More DNS Issues
Our DNS issues from earlier are back. The solution the load balancer vendor gave us worked for only a short time. We are working right now to find a solution until we can contact support again and resolve this for good. Until then reaching our network will have slower response times than normal.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
UPDATE–
After working with our vendor we seem to have the problem under control. We are leaving this post in an “unresolved” status still until we are 100% sure the problem is not coming back as it did yesterday but so far everything is looking much better.
UPDATE– Thu May 24 10:42:09 PDT 2007
Things certainly seem better. We’re leaving this post as “unresolved” for now while we troubleshoot the outage but as of this moment, DNS resolution appears to be working fine.
RESOLVED —
The problems regarding dns and our load balancer have been resolved. It was a combination of problems that caused the outage. The main problem was that the default udp settings on the load balancer did not have any timeout values set (BAD!!!). This was causing any udp connections that didn’t complete to fill up connection tables on the load balancer causing its CPU to spike and stop serving new requests. We sincerely apologize for this outage and are working on new plans that would prevent a similar outage in the future.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Spend the right amount of money for maintenance and you’ll never have another blog entry again. This place is a joke.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Funny that dreamhost rates a DNS issue, at a medium level.. DNS issues are the most basic things that should work if you are exposing your server to the outside world at all.. this is not a medium severity problem schoolers@dreamhost… this is a CRITICAL problem in webhosting, .. first learn your trade and then come to trade.
For innocents : Dreamhost is dying as a webhosting business..
Why??
For they lost focus of providing secure and stable services, in exchange for focussing for making lots and lots of money..
These kids havent learned yet that money is NOT everything in business. .and everyone who is at the top is there only because they understand that.
May they rest in peace.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:29 pm
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.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Well this is shared provider, you would obviously not have anything mission critical on here…
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:29 pm
ya bill… if u think u can do better, y not open ur own company? huh?!?
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:30 pm
my site and email are completely down - server is Coffee.
I would just like to say thank you for working through the night to fix this, though. Much appreciated as I’m in the UK.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:32 pm
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
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:34 pm
ps… “A customer” not all accounts are $8 bucks a month. dur.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:35 pm
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 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.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Yup, this place is really sucking hard. And every time I contact support about my Rails app being down, they blame my app, instead of server loads haver around 30.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:37 pm
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.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Hey James, they are working on it.. Don’t be a dick! (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don’t_be_a_dick)
By the way, “I have several accounts with you guys” is a violation of the DH TOS, so I wouldn’t go about advertising that…or you *might* get to move all you stuff off those “six boxes” even quicker than you you are planning, and might not get fully :packed up”. [wink]
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:44 pm
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
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:45 pm
(sorry for all the only’s - not fully awake yet!)
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:47 pm
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.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Hi People !!! Hola gente
The website off-line
La pagina web esta linea.
Saludos desde Málaga (Spain, Europe)
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:56 pm
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
May 24th, 2007 at 12:04 am
They can’t seem to keep more than one of the nameservers responding. Either 1 is responding or none of the 3 are. Right now NS3 is responsive but requests to NS1 or NS2 don’t get answered. That your site is resolving on your machine means nothing as that has more to do with your machine and your ISPs caching of the IP addresses. If you want to see if it’s fixed, you need to query DH’s nameservers directly:
NS1 - nonresposive:
; > DiG 9.3.2 > @66.201.54.66 mydomain.com any
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
MBP:~ steve$ dig @66.33.206.206 mydomain.com any
NS2 - nonresposive:
; > DiG 9.3.2 > @66.33.206.206 mydomain.com any
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
MBP:~ steve$ dig @66.33.216.216 mydomain.com any
NS3 - resposive (for the moment):
; > DiG 9.3.2 > @66.33.216.216 mydomain.com any
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER
May 24th, 2007 at 12:07 am
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..
May 24th, 2007 at 12:07 am
These threads always give me a profound sense of deja vu, but I want to play my part and state again how happy I am with DH and the fact that this blog even exists at all. Those of us who love you, love you. And my subdomains appear to be working again, for what it’s worth.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:11 am
milky-way:~ alatteri$ nslookup dreamhost.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
Sweat!!!!!
