Core Router Maintenance
Posted (October 19th, 2007 at 10:17 pm PST) by kitchenAs planned, we are beginning our emergency core router maintenance right now.
Our planned downtime window is 2 hours, during which all services including email, webmail, websites, ftp, ssh and the web panel will be offline. We will post updates here as things progress, so please keep an eye out and we’ll let you know when things are back online!
We are going to try to take care of as many things as we can during this maintenance window, so to minimize required outages in the future.
We greatly apologize for the inconvenience and thank all of you for your patience!
– UPDATE 12:18 AM Sat Oct 20
The router is back up, again, after the redundancy test we performed on the upgrade failed miserably. We are now running the new version of IOS, fortunately, so all is not lost. We are currently seeing if the network and the servers are back up and running.
– UPDATE 1:34 AM Sat Oct 20
We believe that all systems are Go! Please write in to support if you are still having any problems. We will continue to monitor this throughout the night. We apologize for the extended outage, we will be contacting Cisco regarding that bug in the redundant failover system.
311 Responses to “Core Router Maintenance”
Dammit >_
Why minimize outages? We love’em! That’s why we stick to DH (or do we…)?
Hopefully this is the answer to this bad month for DH.
I’m tired of having downtime, Please Fix it for good.
I guess mine too.
LOL
Jesus, I didnt even read the post but is EVERYONE down?
How can a hosting company get away with this?
I guess Dreamhost is telling me to get a life and stop working by blocking my SVN access. Oh well, time for Halo I guess…
An email would have been nice. What, it’s up to us to check just in case a “planned maintenance window” is scheduled? Fuck that. Email your users and give them a heads up!
Would you rather they waited until Monday morning to do this?
I think we can wait for a couple hours on a weekend for them to resolve the core router maintenance that we were already informed would be needed.
After 16 hours (at least) of downtime last night, it is good to follow up with another 2-5 tonight.
That really sets the barb.
Good luck!
As much as I would like to complain, I realize that I am paying a very low price for a tremendous amount of disk space and bandwidth. My websites aren’t serious either, if they were, I think I would be with a more reliable host. I do
Perfect timing 
The only time in which i actually needed my e-mail 
Oh well, ill live
hehe it asks for my e-mail when e-mail is down :O
If you are experiencing a problem not reported here, check our web panel for more information.
(Please remember, posting in the comments here IS NOT an official way to contact DreamHost.)
question, how do I get to the web panel if it’s down too?
I really hope this clears up the major instability I’ve been seeing on my spanky new (and not so cheap) Dreamhost PS over the last two days. Counting this planned outage, I will have had uptime of only ~85% over the past two days. Definitely not what I signed up for.
id complain but they have been awesome about me paying my bill late, so meh
Big Fuss has a good point. I don’t mind the downtime necessarily but an e-mail would REALLY be nice.
ALL my site downed,and http://www.dreamhost.com downed also..
my interners! they are all down!!
I hope this network downtime will mean solid stable and fast service for some time afterwords. In case you all haven’t noticed, all of dreamhost is down. I like that Dreamhost puts status updates on it’s off site status page so folks can no what’s going on even when they have to take down their entire network, not even my dedicated server provider does that!
oops its gone!!! got up at 6 to see its not working…..bye going back to sleep…enjoy dreamhost…will get up after 1hr 
Mine works fine.
Core Router Maintenance means, the only thing running is this blog, which isn’t hosted by DH for this very reason.
I think we can wait for a couple hours on a weekend for them to resolve the core router maintenance that we were already informed would be needed.
Ooohh…. my sites just came back up!
Well, at least we’re all in this together
…
If I lose money on this I’ll be totally ticked. I’m right in the middle of doing a PPP post.
I’m really surprised you guys think this is acceptable. I know you’re all humans (at least I think you are…), but you should at least hire ONE robot, so that it can correct these human errors that cause massive problems for your (HOW MANY?) customers.
Though, at least this blog is here so we can all complain.
