More DNS Issues

Spend the right amount of money for maintenance and you’ll never have another blog entry again. This place is a joke.

Fuck off Bill.

You’re paying $8 a month — 100% uptime obviously isn’t critical (nor is it even _possible_).

Also — Dreamhost’s reliability is pretty damn good, considering they’re shared hosting.

ya bill… if u think u can do better, y not open ur own company? huh?!?

If you guys spent half as much times fixing problems rather than making excuses, blaming others… we’d all be happy customers. Notice how other hosts don’t go down 1/10th as much? I have lost so much traffic because of you guys. If google goes to spider a site and it’s not there, guess what happens? buh bye page rank. buh bye google entry.

seriously, with all do respect, do your damn jobs.

you say things are “slow”? umm… no dummy, things are DOWN. there is a difference. I have several accounts with you guys, I am spread over six boxes, several sites… not one is pingable let alone comes up on it’s own.

please, for the love of all that’s holy, spend some money and become reliable. As it stands, I am packing up and taking all my business and the hordes of customers I have brought to dreamhost as well. to quote “Bill Clinton” (in this thread), this place is a joke

Well, I noticed a little odd behavior and wondered what it was, I could and can access my site fine, I don’t notice any lag, but when I tried loading up ftp://ftp.claninfectionist.com through windows explorer, like I always do (it’s a bookmark, and it always works) it gave me a weird error, then opened it in IE7, it was the http://ftp. that was messing it up. Also, I couldn’t use my php editing tool to edit files directly from ftp, it said gethostbyname() wasn’t working.

I hope DH can fix ‘er up.

And all you DH haters, shutup, if you could run a better hosting company for chepaer, do it, it’d clear more space for us, and we wouldn’t have to listen to whiners.

Hmm. My main site works fine but the subdomains just fall over, seems odd.

I’m happy with Dreamhost - half the price of my previous host and at least they have this status page, more than a lot of hosts do.

Everything’s working fine my end. I can only say that the response times I’m experiencing are only slower by maybe 1 second… which surely isn’t anything to complain about

Does MediaTemple spam here themselves, or encourage others to do it? I have a hard time believing that out of thousands of hosts out there, that it’s just a coincidence that they’re the ones that keep getting mentioned/spammed here.

It also seems fishy that every single person that recommends them comes off as a clueless douchebag.

Based on that alone, I’d figure out a way to host sites from an Atari 2600 before I’d give them a cent.

To the whining pussies that keep trying to tell DH how it’s done: SHOW them how it’s done. Go start a hosting company, then come back and let us know when you’re one of larges hosts in the world. Go ahead, I’m sure you can do it, since you seem like such geniuses.

Mmmh all my reroutes in the dns are broken, well atleast my main website is still up.

I see like so many people complaining, well let me tell you this. This webhosting is the greatest ever. have been here for a couple of months and didnt have much troubles at my end.Never had to contact support or whatever.The monthly costs are laughable and you can even get them back with google ads. Look at the diskspace/bandwith you guys have and look at what you pay for it LOL! Its so cheap.

Having loads of domains hosted on your webservers and keeping the whole thing running with the ammount of money these guys get monthly well, i think its pretty hard. I worked at a hosting company and trust me, keeping everything running is hard. Hardware failure and software errors can cause allot of trouble. Once had that our main webserver went down and suddenly 5 others followed. Try getting that to work again withing an hour lol

This is not a critical error as my website still works and i think people complain way to much, but hey just my opinion.Now all go play minesweeper to pass the time!xD

This is amateur hour. Overpromised and underdelivered. I’d gladly pay more if it meant that I’d get some level of reliability but this is starting to look like a couple of kids running a lemonade stand.

I only went with Dreamhost for the wordpress support, who would have thought something as ancient as DNS would still be an issue..

milky-way:~ alatteri$ nslookup dreamhost.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

Sweat!!!!!

yeah guys, we aint getting into the hummer ftp server from thailand - site pages eventually load - but they take a while.

anyone know whats causing this and when its likely to be resolved?

Dreamhost is dying as a webhosting business..

It’s amazing how stupid some of you retards are. They are growing every day and are one of the largest hosts in the world. I can see how that could be mistaken for dying, since they’re so similar.

if your website is your source of income then maybe you should invest in a dedicated or colocated server.

They can’t. Their mommies only let them put $9.95/month on their credit cards.

Without going into the vitriol of some other members, I would say that this deserves to be a Critical severity. What’s the good of hosting a site on a server, if no-one can get the address? DNS is a basic requirement, and as such is not a Medium severity.

Like others, I’d also appreciate an explanation of the current DNS server architecture, and how DH expect to mitigate this problem in the future.

We may only be paying peanuts, but we’re still paying.

I guess I was just a sucker for their advertisements I didn’t even look at the price. Apparently I should have read this blog before I signed up so that I could realize their supporters include douchebags like you Mike.

I obviously need to drop all the rest of the responsibilities of my job so I can play server admin and move everything to another company.

My sites are all totally inaccessable right now. How is this only a “medium severity” problem?

Ah, little flame-wars in what ought to be a support thread… another saddening argument against anonymity online.

Anyway: my sites were down too (all on pocky) and are now back up some 10 minutes after I noticed they were down and found this thread. So whatever it is, it’s either getting fixed or it’s intermittent.

To the support crew: I for one appreciate your having the post up on the front page and wish you the best resolving it without losing too much sleep. In future you might want to mark everything that results in some people not getting into their sites as “Critical” even if the only realistic way to handle it is as “Medium” — because obviously some people will perceive it as critical in the moment if their sites don’t resolve, and we all feel better when we see the flashing red lights.

Update: My sites are back up. Thanks, DH!

May be this why i cant register a webhost at https://dreamhost.com/signup . I’m trying to buy a host and still dont success. I just email to support team ask why? why dreamhost alway maintaine or DNS issue? can anybody tell me that your host with dreamhost are still working or died?

If you’re willing to pay more, check out Pair Networks.

Yes, why is this blog nameservers:

ns1.dreamhost.com
ns2.dreamhost.com
ns3.dreamhost.com

Just a friendly question, Dreamhost is one of the BEST shared hosts out there.

If you don’t like it, shut your trap and go else where. Simple?
Why do people here expect Google-Like redundancy for $8 per month?
I know that there are people who pay more, but I am sure that they are not the ones complaining.

# Mike Says:
May 24th, 2007 at 12:35 am

if your website is your source of income then maybe you should invest in a dedicated or colocated server.

They can’t. Their mommies only let them put $9.95/month on their credit cards.

Love that Hey triple-post

# Mike Says:
May 24th, 2007 at 12:35 am

if your website is your source of income then maybe you should invest in a dedicated or colocated server.

They can’t. Their mommies only let them put $9.95/month on their credit cards.

Love that Hey triple-post

Quadruple Postage COMMENCING.

Hey Angry Dog–or anyone else: you said “0.01% downtime” Where do we get those figures? Our perceptions can fool us, especially when we’re in an emotional “state.” Are uptime (or downtime for you half-empty-glassers) stats available? I know one of the competitors advertises 99.9% uptime. How can we REALLY know what we’re getting?
Thanks.

And you know how dreamhost customer support answers its customers.. They are pretty damn businessment..
Read this

Unfortunate for me (and you), the above link is also hosted on dreamhost.. Read it, if it works.

“If it is that bad, why not switch right now?”
I don’t want to lose approx. 150 $.

My site has been down. As far as I know, it is up, but this is the final straw.

It cracks me up when idiots accuse DH of being greedy for charging a few paltry $ a month for HUGE bandwidth and server space, and uptime that is actually round 99.9% or better anyway if these some winners bothered to track it.. if this site didn’t exist, half of you wouldn’t even be aware of issues.
WOOF!

No worries Turtle - it’s actually a good service to get some perspective on the actual time of the occasional server issues at DH - a reality check if you will.

You know, DH should employ the services (external to DH servers of course) of just such a tracking service on each server, just so end-users can see what the reality is of “all this excessive downtime that is costing me millions of dollars” and stop bitching about it.

Wasn’t this fixed a few months ago?

They ought to do something.
The folks at “Croc” won’t accept 3rd party stats for their “guarantee,” only the OS of the server.
But my own knee-jerk reaction is “Oh, no, not again. Didn’t we just have downtime? That’s it, I’m leaving.” But the actual downtime isn’t really that bad. And now I’ll be able to actually track it.
Thanks again.

