Major Ddos
Major ddos this morning has left many sites (web and mail), inaccessible. The attack is being addressed and seems to be dying down on its own. We apologize for this disruption of service and any updates will be forthcoming. While this issue is addressed and resolved, there might be a few straggling domains/sites that we’re working on.
In the meantime, if you have any questions, please contact our support team.
Happy DreamHost Up-All-Night yet again Team!
.
June 9th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Well, the panel is back up and my email. Now I just need the sites that I spent a bunch of money on advertising to come back alive.
Thanks for the efforts.
June 9th, 2007 at 8:41 am
first!
June 9th, 2007 at 8:41 am
.. or second
June 9th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Does DH have automated hardware DDOS protection?
June 9th, 2007 at 8:43 am
Panel was down for me for about 30 mins - thanks for getting this resolved.
June 9th, 2007 at 8:45 am
25 minutes / 30 minutes downtime… you must have been running like hell hahaha - Ed - technical consultant.
June 9th, 2007 at 8:45 am
And thanks for resolving this so quickly!!
June 9th, 2007 at 8:46 am
ahhhh, was wondering what was happening…I guess I will get some housework done…
Geez, you dreamhost personnel support type people need a break! Good luck, I will check my site later.
June 9th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Yeah…I am back up and happy!!! thanks dreamhost…that was FAST!!!
June 9th, 2007 at 9:11 am
People that make ddos really need to get a life
June 9th, 2007 at 9:17 am
Agreed. Thanks DH!
June 9th, 2007 at 9:34 am
I saw this having problems since 10pm EST last night. 12+ hours is *not* a fast resolution
June 9th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Is this the reason my email has not been working since thirteen hours BEFORE you posted this “outage”? If so, why was this not detected earlier?
My website is fine, but my email is still working only intermittently.
Thank you.
June 9th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Can’t log into my panel and my site is completely down. NOT resolved.
June 9th, 2007 at 9:44 am
@ Dave C.
did you use the panel last night to see if others were having the same problem? is the outage on your email verified? what email server are you on?
@ Chris
what is your website. my was still down after the ddos was resolved, I used the panel to verify that I was still down and sent in a support request…my site was back up within 10 minutes. You might want to try that route, just in case no one on your server has done it, at least then support can check/reboot your server.
@ Everything DOWN
bummer, none of my services were down until this morning. are you back up? or still down? is it email or your site, what are your servers for either service that is down?
June 9th, 2007 at 9:47 am
My e-mails are not working and I still get the “User Unknown” message when I try to send something to myself
June 9th, 2007 at 9:50 am
My site is http://www.i-doser.com and I cant even log into the panel to make a request. My site is completely down, but my email seems to be working.
June 9th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Hi Chris, I can get to your site, spinning thingy on the top left…
try to run a traceroute to your site to see where it is being borked, and you should run verfity this outage in the panel, just to be sure. good luck
June 9th, 2007 at 9:54 am
oh, and you may need to delete your dreamhost.com cookies from your browser, I did have to do that this morning before being able to login.
June 9th, 2007 at 10:45 am
I had some problems with one email account not updating - I notified support and it was resolved within 10 minutes.
June 9th, 2007 at 11:04 am
Mail RECEIVING has not been working since some time in the middle of the night. Still not working. I found out about this rather quickly (first thing this morning) because as part of our automated ordering systems we CC ourselves some information. That CC message was bouncing back to our default account.
In fact it’s only this default @alondra.dream… account that does receive mail. Through sending mail back to myself as a test, I have managed to sneak ONE message through. It took a few hours to finally show up however. But so far nothing else is coming through - no sales receipts, etc… Very very stressful.
Had to put up a news item on the site to make sure visitors and customers trying to contact us know there’s an issue going on that’s out of our hands at the moment.
I submitted a ticket a few hours ago about two email addresses and then a message direct to support when I verified the problem affected all the email addresses at our domain except the default one.
June 9th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Could you give some indication as to which machines/sites were affected? My SSH sessions were intolerably slow this morning and it would be useful to know whether that was caused by the DDoS or some other fault which I should report via official channels.
June 9th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Incidentally, mail host is spunky, web server is alondra (nothing appears broken with the site).
June 9th, 2007 at 11:23 am
VAGINA
June 9th, 2007 at 11:38 am
I have one account on spunky.
I checked it via webmail…I have been receiving emails last one was about 45 minutes ago. have you tried webmail? are you getting bounces? are you not able to send or receive?
June 9th, 2007 at 11:44 am
My mail has not worked properly since 7pm last night. All of my shopping cart orders were being sent to me as undeliverable. Today, my own newsletter was sent to my shopping cart mail account, not my regular account. My site was unbearably slow this morning and last night…matter of fact, for the past four days intermittently. Hard to have a sale and take orders when the people cannot reach the site. As frustrating for them as it is for me.
