Network Problems - router issues persist

Yeah.

Customer support is great but downtime I’ve noticed is becoming more and more noticeable.

How depressing… MediaTemple it is for me I guess.

Me too

I agree, this down time is getting ridiculous! I’m a professional web designer, and when my clients can’t see their design comps because the server is down again, and again, and again, and I can’t access my FTP server, and a host of other issues, then I think I need to find a new hosting company.

I am seriously starting to consider moving as well. Any thoughts on a good replacement?

Tanc - we moved our hosting to (mt) last week but kept the DH account hoping they’ll recover… alas, no recovery. I’m glad we made the move.

*sadface*

Does anyone know how flexible DH are on their 97 day money back guarantee?

I’m about two weeks outside of mine (on my most recent renewal) and would very much like out. I gave them the benefit of the doubt last time and am starting to regret that.

At least we know you are owrking on it… just started hosting with you guys too..

May I be reimbursed for the month? My downtime has stopped cash flow.

Alright…
If anyone want to change hosting provider, i’m offering a rock solid offline solution - you can get a frazzzzzzzillion znafubyte for next to nothing , and it will never go down, because, it’ll never come up.
Sorry for stealing your business strategy, dreamhost.

Pun intended.. its just near impossible to work when its dead slow one day and 3 feet under the other

Yeah, I’m off DreamHost ASAP. This is just ridiculous.

This is ridiculous. I’m trying to show a client their new site and this shit happens. GREAT! Makes me look both stupid and pathetic. Instead of spending all your profit out boozing, snowboarding, sailing, etc why don’t you spend it on some fucking talent so your shit works. I’m finding a new host.

Stop taking pictures of your employees goofing off and posting them on your site while your service sucks! Maybe if you people actually worked then your product would be worth something… patiently waiting the ok from my superiors to move hosts.

My offer to give birth to Dreamhost babies still stands.

My site and database are actually back up, but most of the users who were online seem to have gone elsewhere.

I’m looking at slicehost as the next step up

Ever heard of fault tolerance? This is honestly getting ridiculous lately. Fortunately its an easy migration for me to another hosting provider.

thank god im not in the datacenter from hell (havent been hit by any of these)

oh wow.. dreamhost down? NO WAY!!!

I like it how people post stuff like “oh no, dreamhost is down, lets see how many people claim they’re going to switch providers!”.

In reality, it’s absolute blasphemy how much downtime that dreamhost has had in the past MONTH ALONE.

It’s always the same problem too.. it’s really embarrassing to host a client of mine on dreamhost and have them call you every other day with “THE EMAIL IS DOWN” and have it actually be a real problem and not just some stupid client problem.

Fuck, I just talked a client into signing up for another 3 years of Dreamhosting. Now he says I’m an idiot. Meanwhile, another client can’t reach me all morning to respond to the proofs I sent all weekend. Finally DH reveals the problem, but I’m already using a new gmail account by this point.

Not the kind of Monday I wanted.

While I don’t expect 99% uptime from a feature-rich budget hosting provider I’m frustrated by the past months problems.

It would seem that decency and smart business practices would compel Dreamhost to offer a heartfelt and financially enhanced apology.

Heh, your posts also sent me to PHPwebhosting back in the day… Not your fault though.

I moving my sites to dedicated hosting else where, at least I would lose ad revenue………….to down time

Not too Dreamy, at least the good ones. Pretty much more of a nightmare.

What the heck is going on over there at Dreamhost?? It seems the last few weeks everything has gone to pieces! My service has always been reliable until now. I love you guys but this is completely unacceptable. I don’t want to have to start looking for another provider, get your act together. I think I deserve some financial compensation for this downtime…

I’d tell you to click on my name and visit my site…….

I must say, the one plus to the DH network going down is that it is hilarious to read the comments on this blog. I could do this all day long (which is very bad for me and my business!)

God Bless,
-Dan

Go hire new talent or get out of this game. At least spend some money on redundancy. Ever hear of multiple tiers?

Yes, please fix this problem asap! My business depends on it. Why has there been so much downtime lately?

Time to move to MediaTemple. I pay too much here (almost 20 a month!) for bad service, when I could get great service at Media Temple, so I’ve heard, for a similar amount of money.

Thanks for nothing.

Just came back up for me. This is the second time in as many weeks. But I don’t think I’ll go anywhere just yet. Having bounced from host to host, the only thing that was truly reliable was my own dedicated box, which I had through iweb.ca (great service, highly recommended if you need dedicated hosting).

But since finances don’t warrant anything like that, I’ll be staying here for a little while.

And if you’re running a business that receives a great deal of traffic, you shouldn’t be using a shared host. You should be using a dedicated host, because if you’re skimping on something that’s so fundamental to what you do, then I don’t want to be doing business with you, and you’re probably running on a shoestring anyway.

Maybe I am just lucky, but my site just survived a simultaneous Slashdot+Digg effect (80,000 hits in 2 days) on the base shared hosting plan. If you guys would just wait out the situation, you will find that dreamhost isn’t as bad as people make it out to be.

Dreamhost has yet to recognize that their service has been on a decadent road this year. What’s going on? Even the status page is down sometimes. What’s going on Dreamhost? Will you tell us?

Yeah, I gotta say I have gotten good service from DH in the past. The problem is that my site is down now, not then

This is the worst day of the year for this to happen. This is the day of the year that I need the website to be operating as it falls on the day after my car show. This is disappointing as my website is on the news tonight at 6pm and 11pm EST.

This is unforeseeable I am sure, but we need to have some confidence instilled back into us why this wont be happening again in 2 more weeks. Our confidence is being drained..

Another voice of frustration. We use dramhost for all sorts of things, including file depository for projectpath and now also for activecollab. When things are up and running dreamhost is a great host, but recently reliability has become a total joke. I would have no problem with higher prices, double them if you have to, if I’d get better uptime.

I know this is just another voice in the wilderness, but if this doesnt get any better, and soon, I will look at alternatives.

The best are their blog posts which describe (see http://blog.dreamhost.com/2007/08/21/it-all-falls-down/):

1) How their IOS scripts are poorly written.

2) How their whole infrastructure is a giant house of cards just waiting to come crashing down, and

3) How they could have fixed the problems faster if they just knew what they were doing.

Solid.