I think that if we are able to get the Dreamhost Newsletter each month, could you not use the same mailing list for planned outages.
Down time happens, but if we could be made aware of it, then we can all inform our users…
Simple communication cost you nothing but 10 minutes of your time.
Agree with others above, we shouldnt have to be checking your site in case you post us something there… gesh, we’re busy enough coding our sites and supporting our own users…
Not a bitch, but a suggestion, EMAIL US!! 
Cheers
Oops… my last post was cut short.
Already informed? How… did you get an email? Posting major stuff like this on a blog that your customer has to happen to check in order to get the message is lazy, careless and shoddy practice, imo.. This sort of thing needs to be delivered to my inbox as soon as they plan / schedule it.
QUOTE:
“# Big Fuss Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
I think we can wait for a couple hours on a weekend for them to resolve the core router maintenance that we were already informed would be needed.”
How were you informed? is there a mailing list I should be aware of?
I am wondering why my sites are back up already. A 2 hour planned down time is a 2 hour planned down time. I’d rather the time be taken to get things right than to assume everything is all set if the upgrade went *that* fast (which I doubt it did…)
@Themicles
That is curious. Extremely curious. Was that small outage just a taste of what is really to come?
I don’t want to add to the heap of complaints, but this really is rather poor. Reading through the past causes of downtime, most seem avoidable:
- NetApp filers can be clustered to allow for zero-downtime hardware replacement.
- Servers shouldn’t be booting off individual local hard disks — use thin flash storage or PXE to bootstrap an iSCSI or NFS root…or at least have multiple mirrored OS disks.
- Networks can be redundant and multipath.
- Virtualization can allow you to move “servers” between physical nodes dynamically without downtime. You already have filers — leverage them!
You have the infrastructure to make vast leaps in reliability if you just do a bit of refactoring. I help keep a similar setup running at work with far less downtime.
In the interest of keeping myself from being blindsided again by DreamHost shutting down over 100,000 domains without an e-mail, I subscribed to the RSS feed in the panel. The trouble is, it DOESN’T show only issues that affect me, and it says EVERYTHING is resolved, even when the core router maintenance wasn’t as I write this.
Do status feeds work for anybody else?
BigFuss,
Ummm. Not an email. If you can read, you’d probably have seen this post here on the main page — which is still marked High red.:
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/10/17/core-router-upgrades/
Wow, some people here amaze me!
Not sure if this is a bug, but I’m seeing the last person’s “will not be published” email address in the Leave a Reply section.
That’s not normal, right?
@Jesse
No, status feeds don’t work for me either. It shows everything rather than what’s relevant to me, same as your problem.
Oop.. and down she goes again.
Have to agree with Tyler, particularly as an extra-paying PS customer…
Odd that my stuff didn’t go down until about 10 minutes ago o_o I hope all the work I’ve been doing isn’t gone =/
Sucks that this has to happen on one of the only times I’ll have to work on my site this weekend…damn school work.
Again.
We were informed of this!
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/10/17/core-router-upgrades/
It was PLANNED!
@Daniel (10:52pm)
What amazes me is the free and easy method of contacting everyone via email for a pre-known total outage does not take place..
And you amaze me if you believe that all dreamhosters should be checking dreamhost for this sort of stuff… if a newsletter which in general is 50% crap content, can be churned out once a month, then surely a few lines of text for a pre-known/planned outage is not too far out of the question…
What amazes me is you have time to check the dreamhost status page on the off chance there’s going to be something major going on that affects you. What’s more amazing is that this seems perfectly normal to you to the point where you want to be a condescending prick when others have that sort of “customer service” pegged as worthless at best and negligent at worst. Seriously, how can you possibly defend the lack of email notification on this with “Well, they blogged it! Didn’t you see?”
Give me some of your free time, shithead. Then i’ll camp out “on the main page” to monitor when stuff’s going down with the host.
COOL!!
This downtime gives me a perfect, guilt-free reason to go play World of Warcraft for a couple of hours.
Take your time guys!!!
