearly-labeled links to three other sites on the navigation toolbar at the top.

Total page views of all four sites is between 900,000 and 1,000,000 page views per month.

It includes the WordPress blog, “Gene Steinberg’s Mac Night Owl,” plus two MyBB forums and one vBulletin forum, plus two radio shows, with extensive Podcast downloads. We push an awful lot of bandwidth every month, and I can assure you I’d see a performance degradation pronto.

Yes, I’ve had downtimes, but not nearly as much as others here. I never said I had no downtime.

Peace,
Gene

@Gene - I admit, my site is up more often then not and it’s not ridiculously slow most of the time either. However, I am getting many errors from host-tracker for speratic errors and downtime when trying to ping my site. Responses to my support requests have never included anything about my apps or specific sites because it has been the cluster - I’m only running wordpress. It’s also not ISP - I’m running on the Boston University network (we’re a major net switch for the northeast/boston area) so I’m going to have to think the issue remains at the hosting site.

OK, are they telling you that all of your problems are due to the cluster itself? And did they tell you what is being done to solve these ongoing problems?

Peace,
Gene

Just thought I’d chime in. All of my sites have been up and down for the past three weeks. According to montastic.com (site monitoring software) my sites have been down at least once pretty much every single day in this time period. And not always for just 10-15 minutes, but sometimes for hours. I have been extremely disappointed recently with the service.

If things don’t improve, my clients and I will be finding another hosting solution. Dreamhost gives you a lot for your buck, but it really doesn’t matter if your sites are down daily.

It is worth noting that downtime has only been this bad for about the last month or so.

Curious, but did you report these problems in a support ticket? And what did they tell you, specifically?

Peace,
Gene

Yes, I’ve reported it several times, especially lately.

The responses include problems with:
network fileserver in my cluster, NIC, and inflated loads on the machine my site is hosted.

Everytime they say the issue has been resolved. What they fail to mention is that it is resolved, but only temporarily. The next day my sites go down again. As a matter a fact, I just my logs from montastic and sure enough the sites were down again this morning for anywhere between 30-60 minutes.

Brian

I suppose, then, that the fact that they are working on a problem with the spacey cluster ought to be encouraging to you then.

Peace,
Gene

HEY! Stop speaking poorly of 420chan!

anon does not forgive!

“probably had a coronary.”

Nope - I laugh when I post because I get a warm fuzzy feeling inside when I increase the tear-flow of a whiner.

I’m still alive.

I doubt the same can be said for some of the whiners, though. The way they cry here, most probably end up sobbing in their parents’ basement and cutting their wrists while listening to My Chemical Romance.

If your site is slow or unavailable at some point, and that is the time the search engine spiders come along, your site gets delisted.

If it’s at the point when soemone has clicked on your Google adwords ad then you pay for a click for nothing.

If it’s when someone has clicked on your site in the SERPs then you’ve lost another potential customer.

It’s a s simple as that.

So anyone who isn’t bothered about their site being slow or unavailable, and thinks everyone is a whiner because of their problems, knows nothing about doing business on the internet.

Actually, retards, if either of you knew anything about the internet… you wouldn’t be putting mission critical sites on ANY cheap shared hosting accounts. That fact of life has nothing to do with Dreamhost.

And the search engines don’t just drop you. There’s more to it than that, since EVERY host has downtime–no exceptions. Besides, what if there’s a network problems between the SE and your site, regardless of where you’re hosted? Search engines, unlike some people, understand that the internet isn’t 100% reliable. They return later. Heck, sometimes they return even if you tell them not to.

If you don’t like it, get multiple servers in different data centers and use a failover DNS service. It’s not complicated. If you can’t be bothered to do that, then you shouldn’t whine about downtime. Yes, if you know of a solution, but whine instead of using it, you are a whiner.

THE WAAAAAAAAMBULANCE. You seem to enjoy coming on here with the anonymity of the internet calling everyone names.