DOWNTIME = LOST AD REVENUE, LOST CUSTOMERS
THOUSANDS OF PISSED OF VISTORS and MEMBERS!

Having played the host-jumping games numerous times… I’m stayin’. Yes, I would rather not have the downtimes, but DH owns up to it, gets their work done, and then says “We suck, we admit it, we’ll try to not let it happen again.” Compared to other hosts who have lied to me, told me it never really happened, and so on… I’ll take DH’s honesty any day of the week.

Before I started using dreamhost I was told NOT to use it because of the ridiculous downtime. I was like nah, it’s cool, they seem solid so far.

Boy was I wrong.

All I wanted to do was send email, receive email, and host minimal php scripts on the site. That seems like too much to handle for these dreamhost “livin it up” guys.

I’m as annoyed as anyone about the downtime, but I’d never run a serious business on dreamhost. A personal site for family and friends? Yes. A personal blog with some ad revenue, maybe. Backup a lot of personal files and stream my MP3s? Sure

Anything where I’d have to explain my decision to my boss when we’re down multiple times in a month and the sh*t-eating grins of the yahoos that run the place I recommended were plastered all over the official corporate blog? Not a f*ing chance.

If you run a real business, go get a virtual or dedicated server from someone like superbhosting or serverbeach (I particularly like serverbeach). Guaranteed uptimes, SLAs on hardware turnarounds, professional networking setup/peering, etc. Sure, it’ll cost more than $30 or $50/month, but not that much more. And if you run a real business you can afford the $79-200/month for a business-class hosting provider.

Dreamhost is the king of oversellers, and we all benefit from the great diskspace and bandwidth, but they’re not someone on whom you can really rely for business class hosting. It should be obvious.

A good webhost has failover equipment and pre-configured routers.

SL, I hope your sites with pictures of your dog or your grandchildren are safe.

Does anyone know if this metwork issue is the reason streaming services (Darwin) are not working? I have asked Support to help but not gotten a reply yet (?). Maybe the mail server they use for customer support is also down. Our sites are up, but no streaming. Too bad that’s what most of our visitors are looking for. We lost a gig today because of this. Ouch!

Hawk82: Hey, I’m just trying to give people an emergency out. We’re not ready to go public, I admit that. Or would you rather the five people we just helped get up have been screwed?

I am so thankful I decided to rely on Gmail for all my email for the past four years instead of using forwarders or webmail from my domain.

I love my domain name, but let’s face it, gmail.com is easier to type. And doesn’t have nearly so much downtime.

I’m a DH customer since 2 years for now, and many times I get mad about the network issues at DH, and have been testing many others hosting providers (without leaving DH, at the same time) including some of famous “solid” and “fast support” (like a small orange), and including hosting service of $20 per month.

And believe me, no other host have reported me a better service than DH.

Maybe it’s sad, but it’s the fucking true!

I’ve been a DH customer for more than 3 years, I’ve recommended them to several other people, and I’m really starting to get frustrated. Not only is my stuff down, but I feel like an idiot for recommending DH.

All my sites are “up” and I can connect to FTP as well. All my files look like they are there but all our streaming files are coming back with 404 File Not Found errors. To me, it looks as though the Darwin Streaming Server OR the DNS server resolving those links is down. We use third party DNS for our DH sites, everything except the Darwin server at DH. Looks like DNS trouble to me. This is sometimes the hardest thing to fix. They really should have an off-site (preferably off-continent” backup DNS server. That way, when one goes down the other steps in (duh!). I just don’t think I would be seeing all these complaints if the outage was linmited to just the Darwin server. The must be more to it…..

This place sucks. I’m gonna switch to Dreamhost. Screw this. If anybody wants to get good hosting.. and its cheap.. check out Dreamhost.com. Give them my email address when you sign up so I get comp’d. Thanks!

Will it ever end?

I consider myself a patient person, but jesus christ.

I love Dreamhost.

You know, this is why hosts use redudent routers, so when one goes down….the back up router will take over. It’s really not that hard.

I agree about the pingdom comment the other day. I signed up for it to ping at 5 minute intervals…down up down up down up. You’d have no idea unless you were using your site yourself all day. I’ve got a $1200 credit because of a dedicated server that I sold and I’m hosting 5 or 6 sites in my plan. Unfortunately it is looking like this bullshit is worth dealing with the pain-in-the-ass it would be to switch hosts.

Booo for snorehost.

At some point, the level of aggravation exceeds the benefits of low cost. I’m past that point. Time to go shopping.

How many of you read http://blog.dreamhost.com/?

What looks like happened is one thing after another. How many of you work with Cisco, their IOS, and routers in general? These things happen, and Cisco is not always as helpful as you would like. Yes, they could have written maybe a little less carnivorous script, but you dont know what these things can do until they happen.

Years of good service, and a couple of hiccups in a matter of two weeks. I dont see that as a reason to switch.

Eric..

Chill d00d. You came in to Dreamhost when they started having major problems. Yea that sucks for you. Ive been here since 2001. Yea.. there has been a lot of shit going down lately.. but over the past 6 years… I consider it a “meh” on a scale of Who Cares - OMFG

I’ve been with DH for 5 years now and I have several sites on different hosts, DH is still the best. They never keep you on the dark when some problem arises. Other hosts aren’t as open when it comes to telling their customers something is wrong with their hosting service. I had a number of issues with other hosts and worst outages than these. I will stick to DH. I have shopped around.

@Alex: Instead of plugging “your friend’s” webhosting company, if you want to help people, offer them suggestions as to where they could read reviews of a webhost and then make that person can make their OWN educated decision as to who to go with.

I’ll even help you out: http://www.webhostingtalk.com

Hey guys, if you are looking for a new host, a great review of the top hosts is provided here: http://www.dailyonlineinfo.com.

Oh, shit, dailyonlineinfo.com is being hosted on dreamhost and it’s down tool. Guess i also need to start looking for a new host too.

I think it is about time that DreamHost give up on Cisco. They have been doing a terrible job lately of updating products without testing.

“I think it’s time for me to start looking for another hosting company. This year has been really bad and downtime has increase.”
Agreed, it’s getting bad - failures all over the place.
I think it’s time they dumped some money back into their network to upgrade appliances and hardware.
On a side note, there’s nothing wrong with using the proper monitoring tools to get a general idea of up/down time.
Rob must be kid.