Oh my God I am so very sick of you whiners.

Dreamhost are trying! What more do you expect from them? At least they told us! Would you even know that your sites had been down all day on another host?
All other hosts are much worse than Dreamhost, it’s just that Dreamhost is honest about it.

It’s like I said to my wife when she was sold a car that didn’t start on 1 out of every 10 days;
“That’s your fault for buying a car that is priced below the average price. You pay 10% less, it starts up 10% less often.
…
So what if they didn’t tell you it was so unreliable, did they *guarantee* it would start up every time?
…
But you *assumed* the car wouldn’t be useless for 1 out of every 10 days, you can’t assume things like that! I hope you got a guarantee that the brakes work!”

I love how inexpensive Dreamhost is, which is important for a small business like mine, but this frequent ‘crashing’ is KILLING me…it seems every time I send a new client our link, there’s no site to see! Frustrating.

SInce if I knew anything about webhosting I’d maybe go elsewhere, can anyone tell me how it is that Dreamhost’s OWN site never goes down? Or why is it that I can always access this effin’ page, but not my own? Can’t they put OUR sites on THEIR server?

The customer service I receive from them is top-notch…but I’d take general reliability over that any day!

This is the first time I’ve noticed downtime with DH in a year and a half. The reason I switched was because my previous hosts were charging me more for a fraction of the functionality and space DH offered and with availability issues every week.

I also work for an online business and, as that website is mission critical, it’s on dedicated, managed and clustered servers in a data centre with multiple redundancies and an offsite failover. It also costs thousands of times as much as my DH account - that’s the price of the fifth nine in your uptime stats so if you’re not prepared to pay for that then quit whining about DH and their 3 or 4 nines uptime.

@ Shawn : show me where exactly DH guarantees 99.99% uptime? They don’t. You ‘guess’ it’s around 97% - based on what, the number of pimples on your ass?
Seriously, if my livelihood depended on income from my website(s), I’d be paying more than a few dollars a month to make sure it was actually up and running.

Hi,

i just found the my website is not opening in the browser.
Thn i came to dreamhost status, and i found that, the dns servers are having problems.

SO, i did these steps and i got my website open in my zone. You can try this:

1. Open http://dnstools.com
2. Write your web address and select “do it all” option from the list;
3. Hit enter, and wait a while till page gets reloaded.
4. Thn, open your website in your browser, and it will work fine….

Horray!!

I dont know, for how much zones it work,
but,
it works…

bashukhan@gmail.com

Current Time Is 3:49:36 PDT

This entry was posted 23 minutes ago on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 11:21 pm and is …

Ofcourse the DNS doesn’t get fixed, they’re too busy playing with the time machine!

To everyone whining: First off, learn to spell. Second, stop complaining about prices and how the only sites hosted on DreamHost are those who blog about their dogs. I’m sure your little gaming sites are FAR more important. Third: I tried another host about a year ago. Guess what happened? NO SUPPORT RESPONSE. None. Nada. Zilch. Not so much as a “we’re working on it.” WIth DreamHost? I have NEVER had to wait more than 2 hours to get an initial response and the few issues I have had-resolved in less than 6 hours. For those of you saying, “you get what you pay for,” Not all of us pay $8 a month. I pay a bit more, some a little less. But for the amount of money I pay and the experience I had at another host paying MORE- DH is by far the better choice. Yes it is an aggravation to have my site down. But thank goodness a majority of the recent downtimes have been during the night, US time, and I haven’t lost THAT much. If you’re so upset over DH’s downtime- then stop posting comments here, which by the way remind me of kidswho have nothing better to do, and move to another host where you will never be updated on anything, much less have access to an entire blog about it.

To Abbas: You can also clear the cache in your browser and restart. Works the same.

@angry dog:

i figured my local provider was just a reseller, i wanted to have a “real” provider.

perhaps i wasn’t clear. i haven’t experienced DNS errors with my previous host, nor did i experience any kind of downtime before. I was under the impression this things come as standard?

i ’switched’ because i wanted more features.

whats so befuddling about that? just wanted to ask. =)

hehe ok yeah resellers can be dodgy, and support usually non-existent. If you never had an issue with them, you’re incredibly lucky - or perhaps you just weren’t aware when the site was down? And yeah, DH has a heap of good features too.

I have to say that I’m growing more annoyed with ‘you get what you pay for comments.’ I paid the exact same amount at another hosting company and I had no downtime problems with them.

I came to Dreamhost because it offered unlimited domains on all shared accounts. I manage a lot of hobby sites, so that’s nifty. I could give a rat’s ass about the space and the bandwidth — I don’t come close to using it and I imagine that the average user doesn’t either. The downtime though? Yes, I do care about that. A lot of people care about it. And we could all jump ship right now and get more reliable service *for the same amount of money we’re paying here*.

The thing is: we shouldn’t have to. No, we’re not paying for 99% uptime, but it’s a reasonable expectation that downtime should be rare since we are paying customers and the product is web space + bandwidth + access/ability to use it. Downtime shouldn’t be so regular that I know where the status page for DH is without the help of a bookmark. Downtime shouldn’t be so regular that whenever I’m in a bad mood my friends ask if my sites are down again. (”Argh!” “Dreamhost again?” “…”) I shouldn’t be visiting this page day in and day out to find out why my sites are slow, why webmail isn’t working, why I can’t login to FTP, why my sites are inaccessible.

If other services can provide exceptional uptime for the same cost, why is Dreamhost lagging behind the pack?

I’d shift my sites if I could, but I paid a year in advance and my 90 days has run out. I’m stuck, and I’m not very happy about it since regular downtime seems to be the level of service I can expect from here on out.

A:
“I’d shift my sites if I could, but I paid a year in advance and my 90 days has run out. I’m stuck, and I’m not very happy about it since regular downtime seems to be the level of service I can expect from here on out. ”

Admit you made a mistake, accept the loss, and move back to your previous host. You’re not stuck.

I’ve been looking into alternatives for several months now, ever since my own first experiences of frustration at the downtime, email, etc. Please help me out:
“we could all jump ship right now and get more reliable service *for the same amount of money we’re paying here*.”

Where would that be?

I wish spending money really did make all problems go away. I would still have problems(because i’m so poor) but at least I would feel more secure in thinking that if only I had a little more money all my problems would go away. Back in reality, I know this is not true, because events beyond my control may overtake me at any moment.

Keep on dreaming folks. It’s OK to dream.

(this comment is tripe. The silly things that come out of my mind when I don’t think about what I am typing.. )

Seb Hughes says “Unexpected problems will happen, Nothing ever works 100%”.. well that’s a poor excuse, my car’s braking system has never failed, planes don’t crash so often, computers don’t randomly explode, buildings hardly ever collapse by themselves. It’s a matter of how large the investment to avoid failure is. On the other side, DH is so cheap that I guess we get what we paid for. If I were a power user I’d be very pissed though…

Four and a half hours after this was posted (and twelve hours after the problem originally appeared) it would be good to have some sort of progress update …

I TOLD YOU!!!!!!! NOT TO EVER GO DOWN AGAIN!!!

Everything working OK here, save for a slightly raised response time. Besides, if your’e so angry, contact support instead of posting comments here that:

a. Will not make the situation resolve faster;
b. They’re for the most part non-constructive rants.

Regarding Abhas Khan post using DNSTOOLS.COM (and claiming that it ‘works’).

The source for that site is at the following location:
http://www.systemland.net/

Which means… It’s another hosting company - probably a start-up, trolling here on the DH Status Pages.

Man, I’m getting really tired of the shills.

Well thanks for letting us know whats up DH Any idea when things will be up and running again?
———————

@complainers:

This is suposed to be a SUPPORT site. Meaning I came here to get useful information. I do not believe this site is supposed to be a COMPLAINT site. If you have a complaint with dreamhost, please take it else where. Every time I have to sit here, and read through all the whining and moaning of you guys to get even the littlest bit of information here.

