Fresca down

Kudos to You, DH guys, for giving information so fast. I stumbled upon this message the minute I started to have problems connecting with my sites.

I hope You fix it ASAP

Enrico: DH really is magic!

Thanks, DH…my sites are down again for the 7th day in a row but props for getting it diagnosed and an explanation posted so quickly.

It looks like it might be “just you”.

barry is down.

Like Jim, I’d like to thank the DH staff (even though they don’t read this, right? I mean, I’m not counting the trolls) for always telling me when my site is down (note to self: oops… do not use the word “always” as asked by the trolls, remember?), as if I couldn’t notice that myself. It’s like a thief that sends you an email before stealing your tv.

Below is a transcription of a recent Hosttracking report of today, a downtime not even related to the new problems (I guess, I’m in different servers) but I’d like to show it just to tell that they also know when a DH site is down but I’m afraid that they are liars because their reported downtime is much longer than what DH says it will be/was/is (the time in the report is GMT -3):

Hello,
http://www.fractalland.com is now back to normal.
Operation restored at 2007-06-20 23:56:22.
Url was down as a result of: Http error:Http_client.Bad_message(”Unknown reason (e.g. unexpected eof, timeout)”)
Error was detected at 2007-06-20 23:00:41
Downtime total 55 min 40 sec.

What the heck scheduled maintenance today and no email outages my arse. What the heck I need my business email come on guys.

I guess is the power maintenance thing in the previous post: your server is on, but some details are probably stored in the main computer.

P.S. I would hide that error messages…

and again ?????????

this has been happening WAY TOO OFTEN lately !!!!!!!!

Whats going on ?

yoohoo down (503) …

Yeah our site is down and so is the control panel so we can’t report it.

Incredibly slow with all my sites hosted here. Also http://www.jasonsantamaria.com/ and http://www.simplebits.com/ .

Mail - not simply webmail - is also down.

Hi guys,

Something’s definitely up - no panel.dreamhost.com, all my sites are down, email too (IMAP/webmail).

Everything is down. No email, FTP or web sites. I’d report it but the main dreamhost site is down as well. Last week I discovered I was losing email for a few days and I know its not the first time. The occasional problem is completely understandable but this has now become an almost daily event or me with one problem or another.

Also my sites down, they are on: rootbeer

Hmmm, interesting. Few points to all:

The notice I found on the control panel (which is down for maintenance) was that there was an hour of downtime for maintenance right now, and that email would work but *webmail* would not (I see a comment about them being liars because “email” is down). Is it? If it is and it’s out for an hour making you all mad about losing business then I suspect your “email” might be more than business mail; sounds more like bulk mail if an hour or so of downtime, even infrequent, is a huge financial burden.

Speaking of which - I’ve only every experienced one DOS attack that messed up access to my website and account in my 7 of service with DH. Actually, I can’t remember if it effected my account (control panel) at all, just the website. I have more uptime than down time, and really don’t care to get pedantic about the numbers. Point is, I don’t know what people are talking about with daily DOS attacks and server issues or how it relates to the current problem (if it is a problem - maintenance is necessary sometimes). Do DOS attacks made more frequently by spammers or against them? Either way, I wish they’d leave this network alone.

This new downtime is a maintenance thing for the entire network, scheduled or not, and is not just Fresca going down. Maybe it’s needed because of something that happened when Fresca went down, maybe not - that was yesterday. There is no thread and there might not be one about a scheduled maintenance downtime of an hour at midnight on the 21st.

I’m not defending DH, merely observation of what complaints and praises in these threads look like to me.

Oh, and it looks like the control panel is back up. I found the maintenance notice shortly after 12 am, said it’d be less than an hour of downtime, and it’s now 12:42. Webmail is still throwing errors, but POP/IMAP is working.

Webmail being down may not be an issue for you, but it’s how we access our mail, and the outages are frequent and rarely listed here.

For the past half hour I’ve been trying to log in to the DH panel, but the page won’t load or I get errors. That happens nearly every time our email is down so there is no way for us to report the issue or find out the status of what is going on. Lucky for some they managed to see the posted notice od f planned outage while the panel was still working… why wouldn’t that be listed here too?

I didn’t sign up to pay for “more up-time than down-time”, and the frequency speaks to me of more than this being a one-issue instance that happened after the Fresca issue was under way.

dreamhoststatus down
http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/1488/dreamhoststatuska3.jpg

Webmail access down… mysql problems.