Get a life.

If you think Google has become the most efficient search engine because it likes to send its spiders to web sites that are slow or down, and then list these web sites that are either slow or down, you have a lot to learn.

You seem to be doing the most whining on here, and you have no reason to even post any comments seeing as your site/sites are all up and running efficiently.

How many comments do you make a day across the internet? I’d say more than 100.

@Gene - The response from Brad said that there had been a problem with spacey earlier in the week but not anymore and that everything was fine. ‘Nuff said on this I guess. I appreciate dreamhost support getting back to me whether it’s perfect response or not.

So, I guess I didn’t misunderstand your previous post and wan’t “out of the loop” after all.

I wouldn’t say that my sites are “mission critical”, but that doesn’t mean I don’t lose business when they are down. I don’t expect any hosting service to be 100% reliable, but I do expect for my sites NOT to be going down EVERY SINGLE DAY. My current Dreamhost account runs be about $300 /yr which isn’t even close to the cheapest solution out there. And I don’t care how cheap the plan is, being down every day is unacceptable. I used to host my sites on my own server and had better reliability than this.

And for the record, I don’t currenlty have a better solution and was hoping that this forum would provide one or at least lead to some insight that might direct me towards one. Rather, all I have found are a few name callers who claim to have everything under control themselves, but prefer not to share their vast wisdom with those who don’t have everything under control.

If you have anything but the basic level DreamHost plan, you are entitled to telephone callbacks for tech support. You should use that and speak to a person and explain, during a single conversation, the full background of your problems. If you prefer to do it via email, be sure that your support request has a full history of when your site goes down each day and for how long, so they can consult server logs.

Let us all know what happens.

Peace,
Gene

my 14 sites were also down for several hours. seems like most of them are back now. woheeei

@Trey:

I think that people post here so that new customers are prepared for the massive amounts of downtime.

@Derrick - the servers are in clusters - your email server is the name of the cluster. So if the file server for the spacey cluster is having problems, then your sites could be affected. Often, when DH posts problems that affect an entire cluster, they don’t post the list of individual web servers, just the cluster name.

75.

hi there.

i am having issues with my email forever prompting me for a password.
i am on a mac and i can either put in the password which it does know or i can
even hit cancel and it may pop up a few more times but it continues to do this.
they say they are fixing it but i am wondering if anyone else is ecperienceing
this same problem.

also. when i go into webmail i log in and it shows an arrow. i hit the back button

You know, your problem might also be related to a corrupted Keychain file. Have you used Keychain’s Repair function?

Thanks brasscrest!

Mary - how did you get the report on your sites’ uptime?

Check out http://mon.itor.us/

Again make sure not to monitor just the server uptime. Sometimes the server is up but not the PHP module, so your site can down but server is up. Get me?

Thanks guys. I was just about to sign up for a dreamhost account but figured I would read some reviews first.
The best way to find out about a company is to read what it’s current customers think. I’ll certainly be signing up elsewhere now.

>> Thanks also for the economics lesson. BTW - my masters degree is ECON.

Congrats — but that doesn’t really cover everything about web hosting.

>> I never said that $300/yr is a lot to pay for hosting, but I do think it entitles better service than this.

Would you agree that you could get worse service at a cheaper host and better service at a more expensive one? If so, then what you get here, for the money, should seem acceptable.

>> If not, then I might want to go into the hosting business myself.

You should. I’ve done it, on a much smaller scale than the DH’s of the world, but doing it on any level helps you appreciate what they do and how it really works. Just keeping an eye on 3 - 5 servers is enough fun… let alone 1,300+.

>> I’m not asking for $3 / month as you suggested, just something reasonable for rates near $25 / month.

Actually, you can do two shared accounts & failover DNS, as I described before, in that price range.

>> Dreamhost used to be one of these reasonable hosting companies before a month ago.