Why even complain here? Do you really think anyone from dreamhost reads all your whining? I know I would have given up trying to a long time ago if I was them. Or is it just that it makes you feel like your doing something about the problem? Like if you whine more the DNS will suddenly work again?
———————
Suggestion to dreamhost…… Since all these guys/gals have nothing better to do than complain, why not set them up a small blog, like this one, for them to do so….. So then those of us who do appreciate your services, can actually get some information here Or if anything, since I don’t have anything better to do when my sites down(I admit that), I’d be more than willing to volunteer my time here to moderate out all the B/S here hehehe
———————
Anyway, thanks again dreamhost, my last server was far worse than you guys are, and I’m certainly glad i switched here

@john
Keep in mind this is _not_ a support blog. Posting here is not the same as contacting customer support, and really the only purpose is to communicate with other DH users. So I agree that excessive complaining is pointless, but there’s no need to reserve this space for support issues, if anything this is the most appropriate place to post general complaints (especially if you don’t need staff to look into your particular complaint =p )

My sites are down. This sounds like it is of critical severity. If not, could I get an example of what would be a critical situation?

Correction on paragraph 3 of my post above:
I’ve had more MySQL database connection errors then I’ve I have fingers and toes and arms and legs, and eyes and ears, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, yet I never had ANY MySQL database connection errors, and my downtime was limited to a drunk driver hitting a telephone pole that carried the Internet cables.

Should read:
I’ve had more MySQL database connection errors then I’ve I have fingers and toes and arms and legs, and eyes and ears, When I was running my own server from home and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, I never had ANY MySQL database connection errors, and my servers downtime was limited to a drunk driver hitting a telephone pole that carried the Internet cables which knocked out the entire valley.

This is critical for me, not for my website, but I can’t send email, cause it says I don’t have a valid domain name!! AAAAARRRRRGGGHHHHH!
–joe

I cannot connect to most of the sites I have at Dreamhost and I cannot send or receive mail. I’d have to agree that this issue is critical, not medium. I have been able to get into one of my sites — although the look-up is slow. But my biggest site is completely unreachable. My users are going to be pissed and make my mods life miserable because of this… argh. We just moved that site here Sunday.

Hope it gets resolved soon and does not continue to be an issue. Working DNS is pretty fundemental for a host…

But, I love this page and the fact that DH at least gives me a place to vent… not that it’ll do much good.

Man, I’m a big Dreamhost fan, but this has been one bad week so far. I’m about to consider taking my e-mail services for my company elsewhere… I’ve been quite busy this week and it seems whenever I need to respond to or send out an e-mail, the service is flaky or plain just not working. This seems to be happening every few months now, kind of discouraging…

Agreed, websites being inaccessible is a critical issue. Perhaps it is only listed as medium because some sites are unaffected?

Anyway for people upset with downtime (including me) overall uptime/downtime should be considered. I know DH doesn’t give any kind of guarantee, but if it is an issue for you then you should track your website’s uptime, then you can accurately say what percentage of time your website is reachable.

Lets put things in to perspective, we all talk about how cheap we pay, and we should expect to get what we pay for.

I know friends that off their heads if hotmail is down, or myspace! These are free services… and still people expect serviceability. Its not what you pay, or even if you pay at all. If you are offering a service, and plan to look professional, then you should host a professional service with stable, reliable and contingent systems.

Now, lets look at the DH site… is that not ‘mission critical’? Its not a ‘hobby’ site, its a commercial site, representing (as many of you point out) one the largest global hosting companies on the planet… yet their own site is subject to the same stability…

Getting a picture? its nothing to do with price, if you are a big player, then you should expect to perform like one..

I cant knock DH’s technical support, they are great when contacted… I am a happy customer, though I have to say, things dont look good when their own site (that of a global leader in hosting) has the stability of a backyard ISP.

While I think my logic is fairly on the mark, I welcome the inevitable flames and go f my self response from the kiddies..

Yeah, this has been a really bad week. It seems as if email was going down every afternoon for several days in a row, and when they finally got that fixed, now the whole thing is borked - email, website, DNS, the whole enchilada…. I’ve been with Dreamhost for a bunch of years, and when they have a bad period, it seems to be bad for a while. This sucks. And as others have said, ALL your DNS servers being down is NOT Medium severity.

Sorry about the semantics, but again with the medium. Are you guys (i.e. DH) treating it like it is medium? All services are down that is a high.

The inevitable kiddies come out to play

Dreamhost are cheap, they tell funny jokes, they let people criticize them, and they are carbon neutral.
So who cares if their network equipment constantly breaks and they oversell hardware to ridiculous amounts?

The web hosting isn’t important; it’s the spirit that counts!

Oh yes, cheers John! All the hotheads in here need to go take a walk. Its a lovely day in NYC. Maybe we shouldnt be working anyway.

This week has proven to be the tipping point for me. I know that DH has signed up a lot of people with nice discounts. A year ago I paid full price for a two year plan. I’m not getting what I paid for. Time to start cutting my losses.

I like dreamhost, I’ve been with them for years and while their uptime has not been the greatest, their price and other features make it worthwhile in my book. Having said that, it is downright insulting to list a problem like this as “medium” severity. I work in IT (identity management consultant) and I fully understand that stuff happens and nobody is perfect, but at least give us the impression that you are treating what amounts to a total service outage for many people as a “critical” problem and not a “eh, we will get to it eventually” medium problem.

Looks like sites are starting to come back.. well most mine are… just have been the joke!

I don’t expect no problems, but I agree with DNS most definitely not being a MEDIUM! Nothing works with out DNS. I have many sites using dreamhost ns, some that aren’t even fully hosted here (as this is only a fail back). I figured, how could you have this serious of a problem with DNS these days? They need to get at least one of the servers up and running reliably… how hard is that? Shut the others off if need be!

Most of my sites are back up! Just waiting for FTP access. Thanks DH.

p.s. ftp came back up as I was typing this ^-^

Tom: agreed. All shared hosting providers have problems of their own. I have used half a dozen over the years and DH has been the best. I moved to Textdrive from DH hoping for a very speedy site from the “official Rails host”, but Textdrive took weeks(!) to get back on urgent service requests and kills website processes indiscriminately and without warning making it IMPOSSIBLE to host a site of any magnitude.

DH has a great deal, good customer service, and an occasional hiccup in service. Big freakin deal. For the haters on the list, go ahead, jump ship.

ditto john, david, tom…
what a buncha whiners. crack a window and breathe the fresh air, people. go for a walk or something. barring that, go find another provider and grace them with your blog comment tantrums.

6:15 Pacific Time, and I was just about to add my ’site+email is down’ complaint to the list, but my site and email just came back up - yay!

Thanks, DH team for fixing this. I appreciate how hard it is to keep so many complex interdependent systems running smoothly. I do agree with some posters, however, that these DNS issues were mis-categorized as moderate. Also, I pay $15 a month for my service (- why? Who knows, I over-estimated my needs.) I make up for it with DH’s super-generous referral program. But I’d be happy with a less-generous referral program if it meant more money going into redundacy in your systems and increased reliability.

Thanks for reading - and thanks for being worker owned and carbon neutral. That DH tries hard to rise above the standard corporate pack in these two ways alone is admirable. Just don’t lose sight of that one thing that keeps customers loyal: don’t fail to fulfil thier essential needs. Our essential needs aren’t five billion terabytes of bandwidth or whatever, our essential needa are keeping our sites up.

Julia

“hilary Says:
May 24th, 2007 at 5:29 am

ditto john, david, tom…
what a buncha whiners. crack a window and breathe the fresh air, people. go for a walk or something. barring that, go find another provider and grace them with your blog comment tantrums.”

hahahaha!!!!!

(not that johns site is up and running again, he grabs a fishing pole and heads for the lake :-P)

Please change it to High. My website is still not reachable

Wow,

This is my first time reading comments, and I’ve been inspired to respond.

For all the criticism, right or wrong, I have yet to find a provider that will allow their patrons this open forum to vent unmoderated. If nothing else, DreamHost is progressive, and is comfortable with freedom of speech.

For that alone, I’ll live with the minimal amount of downtime I experience. In comparison to other hosting companies I’ve used (which incidentally cost more monthy), this is nothing.

Of course this has been pointed out by many before me, but if DNS outages that essentially shut down access to all services for customers are classified as a ‘medium’ severity problem I can’t help but wonder what a ‘high’ severity problem would look like. Any suggestions? Maybe DNS outages + all customer data lost? Or DNS outages + massive damage to servers caused by a natural disaster?

