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 24th, 2007 at 10:14 am
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…
May 24th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Thank you
good job.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:16 am
I have dedicated hosting and am having the same problems.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Things are back to normal, yay!
Thank you, Dreamhost, for resolving the issue. Having worked for an ISP, I know that things can happen regardless of company size, expertise, etc. Going with another provider is a question mark as well. No guarantees. I use a lot of the features Dreamhost provides and love the fact that I can do things quickly and easily and add as many domains as I’d like without incurring additional cost. I’m sure they’ll do things in the future to prevent this from recurring. Onward.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:24 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:25 am
It does appear things are back to normal — so this thread will recede back into the depths. Shame, ’cause I was having big fun snapping at the critiques of the bestest web host in the whole wide world:
DREAMHOST! (yaaaayyy!)
Only 227 more toady posts and I’ll level up to Happy DreamHost Lickspittle.
Then, I get a free copy of Wolfenstein 3D and another 200 TB on my Dreamhost storage! Then, I can upload all of my male nude photos with the heads of Lance Bass and Justin Timberlake Photoshopped on to my DH account for a backup.
Yippee!
May 24th, 2007 at 10:26 am
dh suck big time!
May 24th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Lost your mind. They’re great. Powweb has been super down.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:33 am
You bastards! You fixed my problems!
I was so going to whine about them, too!!!!
May 24th, 2007 at 10:38 am
why my post is deleted WTF? ????
May 24th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Back to normal my ass. Our site is still down. Awesome.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:50 am
OFFICIAL DREAMHOST ANNOUCEMENT:
May 24th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Um…no it’s not resolved. You might want to consider testing first, then declaring victory second. Just a thought.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Dreamhost is changing it’s name. It’s new name will be Downhost!!
May 24th, 2007 at 10:51 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:52 am
To all of you hammering the people who are complaining… I like Dreamhost too I think they have great potential, awesome features, and fast support *usually, and lately the hosting industry in general is bad across the board. Everyone should expect issues from time to time. I do. I expect outages and accept them. But according to the DH support indicator this outage has been in effect for over 19 hours.
That’s almost a full day that some people, probably most people, have been down.
At what point is it reasonable to bitch? Should people hold off until they are down for 2 or 3 days? A week?
More than a few people make or supplement their living off their hosting here and pay more than $5 a month or whatever. It may not be a big deal to some of you that your clan website or your blog is down. But some people pay a lot of money and, while there might not be an official SLA, there should be a reasonable expectation of uptime and I think being down for a day is cause to complain.
I think they should establish an SLA. It’s not only good for bringing in customers but, as someone with direct experience, it’s good incentive for employees to keep things working and design better systems.
May 24th, 2007 at 10:57 am
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…..
May 24th, 2007 at 11:00 am
By all means, let’s get the SLA involved here.
To wit: next time DH has an extended service failure, like this one, we send in Patty Hearst to gun them all down.
Great idea!
May 24th, 2007 at 11:05 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:09 am
aksival’s absurd logic: No service can ever provide 100% uptime. Therefore, any and all downtime is not only excusable, but should never, ever be complained about. To do so just makes you a whiner and a know-nothing.
aksival, you almost *have* to be a Dreamhost staffer. How could anyone come to that sort of viewpoint without being a shill?
May 24th, 2007 at 11:15 am
MY SITE IS STILL DOWN IDIOTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!
May 24th, 2007 at 11:21 am
aksival is probably not a Dreamhost employee. As far as I know they don’t have an office in Florida. Also Dreamhost has an ok design, but no employee of there’s design abeautifulsite.net…
They look to be customer… perhaps just a fan boy.
As for the Dreamhost issues, I’ve had many problems (more then my previous hoster) but they have also been more open, and ready to help then my other hoster. My previous… if something went down, it’d get fixed sooner or later with no idea when. So be patient, and don’t fully rely on them for time critical stuff.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:29 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Sidius,
Anyone who is “paying a lot of money” for hosting and doesn’t insist on an SLA deserve what they get, to be frank. Running a business on shared hosting is dumb, but running a business that is internet dependent when your hosting does not need to be accountable (by mutually agreed contract terms, to boot!) for downtime is just braindead.
If you need uptime of a certain caliber, you need to have it specified in a contract with your provider. Otherwise, it’s pointless (and stupid, if you ask me) to complain about “only ~97% uptime” since that’s far, far from even beginning to let anyone think that they are rendering services you’ve paid for (not to mention that uptime stats depend heavily on the interval you use for your uptime sample).
May 24th, 2007 at 11:32 am
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)”
May 24th, 2007 at 11:33 am
For what it’s worth…
Thank you. My site is back up and running at it’s full speed without any more problems.
And to all of you who complain… if you’re so damned pissed off - get another host and stop bitching!
May 24th, 2007 at 11:38 am
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).
May 24th, 2007 at 11:47 am
I would like to second the posts already made that state how nice it is to see a message on your home page that says that dreamhost is aware of the problem and is working to fix it. Thanks.
Ah, and my email just came back up.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:52 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:54 am
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
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?
May 24th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
428 comments (+1, now :)). Wow. All for “…reaching our network will have slower response times than normal”. For me that’s exactly what the problem was. It took me a couple browser refresh to load the page, then everything came up fine. That’s for 3 websites back when the problem not resolved yet. Now all back to normal. Lucky me.
Anyway, thank you for this status page.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
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
May 24th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I am assuming this load balancing system they were having problems isn’t actually a single hardware device for all three name servers? That would be a joke!
May 24th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Patrick Andraste
your site needs to gtfo… lol.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
This problem is FAR from status of RESOLVED.
None of my domains on DH are accessible for the past 2 hours.
May 24th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
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-
May 24th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Resolved? I think not.. sites are dead again, although email still ok. Evian server for sites.
I realize this is apparently not a problem with DH but a problem with a vendor. May I suggest getting a new fucking vendor?
May 24th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Looks like it’s down again. Grr argh. If it were just a blog I wouldn’t mind so much… but it’s a business. Sending good vibes so it can be fixed.
May 24th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
DH sucks. It has been crappy for a long time … longer than I cared to remember!
Move?
May 24th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
You morons. DH provides the best value for money hands-down. I’ve tried lots of hosting companies from maximumasp to theplanet to even rackspace and all of them have the same problems that DH have.
I refer all my clients who have static sites to put it up on DH simply because it gives them the best bang for the buck. For those that require more reliability, I put them on their own dedicated machines.
May 24th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
I am glad that this problem is fixed in a day. Our previous host service is having access problems for most of the time.
May 24th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
all you whiners should just contact rackspace they have an amazing service but it cost me over 400$ a month for a basic box that i need to maintain myself…
May 24th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
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.
May 24th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Still not fixed here.
My mail seems to go down for about a day a month. Some dream this dream host is ?
Numerous emails to tech support and its still not fixed.
What a nightmare.