RESOLVED! DNS caching server is offline…
Posted (September 1st, 2007 at 10:27 am PST) by StevenOne of our DNS caching servers has gone offline and this may cause problems on our network. We’re on the case! Please check back for further updates.
Update: A backup caching server is letting the one that took a dive have a nap. The network issues should be resolving themselves now. If you are still having issues seeing your sites, please file a support request.
Update:There were dns issues this morning causing problems with sending email. The original caching dns server that had issues before has been replaced and all is functioning normally again. Our apologies for the downtime.
114 Responses to “RESOLVED! DNS caching server is offline…”
Slowness for the x time this week -
What dreamhost? Slow again? Well fuck me sideways!
Sort yourselves out lads….its not funny anymore.
What? Slow? Big surprise. What are you doing over there? Should I pull back and host my sites off a serer in my closet and cable connection? Might have better uptime….
urgh hate when the site goes down when i’m working on it
~50% packet loss to my sites right now.
Livin’ it up since 1997!
It is looking more and more like I’m going to have to use that “money back guarantee!”
I can not even use my FTP nor will my site load, is this the problem?
I just recommended you guys to a non profit org I am doing work for and now I look like an idiot because your service sucks..I think we have like 20 % down time and they are always at peak hours…excellent
caching server - nothing is working - my website is down because it cannot connect to the mysql. Lots of lost packages. Even the pannel isn´t reachable from here anymore.
As soon as I can, I’m switching over to another hoster. You guys have downtime at the most inopportune times. Do you know how hard it is to show your future employer your website or blog when you can’t get it loading because of a “server issue”? Or to show off photos of your kids to your family and friends?
Tell you what: How about you take all of our websites and host it on the server your website is running at? Because that sure as hell seems to be up more than the servers that we’re on. Why should we pay for a service that continues to break? You DreamHost guys should make it fair for your customers—a good amount of uptime, or log every minute that a person’s website is down at your fault and credit their bill.
Otherwise, I see NO REASON why anyone should go with your service. This is frustrating.
I would agree.. I’ll never recommend this host again.
I disagree with the severity status, is all.
AGAIN…………………
do you guys even have an uptime????
if it is not one thing it is another. i want a refund
LOL , dreamhost is the most lammer and fucking shit hosting by far
Will: 20% downtime? 3.8 hours of downtime in a single day? That bites. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a problem that bad with Dreamhost’s service.
Maybe I’m on a lucky server — I rarely see it mentioned in the status reports here — but my sites get nearly 99% uptime. When things break, it’s minutes at a time. And that really doesn’t add up to a whole lot — especially since I’m not selling anything (if I was, I’d be smart and buy dedicated… 
)
My site is back to normal now. Hick-ups happen.
Could this be whats causing the issues with cURL no longer working for offiste files aswell, or is that a whole different boat of shit I have to sort out still?
I had a year or so of decent hosting, but the past few months have just sucked! They need to do something. Swap servers…hot standbys…month or 2 worth of credit…something.
use discount coupon “NwS-12″ to save $55.. Thats a reliable host.. IMHO always!
This should be either High Severity or there’s another problem going on that is severely killing transfer speed. I was fetching a remote file from the shell using wget and was really surprised when the transfer slowed down a crawl (actually, even TYPING commands in the shell window lags now)
my site is back to normal now too and yes, hickups happen….i bet all these people commenting use a cell phone service that they loose calls on but still pay for the service…everything breaks at one point or another..just glad people take their labor day weekends to spend time to fix it for us..so Thanks dreamhost and keep up the GOOD work….
I hate it when it shuts down when I’m uploading files! grr… I hope it comes back up soon.
I wonder…are the servers storing the kiddie porn up, DreamHost? When you’re done beating off, could you please restore our websites?
I don’t suppose they’ve noticed that they’ve noticed that their mail exchangers are also down? Hell, one of them doesn’t even resolve in DNS!
mostlyharmless.net MX preference = 0, mail exchanger = fltr-in2.mail.dreamhost.com
mostlyharmless.net MX preference = 0, mail exchanger = fltr-in1.mail.dreamhost.com
roach@satan:~$ telnet fltr-in2.mail.dreamhost.com 25
Trying 208.97.132.72…
Connected to fltr-in2.mail.dreamhost.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
Connection closed by foreign host.
roach@satan:~$ telnet fltr-in.mail.dreamhost.com 25
telnet: could not resolve fltr-in.mail.dreamhost.com/25: Name or service not known
At this point, they have become completely useless, even at $10/mo. I’ve retracting everything I’ve said recently about getting what you pay for … here, you basically get little to nothing for your $10.