I agree with a lot of the posts on here — this is not a ‘medium’ issue. For businesses and people that rely on their e-mail and websites to generate sales, this downtime is a killer. I’ve been with DH for years & the problems are becoming more frequent and irritating, might be time to shell out for a new provider… too bad I’m paid for 3 years…
I would think that ‘professional’ hosting would have more backup plans in place than DH seems to have.

Sometimes things can’t be helped.

I’ve already gone through 2 DDos attacks already. So sometimes I can’t help but feel that some people are targetting DR directly.
But anyway, since I’m already here for 2 years, I may as well stick with what I got for now. I’ll reevaluate when the time’s up.

Does anyone know if DNS is down does it affect the webmail system?

Dream. Host. Sucks.

Well Im getting sick of this. I am getting a dedicate server from another comany because I need it, but i was going to have DH manage the DNS and make custom records for them. guess I’m not now.

Ok that’s twice for my sites in one day., ENOUGH ALREADY

faaaaaaaark

OK, I do business every day with companies that don’t have half……strike that….. not one tenth of the customer service that Dreamhost has so, I’m not too upset at this point. They’re a growing company and tech problems are a part of growing. Please don’t drop one of my emails though. Thanks Dreamhost team.

pathetic, yet again. this is happening way too much for my liking. obvious solution = change host, end of.

Also anyone who has a unique IP address, that seems to work ok. You can (partially) admin your site by connecting to that IP address.

Half of my website works. Half doesn’t. Bugger.

Arrg. Such bad timing. My sites are totally down!!! When is this going to be fixed??????

Im losing alot of money i would have been getting through googleads today…thanks.

When will you be up again guys ?

I need my e-mails….

I too agree that DNS services are critical… and it’s been more than 24 hours….

If you have a fixed ip and need to get work done just add it to your hosts file.

208.113.173.249 delirium-vault.org
208.113.173.249 http://www.delirium-vault.org

I have also registered alternative domains with other registra’s that point to my ip for .com/.info You can also use one of the free dns services http://opendns.com/ which will also give you some resilience against dh dns failure.

I highly recommend getting a unique ip address and using additional dns providers which will allow you some resilience agains t this thing kind of thing.

jesus, its up and down like a 2 bit hooker…

This is getting a little out of control with clients calling non stop wondering why their websites are not working. I’ve been using dreamhost for years and havn’t had any real problems until the past couple of months. I can’t afford to have unhappy customers and clients.

To those who say “my site is working”: my understanding is that this should read “it is _temporarily_ working”. If the situation persits, you’ll get hit sooner or later when the cached entries in your ISP’s servers expire. This is why it is critical.

########## FIX IT NOW #############

Custom DNS guys. Seriously, you should have learned the lesson by now

we are also work hard here and i couldnt connect to my websites….

so u need to work harder….

pls…

Looks like ferrari is running fine now…..thanks workin hard dh

My website just came back up after a short downtime. I don’t mind, and I actually like the hosting you provide. However, I was wondering, do you guys even host your website on your own server? From all the problems you seem to be having, the DreamHost site never goes down. Or are you giving special attention to your own server?

I am having real issues here with my websites…all are down and the emails are down…my people is contacting me for solutions….please fix this problem asap DH!!!!!….

Jesus Christ on a crutch, you guys are a bunch of whiny bitches!

I’ve been with DH for years and can say they are better than every other host I’ve had in this price bracket. Downtime and other issues come along now and then, but they get fixed and we move on. Get over yourselves.

BTW - I pay A LOT more than $8-9/month here and still have nothing serious to complain about…

I just heard the bell, time for recess!

A huge LOL for this…

“F— YOU DREAMHOST, REPARE THE SERVER MACHINE…………..
KISS FOR YOU FROM CHILE, STUPID MAN”

They will repair your server machine when you repair your spelling.

It’s funny how every time there’s a problem there is always a conversation that starts with a guy complaining and weeping and moaning and then the response that it’s shared hosting and they shouldn’t complain, and then there’s a big fight and a bunch of expletives. It’s comforting to know things haven’t changed.

Hopefully this will be resolved fairly soon.

Any word on how fixing the problem is going? Or a guess at how long it’s likely to be before we’re all back online?

I’ve been with Dreamhost for 7 years and this is only the second major issue I’ve been hit by; I suppose that’s not a terrible track record, but things can seem rather bleak when I can’t get to any of my sites or even my email!

Here’s hoping it’s resolved shortly…

People, please point out an alternative. We can understand DH gives a lot for the price you pay but If you were mistaken enough to choose them for hosting your business and you DO need to read your mail and stuff you’d really consider moving away. Please somebody point alternatives, it’s not necesary they are as cheap as DH but priced 10 times DH, something reasonable, maybe 2, 3, up to 5 times the price of DH

“Quantize Says:
May 24th, 2007 at 6:02 am
jesus, its up and down like a 2 bit hooker…”

My site wasn’t working earlier, but now it is.

I’m pretty happy with DH so far. I’ve been with them for a yr and a half now, and this is the first major problem that has affected me, Besides, DH is a far better host then my last one. They would always blame their providers for any problems, and would hide any problems on their status page once they had been dealt with. You wouldn’t be able to see what sort of problem they have had if you were a potential customer.

Well, I’m sure the DH staff will have this sorted out in no time.

Hi

I have been facing many problems with my site today i.e http://www.scriptsbible.com and got many complaints from visitors. DH has made it a habbit to go down any now and then, it is a big company making big bucks and they have hired a third party to make them load balancer, this is above my understanding. why dont you hire RHCE yourself? may a little more now please but save our so much money invested to get our sites up and ranked in SEs, we lose visitors due to this down time.

and any person ( i guess he was from DH team duhH!) who is abusing respected fellows like Bill or any other here is out of his mind and should learn some manners first.

How many customers DH has and what is the ratio of small hosting accounts and big hosting accounts? if you do not intend to provide service to the $8 packages customers then why dont you just stop this package? why talking about money? on the DH home page 99.99% uptime is claimed and it is not written that they give this to only dedicated or big customers.

there is a problem and this must be fixed, dh has made it a habbit to go down and it is unbearable.

- Natasha

All our sites are still down. It’s really disappointing to lose the service all day. I’ve been having serious MySQL problems too — ‘MySQL has gone away’ errors. I’m generally pretty happy with DH but recently… I dunno. How can DH make it up to us?

hey, does anyone knows a better place to go, with cheap plans for vps? im moving from this shit! always giving problems to us…

Come on, 7 hours with no update? That’s really not on.

Ralf:
I use Future Hosting (www.futurehosting.biz). The space is low, but the prices and stability are good. I use their service primarily for my main Web site, which is apparently “too much” for DH, since its backend uses many files per hit, and DH’s NFS mounts are really slow. I only use DH now for the space.

Well, i do have email and ftp access…just no web access. Doh!

After the 8th time this happened I keep a backup account at Aplus and just redirect.

At least their ‘contact support’ computer is always working so I know some time tomorrow they will reply and tell me my site is down.

I do have SSH and Web access, apparently. I can also access my mail, but no new mail are coming in.

I’m really deceived by the poor performance of DreamHost nowadays. It’s like they are not even taking their business seriously anymore. Web, SSH, FTP down? Fine. Anything but e-mails. When my e-mails are not reliable, I get a hard time.

My site is not slow, it’s completely unresponsive since I first checked at around 8am them morning (3 hours). I can’t get my email and I’ve had to suspend my Adwords campaigns. I keep checking this blog for updates but apparently there has been no change in the status of this issue in the last 7 hours.

At least give us some kind of progress report. And change the stutus from “medium.” It’s slightly insulting.

Whenever you have problems visit This Site. Don’t waste your time on dreamhoststatus.com

Ok, i’ve been phoning people I know who hosts or has hosted with DH. The story they tell me is it’s not reliable, at least for projects or sites you consider “serious”. A couple of guys pointed me to http://www.jaguarpc.com, they have OK plans for under US$ 10/mo. Take a look please and advise on alternatives. DH looks pretty cool but maybe not for all of your hosting needs.

I’ll move to Yahoo, because for a few extra bucks per month they offer backup servers in multiple locations.

I don’t care about the price, what I care about is RELIABILITY in the first place! I’m tired of looking like an amateur to clients who check out my websites - but it is only my fault, for putting up for years with a company that lets us down at the worst times.