They, like every other host, have always had their good times & bad times–and always will. Those of us that have been here for years usually seem to get that, understand it… and accept it as a part of life.

If you leave DH when they’re down & hop to Host B while they’re up, they’re going to seem better. But when they hit a bad time, there’s a pretty good chance DH will be a better choice at that exact moment.

A failover setup makes those “exact moments” not seem like a big deal.

Note: Common sense should tell you that the two accounts, whether cheap/shared or dedicated servers, should be through two different hosts, in two different data centers, preferably in two different states.

>> But never the less, downtime still costs me customers = costs me money. I can deal with a little bit of downtime, just not daily downtime (in the middle of the day).

You have to match up how important it is to an actual dollar amount and make it happen. Just thinking of it as annoying doesn’t really change anything.

Downtime is downtime, so you can’t just hope that it will be in short bursts or at certain times of the day.

The reality of it is that you could miss your biggest sale ever during the 1 minute of downtime at the most reliable host out there. Not likely, but it’s up to each person to decide what odds they want.

>> If you were trying to help by giving advice all along then I apologize for misreading you. I guess it was the way you referred to other posters as “whiners” or “retards” that made me think otherwise.

I don’t refer to posters as whiners & retards. I just refer to the whiners & retards as whiners & retards, which really seems to upset the whiners & retards.

Also, keep in mind that the people doing the whining about downtime never even researched it and do nothing to make it better. They were greedy, saw the promo codes and huge amounts of features, space & bandwidth and jumped on it. They won’t leave DH over it, but even if they did, the next host choice would be based purely on price, and maybe the “opinion” of a few people offering affiliate links.

Notice no one ever says, “I was just with _____Host for 10 years and they were perfect, so I came to DH and hate them”? That’s because host-hopping cheapskates have locked themselves into a lifetime of whining and always thinking that their host sucks, regardless of who it is at the time.

Example: For $__, you can usually choose between two things:

1. Cheap Host #1: Fairly reliable, faster support and/or phone support (not always both), small account with limited features. Often more restricted & no shell access. Add-ons can sometimes price you out of where you want to be (IPs, etc…).

2. Cheap Host #2: Possibly less reliable (but not always), longer response times & email-only support, more features/space/bandwidth than you’d imagine possible for the price.

But both are still shared hosting, so you will always be at the mercy of other users.

Both cheap, but one charges more for less. People hate that. It would seem like DH figured that out and targeted the largest hosting market there is.

People that choose #1, probably wish they were getting more, but they make their choice and get over it.

People that choose #2 quickly forget everything they’re getting and constantly complain that they’re not also getting what the person that chose #1 did.

The whiners here are operating on the same level of stupidity as the DIY’er that goes to Wal-mart to buy a kitchen sink, then whines that there’s not a licensed plumber on staff to walk them through the installation for free.

Gene,
Reading over what you wrote, I think I would have to agree. Not many companies have forums or an open commenting system.
From what I’ve read, the downtime/problems seem to be quite limited. That’s great but with my luck, I’d be dropped in on one of the ‘problem’ clusters.
Would someone be more likely to be put on a ‘better’ cluster if they paid full price and skipped the whole promo code thing?
I don’t mind paying a bit more if it means a bit better hosting.

@trip

No, the server/cluster you are in is assigned randomly to you. Paying full price means absolutely nothing to the script that performs your account setup.

Gene,
Reading over what you wrote, I think I would have to agree. Not many companies have forums or an open commenting system.
From what I’ve read, the downtime/problems seem to be quite limited. That’s great but with my luck, I’d be dropped in on one of the ‘problem’ clusters.
Would someone be more likely to be put on a ‘better’ cluster if they paid full price and skipped the whole promo code thing?
I don’t mind paying a bit more if it means a bit better hosting.

I’m in the spacey cluster, one of the so-called “problem” clusters, but I rarely have problems. As indicated above, the issue, when it existed, only affected a small number of users (but we have to reach DreamHost’s staff about the difference between “effect” and “affect” :).