I feel like I broke it. I have hosted with DH for 3 or so years and have used it primarily for email. Then about a month ago I figured I should start doing something with all this space I have. Now that I am trying to set things up (bandwagon, gallery, wordpress, hosting my own RSS reader) things are down constantly. It is so frustrating.

Maybe it’s time to get another router vendor? Someone should be totally kissing your (dh) butts for these issues. Don’t settle for a free lunch.

Please wait until issues are resolved before turning in those tickets to Mexico.

@Chuck:
If you are paying $60/mo, get yourself a real managed provider. While I use DH for my personal sites, I am also shelling out the $70/mo for a real server that has only had 5 min of downtime this year, that is ~99.999% uptime. They have a phone number, they reboot servers in under 15min if you accidentally screw something up, etc, etc, etc.
In my humble opinion, anyone who requires more from DH than the L1 plan, needs more than they can get from a Shared Hosting provider and should be looking for something else. I am paying $7/mo and I am getting my money’s worth and I am satisfied. I do find it slightly inconvenient in a situation like this where I was trying to do a bit of development and found it impossible to reach the DH panel, but I worked through it since as an avid developer I have plenty of other resources available to me.
And really, throughout the entire network process the only real problem I have are problems connecting to the DH panel. My sites are a little slow but that is not even that much of an inconvenience since they are still usable.

And no, I’m not a DH employee, nor have I ever received compensation from them. I’m just a guy who thinks that the most vocal part of DH are the complaining subscribers who plague these blog comments. Maybe someday I will bother to read through all the comments, once all the whiners have moved on.

@Alex & all:

Many didn’t actually notice that there seems to be a bug in IOS and IOS is the operating system of Cisco routers. So it doesn’t help to switch another Cisco router in place. What can you do? Cisco is the leader and the largest IP router provider in the world but doesn’t seem to handle this very well.

The only option would be to change Cisco to some other vendor completely but how can you know how well the other one will perform? Changing main routers to completely another vendor isn’t that easy, running two vendors at the same time is just going to be even more difficult.

This time - this isn’t DH fault - this is Cisco’s problem.

Maybe you guys should do less fooling around (as evidence by your home page photos) and focus on keeping your servers and networks working!! I’m moving a bulk of my business - which you guys have had for well over 5 years - to another provider at the end of our service agreement. Count on that!

Seems a lot of people are moving to Media Temple, were i have been planning to go for quite some time now.

Perhaps The Lord is punishing some of you for having shitty websites! I have many websites hosted with Dreamhost… all of them are W3C valid and all of them praise The Lord in some way, and all of them have been working well through each of these recent crises. I think it’s time for you to get your sites right with The Lord… and the W3C and he might then let them who serve him be served!

ROFL @ VOO, don’t ever change

Dear everyone that wants to leave Dreamhost,

Please do, then shit will be better for me.

Love,
Me

DH is one of the best and only hosting solutions for me and those like me that have been with them for a long time. Show me a hosting provider that will give me:
26 domains
12000 email accounts
700GB of storage space (and growing)
8000GB of transfer per month (and growing)
+SSL
+Unique IP

All for $10 / month. Unlikely.

Ryan,

I realize that you do not need reliability and that DH’s L1 product doesn’t need to offer it to you to make you a satisfied DH customer. If I had a test site and was paying as little as you, I might agree.

What you may want to consider is that DH offer’s more expensive products, like their L3 plan. Some of us DH customers pay DH as much as Media Temple charges for superior service. Why should we not expect Media Temple-like reliability and Media Temple-like telephone customer support for DH’s similarly priced L3 product?

I’ve been with dreamhost for 4 years. this is the last year - these downtimes are comical. Sorry, DH, you were good, but… not anymore.

Unfortunately Media Temple has been having all sorts of problems with their grid hosting environment as well. Why is it so hard to find a good web hosting company? Ones that start out reliable soon end up terrible. There’s a significant business opportunity here for whoever can figure out how to offer reliable web hosting for reasonable rates. I know I’d sign up.

Chuck Says:
“If I tell DH what I expect as a customer, what I’m really doing is giving them an opportunity to retain me as a customer.”

Chuck, you are wanting Dreamhost to listen to you, yet you are not listening to The Lord. You will continue to have a hard time in life if you cannot see the juxtaposition there.

Also, I too am making my living using the internet, so there! Course, my sites are working fine so maybe that’s why I ain’t so grumpy, but if they WERE down, I’d still be pretty cool because my business takes place over the entire year and is not predicated on a single day… as long as The Lord keeps my sites up for by far most of the time, then a little bit of smiting here and there will not bring about the End Times.

To those who DO choose to leave Dreamhost, you’d best not look back as you run lest ye be turned to a pillar of salt!

You guys are unbelieveable! First, for the price you’re paying you’re getting a whole lot of benefits, and second, you should be lucky that DreamHost are sharing inside information with you. We’re family so stop being jerks!

I want more uptime too, but I’ve been working non stop on web design (literally stopping to eat and sleep and little of both) for the last 10-days with few interruptions.

A year ago it was worse in my memory.

I’m sure if your sites are down, that’s gotta suck. But some of you are such sniveling crybabies.

If you want to pay more money for hosting that - might - be more reliable, then do it. No one is stopping you.

If you want to complain, that’s fine and do it. But whining and issuing little childish threats. For goodness sakes, people.

I pity those heavy plan users.

@Series - or you’re just spamming to get traffic to your blogspot site, since that’s the one you linked in your post. If you’re sites been down for DAYS, then it probably isn’t because of anything that DH did.

If you’re dissatisfied with the service at DH, please go away. But most of those who are whining on this blog will not be happy wherever they host, because they don’t seem to understand the you get what you pay for.

I moved my sites to DH over two years ago. Since then, my TOTAL downtime has been (including the power outage last summer) less than 48 hours. That’s good enough for me.

MediaTemple is worse

NightmareHost

Well, none too impressed. My last site was hosted by Dreamhost and we lost hours and hours, probably customers with it. Now I have bought a new domain for 2 years and the fisr 2 days results in downtime.

Hoping this won’t be a continous problem.

Wow! I thought that I could come here for pointers on how to setup a temporary and robust SMTP or something of the like, and I’m met with a bunch of comments that aren’t really helpful.