Having websites down repeatedly is NOT a ‘MODERATE’ problem! Every time when things go smoothly for a couple of months, this company implements some unnecessary ‘improvement’ that bogs down everything for a long time. They didn’t learn the principle “If it works, don’t fix it!” - this is apparently a service managed by kids, for kids.

Good luck to you guys, when my current service period expires I’m out of here!

Well, for those of you who haven’t been with dreamhost for the 2 years I have then I suppose you can go on saying they are doing what they can. Meanwhile, I’ve exerience issues periodicaly throughout the last two years and all have been approached with the same professionalism. Just because this isn’t dedicated hosting doesn’t mean that people are expecting their sites to go down. And yes, a DNS issues is not “Medium” it’s Critical. I guess when a nuclear bomb hits their location facility they will post a “Critical” status. It wasn’t very long ago that many of us were down while that repaired router issues. Quit trying to run this place off a MAC IIE and buy some real equipment, then hire people that know how to manage it. And while you’re at it, why don’t you buy a few redundant systems so this shit doesn’t happen anymore? I guess I don’t really care since I’ll be moving all of my domains to HostGator at the end of my term.

First experience with downtime….

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access / on this server.

I know that its a cheap hosting, but almost 12 hours of downtime seems serious :S
with this “little downtime” we should ask for a bonus on our accounts, 6 months more on every plan as a gift
keep working dudes.

Been with DH for awhile now. This is the first time I’ve had this much problem. Hope they get it fixed asap.

Can’t believe the people in here… WHAAAAA, my site is down… WHAAAA.. I’m moving to another host. Well move then. Geesh.

No email. Often times when dreamhost is ‘up’, there are small delays. Outages or delays that last a minute or two.

No email is a ‘Severe’ problem. I cannot work without email. So, I sit here and wait and wonder if I should move before my 3 months are up.

Poor uptime like this is not acceptable. I would gladly pay a dollar or two more a month for better reliability and redundancy.

Apologizing for dreamhost by saying something like ‘what do you expect for shared hosting’ is like apologizing for salmonella at your favorite national chain of restaurants.

yay now websites work!!! thanks for u services :p

welll working slow but working.

My sites here aren’t critical, but even so I loose money with every downtime. Paying for ppc advertisement only to have people bump with an error page.

I would also gladly pay more, if that meant more stability.

hey hostgator back me 10 dlls and 10 freedays for interruption of service like 6hrs.

so DH can u back my money!!

For all the people that are capping on frustrated people, telling them they get what they pay for:

Give me a break! As a customer paying for a host, I expect that host to be working, regardless if it is shared hosting or not. I am paying them, as are many of my customers, who also pay for the higher plans with dedicated IP’s, to host my sites, not to give excuses and have these issues last for days at a time. This is listed as medium and that is a huge insult. This should be critical! They should also have a second set of DNS servers that are not attached to this “company” that is supposedly giving them the run around.

Please don’t use the you get what you pay for this is not a mission critical host excuse, because that is simply lame.

“This is the first serious downtime I’ve had with DH in over a year so cut them slack.”

Well that makes you the luckiest guy on Dreamhost, Alan, because not everyone is having such a sunny time of it. This is the second serious downtime that’s affected my site, and the second downtime to have affected it within the last two weeks, and the third fourth or fifth within the last few months.

People’s experiences differ according to which server they’re on (inc. e-mail server) and a host of other issues. My combination of spacey/punch has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. File server troubles. DNS problems. ‘NFS inflated loads’. ‘Spacey cluster issues’. ‘Downtime on Spacey clusters’. ‘Slowness and Downtime on Spacey’.

How much slack are we talking about here? Sure, problems happen occasionally. They shouldn’t avalanche.

Which magic server are you on?

Since it seems that at great price one also gets daily outages of one sort or another with Dreamhost, I think they could roll out new and improved hosting plans by guaranteeing people exact time their services will be down. That way, we could simply plan to take 4 or 8 hours off every day and be done with this. Perhaps they could, for an extra fee, allow one to choose the exact times (say from 9AM and 5PM) and specify their time zone.

Feel free to add your own ideas and suggestions.

Isn’t the purpose of having more than one nameserver to prevent an outage when one nameserver goes down. How likely is it (for any other host that is) that all three nameservers are down?

To me, this is incredible:

- they have 3 name servers, all are down??
- the problem has existed for over 12 hours (that’s unheard of in webhosting anywhere else!)
- Since I joined Dreamhost 3 months ago, I have had no less than 6 outages that lasted over 1 hour, three that lasted over 8 hours, and at least a dozen more less than one hour. Those are awful numbers for 3 years, let alone 3 months.

How they built up so many hosting customers is beyond me - I certainly could not recommend them to anyone. I would much rather them raise my price than have such lousy reliability.

Anyone know how I can add a DNS server externally? I have two I use, but how do I configure the dreamhost nameservers to allow the IP address of my external ones to authoritively pick up the entries from the dreamhost servers (I need to allow the IP address of my name servers somehow, but how to do that escapes me).

Open letter To DH
heya DH,
i have been using y’all for years, and I love your features. Your reliablitiy is not the greatest, but I have always appreciated your honesty and straightforard approach to correcting any errors. These things happen, even to the majors, but I would like you to return to your policy of clarity.

please post what the hell is going on. A medium DNS issue is not what’s happening here. We have a critical downtime (my site and webmail for 12 hours now). All I am asking is more clarity, so I don’t have to waste my time looking at comments like the one I am leaving right now.

thanks,
N-RON

The worst about it: uptime is getting lower and lower consistently along the last 18 months (as tracked by http://uptime.besthostratings.com).

I charted it only to find out that we went from an average 0,1%/month downtime to 1,2% average downtime, in a very consistent ramp.

This means uptime is 12x worse on dreamhost and it doesn’t seem like it is reducing this growth rhythm…

Don’t let 99.xx% fool you, it is downtime numbers that you’ve got to look after.

“Safari can’t open the page “http://dreamhost.com/” because it can’t find the server “dreamhost.com”.”

Doesn’t this just say it all?

If we paid for a dedicated IP address, would we at least be able to access our site with the IP? I might do that for the future.

Trollfighter - seriously, dude, get a life. And remember, the decaf’s in the pot with the red handle. You’re actually getting worked up about people being upset about system downtime? You’re actually freaking out defending a company you don’t work for and are not affiliated with (I hope)? What is it with some people who can’t handle the notion that someone else is complaining about something that *they* deem “not a big deal,” and so….they complain like mad about the complainers? It’s kinda creepy, isn’t it?

if the down time was REALLY only ONCE a Year! then I wouldn’t be complaining….

DH,

Less suck package.. I think my wife already gets that one.

I have been a customer with them for 7 years! and these last couple of years have been really bad! I like how someone said that we better be getting money back…yeah I wish! I am on the hunt for a new hosting company!

Dreamhost: since you obviously are not doing good at fixing the problem, you can at least do a little damage control on the customer side by giving some sort of clue as to what is going on with regards to fixing the problem. Is it too much to ask to get an update that isn’t 8 hours old?

Curious how the lack of updates for past 7 plus hours corresponds with the nighttime hours. I hope nobody there is sleeping.

Simply stated: this sucks. Regardless of whether you are on shared hosting, dedicated, whatever. To all those chiming in that you get what you pay for: you’re validating and reinforcing the fact that situations like this suck. “What do you expect for $8 a month?” = expect crappy hosting.

I’ve started moving all of my sites to MediaTemple. The difference is night/day. I don’t work for them or anything like that, but I figured I would share my 2 cents.

Good luck to everyone! (and yes, feel free to denounce me and rejoice at the fact that your site’s server will have less load as a result of my departure…only to realize that that doesn’t matter if the whole server is down…or if DNS servers are down…or if the email cluster is down…or if power to the data center is interrupted for over a day…or if DOS attacks cause latency…or if you only have one other site on your shared server, but that site is a bloated porn site…or if…man, my fingers are tired of typing).

This is THE WORST host I have ever experienced!

Dreamhost has great prices, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot if your web site is offline from a server failure.

Hmm… I work in IT. In the last 5 years, our websites have had no down-time. I’ve often considered using my Dreamhost account to host some of my side-work prefessional apps, but to be honest.. I’m thanking myself for not doing so now. My Dreamhost sites are down waaay too often. Dreamhost is a good hosting service in general, I would say they are simply overwhelmed. They need to step back and focus on one thing “redundancy”. Single points of failure will get you every time.