Is the problem resolved or not??
All the emails from my forum and my shopping cart state the following:
This is the Postfix program at host spunkymail-mx5.g.dreamhost.com.
I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be
be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.
For further assistance, please send mail to
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.
The Postfix program
(expanded from
): unknown user: “crystals”
June 9th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
>DW Says:
>June 9th, 2007 at 8:42 am
>Does DH have automated hardware DDOS protection?
No such thing buddy… You have to work with your upstream providers to block specific attackers. When it’s a Ddos, the big D is distributed… meaning you have lots of attackers.
Because the DOS attacks typically saturate your connections to the internet, your bandwidth provider has to help filter so that real users will still have access. So to do a good job you have play whack-a-mole all night with ACLs on firewalls upstream…
This actually happens to a lot of providers - they are just too whimpy to publish it on a blog for all to read.
June 9th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
There were issues yesterday (at very approx. 16:30 ish GMT) where the panel was really slow (it took about 10 minutes to appear), I had websites slow to not working, FTP pretty much not working and SSH very slow. “uptime” via SSH seemed to show that the server (redondo) wasn’t under any load though. Was this the same issue?
Also… both Monday and Friday, my websites show less traffic than normal. Again, are there issues going unreported?
June 9th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Just as we were really getting going again!
I had noticed pages loading really slowly at around noon EST when this was posted but it picked up for a bit and now my site is inaccessible again.
Keep on keepin’ on and let’s get these servers goin’!
June 9th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
It is funky that while the control panel and email were slow, FTP-transfers worked fine.
June 9th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Email to pretty much every address at my domain is still bouncing. I can log in to all accounts with web mail and verify the mail is NOT being delivered.
(expanded from
): unknown user: “mNNNNNNN”
Reporting-MTA: dns; spunkymail-mx4.g.dreamhost.com
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 55D1E19A9E4
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; ACCOUNT_NAME@alondra.dreamhost.com
Arrival-Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2007 10:30:54 -0700 (PDT)
NNNNNNN = the mailbox number
Mail has been my biggest gripe in the past year with this hosting plan at Dreamhost. It has never been reliable.
June 9th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
And if you can’t login to the web panel (like one of my users and I) then it makes getting info and support a little trickier.
June 9th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
There is an active bot, trying to get to my site (and many other Drupal sites). Typically userid qwyghxh, but he uses other ids as well. Over a million hits on that id on Google. I have deleted his ID but the bot is too stupid to know that and keeps trying to logon. His email address is blogger4@sdial.biz where 4 is sometimes 2, 6 or other numbers.
June 9th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
@Tim: Try to clear your cookies, restart your browser and login again.
June 9th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
When I noticed the mail bouncing earlier, I went ahead and moved mail over to google. Its free and does a good job, I’ve had enough with DH mail, I can’t take it any more.
We have moved all of our mail off DH. Mail is too important to miss a beat such as this.
I will agree though that there is very little that DH can do if there is a DDOS, the only true solution is to get more bandwidth. If you are attacked from all angles, you need to just hope that your connection isn’t saturated to the point that you are shut down.
I don’t under stand how mail was effected though, I would imagine that that would have been taken care of on an internal network. If the mail comes into the MX server, it should be routed internally to the next server, I don’t see the point in pushing it back out onto the internet to the next server to transfer it (or do account verification).
Anyway, thanks DH; you have lost my faith.
June 9th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Damd those dDOSites… I hope their batteries die!
June 9th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Wizguy - Just remember Google owns all your email content forever now :/
June 9th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Wouldn’t it be nice if just for ONCE we found out WHO originated this DDOS, and have them nailed to the proverbial wall (or at least get a visit from the FBI/KGB/(insert-your-favourite-sinister-agency-here)?
Seriously, having experienced a small DDOS myself elsewhere, I know it really sucks not being able to trace the attack past the army of infected windows machines
Kudos to the DH team and their upstream tech buddies for stopping the attack.
June 9th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Re. Wizguy, who said:
er, no…servers being hammered into submission by the continuous onslaught of requests is the real issue here, not so much bandwidth. Adding all the bandwidth in the world won’t help unless you also add additional servers and load-balancing to handle the requests - and that is not the way to approach such a problem. DH handles Ddos attacks the same way everyone does - as best they can!
June 9th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
WTF is wrong with these wankers who initiate these attacks or the recent FTP hack? What’s the bet they’re 13-year-old pimple-faced losers who jack off to stories of overclocked PCs with pictures of multiple GB RAM sticks on the side. Don’t these fucking nimrods realize they are sabotaging themselves as well as everyone else? Fucking shoot every single one of them - better yet, why waste a bullet when you can just stab them in the face repeatedly. DIE YOU FUCKERS.