I pay a lot here at dreamhost for my services (i’m not at the entry 7.77 level). I also have been here for a looooooooong time. I’ve enjoyed the services in the past, and loathe what is happening over the last six months. It’s not a question on who’s on shared hosting or personal servers — we’re all feeling the downtime lately!

I know some people are having issues with website going down, and others are having issues with the e-mail servers being down (smtp in my case). It seems like, since the average dreamhost customer is intelligent, we could have some ideas on how to work around this. It’s a shame that we have to, and its bad that we need back-up plans…

But, the bottom line is that we need to figure unique ways around this until it is resolved. It’s unfortunate that most of these posts are senseless whining.

I was hoping it would be more of my SMTP server is still up, or I have a temporary one setup like this, and my users are utilizing it in this way.

So much for help from these posts. It just seems like a bunch of whiners.

-AJ

I am still out. Cannot send anything. I am way behind in my work and very ticked off about this.

All I want is the up time that got me here in the first place - in 2000. What is going on? The answers on the status are not helpful or encouraging. Dreamhost, it’s time to give consideration for all the business your downtime has cost us. I wish there was another place to write about my bill.

In the meantime, is there any ETA on when this WILL be resolved?

AJ: You can’t really blame them for whining, Dreamhost don’t seem to provide any outlet for their concerns, timescale for fixes, hourly updates: even just saying “no progress, still working on it” goes a *long* way, unlike a single post 18 hours ago with no more info. When you leave people hanging like they continue to do, and have done repeatedly in the past, they’re going to vent. Their customer service in this respect is just plain terrible.

As for an SMTP solution, the best I can offer is to suggest switching to Google Apps for Domains, which is basically Gmail but using your domain e.g. you@example.com (and Calendar, Docs, etc.). See more here:
http://www.google.com/a/

You need to set it up, then change your DNS MX entries to point to Google instead of Dreamhost (and wait for propagation). I’ve been running it primarily for e-mail on one of my sites and it does the job really well; the web interface is fantastic, you can access via your regular mail clients using SPOP and its spam filters are *far* superior to Dreamhost’s, mostly ’cause Dreamhost are still running the old Debian Stable (Sarge)’s version of SpamAssassin, which doesn’t have certain tests such as SURBL/URIBL enabled. (When they eventually upgrade their mailservers to Etch this will massively improve things, though asking them when this is scheduled for results in silence.)

Stef: I agree that dreamhost could at least update semi-frequently. BUT!!!

That’s what I’m talking about when I say adding something of value to the discussion. Thanks for coming up with some good ideas for the interim! It might be a great thing to do a howto/wiki thing on that very idea!

I’m beginning to wonder if it would help if I donated the 3 linksys routers I have laying around. They seem to work really well.

Anyone else have ideas other than, “Just move to ?”

-AJ

My whole company have been stuck for nearly the past day, unable to send e-mails. It’s relatively annoying, to say the least. Before someone jumps the gun and says companies shouldn’t use DH, not all companies have multi-gazillon dollars to spare, especially when DH “did the trick” for us for a while, and was better than Valueweb, where their dedicated servers are all blacklisted everywhere due to the massive amount of spam that gets sent by newbs administrator computers.

Also, we paid for years of service in advance … basically locking us in here. Evil, all in all.

yesterday sites down

today again?

tomorrow again?

This is really beginning to annoy me. It’s been almost 18 hours that the outgoing mail has been down, and like many others I have things that need to be sent.

I just wish there was some way to contact them that resulted in some kind of an idea how long this would take.

This is my uptime page: http://www.siteuptime.com/statistics.php?Id=45332&&UserId=55344
My plan is Monster Code 20$ / month. I think this price is OK for service (uptime) that I riceive.

Everything was fine until 5 minutes ago, SQL Database Connection failed on all sites I host at the moment. Any news?

I am as pissed off as the next guy, but PLEASE … they have been really great for me, and for the price … come on. But for the price … I am super happy … extremely happy … I think they have done a superb job.

I have stuff on MediaTemple too and they actually don’t seem as fast, but has been more reliable, in my short experience. But cost nearly as twice as much …

No one is chaining any of you here … unhappy … just leave … go pay some big bucks at RackSpace.

I just spent about an hour messing with my wife’s macbook because I didn’t “dream” that dreamhost would be having problems again with servers.

Still no outgoing mail??? And why would incoming work, but not outgoing?

@brasscrest , I don’t know you, but I have got my sites down many many hours, and usually really really slow, comparing with other hostings.

Of course I will change to another, I just need time and money, but I will, since I started like a hobby but right now I can’t afford 1 day off 6 on, and lately is like that.

brasscrest, are you from DH?

Otherwise, don’t talk about what you have no idea, I’ve got DH for no important sites a long time, but right now I have sites that can’t afford losing mails or traffic, and I don’t want a 10 times bigger load time than other hosting services.

I have send tickets many times to DH, but the server is still extremely slow and now, this summer with a lot of fatal errors, and this is not what I paid for.

Actually it was better some time ago, maybe now they want more money and the put more users in the same server, is that?

I don’t know, I don’t mind, I just want a good service.

My clients complain so much about their website!

>____

I’m sorry that DH is down, and yes I am affected.

Posting your sob stories here does not help.

If 1. Your company is going bankrupt cause your losing income because DH is down, you probaly aren’t making real big money anyways, and if so, stop cheaping out and host elsewhere.

2. If you have no money to go elsewhere, what the heck are you hosting that you need all the space and bandwith that DH offers? There are plenty of hosts that offer excellent reliability but a lot less space/bandwith. Find one.

3. If your clients are bugging you… well switch hosts! If you can’t afford it, tell your customers how much you pay dream host, and than tell them how much a more reliable host would cost and ask them if they want the service or not. Its so easy to offer tiered service it’s not even funny.

Yes I do wish my email was working right now with DH, but I have accounts with other hosts, and the world will not end for what DH is, and that is cheap budget hosting.

I use this service for my personal website, along with a couple of other development projects I’ve got going. Yes, it’s annoying when I can’t login to my shell account and do my work, but at the same time, the value I get for the money far outweighs the inconveniences.

Besides, it’s not like they aren’t doing anything to fix the issues. I work in IT, and let me tell you, the solution isn’t always easy, and sometimes it takes a while to get things back online. So if you can afford it, be patient with them.