I don’t care if we are paying $1 or $100, we are still paying for a service that isn’t working and we aren’t getting any timely updates. I was in the middle of updating when this all happened. Do I expect 100% uptime, no…..no one offers that. But I do expect communication.

Please don’t take this the wrong way but here are some things you might want to consider:

1. No system is fool-proof. Manage your expectations against what you need.

2. If you are losing sleep or money then you need co-location or dedicated servers. That is the whole story. Complaining here makes you look like you don’t have a clue about what you are doing.

3. Co-located and dedicated servers go down as well, so be sure to manage your expectations around that. Oh, and they cost a whole lot more than $10/month.

4. I am pretty sure that the nice folks at Dreamhost are very happy right now and are doing their best to fix it.

5. Wow, some of your comments are really rude.

Wow, this is pretty bad. I switched off hosting my site at DreamHost months ago because the servers were so highly loaded my app wouldn’t run, but I’ve been using it as cheap storage for rsnapshot backups and for DNS hosting. I couldn’t imagine a host of this size actually having problems with DNS!

Of course, then my cell phone went off at 8:00 this morning because my monitoring software noticed my site was down. Oi.

Time to switch DNS hosting to ZoneEdit or my new provider (eboundhost.com — nothing but good service from them).

aksival, Tom, and all our other shills on the board.

Thank you very much. Your “spontaneous” show of “grassroots” support “without compensation” is very reassuring. ;^)

We’re going to need you to step it up a bit, however, and really lay into the detractors out there. Next person who dumps on Dreamhost, I want to see a total dogpile!!! Let’s remind the chum…. ah… clientele, that is, how lucky they are that we even deign to take their paltry payments in return for our own special brand of Happy Dreamhosting!

And don’t be afraid to bring their mothers into it.

Upon the completion of your contracted number of posts, please call Julie at the reception desk to redeem your free year’s hosting and BestBuy reward points.

Steve
VP, Street Marketing & Shill Poster Programs

Methinks you need a new load balancer provider.

HTH, HAND

What a shame dreamhost, we’ve had 100% uptime for the last 28 odd days. and this DNS thing has finally killed that I’ve not been able to get in from work, and finally managed to clear my cache to bring the site back up here at home. Luckily I was able to get in and post a comment on the front page to let everyone know that you had DNS issues and that with some patience it would be fixed (Of course if they don’t flush their cache they may not see the message ).

Its a small hobby/community site so its not critical and for 8 bucks a month I’m happy with the service. I can appreciate those of you that are on the code monster and more expensive plans are p*ssed off, but can I point out that ALL you get for those things is more features NOT a better uptime guarantee.

We are trying to put in a resiliant dual site architecture at work for our internal IT, and currently the budget is running at 500K UKP (NOT DOLLARS!), and thats just the infrastructure investment, we only have ONE of our services running dual site, and thats not email! (Yeah we had a 15 minute outage on email and the CEO wanted to know why we had an outage at 11PM at night considering all this dual site stuff we had bought, Does this sound familiar? ) We don’t guarantee that we are going to have 100% uptime even on our SQL clusters, as the cluster failover will cause connection resets . . . thats downtime. . . . High Availability costs, and I’m happy with 99.83% uptime for the last 51 days

I don’t think that the “you get what you pay for” is a good statement. But, then again, shared hosting vs dedicated hosting is different. Dedicated goes down too…so does “get your own server and host yourself.” You might go down then too.

About the hardware. I am sure they are working on it. They moved the level of critical to High. They know we are all sitting here with nothing better to do than snarl about our sites being down…

my webmail is working for me at the moment, but my email client isn’t. so at least I can email through webmail. some of you may not be able to.

you might want to think about failover monitoring…there is a thread started about it in the discussions…

I can reach sites that my clients can’t reach…

I am not sure about losing mail while this is happening…but I am sure dreamhost will let us know if we lost mail during the outage, but I hope they fix the problem first, then bother with the details.

I know it’s a bugger that some of your sites are down…and even the smallest site is critical to that person. If you think going to a different host will ease your mind, then you should do it, I doubt dreamhost would want you to feel you suffer with them. They want success for their clients and they are probably scrambling and screaming at their vendor, just like you are doing here.

I don’t have issues with any of you “whining” and don’t think it’s whining, but complaining, which is a fact of life.

If you understand the nature of webhosting (I have been with dreamhost since 2003) you realize there is little you can do at moments like this.

My sites started coming back up about three hours ago. I host over 100 sites at dreamhost on about 27 different servers…some are still down, most are up. I have clients who add up to about 14 different web accounts (I only own one of them)

Dreamhost does need to let us know what is happening, if they can…if they are still left in the dark themselves, then that’s another story.

good luck to you all…I wish you a better rest of this Thursday.

Look it is high now. No doh… It was high the first time it happened.

Hey, A! You expect uptime? You expect uptime?! ‘Cause that’s what you got at Surpass?!

Well, how about you take your whinging little website, and your whiney business, and your filthy, stinking $10 a month back to Surpass and help keep Dreamhost happy and content and brimming over with the milk of HUMAN LOVE!

You should be on your hands and knees, trembling with sheer gratitude, that Dreamhost will even host a site for such a miserable, pathetic, cringing milksop as yourself and all of the other complainers on this board.

You are way out-Ethics here, Mister. Your public rants put you well past a Condition of Confusion and deep into Treason.

Any more of this complaining cr@p from any of you and it’s Condition of Enemy for every one of you and you’ll have to go back to Crazy Domain Insane and start your Dreamhost TRs from scratch! I’ve got names! I’ve got IP addresses. Don’t think I won’t do it!

Is that what you want? Is it?

Now — repeat after me -

I believe in one Dreamhost. Dreamhost proceeds from Josh and can do no wrong….

I’m hoping that as soon as the whiners move elsewhere, it will lighten the load enough for us that stick around..

Dreamhost - this issue is not resolved. I’m still getting mostly timeouts on all requests to dreamhost nameservers.

Everyone else! What vitriol! I think everyone’s right here. Dreamhost should be ashamed of themselves for having a DNS service with a single point of failure. It’s a total rookie mistake, like most of their mistakes.

On the other hand, you get exactly what you pay for. What’s nice about Dreamhost is that they are very transparent about their failings. Every other host that charges next to nothing for a lot of service has the exact same inability to provide uptime. But none of them admit it or provide details on how they screwed up and how they’re fixing it.

So, I’m mad about it, but I blame myself for being cheap!

If you want to connect to your site, log in, etc. go to that web site : http://anonymizer.su

Enter your domain name, for example myWebSite.com, then check any country among the list, then submit the form.

works for me. I can at least access my web site, because it still does not resolve otherwise…

(Thank you, Andrew, for the trick…)

Resolved??? I don’t think so.

milky-way:~ alatteri$ nslookup razzle.dreamhost.com
Server: 192.168.1.1
Address: 192.168.1.1#53

** server can’t find razzle.dreamhost.com: SERVFAIL

milky-way:~ alatteri$

Hee hee, does this mean I don’t have to work today???

ipconfig /flushdns

thats work for me :p.

I am suprised that you dont have backup server or something for DNS… at least a temporary solution…

Can you estimated the amount of Adwords money that you are making us (all you costumers) loose?

For all of you people who say “you get what you pay for”, you are full of shit. I have a DEDICATED SERVER HERE AT DREAMHOST. $100 per month. All of my sites and email are down. AM I GETTING WHAT I PAY FOR??? I too have experienced too much recent downtime. This is rediculous. I will also be searching for a new host asap.

Webmail for us is still down. POP and IMAP client access is up. Our website is up and working fine.
Thanks for all your hard work on this problem. I hope it will not happen again.

Well I see that they ‘have it under control’, whatever that means. I still can not get to my web site.

ALL of my sites are still intermittently timing out as of 12:39 PM EDT.

Only 3 main DNS servers? is that normal?

KLA wrote, “Please get these issues under control (not just “fixed” every other day)…” I think that is the crucial point. It’s this, then it’s that, then it’s this again. We all understand that technology includes problems, but it is UNACCEPTABLE for there not to be IMMEDIATE ONLINE FIXES. No backups for broken nameservers?? There should be remedies available for ALL critical functions regardless of the likelihood of a problem. DreamHost, pay attention: Your 364 day a year high value is worth nothing if there’s an unforeseen floating day when nothing works. My professional firm cannot afford flakiness. Years ago, DH was reliable and responsive. The last two years it’s been like a different company.