What’s happening guys?

Mark, I’m glad to hear your webmail is reliable, I unfortunately experience access problems a few times a month.

If it can’t be provided for the price advertised, it shouldn’t be offered.

>
Webmail access down… mysql problems.

What’s happening guys?

If it was before 5:00 AM EST, I’d say central database maintenance. But… um… it’s 6:00 AM EST, the maintenance was supposedly over an hour and a bit ago, so… beats me.

OK, to access in your webmail >> http://mailboxes.yourserver.com it works, i think there’s a mysql problem in webmail.

Everything seems to be working again.

“# Mikey Says:
June 21st, 2007 at 4:54 am

I can’t believe so many people at the start of this thread are saying how great DreamHost is. Our site is still down. It has gone down literally 20 times in the last two weeks. Once for 15 hours. Totally unacceptable and unprofessional. And the worst thing is the communication has been absolutely terrible by DH. Scheduled downtime is one thing but this is more than that. And its obvious from this thread that even the scheduled downtime isn’t being communicated well enough. Do customers have to constantly check a hoster’s status page if they currently lose their website? Some of us are running businesses here and we need to be proactively told about scheduled downtime BEFORE It happens.”

I’d recommend getting a host that offers an SLA on up-time then. I havn’t encountered any of the problems you seem to be having, even though I seem to have domains on every server. If you’re running a business on a host that doesn’t offer a 99.99% Up-time, you should rethink your strategy.

I [heart] DreamHost.

@andrew: You can subscribe to a RSS feed for outages/problems applying only to your server.

I’d recommend getting a host that offers an SLA on up-time then.

An SLA doesn’t do anything. Dreamhost could put a 100% SLA up right now and all it would change is that they’d throw a few pennies at whiners to pacify them during downtime–if they jumped through enough hoops and followed the correct procedures to collect on it. Seeing how many people can’t even find the support form, I’ll guess that hardly anyone would be able to figure out how to collect the credit.

Plus, most SLAs are network SLAs. Hardware problems? $0. Thinking your site is down because you can’t figure out how to run a traceroute? $0. Software problems? $0. Whoa, look at those credits add up!

People often mention Rackspace when talking about SLAs. Even Rackspace, with their fancy SLA and sky-high pricing, has a one-hour hardware replacement SLA. What good is a 100% uptime if your server isn’t part of it? And the hour doesn’t even include rebuilding RAID arrays or OS reloading.

But, if they do take over an hour, they’ll give you a whopping 5% credit for each hour after that. So, at $500/month, that would be a $25 credit for 2 hours of downtime. Is that really good? Nope. You’d be pissed that you were paying $500/month for two hours of downtime.

That would be a HUGE fifty cent credit at DH pricing. Like that would actually shut anyone up. And you’d have to work for it–they don’t just hand it over.

An SLA is nothing unless you’re spending hundreds or thousands per month, where it can actually add up to an amount worth filling out forms to collect it. Even a $500/month bill is barely worth it. If you’re getting a lot of SLA money because you’re shelling out a bunch of $$$/month, then it would seem to indicate that you’re not getting the level of service you thought you were paying for.

Hmm… it’s almost as if SLAs are nothing more than marketing gimmicks. I’m shocked!

Anyway, thank you Dreamhost, for not insulting our intelligence with a lame SLA.

Also, here’s a few problems SLAs don’t fix:
- You still have downtime.
- Your customers will still yell at you.
- Your business will still lose money while collecting a small credit.

If only there was a way to not rely on a single host for uptime. Hmm… if only someone would invent a system that failed over somehow. We could call it failover DNS. Of course, hardly anyone would go for it, because actual redundancy (not free) isn’t as fun as whining about downtime and trying to blame business failures on shared hosts.

Ha! I forgot about that post.

It really is nothing more than a marketing gimmick, when you’re paying chump change for a shared hosting account.

It’s funny that people will steer clear of unlimited bandwidth & disk space (smart move), yet get a warm fuzzy feeling in their belly when they see the SLA crap all over a web site.

You could even have an account @ DH with no SLA, resell the space, and give your clients any SLA you want. Doing that, you could technically take on customers that wanted to avoid DH because they think an SLA means something, and put them right where they didn’t want to be.

yoohoo down (503) …