People, you get what you pay for. While your shit is broken, why not go sign up for a SuprBay (http://suprbay.org) account? ROFL SHAMELESS PLUG ALL UP IN THIS MUTHER

I agree with Geraldo…we need more communication…

I’ve got 15 domains hosted at DH and they all survived. However, the outgoing email service is pretty slow and sometimes it’s unaccessible. Really hope they fix these problems. Otherwise I’ll have to look for some other hosting company which is always a big pain in the ass… Telling all my clients that they’d have their sites down for 1-2 days and then set the email accounts all over again… Ouch!

Anyone ever done business with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET?

I have only seen a few minutes of downtime around 5AM PST in the past few days. I guess I have been a lucky one who’s site hasn’t been affected by this?

true, 2 hours without email won’t mean we go broke….But since i have to wait for a particular email to come in so I can forward it on before I leave for lunch, 2 hours means i’m gonna be mighty peckish…

Kevin, I’ve got weird downtime (as in text loads but not images on many of my domains), but my most important domain is, so far, unaffected *touch wood*

I can´t logon to panel.dreamhost.com.
Here´s what´s showing on the top of the page:
$VAR1 = {’_type’ => {’session_id’ => ‘bigint(20)’,'auth_stamp’ => ‘datetime’,'last_username’ => ‘varchar(32)’,'last’ => ‘datetime’,’session_data’ => ‘mediumtext’,'username’ => ‘varchar(32)’,'created’ => ‘datetime’,’session_info’ => ‘mediumtext’,'auth_username’ => ‘varchar(32)’,'last_agent’ => ‘varchar(255)’,'cookie_goop’ => ‘char(64)’,'last_while_auth’ => ‘datetime’,'last_ip’ => ‘char(16)’},’_key’ => ['session_id'],’_auto_increment’ => ’session_id’,'_db’ => ’session’,'_null’ => ['username','last_username','auth_username','auth_stamp','created','last','last_while_auth','cookie_goop','session_data','session_info','last_ip','last_agent'],’_table’ => ’session’,'_fields’ => ['session_id','username','last_username','auth_username','auth_stamp','created','last','last_while_auth','cookie_goop','session_data','session_info','last_ip','last_agent']};got here. $VAR1 = {’_parameters’ => {},’_key’ => ['username'],’_db’ => ‘people’,'_table’ => ‘person’,'_fields’ => ['username','password','password_ndn','secret_question','secret_answer','first','middle','last','prefix','suffix','sex','birth_date','time_zone','language','industry','occupation','salary','found_us','referred','when_joined','joined_from_ip','status','reseller_type','rewards_type_one','rewards_type_two']};got here. HTTP/1.0 200 OK Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:26:41 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_perl/1.27 PHP/4.4.7 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 $VAR1 = {’_parameters’ => {},’_key’ => ['username'],’_db’ => ‘people’,'_table’ => ‘person’,'_fields’ => ['username','password','password_ndn','secret_question','secret_answer','first','middle','last','prefix','suffix','sex','birth_date','time_zone','language','industry','occupation','salary','found_us','referred','when_joined','joined_from_ip','status','reseller_type','rewards_type_one','rewards_type_two']};got here.

What the heck is wrong with the DH panel?!

I’m trying to do a one-click upgrade on my site, go to the panel, and it’s a bunch of raw code.

Of course, there is no where to report the problem.

*sigh*

Minor details. I love you guys! (And I really mean it!)

https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi on Opera today:

$VAR1 = {’_type’ => {’session_id’ => ‘bigint(20)’,'auth_stamp’ => ‘datetime’,'last_username’ => ‘varchar(32)’,'last’ => ‘datetime’,’session_data’ => ‘mediumtext’,'username’ => ‘varchar(32)’,'created’ => ‘datetime’,’session_info’ => ‘mediumtext’,'auth_username’ => ‘varchar(32)’,'last_agent’ => ‘varchar(255)’,'cookie_goop’ => ‘char(64)’,'last_while_auth’ => ‘datetime’,'last_ip’ => ‘char(16)’},’_key’ => ['session_id'],’_auto_increment’ => ’session_id’,'_db’ => ’session’,'_null’ => ['username','last_username','auth_username','auth_stamp','created','last','last_while_auth','cookie_goop','session_data','session_info','last_ip','last_agent'],’_table’ => ’session’,'_fields’ => ['session_id','username','last_username','auth_username','auth_stamp','created','last','last_while_auth','cookie_goop','session_data','session_info','last_ip','last_agent']};got here.

$VAR1 = {’_parameters’ => {},’_key’ => ['username'],’_db’ => ‘people’,'_table’ => ‘person’,'_fields’ => ['username','password','password_ndn','secret_question','secret_answer','first','middle','last','prefix','suffix','sex','birth_date','time_zone','language','industry','occupation','salary','found_us','referred','when_joined','joined_from_ip','status','reseller_type','rewards_type_one','rewards_type_two']};got here.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:29:48 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

136f3

I don’t have mission-critical business sites at Dreamhost (as someone else noted, that would be stupid) but I’m moving my hobby website and email to another host within the next couple of weeks. Dreamhost has been shockingly unreliable. My website goes down at least once a week (16 times during the month of May) and I’ve actually lost mailing-list email during outages. Sure, Dreamhost is cheap, but if I’m losing mail due to technical incompetence and my small website goes down due to overselling on capacity, what’s the point? Shared hosting blows, and Dreamhost blows harder than most.

Angry Dog now Laughing Dog Says:
“I’m amazed people are still sticking up for them.”

Laugh now, but The Devil’s main tool is to lure you in with flashy fangled things, and you my friend have allowed those things to hypnotize you away from The Lord. The Lord’s servers may not always work, but it is no haphazard thing… it is of His choosing so as to facilitate well needed humblings upon thine asses, and to run from the tests of The Lord is to fail them. The Lord shall keep thine account in dormancy for you, and should you someday prodigally return He can surely bestow resurrection with nothing but welcoming love, as evidenced by the Happy Dreamhost Account Resurrection Team email that shall follow soon thereafter, and of which I myself have received two from past sinful straying!

I was wondering where the traffic had suddenly gone in the last day and a half. Oh well, guess I’ll just have to take it easy until the situation is resolved. Don’t hurry. I haven’t had a vacation since 1992.