May 24th, 2007 at 12:16 am
So, you’re willing to pay more for something better, but you paid less to come here and complain? I see you really thought that one through.
Yeah, because something as complex as WP, using hard-to-find things like PHP & MySQL, will hardly work anywhere. That’s why there are only a few million blogs online that use WP–it’s impossible to find a host that supports it.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:20 am
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?
May 24th, 2007 at 12:23 am
ouch take it easy mt
May 24th, 2007 at 12:31 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:32 am
smoke a bowl and relax.
if your website is your source of income then maybe you should invest in a dedicated or colocated server.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:35 am
They can’t. Their mommies only let them put $9.95/month on their credit cards.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:44 am
I hope the Dreamhost folks would let us know, for each problem they have, how they are going to prevent it from happening the next time.
The problem this time is with the load balancer… which means that the LB is not redundant and a single point of failure. Would they install a redundant LB after this? One will never know.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:45 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:46 am
OK, what the hell is happening now, my web site is down, I have no email and I can’t get into web panel, how do you contact dreamhost support without the web panel? I am seriously considering switching hosts…
May 24th, 2007 at 12:49 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:49 am
I’m thinking you guys (Dreamhost) want to get the DNS for dreamhoststatus.com on to different servers from ns{1,2,3}.dreamhost.com, so that we can still get to it even when there are DNS problems.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:50 am
My sites are all totally inaccessable right now. How is this only a “medium severity” problem?
May 24th, 2007 at 12:50 am
Does anybody here have a redundant 2nd host provider? For eg., if DH fails, you can point your domain to a 2nd ISP. If so, care to share which ISP you are using?
May 24th, 2007 at 12:53 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:56 am
Saved for having my own custom servers. Nice I knew they would become handy
May 24th, 2007 at 1:01 am
Update: My sites are back up. Thanks, DH!
May 24th, 2007 at 1:03 am
(BTW, what’s with your timestamps? Aren’t you guys on PDT? I’m posting this at 2:02 AM PDT, but the stamp says ~1:00 AM.)
May 24th, 2007 at 1:11 am
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?
May 24th, 2007 at 1:28 am
When my prepaid time (1,5 years) will expire here at DreamHost, I’ll find a more expensive/far better hosting. This quality is unacceptable. When my website was served from my residental ADSL line, the uptime was far more better!
May 24th, 2007 at 1:38 am
If you’re willing to pay more, check out Pair Networks.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:38 am
My websites seem to be up again (finally), but still no luck with FTP’ing to any of them.
If there’s one thing I can always rely on with DH, it’s their weekly/monthly unreliability.
Go figure.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:39 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:40 am
“When my prepaid time (1,5 years) will expire here at DreamHost, I’ll find a more expensive/far better hosting. This quality is unacceptable. When my website was served from my residental ADSL line, the uptime was far more better!”
If it is that bad, why not switch right now?
May 24th, 2007 at 1:41 am
# 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 $9.95/month on their credit cards.
Love that
Hey triple-post 
May 24th, 2007 at 1:43 am
I dont think have anywhere that can buy host cheapper than DH, (like just 22$/Year)
But, if this cheppest so this quality so worth, it’snot acceptable.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:45 am
# 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.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:45 am
WOOF.
@ James (11:32 pm):
James said “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.”
You dumb end-user - check your facts before making up shit like that. If that were the case, Google would be empty.
James said: “please, for the love of all that’s holy, spend some money and become reliable.”
Pot, Kettle, Black, you tight-ass wanker - you’re complaining about 0.01% downtime (if that) when you’re paying peanuts? GFY you clown. Take your six boxes and ‘hordes’ of customers and fuck off then I bet you’re not charging them peanuts for their websites.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:55 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:59 am
I use host-tracker ( http://host-tracker.com/ ) - my DH websites are currently sitting at 99.92% uptime for the last 38days.