- Roach
Wicked: Yes, hiccups happen. However, a person who is constantly hiccuping is someone nobody can understand. Get my point? Just because your happy website is running fine doesn’t mean other people are having that problem. And no, I don’t pay for a “cell phone service that constantly breaks,” and nobody should. Companies who take money in exchanged for a “GOOD” service should do GOOD work. DreamHost fails.
After 12 minutes and 38 seconds of downtime last month I would have thught you DH folk could get your act together. At the rate you’re going, it will probably be 14 minutes for the month of August. Oh… Wait… We’re in September now… Never mind.
Roach: thats because its fltr-in1.mail.*
Dreamhost: this sucks. Come on, get your act together - this is a joke now!
FATAL ERROR: Unable to connect to MySQL database
I’ve seen that more than a few times the past couple of months…
I can’t help but wonder what the DH sycophant think they’re getting when they post their bootlicking comments here. Do they think there’s a “brownnoser” list that the DH techs use to prioritize support requests or something?
@Chris:
Eek, you’re right. Bad copy and paste. It DOES resolve … it was just down like the other one. They appear to be coming back up now as mail from the last few hours is showing up in my inbox.
- Roach
@Romi: Where on this page: http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html
Does it say ‘UPTIME GUARANTEED!’ ???
There are some hosting sites that state that and better damn well back it up. Dreamhost does not do that. They guarantee you low-cost, high feature hosting, but not uptime. So as for you’re “people still buy cell phones”… well, people still buy hosting with Dreamhost as well.
I am also disappointed by the service level of DreamHost, and concerned about their reliability.
So I would please ask from all of you reading this post to tell me:
What other hosting alternative would you recomend?
Email me to dav1d {at} marcalibre {dot} net.
I will publish all recomendations at
By the way, this is hosted on a free service that happens to be very reliable.
David,
Someone up above suggested this…
http://www.hostican.com/whyus/guarantees.php
They do have a 99.9% uptime guarantee and if they dont meet it, they credit you.
I recommend going over to AnHosting.com, i have already moved two sites over to them from dreamhost. I am thinking of moving my other two to some other host, all eggs in one basket thingy.
I just launched spent the entire week gearing up to launch my site, and spent all last night spreading the word, to get people to check it out, and now this.
Great….
Sites and DH panel are running so slowly and timing out, clients mail not being delivered !!! … Not all of my sites (different accounts, different servers) are affected, though. Some are running fine.
Is that why I haven’t received a single new piece of email in over 3 hours, including spam? Normally, I would have 30-40 pieces of mail, plus spam during that period.
Lesson of the day:
DONT USE DREAMHOST FOR ANYTHING IMPORTANT - THEY OFFER NO UPTIME GUARANTEE.
Simple as.
Oh and for gods sake review them at http://www.webhostingtalk.com instead of bitching at each other
Dreamhost can host as many domains , how about other hosting companies?I have about 150+sites
DH can host as many domains, how about other hosting companies?
I have about 150+ sites
What the fuck?????
Simple php contact forms in Mambo don’t even work!!!!!!
Get your crew off holiday!!!!!!
“Simple php contact forms in Mambo don’t even work!!!!!!”
PHP Contact forms that usually connect through a domain name to a mail server (which still seem to be borked), that probably didn’t resolve to an IP address, and the simple form doesn’t give the simple error? 
I believe they have a legitimate reason to gripe. It’s certainly better than the possible alternative of having irate customers flooding phone lines, and showing up at their doors. It gives customers an outlet. As well, some people for whatever reason chose to run their business on a shared hosting plan. If this interruption is causing as much loss to business as is believed, then surely that business is generating enough revenue to use a dedicated hosting solution?
I believe that probably the main difference between DH and other shared hosting providers, is the web panel. A few of the many shared hosts I tried in the past used Webmin… which takes a bit of getting used to and certainly is far from “easy to use” the first time around. DH certainly cannot be given any “uptime” awards, however they are by far one of the largest, if not the largest, employee-owned hosting companies in North America.
I wonder if Terri reads this blog. Get back to work!
Matthew Says:
September 1st, 2007 at 11:00 am
I wonder…are the servers storing the kiddie porn up, DreamHost? When you’re done beating off, could you please restore our websites?
Matthew you’re aan idiot. get a life
Most of us only paid $22.90/YEAR for dreamhost. With~ 99.5% I think they deserve some slack. And those who decided to but a nice corporate or business or large website on dreamhost shouldn’t be complaining because dreamhost is recommended by most people for SMALL BUSINESS and PERSONAL. Seriously guys, come on!