Listen, just click on the link under my name, and look at the site’s navigation bar for links to my other sites. Try the sites out at different times of the day or night to get a feeling for performance. I think we’re doing very, very well.

Peace,
Gene

Thanks 1337g33k and Gene.
I just finished signing up. I used a promo code so I figure for £10 for the first year, I can’t really go wrong. If it doesn’t work out, I can move elsewhere.

im also on spacey, and have seen very minimal downtime. Its pretty nice.

All 30 of my sites are down again. Every day for the last week they have been down for different amounts of time.

I appreciate the hard work Dreamhost does, I love the system, I love the price, but in the end if my sites are down I lose money.

Is there anything that can be done to minimize this downtime?

Yeah we just had an outage for about 30 minutes - it’s back online now, there was another similar one about 3 hours back, as well.

Actually, apart from that… the service has been incredible for us during the last 24 hours - - huge amount of traffic (site was on the front page of a whole bunch of big traffic sites like fark and reddit) with barely a noticeable slowdown - THAT’s pretty impressive for $8/month.

Still, despite that, such frequent outages aren’t acceptable for us in the long term… we really need something in between this and dedicated, pricewise

David, you are correct. Same situation here. Seems tonic.dreamhost.com has gone down.

*sigh*

again with this downtime.

my site doesn’t load, i get excuses how my site is using too much memory.

this is absolutely retarded.

OK, that isn’t retarded. It may be a reflection of a problem where your code is using too much memory. Maybe you should try to work with DreamHost to see if you can make things more efficient.

Peace,
Gene

Spacey is experiencing high loads!? How exactly were you able to figure out that information?
Spacey is a CLUSTER, not a SERVER. *BIG* difference.

dads. the server I’m on WITHIN the Spacey cluster, is doing quite alright. 1-2.x loads for the last few days now.

If your *server* is experiencing high loads, you should probably consider reporting it (at via the “Global Outage” option if anything).

What does it mean when traceroute says that a “firewall did not respond” on Dreamhost’s end? That seems to correspond with my site being slow.

@Gene

Thanks for the insight, but the best answer they could give me is to revise my code and plugins. I’ve asked my developer to do this so that we can isolate problems. Previously, I had zero issues with DH. Now my site uses too much memory despite not making any changes or additions whatsoever. The problems seem to be getting worse. Now I’m having issues with the forum sending notification e-mails to my users.

This is very frustrating. I’m a stones throw away from canceling and going to a new host.

Everyday I’m plagued with 500 errors, site lag, and assorted service issues. Host Tracker is reporting substantial site outages every week.

While I appreciate what you are saying, Gene, my previously statement stands.

This is retarded.

Thanks for the insight, but the best answer they could give me is to revise my code and plugins. I’ve asked my developer to do this so that we can isolate problems. Previously, I had zero issues with DH. Now my site uses too much memory despite not making any changes or additions whatsoever. The problems seem to be getting worse. Now I’m having issues with the forum sending notification e-mails to my users.

This is very frustrating. I’m a stones throw away from canceling and going to a new host.

Everyday I’m plagued with 500 errors, site lag, and assorted service issues. Host Tracker is reporting substantial site outages every week.

While I appreciate what you are saying, Gene, my previously statement stands.

This is retarded.

Has your traffic increased? That might explain what’s happening, as this will increase connections.

You might also contact DreamHost again, explain that you have not changed your code at all and that they should look to see if there’s another cause. Don’t take NO for an answer!

Peace,
Gene

Jorge: Unlike Gene , I do understand your fustration

Re. Chris Smith, who said:

I still can’t check mail without being spammed whats your username and password :@

Which has less than nothing at all to do with this post, and is most likely an issue with the setting s on your email client. Help for such issues is often readily available on the Dreamhost Forums (and you can easily research the definition of “spam” in a myriad of ways).

Anyone else experincing site being slow?