If you came here to check out what happened, I would have to assume you hit the main page — and would have seen the RED marked post:
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/10/17/core-router-upgrades/
Shithead? Nice one, for someone who apparently cannot read.
What would be useful is notice put in the MOTD on SSH logins of this. I just started to upgrade wordpress and pop, dreamhost disappears halfway through the upgrade. Fun.
This really pisses me off. Why not do this more towards 1am PST or so? That way it minimizes effects to both coasts. As it is, I’ve been completely down since about 10pm. LAME! That’s prime-time for me!
Also, if they’re gonna do this, and it’s planned, then why not email everyone? That would have been appreciated.
Wow, great job guys. Thanks for the heads up.
I still remember when dreamhost was a quality host, but it’s getting harder by the month.
Daniel,
The idea behind a planned outage is that it takes place at a predetermined time. It is a “proactive” step that customers can be warned about ahead of time.
What you are describing is a “reactive” step — using the blog to find out WHY things are down AFTER they are down.
The complaint is that despite being planned, customers we’re not PROACTIVELY warned beforehand. This eliminates the virtue of the outage being planned, which is pretty silly when you think about it.
It’s like the start of the Hitchhiker’s Guide — the fact that there was a warning floating off where nobody was looking at it means there was basically no warning at all.
Is the site still down? I’m having issues accessing. Thanks!
My DH account is due in January. I’ll be shopping for a new host.
We havent had a good uptime since we started here, do most my work in the evenings and it seems like I’m spending more time waiting to the ftp or the site to return service than I do coding… Hope this will fix some of the issues on the model-t.
I came here when I noticed that my sites weren’t working, from my control panel (which some of us seem to be clever enough to be able to do without going through the main page, I guess… ). I sure as hell wasn’t checking in two days ago thinking, “hmm.. wonder if the whole thing’s going tits up on Friday.”
And what difference does it make if i came here to check out what happened and THEN saw that, on the 17th, they posted that it was planned. It’s STILL after the fact. It’s still not an acceptable notification in the customer’s inbox where it could actually do some good.
Sadly, my site isn’t working either. Thought it was just me. Oh wait… It’s not. 
Wow it would have been really, really nice to have gotten an email about this instead of having to check the status blog now that my site is actually down. I doubt many people are begrudging you the downtime to perform maintenance, but I suspect that the only time people check the status page is if their site is already down, so your “advance notification” solely via the status blog is totally unhelpful.
Seriously, feel free to email us when your entire system is going to be down for up to 2 hours. Some of us are trying to work, 10:30pm or no.
TYLER!! It was PLANNED!! Gimme a P! Gimme an L! Gimme an A! Gimme an N! Gimme an N! Gimme an E! Gimme a D!
What’s that spell?!
PLANNED!
Any excuse for your lack of following Dreamhost suggestions as to how to keep informed. I find this hilarious. You have access to an RSS feed off the Status site — yet — here you all are… attempting to work on your sites when a PLANNED downtime was already announced!
Let me guess… You’re the same ‘developers’ who recommend Firefox to everyone, every opportunity you get — yet, you don’t even utilize FF’s core asset, which isn’t just compliance — it’s in its ability for you to subscribe to RSS feeds from web sites!
I love it!
You’re either the laziest ‘developers’ I’ve ever seen in the many many years I’ve been ‘actually developing’ on the web — or — you’re just shills from another hosting company, attempting to ‘bash’ the company during a KNOWN and PLANNED downtime!!
@Tyler
Your email address is showing up in my Leave a Reply box.
Strange.
Daniel:
We only come here when our site is down. We should only have to come here when our site is down (if ever). If this was planned, we should have been notified by something that we check. That way we could plan on our own.
We are saying that we know that the post is there in red. We don’t care what color it was, because we never loaded this site. Why should we? Our own pages worked just fine.