Ryan, you sound like a real jerk. If you’re an employee at Dreamhost, you ought to be canned for insulting customers.
David:
I’d recommend NearlyFreeSpeech.net. They’ll host you on a VERY fast FreeBSD cluster for pennies a month. They’ll handle Digg/Slashdot traffic just fine, and they won’t censor your site.
Their uptime is UNGODLY.
No, I’m not an affiliate (they don’t even _have_ an affiliate program) — I’m just a very happy user.
Yeah, but sometimes customers are idiots.
I’d be willing to bet that The Lord had nothing to do with the name Hostican… what a visionless name! I cannot see putting any faith into those who can do no better than that for a business name.
You people are FAILING The Lord’s tests… when your sites go down, instead of blaming Dreamhost, look towards yourselves… ask “Does my website actually contribute positively to humanity in any truly meaningful way, and is my website AT LEAST HTML 4.01 Transitional valid code? If the answer to both of these questions is not YES, then your sites are being punished by The Lord for being shitty.
Rob says
“No, I’m not an affiliate (they don’t even _have_ an affiliate program) — I’m just a very happy user.”
So then WTF are you doin over here? Did you just go to WebHostTalk and start a thread that says “NearlyFreeSpeech doesn’t have a forum or blog… can anyone please recommend a good forum or blog at a webhost for me to hang out at?” Sounds like you may be under the control of The Devil.
Hardedge: You do realize that 12 minutes & 38 seconds of downtime in one month means that you had something in the neighborhood of 99.97% uptime??
Doesn’t exactly seem like something to cry over. That’s about as good as any host promises.
Well I’d send a support ticket, but they can’t even keep their own damn site up. They should probably drop the server business and go into nuclear power.
ns3.dreamhost.com is not responding to ping…
Nice to see it got resolved
How funny that many times visit to my sites was not cut down by DreamHost rather than GFW
I’ve been a customer for over a year, and the service is OK. Don’t you people realise you get what you pay for?! Dreamhost is a BUDGET provider. If you want reliability go find some other host, where you’ll pay a fair bit for than $7.95 a month. Buy cheap, get cheap. Simple as. Don’t like it? Stop trying to save your stupid ass some money and fork out for decent hosting.
FATAL ERROR: Unable to connect to MySQL database
I’ve seen that more than a few times the past couple of months…
Why are the servers down so much, I though having 3 redundant name servers was supposed to prevent downtime, except for once in a blue moon. Maybe there needs to be some more redundancy build into the network. Even if it is a budget host downtime should only occur in extreme emergencies.
No Problem, never trust a machine is my motto.
I was confused though. A good idea would be to separate the known problems area from your main infrastructure. I wasn’t able to get on dreamhost.com either, so an alternate for information would be nice. Ronald
Is anyone else experiencing an issue with their email? I haven’t been receiving email normally for the past couple of hours. I keep sending myself test messages from non-DH accounts online, and none of them come through. I normally get 50+ emails per hour but this morning nothing has been coming through. I left a support ticket but they haven’t replied; guess I should have picked a higher importance flag.
Just wondering if there’s a mail server down or something.
I’ll have to say my input too.
There seems to be a problem with DH at least like once a week. If it is not with a site server being down - it is with some mail problem. It’s really getting to a point now for me also where I may have to consider using a different hosting service as it is too frequent.
THe first few times it happened I let it slide - now I can’t afford to. It is too frequent.
Oh wow. It’s not just my email. Many of my sites are down - I get just a blank page visiting several domains.
What’s next?
I’m having issues, too. My site is just ridiculously slow. Again.
dream sucker:
went to submit ticket but saw:
Your account is still in the process of being tested by our system.
what are y test for??? all my sites down!
everyday down right now.
everyday down right now.
everyday down right now.
everyday down right now.
everyday down right now.
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everyday down right now.
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everyday down right now.
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everyday down right now.
Ahhh, grow up. My site’s slow at the moment too. It’ll be back up before you can sneeze.
All external connections like pings, traceroutes and ssh session are extremely slow right now.
Can’t send or receive email for three hours now, no response from DH customer support (dudes, it’s early in the AM, we’re still partying, check our pix on the home page!!!!!!), no mention of the problems here. Suckage.
Same here. Can not send mail. Connection keeps being reset.
I woke up this morning to find all 3 of my domains unresponsive, I was unable to check my e-mail and even dreamhost.com and dreamhoststatus.com were down!