June 9th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
HELP! my site seems to not be running STILL. when i go to it (the-material-kid.org) it shows a generic search site as if the website doesn’t exist. it was working perfectly fine after the crash you guys were talking about, and then around 2pm it just disappeared. can anyone help me please?
June 9th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
@aaron - a friend called me the other day to report something similar about one of my sites, but strangely, when I checked it was fine, so I suspected some sort of DNS propagation problem… but I just did a whois lookup of your site and it shows your registration due to expire tomorrow and the nameservers listed are for name-services.com and not dreamhost.
June 9th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
hey dan, thanks. i did just figure out that my domain needs renewal. i’m on registerfly and i’m trying to renew it, but when i go to checkout it says “The+merchant+login+ID+or+password+is+invalid+or+the+account+is+inactive.”
gaaaaaaaah, i’m so confused. anyone familiar with all this?
June 9th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
aaron: registerfly is dead, they lost their license in april. All their accounts got automatically added into godaddy. Go look in your mail box, you should have a mail explaining how to open a godaddy.com account with all your registerfly domains already added in godaddy.
June 10th, 2007 at 12:07 am
dreamhost moved me to a new server, saying that its a better place
but the new place is down a lot
website is slow like hell
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
June 10th, 2007 at 1:45 am
Well, that’s it - this is the final straw for me. I’ve only been here a month and I have yet to receive a full week of uptime. The name Dreamhost fits this company quite well, you really do have to dream for it.
Seriously, not a single week of uptime - yeah they offer some good features and their control panel is really good IMO, but for god sake sort out your servers before you loose more and more customers.
If anyone is looking for a good website, I can highly recommend Site5.com - I have another site hosted with them, not had a single minute of downtime with them so far.
June 10th, 2007 at 1:46 am
woops I mean Webhost not website =D
June 10th, 2007 at 2:54 am
My website is still down. Can u say which site or account was being ddos’d?
June 10th, 2007 at 4:34 am
AlexC: What is the URL for the site you have with Site5, so I can do my own tests.
June 10th, 2007 at 8:06 am
I’m still down, 22 hours later.
June 10th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Yeah, This is crazy, could this still be the problem on my sites? NONE of my domains on dreamhost seem to be working this morning. What is up with the recent lack of reliability guys? Seems like the last few months have been a nightmare, I am trying to run a business here and Sunday mornings is usually when all of my clients go to my site to view photos from the previous day (we are wedding photographers). It really makes me look bad, I used to be the most die-hard dreamhost advocate but now I am actually considering leaving … sad.
June 10th, 2007 at 11:06 am
My site, which is just a personal one, is still down. Apparently all of the files in my home folder are gone. Thankfully, I have a pretty recent backup. I contacted support almost four hours ago and still haven’t heard back from them. I’m not losing money, but it is pretty annoying.
June 10th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
No issues here. I am very pleased with DH’s response.
June 10th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
>My site, which is just a personal one, is still down. Apparently all of the files in my home folder are gone.
Same problem here. I’ve submitted a report and still no response after 24 hours. A bit disconcerting when this is all of your data.
June 10th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
all of my sites are down — my websites are on OLIVE. it’s not even clear to me if they’re down for this problem, or some other problem; i haven’t heard back from dreamhost support.
disheartened.
June 10th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Helen’s website is up…her panel is up, but no http://FTP.
June 10th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Well, all my files appear to be back, but none of my subdomains or my other domains are up.
Still no word back from Dreamhost. It would be nice if, while they solve the problem, the acknowledge that they received my support ticket.
June 10th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
Can’t get into panel to clear out mysterious email accumulation. Leaving country for 15 days tomorrow. Dreamhost’s notifications are inadequate. Are all hosts like this? (I’ve been a Dreamhost customer for all 5 years that I’ve needed a hosting service.)
June 10th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
everything seems to be working fine for me.
June 10th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Helen’s FTP went back up right after I posted the first time. lol
June 10th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
My site is still not accessible, I presume this to be because of delayed effects of this attack?
June 10th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
This site: http://www.ov-daltonschool.nl/
June 10th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Are we down again ?
It’s been playing up all weeked … whats up, can we have some explanation ?
June 11th, 2007 at 1:25 am
My site is http://www.muratca.com and I cant even log into the panel to make a request. My site is completely down, but my email seems to be working.
June 11th, 2007 at 3:07 am
gr8 resolution time. I’ve just subscribed to the feeds
June 11th, 2007 at 3:24 am
Slower than molasses running uphill in January tonight!