Mary Says:

May 24th, 2007 at 8:28 am
@Caroline : Are you asking people to enter their LOG IN Information using some russian proxy that might be stealing their passwords ?

’su’ is not ‘ru’… what is ’su’ anyway ? I know it’s not sweden. You have a point, Mary. It’s at your own risk. Thanks for bringing this up. When I am done, I will change my password…

ns1, ns2 and ns3 are all completely unresponsive at the moment - so much for the vendor’s fix.

The one time I don’t need my site to be down is now, Yankees vs. Red Sox and I got nothing to show for, Dreamhost just cost my reputation on the days where I get the most traffic. f-boston.com? maybe I should start f-dreamhost.com

nslookup using ns*.dreamhost.com gives me:

;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

Still down here. DNS problems are obviously not fixed yet…

Lucky you Amanda. All my sites are still down - 9:52 am PST.

Anyone had any luck with Mosso for web hosting? I’m thinking of making the switch, I just can’t take this anymore!
I am prepared to pay more. I came to Dreamhost for their toughted reliability, and have had just the opposite.

Perhaps Dreamhost should read these comments. Everything seems to go down monthly and no one is ever compensated. They don’t even bother explaining themselves.

admiralty.dreamhost.com

still down. NOT RESOLVED

Still down…………………………
Geez, why we always get this problem??

Likely we’re going to see the problem presist on our end and for our users for another few hours, just like when you initially setup a subdomain. The DNS, although not requiring true Propogation like a new Domain Name will still need for ISP’s DNS servers to uncache the old responces from Dreamhost’s DNS (or lack of a responce there of). Hopefully we can all see it come back soon enough…I have 1 of my subdomains resovling but none of my other subdomains yet.

Here is Quick solution to DNS problem. First find your site IP using panel->manage domains->DNS. Then add the entry in the hosts file in your system.

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx mydomain.com

replace xxx. with your IP
replace mydomain.com with your domain.

Now you can access ur site without DNS servers!

Jayson joseph, in response to your comment…. I cannot even access the panel, so that does me no good.

10:15 PDT and my site’s are still down, or at best intermittant. I have multiple clients called already about lack of access to webmail. This is NOT RESOLVED so stop waiting for it to be fixed and make sure you fix is good!

seriously, why is there no back-up system? this has been going on for far too long and is totally rediculous…

DREAMHOST PEOPLE- if you are reading this, PLEASE focus on improving the situation… i have been with you for seven years and would love to stay, but if this persists i’ll have no choice but to use someone more reliable…

i’d rather pay someone else a couple of extra bucks a month for a site that STAYS UP.

every minute that goes by is $$ down the toilet, for myself and i’m sure for others.

it’s gotten to the point where it’s impossible to run a business using dreamhost…

All of my sites are down on the webserver blowpop.

Hope this is resolved soon. Good luck.

There are still some intermediate issues with both connecting to sites hosted over at the Dreamhost network, but also internal errors / slow performance using webmail.

The controlpanel works fine though, which probably is because of higher TTL entries for the DNS-records regarding panel.dreamhost.com.

Brandon, I also am looking for new hosting services . . . do you have suggestions?

Hi michael kebbekus

I can get to your website, I think that Robin hit it on the money…

“Likely we’re going to see the problem presist on our end and for our users for another few hours, just like when you initially setup a subdomain. The DNS, although not requiring true Propogation like a new Domain Name will still need for ISP’s DNS servers to uncache the old responces from Dreamhost’s DNS (or lack of a responce there of). Hopefully we can all see it come back soon enough…I have 1 of my subdomains resovling but none of my other subdomains yet.”

I really like what Dreamhost is trying to do but I have to agree that reliability has been lackluster at best in the last few months.

Yah, my hosting is cheap, but I think it’s reasonable to expect better than what has been going on lately. I have been averaging a support call a week and mostly regarding e-mail. If I can’t even reliably communicate then that is bad. Gmail has been down maybe once this year and it is free. I know there are nuances to that but really… I am using gmail right now because my dreamhost hosted mail is going bananas.

And I realized last night, as I was putting all of my domains in a host file so I could hit them and check mail, that I already had half of them in there. Sad that having my domains in a host file has become normal.

You guys really need to pull things together or you are going to lose a lot of people. From one person in the industry to a company I would really like to see succeed, simplify your systems. Your uptime is likely getting nailed because your systems are so complex. Multiple single points of failure, and redundant single points of failure, are no way to opperate.

This is very bad….. *sigh* Why does it always happen when you least need it to to happen. If only Google ran a hosting service.

I starting to feel dissapointed in our “Employee Owned Company” , I have several of my sites down, and allot of people are calling me about this, FIX IT FAST!!!!

Just saw the update saying it’s fixed again… Really?

> server ns1.dreamhost.com
Default Server: ns1.dreamhost.com
Address: 66.33.206.206

> http://www.inoutbail.com
Server: ns1.dreamhost.com
Address: 66.33.206.206

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to ns1.dreamhost.com timed-out
> server ns2.dreamhost.com
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Can’t find address for server ns2.dreamhost.com: Timed out
> server ns3.dreamhost.com
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
Default Server: ns3.dreamhost.com
Address: 66.33.216.216

> http://www.inoutbail.com
Server: ns3.dreamhost.com
Address: 66.33.216.216

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to ns3.dreamhost.com timed-out
> http://www.aeternus.net
Server: ns3.dreamhost.com
Address: 66.33.216.216:53

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to ns3.dreamhost.com timed-out
> aeternus.net
Server: ns3.dreamhost.com
Address: 66.33.216.216:53

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to ns3.dreamhost.com timed-out
>

Perhaps a poor time for a testimonial, but I certainly appreciate the fact that DreamHost at least runs a blog with info regarding ongoing outages. Speaking from my experience with previous discount hosts, it’s much more satisfying to have even a small amount of information about what’s going on than to have none at all. And, after realizing that this was indeed a major outage for users, DreamHost responded and raised the ’severity’ from ‘medium’ to ‘high.’

I am a professional 3d artist living in L.A. I have a job interview at Digital Domain (a vfx house) in about an hour. I’m really looking forward to telling them that I can’t show them my current portfolio in the interview because my site is down.

This probably just cost me employment with them.

http://www.zoneedit.com

Free DNS. I just set this up to bypass the DH DNS nightmare

> I certainly appreciate the fact that DreamHost at least runs a blog with info regarding ongoing outages.

Good point, Morris, it’s much better than being left in the dark about it.

Good luck, Josh. Man, I can’t tell you how bad this has been for us here. Unreal. We’ve switched hosts already and I’m just waiting for the change to propagate so I can kiss DH goodbye for good.

Hope your site comes back up in time. And don’t pay attention to all the unhelpful pricks who say you shouldn’t have anything important on shared hosting.

It’s a bizarre thing for them to be upset about people being upset for losing money and credibility.

>And don’t pay attention to all the unhelpful pricks who say you shouldn’t have anything important on shared hosting. It’s a bizarre thing for them to be upset about people being upset for losing money and credibility.

He who’s credibility relies on others is only as credible as the one he’s relying on. If it’s that important to you, run your own server.

My sites seem to be coming up now. I’m on the East Coast. So this issue has been going on all day for me. I realize that this is run from the west coast so the people may have been asleep while the servers were not responding.

Hopefully, it continues to work from here out.

aksival, not everyone has the time, money, or know-how to run his own server. like i said: unhelpful.

What I don’t understand is how a competent, professional web hosting company that has been around 10 years doesn’t have redundancy and contingency plans for things like this.

On top of that, how things get posted as “resolved” when they clearly are not. These issues (and related issues) have been off and on for nearly a week now.

aksival: “who is” credibility?

and:

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Dear Dreamhost: we need two things from you:
1) An explanation
2) A list of actions you have taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

Love,
Your customers

I have heard good things about Webmasters. I was going to use them originally, but they didn’t offer IMAP email. Now they do. I think it’s around the same price too.

http://startlogic.com/special_promo.html

These guys have a 99.9% uptime gaurantee, for what it’s worth. PHP/MySQL 300GB/3000GB $4.95/mo/12mo Didn’t see anything about RoR but I don’t use ruby anywho…

Tempting…

I have dedicated hosting and am having the same problems.