I would like to suggest to dreamhost that they don’t use their own nameservers for the dreamhoststatus.com domain, because it defeats the purpose of having dreamhoststatus hosted on a different provider.
My site is down too 
My sites are slow and pings are failing on 2 networks. This is getting pretty old.
I don’t know if it’s the heat or the water over there on the west coast but how can you label this as resolved when it clearly isn’t? I’ve been loyal to Dreamhost for a long while and have seen outages that have been resolved pretty quickly. But they were few and far between. Now it’s almost a regular occurrence and quite frankly I’m getting quite frustrated with it. It is always something anymore.
I’m shopping around for hosting solutions but still giving you the benefit of the doubt. If these “growing pains” aren’t resolved soon, I’m only left with one choice… leave.
I’ve been using DH now for over six years and they have been very reliable. However over the last year or so their system performance has degraded and most recently I am starting to receive complaints from my clients. I suggest that DH act swiftly to correct this and communicate the reasons for past problems and provide a detailed corrective action plan.
I just moved all of my sites (except 1, it’s in process) over to MediaTemple. So far they’ve got much better service, support, and attitude…and the price isn’t bad.
“So then WTF are you doin over here?”
Because I also happen to be a Dreamhost customer. I use Dreamhost for high-volume static serving, and NFS for dynamic content.
It bothers me when Dreamhost has issues, since that means that my static content is inaccessible. Of course, since I use a ton of bandwidth with Dreamhost, I couldn’t afford to move my static content to NFS — thus I host my sites using a combination of the two.
Since most of the Dreamhost customers seem to have smallish PHP-based sites (Wordpress blogs, etc.), I recommended (in response to a fellow customers question) a host that has served me well for exactly that purpose.
In return, I get flamed by you. Very professional.
Rob Says:
“In return, I get flamed by you. Very professional.”
Well praise The Lord that bein “professional” ain’t one of my chief goals in life! How “professional” is it to come to one host’s blog and recommend another host? The Lord asked me to tell you to please deshittyify your websites.
I have been a customer since 1999. What bothers me most now is not the downtimes and the crashes, but the wide range of website performance I get.
I used to laugh at my customers (under my breath, of course) when they asked me to work on their GoDaddy websites. But I’m not laughing anymore.
Yes, Dreamhost has a great panel. Yes, they generally have good support. But what about the HOSTING????
The only reason I haven’t moved already is that my shit is so deeply entrenched in Dreamhost. But, trust me, as soon as I have the free time I am voting with my feet and my money. Sorry, Dallas, maybe you should have gone to business school instead of Harvey Mudd.
I hope DH gets it all figured out. Been generally satisfied, DH been responsive in past dealings… …code and machines breakdown, need a better harness.
Sick of all the down time.
I’m in the process of moving to an Irish host which are actually cheaper and good service.
http://www.hosting365.com/
Cya
It’s amazing that you asshoIes try to use downtime as a reason to spam.
Any hosting company that has been spammed here is pure shit compared to Dreamhost. They’re almost as big of pieces of shit as the people that are posting them here.
It’s also funny that dickheads like vasco don’t like problems with a cheap host, so they go to a cheaper host. Good thinking.
I like the name KY !
I’m not part of the hosting company - just thought it would be good to help someone else out if they were thinking about moving too.
The reason I went with the new host is because the ping is better - the price was not the main factor.
Hope DH gets it’s act together because they were great for 20 out of the 24 months I was with them.
Cheers
Common sense should tell you that it’s inappropriate to link to competitors here.
Look VOO, I’m not going to debate this any more.
I wasn’t spamming (notice how I intentionally didn’t link) — I was simply trying to answer another poster’s question to the best of my abilities.
I am a customer of both companies, and am happy with them both, albeit for different reasons.
I’m sorry I struck a nerve with you, and I’m sorry that you believe my websites (which I am puzzled how you found, given only my first name) are shitty.
If you wish to debate this further, please do so outside of this blog, so that the rest of the customers don’t have to wade through our argument.
Cheers,
Rob
Rob Says:
“I’m sorry I struck a nerve with you, and I’m sorry that you believe my websites (which I am puzzled how you found, given only my first name) are shitty.”
I do not know what your websites are, I am just going by law of averages and overwhelming probability that they are shitty. Do they praise The Lord? Are they 100% W3C valid? If no, then they are shitty!
Also, you struck no nerve with me… I’m just a shit stirrer as I am not yet completely free of The Devil’s influence.
I’d be happy to have 1/20th of the disk space/BW if the uptime were reliable.