@Daniel:
Posting something on the dreamhoststatus page is not informing all users… most of us only check this page when things go wrong… maybe you have time to check this along with your many other meaningless tasks every day, but others are busy with real issues…
Answer this question Daniel.. a ‘real issue’:
Why wouldnt you send an email to clients for something that is known in advance that will affect 100% of us?
wouldnt this simple task that probably takes less time than updating the dreamhoststatus page ensure 100% of clients have the opportunity to be informed…. Clearly the people posting here (in majority) are like me and only come here when we realise something is wrong…
You may also flame me if it makes you feel better/bigger/wiser(haha), but seriously, see if you can manage to answer my question… (and now I know you can read)
Jesse, once the panel comes back up there’s a link in there that will provide a customized feed for the servers your account straddles. It goes by providing the servers you use as part of the url to get the feed.
This is all from memory ’cause the panel’s down.
TO ECHO WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID, PLEASE E-MAIL US WHEN OUR SITES WILL BE DOWN.
Awww… don’t they have RSS readers on Caitlin’s planet?
I say we stop whining the one time - let’s see what they do, apparently it is to stop otages in the future…let DH do this one thing and let’s see how it goes in the coming weeks
As in the last month my sites have been doing up and down quite frequently…maybe this will solve it
I can wait a couple of hours
Do you or do you not subscribe to the feed off this site? Yes or no will do.
Here’s a free tip: When you say you can’t stay up to date with a site that has little RSS icons all over it… it means you’re retarded.
Are you F—-ing kidding me? I’m pretty sure that you guys have my e-mail account. I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have planned working on developing websites all night tonight if I had known about this beforehand. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been livid, and i’m pretty F—ING SURE that i wouldn’t have been PROMOTING my new site throughout the night tonight.
This is beyond horrible, this is shameful. I am losing ad revenue by the moment thanks to your poor poor poor excuse for a website hosting company.
Also, if the status site is up, how hard would it have been to change some fucking CNAMES to point to a page on this site that says “scheduled maintenance”. After all, this was a PLANNED outage.
bulls***
I second a previous post that an email would be nice. Made some nice changes to my WP blog - and - it didn’t save….I guess this is called sh.. happens. 1/2 hour is gone.
Well this was planned, i hope everything works fine at the end and be resolved in the estimated time.
Regards.
<My web site mirrored here />
Well this is suck >.
4chan is down
I recommend that everyone searches for a new ISP because I see more disadvantages the advantages with having my site hosted on dreamhost. Unfortunately every time the site or e-mail goes down, we have to put in a support ticket and the average response time is 12 hours for me. This company is making enough money to upgrade thier servers and hardware, but obvoiusly they dont want to dig into the profits to upgrade a better product for all of us to host our sites. I am tempted to report dreamhost to the BBB and make sure that they know that this company doesnt feel its important to notify its customers when they have major outages like today. Further more, if they would have cared about thier reputation and paying customers, they could have fixed this problem during the late or early hours of the morning when traffic was at its slowest rate for all of us. I have personally switched back to my old ISP and I expect a full refund for the time I have wasted with this company.
Do you imbeciles really think it makes more sense for Dreamhost to send out hundreds of thousands of emails, instead of making a single blog post?
I’m glad I’m not too stupid to get RSS.
Then again, if you idiots kept up with the RSS feed, you couldn’t come here and whine about not getting an email, since you’d already be clued in like the rest of us that aren’t dumbasses.
To the other Daniel: I subscribe to the feed as well. Its on my firefox. The title always says “DreamHost Status”, never “scheulded maintanence planned”.
ISP?? lol.
Diggler. You know,… I would go to your site… but it appears your web host is down.
Daniel,
I think this is getting childish. I explicitly stated that it was planned. That is not the issue. We can all agree on that.
The issue is the means of notification. It is common practice to send an email to customers prior to a planned global outage. Most any hosting company will do that. I do it for the users of our clusters.
You should consider the idea that monitoring an RSS feed is not a reasonable requirement to being informed of such outages. The basic reason is that RSS is a passive notification system — it relies on me reading entries as they come by, most of which will not be applicable to me. Email is an active notification system — an alert sounds, there is a clear read/unread flag, etc.