I’m not so pleased with performance lately, but I’ve been a recent customer of both Mediatemple and Textdrive. Mediatemple’s performance was stupendous, despite their innovative architecture, and they do not include mailing lists (i.e. Mailman) in their hosting package, nor would they give me any assurances that adding them would be a priority. It’s a minor thing for most people, I know. Textdrive’s performance was just terrible, their mailing list server kept going down without notice (they didn’t even know it was down until I complained each time) and I was always made to feel stupid whenever I asked on their forums about how to better gauge my sites’ performance. At this point, I doubt if there are any value-priced hosts that really give great performance.

I’m not worried about losing money… I’m sure DH has lost far more than the ten cents I would have made off AdSense today.

That being said… who wants to partner with me and host out of my living room? I heard the electric bill kinda builds up on you, but I think I can deal.

Also finally thinking about giving up. Been with DH for a long time, but not being able to access my webmail so often during the day is really costly and frustrating.

@aaron

You know how DH doesn’t monitor this blog? They say they don’t monitor this blog. That’s a fancy way of saying that they don’t look at this blog. I believe them. The way to find out if they’re addressing your complaint is to actually complain (i.e., submit a ticket), as opposed to bitching (i.e., moaning). When I submit a ticket, I often get a response pretty quickly that tells me what’s wrong and what’s being done. That’s because they look at tickets.

Additionally, come on. You run a site that provides information about Costa Rica. What business are you losing? What business is being lost by anyone using a non-dedicated, no-guaranteed-uptime-having service?

Though I’ve not been effected in terms of down time, the speeds at which files download from my domain have been awful. I have a 20Mbit/sec download speed from the internet. Under normal conditions, I can download from dreamhost at anywhere from 1.6 to 2.3 megabytes/sec, yet now I’m only able to download at between 280 and 355 kilobytes/sec from my domain, yet a friend’s domain, also on dreamhost, I’m able to download a file at 2.03 megabytes/sec! Why can his site give me good speeds and my site cannot, even though it use to?

I agree that they probably need new equipment, but I believe they’ve already got professionals. I’ve been more than pleased with the quality of service from tech support. Hopefully I won’t switch either.

What i want to know is. If this happens, do any e-mails we get sent to our mailing address’s, get bounced, e.g. they don’t ever get sent. If thats the case i’ll probably have to move as well, which would be bad.

You know what I think would help - how about more funny, snide newsletters from Josh!

Yeah, keep up the attitude Josh; you would have been fun on the Titanic.

This is so beyond ridiculous.

or, instead of just pictures of people at the hospital for a birth, maybe pictures of the actual birth would do it…

i’m so screwed, i just switch 2 clients to DH last week…

Carlos is obviously new around here.

lol @ carlos. false hope is such a dreadful thing.

DreamHost oversells. You can’t actually use the majority of the space/bandwidth you’ve purchased, only a very, VERY small fraction of it.

That’s a flat out lie. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Not the overselling part, just the second part. The first part was pointless, since ALL hosts have overselling somewhere in the system. Anyone that doesn’t know that isn’t qualified to even use overselling in a sentence.

Hey,

I moved my sites over to http://www.EastSolid.com — They are great!

Tony

J,

What are you talking about? I had my site with dreamhost for almost two years. I was hosted on the web server limbo-spunky4, email server spunky and for MySQL cheshire. I was with them for the massive downtime they had last year with power and network.

I do not work for EastSolid, just simply sharing who I moved my site too.

Yes, they are not as big as Dreamhost, but they are great. Adding MySQL, Email, FTP accounts are done in seconds and not 15 mintues with dreamhost. All mail, web, mysql is hosted on the same server which I can only guess makes it so fast.

If you want to bash me for sharing who I moved to, go right ahead. But I do not work for EastSolid at all.

Tony

it is not good when http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ is on my daly visits 2 days in a row and multiple times a month.

should change the category to be filed under “daily outages” not “general outages”!

@J - “very VERY small fraction” is right. my plan currently allows me 8 terabytes of bandwidth. per week.

let’s do some math. that works out to around 110 megabits per second. in other words, they’d have to be streaming my data from two drives in parallel, saturating a 10/100Mbps ethernet connection to the theoretical maximum, every second of the entire week to even achieve 90% of this rate.

so yes, dh oversells quite a lot in terms of promised bandwidth.

I use 25% of my 250gb disk space

It’s odd, I still haven’t been affected by these problems.

Perhaps investing in redundant connections/servers would be a wise idea. You might keep all of these happy people (above) from being so unhappy.

note new. i’ve been with DH for many years now. I thought it be fun and take a poke at these whiners. Like the kids that keeps touching the hot iron and saying that it burns. “I’m going to another iron if this keeps burning me.” Either move already or shut the fuck up. Hijos de sus madres…

Hey DreamHost, I hope you read this. Can you tell us what’s going on? I am ready to be a lemming and jump hosts and go with these other whiners if you don’t tell me what’s going on. Please tell us. Please. Also, can you better monitor this blog and get rid of the whiners. I believe they are taking space up that can be used to post messages for you, DH, to read. Thank you all. Don’t forget to tip your waitress…

The logic here is astonishing:

1. DreamHost is great becasue they claim to give me 12 gazillion trajillian bytes of storage when all I need is 500MB
2. Customers are “whiners” because they expect to be provided with the service they’ve paid for.

You guys should go work for the Cable company or the Electric company:

Customers:
“hi, I’m in the dark and my power’s out”

Angry dreamhoststatus dudes:
“Go get your power somewhere else, whiner! Do you have any idea how many things you can run off our amazing grid?”

Customers:
“ugh, I’d kinda just like the lights on now”

Angry dreamhoststatus dudes:
“whiner! I hope the Electric company shuts off your phone!”

Chuck,

It’s an L4 product not an L1 or L3 product. *LOL*
It’s $10 per month.
It’s like the City Fido plan.

To top it off, the websites have not been down once during this entire time of network woes, but, in the case of last year during the power outages, I run a very inexpensive dedicated server at an extremely low-cost to my company, in New Jersey for under $5 / month. Awesome.

And for whatever reason, when webmail was down and outlook was offline, I’ve still managed to read and send email using pine. I guess it’s just me.