Jesus Christ - you people whinging on here are unbelievable.

If even half of the loud and annoying leeches - making money well above your hosting fees with your linkjacking adsense flytraps, and piss-poor ‘client’ sites - actually made good on your threats and bailed, the rest of us will welcome the lessened loads, not to mention the more civil environment here on the status blog.

Dreamhost has great tools, great service, great transparency through problems like this. If you actually attempt to engage in civil discussion or even open a ticket with them (as opposed to spewing vitriol into a status blog which clearly states that it ‘may not be viewed by DreamHost staff at all’), you’d be amazed at how far they’ll go to make you cheap bastards happy. As someone who has had *alot* of experience in IT and networking, I can safely say that you noisy idiots have no clue how good you’ve got it.

Those of you with the conviction to actually kill your DreamHost accounts and go elsewhere could be in for a very unpleasant shock - crap tools, problems that *don’t* get reported promptly, and customer service that’ll make you realize just how beyond the pale and exceptional DH’s is.

If you have a SLA, that’s one thing. But if you don’t - shut it already. Take some personal responsibility, kick *yourself* in the ass for hosting ‘important’ sites without having your own redundancy arrangements, or provider SLAs at the very least.

dh suck big time!

You bastards! You fixed my problems!
I was so going to whine about them, too!!!!

Back to normal my ass. Our site is still down. Awesome.

Um…no it’s not resolved. You might want to consider testing first, then declaring victory second. Just a thought.

My site has been down for about 4 hours.
It’s still down now.
It happened too many times.
Please do something to help.
Thanks.

Thanks Guys!

Downtime is a fact of life on the internet, sometimes yo u get good stretches and sometimes they are bad…. Dreamhost more than makes up for what little downtime does happen by have the the BEST, bar none, support guys around.

I love emailing them some stupid question labeling “low importance, comment or suggestion…” and hearing back in 10-30 minutes during the day, and a maybe a couple hours at night!

That fact alone keeps me here, i have been with big and small hosts, and the bigger they were “hostgator” the worse the service was, they just never said anything!

Thanks again dreamhost…..

aksival, you’ve been flaming anyone who complains about this outage for going on four hours. You are obviously a Dreamhost employee — and certainly not a high level one. Who else would have the time to waste trolling this thread, or such a vested interest. Do you think you are representing your company well? With asses like you at Dreamhost, who in their right mind would host there?

Sincere advice: if you want to support your employer, go back to answering your technical support calls and shut the f up on this thread. You are just making an embarrassing situation worse.

MY SITE IS STILL DOWN IDIOTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have been having much better luck with godaddy virtual dedicated hosting. It comes with no tech support and you are responsible for setting it up yourself, but I have never noticed any downtime in since signing up last November.

any other suggestions?

I will say it is cool that Dreamhost has this blog, but that matters so much less to me than reliability, and they utterly fail in that regard.

Sorry, that should have been “far, far from even beginning to let anyone think that they are NOT rendering services paid for (in a legal sense)”

Note to all noobs:

DNS problems are indeed fixed. I’d explain how to verify it (hint: info on this thread in between moronic rants), but it’d be a waste of time to do so or explain in detail why it can *appear* that your ‘SITE IS STILL DOWN !!!!!!!!!!!’

I’ll attempt a translation, however: “JOOR ISP CAN CACHE FAYLED DNS REPLYS [2 SAVE A BUCK]. UR WINDOZE BOX CAN TO”.

“ipconfig /flushdns” may help if the problem is purely local.

“nslookup” is your friend, might want to learn to use it before you assume Dreamhost is still the problem, and not your cheap-ass ISP cacheing a negative DNS response for 6 hours (which is just plain dumb).

Wow, I can’t believe people are getting this mad when Dreamhost brings the absolute best in hosting for the price. Calm down, they know what they are doing.

I seem to be having a lot of lagged e-mail issues starting back from yesterday afternoon. Emails are coming (from all different sources) anywhere from 1 to 3 hours after they are being sent. Is that part of this issue or something completely different?

Real mature to spoof comments from other people guys. And, no, I’m not a DH employee, I’ve just been through a number of hosts who haven’t been able to perform as well as DH has, at least, not for any reasonable amount.

And by the way Capo, fuck you here and on FT’s forum. You’re still an idiot

Things seem to be working. E-mail is trickling in, although out of order which is curious to me. I am just now receiving e-mail sent ~ 8 am yet I have received e-mail sent later today.

Maybe some of the lost e-mail from yesterday and last night will show up in the next few days.

Thank you Dreamhost for persevering in resolving this issue. I do think it appropriate to do some sort of follow up to the subscribers explaining what was found and the steps to prevent an outage of this severity in the future.

E-mail has become a primary communications vehicle in these modern times and there has to be more reliability built into your systems.

In the three-plus years that I’ve had sites hosted here this is only the second major (extended time period) outage that I personally have been impacted by. The other was that major power outage in LA that happened a year or two ago.

For the amount of money that I pay for shared hosting, the amount of bandwidth and disk space that I get, unlimited subdomains, MySQL databases, and so on plus the relatively low downtime (and how good they are about letting us know what’s going on), I’m extremely happy with Dreamhost.

My blog is not accessible in the last hour. What gives?

DH sucks. It has been crappy for a long time … longer than I cared to remember!

R-

Why are they saying that all issues are resolved, if they know that they are not? Hmm… sigh… I guess we aint makin’ any money today.

DH sucks. It has been crappy for a long time … longer than I cared to remember!
Move?

I have been having on and off hosting problems for the last 2 months with this email. At 120 dollars a year pre-billed, the service is not worth the price. I shouldn’t have to wait hours for critical sensitive emails. For the mire fact that I am taking the time out to come to this site and read this says something.

uh, still having problems with mail here, albeit intermittently…

also, website problems come and go still.

looks like this ‘medium’ issue that was resolved was neither medium nor resolved.

Thanks for solving it, guys. Unfortunately it cost me 2/3 of my normal traffic.

Seeing as it was your fault (settings…), you should do something extra for your customers.

works for me.

I seriously think its about time DH start reimbursing their customers.

@harish020 Says:

[quote]
And you know how dreamhost customer support answers its customers.. They are pretty damn businessment..
Read this

Unfortunate for me (and you), the above link is also hosted on dreamhost.. Read it, if it works.
[/quote]

That blog says:

[quote]
To questions on the phone.. dreamhost support team lazily said that “your downtime problems are because I live in India and probably we don’t have better connections here”. To which I stated that my customers who use the service on my website in countries like australia, USA, UK, etc., also have the same problems with reaching my server, he simply said, “these countries that you are saying are all far away from our datacenter in brea, california, and possibly they also dont seem to have good connections to our servers for which we can’t do anything.”
[/quote]

Funny thing though… I’m pretty d*am sure all dreamhost employees know that their data
centers are all in LA, California. Always nice to see people making up quotes though!

In the era of high availability networks, losing DNS is non-sense. Time to go back to Bill Gates.

artık sitelerim açılıyor oyess

Why is my site still very slow today? Are the DNS issues really resolved?

Damm again it is going bad.

So it will be the three time

Hope it get fix …

All my sites are down again

Dreamhost, can you give us a status update??

Yes, refunds/rebates would be nice.

Apologies really doesn’t do anything. T_T

I love dreamhost, I really do but damn it seems to be falling apart… downtimes and internal server errors. Oh well…

@Mike, does someone at DH pay you to post insulting comments in response to the whiners … or is it just you hobby? b.t.w. before you get started on *me*. please note that I said whiners…

as for me … I love the deal I get at DH. I only use a minuscule fraction of the BW and space I am allowed , but even so I would have to pay a *lot* more with some other host.

My site is not life-and-death to me (would I be on shared hosting if it were?) but my email is. Happily I can outsource *that* to Larry Page and Sergey Brin and have them do the hard work for me. Better yet, it is free.

To the guy who wanted rebates … will 90 cents make a difference to your life?

Mike, does someone at DH pay you to post insulting comments in response to the whiners … or is it just you hobby?

Nope–the whiners pay me in tears.

http://www.dns-utils.com

DNS Utils has lots of free utils and tools to assist with DNS problems.

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