So calm down. We’re not “shills from another hosting company”; that’s plainly ridiculous. Let’s be rational about this. The company, in this particular case, did not take a basic, reasonable step to keep its customers informed of a planned outage. That’s all.
Here, kids. I’ll even help you out, since you can’t seem to manage it all by yourselves.:
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/feed/
It’s easy. Load up your Firefox, or your favorite RSS aggregator — or even Google RSS Reader!! Oh, hey! You can get that in an iGoogle Widget these days too!!
SUBSRIBE!! BE INFORMED!! STOP BEING RETARDED!!
(1, I think we should set-up a Dreamhost site specifically for the RSS challenged — where we can sell that t-shirt. “STOP BEING RETARDED!”)
We’d probably make DHSOTM!
Wow….
Come on you could of choose a better time, like 3 cst in morning on sunday, were in fact there is less people online using your services….(unless you have a study that proves friday is better)
I know this might sound odd, but have you ever heard of doing a test group, you do not need to shut down the hole network to do a test/maintenance.
It may cost some money but investing on a backup core router…
I am no PHD in networking; however, I do know if you are planning to do maintenance on a network, you usly have a back up system in place….
I just think this could of been handled a bit diffrently…hope next time it will be handled better…
But its only two hours so I guess its not all bad….
Hi Dirk Diggler,
Let me guess, the coupon is only valid for another 90 minutes? tee hee..
I’ve just realized that two of the podcasts I subscribe to are hosted by DH! How did I figure this out? Itunes couldn’t update them because they timed out.
Bah.
amazing….why do I keep paying these hacks money?
You should consider the idea that monitoring an RSS feed is not a reasonable requirement to being informed of such outages.
It is if you’re not a clueless jackass.
this sux
Daniel: Wow. So apparently I have to check the RSS feed every day to make sure that my hosting company won’t be down for 2 hours?
Tyler: Daniel apparently likes to “flame” us “n3wbs” for not knowing what “R55″ f33dz ar. whatever.
“You should consider the idea that monitoring an RSS feed is not a reasonable requirement to being informed of such outages”
But…but… Tyler, Daniel is able to manage it. I mean, he strikes me as someone with a full, rich life full of outdoor activities, and girlfriends and a thriving career, yet, somehow he can be five steps ahead of the rest of us AND be home on a Friday night - even though he KNEW this was going to happen. Seriously… I found a new hero tonight.
WOW , they should use DD-WRT
i hava 4 websites and all is down
Ya van 2 dias que pasa lo mismo esperemos que este sea lo ultimo dicen que su uptime es de 99.9% deberia bajar a 98.9% en cuanto tenga dinero me cambiare de hosting espero que alguien me recomiende uno bueno y que no sea caiga a cada rato
Not subscribing to the dreamhost RSS feed makes me stupid? Come on. Let’s elevate the discussion here.
I don’t subscribe to the dreamhost RSS feed. Most posts don’t effect me, and I wade through enough text as it is.
Long term global outages warrant an email.
If RSS is good, RSS+email is better. They’re not mutually exclusive.
Don’t need the email since you saw it on the feed? Fine; delete it. What works for you doesn’t have to work for everyone.
I read about this in advance via the feed, but I have to agree with the majority of here: Notice about this should have been pushed out to users. Not doing everything you could to warn people was irresponsible.
aaarrrrgghhhhhh!
@L33tkill3r: we do have a couple of wireless routers running dd-wrt actually
f that , I’m totally loosing money right now
when my thing is done I’m switching to dedicated. can’t keep doing this
Hey Tyler: I’m with you here, but a cool thing that dreamhost set up in the last… year or so is a customized RSS feed. You can get it from your Panel by clicking on “your account”. It only shows updates that apply to the servers on your account. Pretty neat.
Daniel and Fuss,
That’s the point… You would have experienced the outage the other day, obviously. You would have either checked-up on it then (because I see a couple of your messages in previous posts, complaining as usual) — and — you have read the announcement that it would be taking place tonight at 10PM PACIFIC.