Media Temple and Pingdom suck. But go to them if you want, you’ll be back soon when the grass has regrown on this side of the fence.

Dreamhost Network Ninja Team Go!

“# Chuck Says:
August 27th, 2007 at 9:41 pm

Ryan,

I realize that you do not need reliability and that DH’s L1 product doesn’t need to offer it to you to make you a satisfied DH customer. If I had a test site and was paying as little as you, I might agree.

What you may want to consider is that DH offer’s more expensive products, like their L3 plan. Some of us DH customers pay DH as much as Media Temple charges for superior service. Why should we not expect Media Temple-like reliability and Media Temple-like telephone customer support for DH’s similarly priced L3 product?
“

@A Different Jeff: Dreamhost has been made quite aware of what’s going on in this post. If they choose not to respond, it’s on purpose.

Apparently DH has around 500,000+ user accounts. A significant number of those would be expensive dedicated hosting accounts, but lets just assume they’re ALL $7.95 a month shared hosting accounts. That comes out to $4million a MONTH in gross income, or $48million a year, and that is a very conservative estimate - in reality the money rolling in to DH is very likely significantly more. Overheads obviously take a big chunk of that, as would taxes, but for that kind of money, they should have a MUCH better set up - certainly not one that craps out on a regular basis month after month and even week after week as it has lately. Time to put some of that money back into the infrastructure via decent upgraded equipment instead of lining the pockets of the top execs.. in fact, DH should be leasing the equipment if they don’t already.. and if they are, then their lease agreement SUCKS if they don’t get upgrades more frequently - and fire the accountant - reinvestment into the company can be written off tax, so saying money is too tight is a load of cr@p, especially with what is pouring into DH.

Sure DH appears to be good value on the surface for subscribers, but considering the sheer volume of users and thus their collective purchasing power, the service should be far better than what it is. I joined after hearing good things about DH, but it seems I joined just when things started going downhill after last year’s SNAFU, and now I’ve finally had enough and moved most of my sites to an alternative host. A bit more expensive, but there’s a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and each and any month it falls under that, you get your money back. Add onto that faster servers and modules that are kept up to date, and it is more than worth the few extra dollars a month.

Why am I posting this if I’ve moved on? Because I’m pissed at the time lost with network issues, the extra time I’ve had to spend transferring to a new host, and very pissed about email I have never received that I know was sent - makes me wonder what I missed that I didn’t know was sent. Even free service providers have a better performance level!

Hey VOO It’s worth coming back to these comments just to listen to your praises. hehe. Oh ok, yes, I had about 20 running through DH until recently.. wonder what there clientbase size is then.. pretty damned huge I’d imagine. Damned being the operative word, of course.

How quaint. Someone saw my post here, apparently, and SOMEHOW got my email address (I’m still trying to figure that out - it’s not on my website and it’s supposed to be hidden here). They then proceeded to SPAM ME with their services.

1) I never said I was leaving DH, just that I’m extremely disappointed.

2) I never give my business to someone who emails me unsolicited.

AISO, congrats for ensuring I NEVER give you a cent of my money. I loathe spammers more than I loathe downtime.

hmm.. if that is your comment earlier at 6:14pm with a link to your website via your name, I just looked and saw you have a contact.php page with an email addy on it.. if your site is kagenek0. Sympathize - I loathe spammers - scum of the earth!

Ah, buy Angry Dog, the email address on my website isn’t the one they used That’s what perplexed me for a bit. I would have expected it some there.

But that’s alright. I’ve now made it a duty to let everyone I know be aware that AISO are opportunists and spammers. Sad thing is, had they not spammed me and I WERE in the market for a new host, I probably would have seriously considered them.

Sucks to be them.

The first part was pointless, since ALL hosts have overselling somewhere in the system.

Umm… no… _MOST_ hosts oversell — not all.

The pay-as-you-use service NearlyFreeSpeech.net doesn’t oversell (and people often bitch that they don’t) — instead, you pay for the bandwidth/storage that you use. It’s typically the pay-per-month services that oversell, since their business model is more conductive to that sort of thing.

VOO is the best!

Wah wah wah wah. The ridiculous whining on this page is absolutely pathetic. I come here to see what’s going on and all I can see is people complaining that they didn’t get the guaranteed uptime that they didn’t pay for in the first place. How amazing! I didn’t get what I didn’t pay for! WHAT AN OUTRAGE.

Guaranteed uptime costs money. You want 100% guaranteed uptime on a computer? PAY FOR IT. I’ll bet half the people spitting their useless e-chips here can’t even guarantee their own hardware will work 100% of the time, why should they expect it of someone else’s?

Computer hardware and software will fail. Dreamhost are losing money every minute this problem exists, why would they be slacking off instead of fixing it?

Goddamn it, if you’re going to change hosts just do it instead of spraying your useless bile on the internet about it. It’s a big internet people. When their hosting eventually flops as well, I’m sure you can start the whole self-destructive process again.

Any updates???

This is stupid.

Screaming at your customers and hurling insults at them does not seem like a good business model to me. Just my two cents.

Probably isn’t good for your health either.

Have a glass of wine and chill out.

The customers you are so angry at really just want to remain your customers. That’s a good sign and you should try to retain them.

Flipping out at them here probably will not bring about customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, etc., etc., etc…

Still no word from DH about this problem?

My site has been working fine since last evening as far as I can tell, but a report from DH isn’t too much to ask for. Sure, I know their technical staff is busy fixing stuff, but nobody on sales side that they can spare to write up a paragraph???

I’m soooooo tempted to start http://www.dreamhoststatusstatus.com and do a yellow / orange / red rating for how users are reacting.

It’s formulaic at this point.
X% - ‘I AM LEEVING BECAUSE NED’Z SPACE CENTR3 IS GIVING M3 BETTER SERVICE!’
(I doubt you are real dreamhost users… just Ned’z Space Centr3 advertisers…. hi Ned.)

Y% - ‘WHY DO YOU NOT ANSWER MY PLEAS!!!!!!’
(Because this is not a place to answer problems. Go to your panel. If you can’t get to your panel, they are aware. When your panel is back. Email them from your panel)

Z% - ‘MY SITE WORKZZZZ!!!!’
(Braggart)

Oh, and X+Y+Z = 90% and the last 10% are a mix of people like me who watch this all with hollow indignation that their site’s worked fine, people who are actively flame-baiting, and people who lost billions of dollars because not only is their site down… it’s selling things that nobody wants.