Unless you’ve got a new problem we don’t know about… Resolved?/Yes!
Is not correct!
June 11th, 2007 at 3:57 am
my webmail address down.. imap disconnect pfffffffff
June 11th, 2007 at 4:37 am
My site is down, in every aspect. What is going on? Critical Errors everywhere!!
June 11th, 2007 at 5:33 am
I think most people here are less upset about the downtime than they are about Dreamhost seemingly ignoring the problem. I understand you guys might be busy getting this resolved but you could at least throw us a bone rather than have us commenting on an issue that’s supposedly “resolved.”
Still no reply on my support ticket almost 24 hours later…
June 11th, 2007 at 5:42 am
Is the Panel down for everyone?
June 11th, 2007 at 7:18 am
Once again, my blog is down. What the **** wrong with DreamHost?!
R-
June 11th, 2007 at 8:13 am
Everything is up and working for me.
Nothing is wrong with Dreamhost, there not much you can do when you get a DOS attack. There is no such thing as full protection, even hardware protection fails. Especially when your getting hit with a million hits per second on all your routers. To much for any hardware to try and differentiate and separate legitimate traffic from bad traffic. Especially if the attack is coming from some of which were probably apart of the attack because you have spyware, trojans, etc. installed and don’t even know it’s there.
June 11th, 2007 at 8:18 am
I wonder if it would be an idea to have smaller DH clusters, so when a site is attacked it does not affect a thousand others. It’s nice to have big clusters spreading the load, external filers and all that jazz but this also increases the chance of being hit when one of the sites in this big happy cluster is attacked or maybe just slashdotted.
June 11th, 2007 at 8:26 am
I have been receiving an error message and nothing has come back on line, support is telling me that its an internal problem and then i come across this. Is there any way that our site will be back up today as we are losing money by the hour. What is dreamhost doing to stop these types of things from happening?
June 11th, 2007 at 8:47 am
my site http://www.dymers.com is still reading an error. Can anyone help me get this up and going again?
June 11th, 2007 at 9:05 am
My site is unavailable since 5:45. No reaction from support team to my request so far. I’d really like to know what’s going on and how long it will take to solve this issue.
June 11th, 2007 at 9:51 am
Listen up… All this downtime and these problems are getting crazy. Just look at the downtime stats for my site. How can I complain with numbers like this…
Total uptime:99.97% Downtime:12 min 33 sec
Weekly uptime:100.00%
Day 2007-06-10 Uptime:100.00%
Day 2007-06-09 Uptime:100.00%
Day 2007-06-08 Uptime:100.00%
Day 2007-06-07 Uptime:100.00%
Day 2007-06-06 Uptime:100.00%
Day 2007-06-05 Uptime:100.00%
(…and, of course, now that I’ve said that, my site will crash in about an hour…)
June 11th, 2007 at 10:03 am
i’ve been using hosttracker for the last 101 days.
99.96% uptime
down for only 55 min 40 sec
yeah dreamhost sure is unreliable… you people get angry way too fast.
June 11th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Rj & Hardedge — That’s swell, really. What server clusters are you on, because I would like DH tech support to move my sites from olive/spunky to yours. If only I could get hold of them. *MY* uptime has been about 50% for the last month. Seriously. Multiple spans of many hours, completely down, with files inaccessible. Preceded by a couple of weeks of mysterious memory errors that left the sites effectively down, because you could go hours without being able to pull anything up, and then a little bit of time being able to pull things up but only exceedingly slowly. I would open up an account somewhere else temporarily, but things haven’t been up long enough for me to migrate my files….
June 11th, 2007 at 10:44 am
My webmail is down and the issue is listed as resolved. Whats going on with that.
June 11th, 2007 at 11:27 am
My webmail’s dead too - has been for a few hours now.
June 11th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Echo that. No access to my panel…
June 11th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Webmail is still dead, IMAP connection refused error. Filed support request in panel too.
June 11th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
This is getting crazy. I think its time for me to leave dreamhost!
June 11th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
@Laura: I’m on the spunky cluster and never had serious issues.
June 11th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Well, it’s not working again! I can’t reach the panel and my website is not really responding (I’m maybe, sometimes, getting an HTML page but no images/css).
FYI I’m on the spunky cluster. And recently, things haven’t been great for me.
Also, if the panel is down, how should I report a problem?
June 11th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Possible? Yes. Will it help? Um… no. If the servers are set up just right, you won’t notice the effects of a user being slashdotted unless they happen to be physically on your server. An attack like this is a killer on network bandwidth, though, rather than server resources. It can potentially take out an entire datacenter, and not just one or two clusters.
June 17th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
I moved to hostmonster–tech support is top notch 24/7 much more reliable for me