Now… Call me silly, but you could have also have been subscribed to the feed — and you would have seen it as well. In which case, you would have known that it was announced and remained a critical high priority notice — that it would take place at 10PM PACIFIC.
I planned for it. I was in the middle of an update on my site — but of course, as in many cases — I forgot the time and realized what they were doing. Why didn’t I get upset? BECAUSE I’M NOT A RETARD AND I STAY INFORMED!!
I can’t believe this bullshit. i’m cancelling my account asap.
@Steven Fisher: Yep, that’s the link I used. It gives me a URL like this: http://feeds.dreamhost.com/?q=server1+server2+server3+server4. There’s a feed being served, but it’s not customized to me. Instead, the top three stories are: “Resolved - Core Router Maintenance,” “Resolved - Troubles with Janky,” and “Resolved - sanjay / lovejoy filer issues.” Of the three, the only relevant article is Core Router Maintenance, which is still unresolved according to both Firefox and DreamHost Status. Have you used this and does it work for you? I suppose it could be a buggy aggregator that doesn’t account for system downtime properly. That would kind of defeat the point ;).
@the Troll: When your beloved, flawless DreamHost can manage a simple thing like a RSS feed correctly, let me know. It takes some fairly low competence levels for an ISP to mess up something that’s built-in to the vast majority of content management systems.
Posting a sign somewhere that 90% of customers do not look until something goes wrong is not enough notification. If you want people to know what’s happening, you have to tell them. Road crews don’t post a sign on a community bulletin board, then wonder why everyone’s mad when they block the road to fix it. They have to inform news stations and post BIG, OBNOXIOUS SIGNS. Applying this concept to a web hosting company isn’t that difficult.
Dreamhost simply failed to do this.
Shills from another hosting company? I wish. That way I wouldn’t be so broke that a 2 hour outage is affecting me financially.
While we’re on the childish accusation train, I would like to hazard a guess that some of you are aliens and robots. L.O.L.
And most of us aren’t planning on “switching to another ISP” (LMAO, ISP…) because of this. It’s just annoying, like bringing a significant other home with a different background/lifestyle that shocks your parents. A little heads-up via email would have been appreciated is all.
To those name callers who thing signing up to RSS is the answer,
Remember a commercial entity with clients should listen to their customer base. Should clients conform to dicatorship, this is how you get notified and no other way, or could we possibly offer our clients what they want. Lookup up there are many people who would love an email.
If everyone has an option, be it email or rss, we’d all be happy. Email certainly is the universal well known and free method of keeping informed, whether we’re in the know of RSS or not… I dont subscribe to RSS by choice, and nor should I have to, I have a perfectly working email account.
sending thousands of emails out doesnt seem to be an issue with the newsletter.
:)
Oh, and good on those who use RSS, its your choice.. not mine.. I have nothing mission critical here, but I support the email notifications, and not this dicatorship that we must check the site or subscribe to RSS
@ Mikes3ds
In fact, many people says that are less people surfing on friday and saturday, because the people go to partyes or something. But friday it is used by many webmasters (like me) to upgrade the sites, apply changes and stuff.
@Steven Fisher: Excuse me, I meant http://feeds.dreamhoststatus.com/?q=server1+server2+server3+server4
Am i down? today is oct 20 2:32 pm
Daniel!! Go to the main page of THIS site!! You DO NOT need the RSS feed from the PANEL!
Here’s the feed URI once again.
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/feed/
Wow, that was hard.
Daniel — do us all a favor and drop the word “retard” from your vocabulary. Maybe also drop whatever is making your all your posts insulting and sarcastic. Maybe even ditch the whole “everyone else is stupid and lazy” thing you’ve got going.
If I’m saying that I’d appreciate an email before the downtime, that’s nothing to you. If I don’t want to subscribe to the RSS feed, again, no effect on you.
Cool off on the nerd rage. Stop arguing on the internet. Go to sleep. Good night.
What a bunch of crap. Any other web host I have dealt with always sent out an email if there was a planned outage.