My sites are working, but email on one of my domains has been down all day. I’ve submitted a trouble ticket (14 hours ago) with no response. The panel says there is some critical email outage and to visit the status page for updates, but there are none. I am more than a little irritated at this point. I’ve been with dreamhost for over 4 years, and have stuck by during the ups and downs, because i figure 99.xx% uptime is ok for the price, but the complete lack of support on these issues is prompting me to consider another host.
I moved my hosting becuase of downtime but still have a domain name with DH. Should I move that too?
or should i yank a big steamy turd out of my ass and rub it all over my face and pretend everything is ok like some of the fukkin goobers posting here
All my sites are down now as well.
I’m sorry DH - I’ve been a customer of yours since for what seem like forever, loved the newsletters and the irreverent copywriting but I’m sorry, you’re costing me money now. I hope you get things sorted out but I’m moving everything elsewhere in the morning.
Aw crap, I just got my site fully up over here, set the DNS on Friday, and sure enough the first thing that goes down here is DNS resolution and now we can’t send email. (Email services hosted elsewhere but smtp.ourdomain.com has to find them through DH.)
The reason I moved from my former host was that I was with them for a couple years and happy, but then everything started screwing up and I slowly lost faith. I moved to DH after months of research. Now I come to this blog and I see people sayin the same stuff I’ve been saying at my old host.
Of all the freakin luck…
FWIW, it seems the general state of web hosting in the world is pretty bad folks - the world just aint ready to competently support the infrastructures that we expect. Well, maybe not for $8/month anyway… ;^b
I’m going to put an external watchdog on my account and record the downtimes (web & mail).
After summerizing them, we gotta talk.
Performance and transparency counts….
Flash
This sucks! The article says resolved but from here in Malaysia my server is still down. What is going on?
I refuse to continue hosting my website with Dreamhost if this is not resolved within the next 3 hours.
I’ve been waiting since 7am here in Malaysia for this situation to improve. It’s already 8pm and nothing has changed. I get an average of 30 emails a day and I’m a web developer who recommends web hosts to my clients. When they receive emails saying my email address in invalid because of this problem, what would I look like? Yes, a fool! Who is going to pay for my loss?
Put it in context, my droogs. The local cable internet provider is down every day at noon or thereabouts, and then conks out sometime between 7 and 9 pm, and then gets dog slow until 3 am, when there’s a little hiccup (reboot after they clean up from the porn downloaders?). Dreamhost is doing OK by you, but the internet is sheer chaos. If you really get nervous about it, try hosting on two providers and list DNS hosts from each.
Unable to connect, again. 11:56am, EDT. What’s up?
Site down… again. This is the never end story.
Attn Dreamhost: YOU DIDN’T FIX THE PROBLEM!
[Technical writing said: "If you really get nervous about it, try hosting on two providers and list DNS hosts from each."]
Ya know, that might be a quick solution for many of us. If you are technically inclined and have cable modem you can setup dynamic dns with dyndns, point it through your cable modem and into a local system, then run a mini-dns that resolves back to your email server.
I’m lucky in that I didn’t stop paying my other host yet, so I’m going to try to use one of their dns servers to resolve HTTP here to DH and mail to my hosted mail server (everyone.net). Good luck to everyone here…
I added a couple of domains this morning and they still aren’t resolving - I assume it’s due to this issue. Any chance of an update as to when this will be resolved?
I’ve moved a couple more of domains to your service, and just found out this problem now after DNSreports/DNSstuff showed a couple of problems with the DNS transfer.
Any idea as to when this will be resolved? I don’t really want to move my clients websites back to their original servers, but at the same time, I cannot afford the downtime and them getting errors with their site and their e-mail isn’t helping things.
I must be on a lucky server or something because I have not experienced major problems. A bit of downtime and slowness this year at peak times, but nothing I can whine too much about. I LOVE DreamHost and have recommended DH to many satisfied friends (as well as a non-profit that I am involved with). Keep up the great work DH!
I hope DH gets it all figured out. Been generally satisfied, DH been responsive in past dealings… …code and machines breakdown, need a better harness.
I dont get yet, how the pages are created… do I have to worry about CPU if they pages are cached ?
Thanks for informing us about the downtime. Looks like dreamhost is my best hosting.
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that might be a quick solution for many of us. If you are technically inclined and have cable modem you can setup dynamic dns with dyndns, point it through your cable modem and into a local system, then run a mini-dns that resolves back to your email server.
Very informative site you have.
why someone swearing here!
awesome website
thanksssss
I would agree.. I’ll never recommend this host again.
nice articel
i like this blog, thanks
oh so thats what is wrong