This has been James with your NETWORK OUTTAGE dreamhost status status.

Thank you, and Good Night.

Man, I’ve worked with Cisco stuff before in my last IT/MIS job, and sometimes you just have to break down and call in the big boys of Cisco support. Their routers and such are great, do their job well, but every now and then they fuck up so royally that even the sysadmins don’t know what happened. It happened to my company’s entire VPN one day.

VPN down == worse than a website being down.

They got on it and got it fixed, but there wasn’t any way we could do it on our own. If they have support tickets open w/ Cisco, the problem *will* get fixed.

Thing is… All of my sites have been up and running quite well… Only had about a 20 minute outage on the webmail service yesterday… other than that I haven’t got any downtime at all since Monday’s outage, which was about 20 to 30 minutes… and the week before that it was the same… I think they’re not lifting the red tag on this one until they’re absolutely sure that everything will run fine.

This is getting out of control. Can someone please move the server(s) AWAY from the leaky pipes?! Also can you please ask employees not to make calls on the line being used for the dialup connection that powers our servers?

Well if anything all the ones that do leave, just free up bandwidth/space etc, for us. so its a + .

Well, my site works wonderfully, but myphpadmin page is not working at all.. so there are still issues. but they are not ‘end of the world’ issues.

Also i’ve found out that 90% of the issues i was experiencing were the fault of the coder I let originally design the site. Now all is well and improving.. IM SUPER satisfied with everything.

And if a person has a high volume site that they will lose a lot of monies if its down, they should get a dedicated server. You’re just hurting yourself by sitting on a shared system =)

Wow, are you really going to go 2 solid days without updating on a critical issue? Show us some love, DH!

-sam

Its weird people dont mention anything about the higher costing packages… many people argue “It’s only $10/month! You get what you pay for!” and say that dreamhosting isnt for business customers.. though you seem to ignore the “Strictly Business” package, literal or not, many people pay around $1000/yr for hosting.. not the $100+.

*pouts*

You don’t know what any host is doing, regardless of what they tell you. At least Dreamhost is honest about it and tells it exactly how it is.

Think about what you just said… Logically one of those statements must be false…

At any rate, there is also a HUGE difference between a host overselling to its customers (which, despite your statements, some do not), and a datacenter “overselling” (by which you refer to the idea that not every link can be fully saturated at all times.)

This sucks. I’ve got enough of a referral downline that my hosting is paid for but what is the big deal if nothing works!!!! Now I look like a dumbass b/c I referred so many co workers to this excuse of a host. Seriously, how can the same problem continually affect so many of us for so long? Just FIX it!

—SIGH—

John says: I can’t wait for these retards pretending that they are switching hosting plans to find out that every shared hosting is the same as DH, if not much worse.

You are clueless John. Yes there are some bad hosts (probably DH resellers! hahahaha) but most reputable shared hosts that have serious issues like this fix it and make sure it stays fixed, and have some form of redundancy so sites remain live while they work on the ‘broken’ part of the network. The only retard is you for making such unfounded assumptions that all shared hosting is as bad as this - my 10 years of experience with near a dozen different hosts argue that you are full of crap with your ignorant statement.

At the top of the page, it says, “Please check here for updates…” A few questions:

1. How do we know which posts are by DH employees?
2. Why are there (apparently) no updates? (If there are any, I can’t find them.

Sheeeshh…

This is sad. Yes, emotions run high when stuff you depend on to get clients breaks and you lose a sale.

That’s human nature. Get in between me and my paying the rent and we won’t have a pleasant conversation.

The immature and assaultive behavior in here is sad and uncalled for.

If people wanted to leave DH, they wouldn’t be on this site. Think about it.

People want to stay with DH because there’s something they liked about them that made them become customers in the first place.

DreamHost: your customers are not your enemies. They’re the reason you exist. It’s great that you’re honest about dropping the ball. But please have the same respect for your customers who are being honest about our desire to see you improve.

Let’s try harder to get along and realize we are not each other’s enemies. You respect us and we’ll respect you.

Did it just die again for anyone else?

I think punch just went down, my site is inaccessible.

The service has had a lot of downtime lately.

dead here…grumble

My site’s gone.

hi, dream suck:
the whole network down again.

I can’t even get to my site to transfer all my content to Media Temple (which is supposed to happen soon).

Damn! Was happily typing away on WordPress, saving every so often, then, just when I click ‘publish’ it goes KaaaPooofy!

Not been affected by anything else the past few days except this current surge of random downtime. I guess luck doesn’t last forever.

Shame.

Darnit, I was just about to ban some people from my forum, now I have to look them all up again. *sigh*

This is starting to become a regular occurance. Not good. At all. Let’s see…email’s down, my two sites are down (especially the most important one). If this keeps happening, I may have to jump ship, too.

wack

My site is down for the second time this week. Not cool.

We just lost our web site right in the middle of update. Think it’s Nehi.

Hmm, I spoke too soon it seems.

*sigh*

Gah I don’t know… one minute it’s there, the next it’s not!

*bangs head on closed iBook*

I’ve been with DH for two years. The first was swell. The second has been increasingly troubling. I hope DH can resolve their problems and provide satisfactory uptime once again.

I also have sites with JaguarPC. The latter have never been down for any serious length of time during the five years I’ve been with them. I like the idea of having sites on multiple web hosts but am slowly moving some away from DH. Hopefully the service will be what it once was and I’ll remain a client here. But it sure does look doubtful at times.

I was in the middle of building my site and it went down for 15 min - and my other site was down as well - it’s like the 3rd time this week!!! I don’t think anyone can use this service for a serious business unless a drastic improvement happens.

To all the people bitching about how much money they lose and angry clients they get because of “all” the downtime. Maybe, just maybe, if you take your company slightly serious, you should invest in a somewhat more reliable host, maybe even a dedicated server rather than hosting all of your clients on a shared server of a budget web host. Say ~40 bucks a month for a VPS is no money for any company. Unless you’re all just a bunch of kids who’s definition of a company is making 50 bucks websites for friends and family in their parents basement, which is more likely.

/rant, now fix the damn downtime DH