What planned outage is occurring right now? I really do not why there need to be so many planned and unplanned outages. Why can more preventive maintenance not be done without downtime; and why is there not more network redundancy? I wonder if there is there even an effort to make improvements to the network or if it is like an old car that is just holding together.
Ok thank you for the comment Aikora, I will have to look into that more….(However my college does its maintatnce on sunday morning….thats why I said that)
Next time please post more detail about the problem….I know it has someting to do with the…emergency core router maintenance…
What is wrong with the core router….is it being replaced…fixed….upgraded…downgraded…..ect….
With this information I can judge if I want to stay with dreamhost or not….
An Ode…. to Dreamhost….
Today I found a black leprechaun and white wife playing D&D at Michael Jackson’s house of flying daggers.., jack hammers, and.. empty vodka bottles. The next day he stole my house and sold my children to the Jamaican Mafia. I was relieved because I hated my beaner children. Especially the one suffering from lupus but i love the euros received for my left kidney that I ate onstage at it tasted like BoC’s left nipple when in reality it was like Lucifus’s left nut. No one really cares about howI feel when I have only a little bit of dirty ass to keep me from playing with with my penis while i watch a nude Barney quietly licking some homeless bum, whose dog was molested by KAA staff who had problems with his personal flying programming monkeys hit h game.
If you think thats weird try raping some bros and ejaculating in cans of tuna while playing with.. your favorite slinkey but always remember to shake your manwhores down for enough money too pay for my fine fat goose and my Negroplasty. Because if you start drooling my thick and juicy hog around here named Bacon will start jizzing all over the walls.on the bright.. side of things, the goatse man and his wife burned in hell for 6 minutes and they looked like something that.. just got burnt. I’m sure that is lame but.. I have cancer and the doctor screwed my wife while i was experimenting with his french maids outfit and feather duster on his new ten-speed bike. Then he cut off the power , but suddenly a very moist and naked girl Who was a prostitute on the professional golf circuit was hit by a wiggly and sluty female golfer.
She was obese and smelt of old eggs and curry, meanwhile back.. at The Bronx she went to the sex store and bought a Saber inflatable doll then suddenly deadfire pulled out his flaccid and unimpressive 3.25″ floppy device lovingly named Binky.
Honoring a hamster that once fought.. to restore peace in his pant. speaking of pants mine are wet which probably explains..earlier furious masturbation. In the meantime while time traveling means being stoned out of your freaking mind I did a goatseand then a giant clone of M.C Hammer came out from my computer screen started doing some stand up comedy the comedy was offered by the goat show from mexico and that was the end my virginity. I started taking piano.. lessons from a perverted American midget with the name Jefferson GayLoussac III who touched me very very roughly in the deepest.. sections of my pants and buttocks. Meanwhile, the plan.. for world domination was nearly completed but something happened when my doorbell electrocuted the postman unfortunately the part I ordered earlier was destroyed, so then i had continued my plan with the help of my wife and her weird family and friends. We all decided to hunt down Munsu because he was too evil to really be a living being he was also a very very experienced master baiter. ” Oh my god “, “everybody gets shot!”
The next day was the best because we finally were able to make Deadfire forget about his beloved Bavarian Prostitute. Then Terracosmo, wearing drag came out of the closet and started a fight with Deadfire. They then had sex about three times. Oh my god! They Killed Kenny! “You Bastards!” screamed Masamuneehs. He then began fisting himself with Celine Dion.
In my personal opinion, dreamhost does fine, if you cant figure out how to read a site’s RSS and take some time to look into things that you obviously invest your money and time into then don’t complain when you are not informed enough to know.
An email would have been considerate.
I think I’m going to move to mediatemple next year.
@Tatertots: it’s never lupus
So…. according to the post, this was announced 2 days and 6 hours ago. What about those users that don’t do website updates more often than once a week?
Daniel: I like Dreamhost, too. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t still be with them. I am a happy customer. I’m pissed that I wasted a good chunk of a Friday night because my hosting company didn’t send an email. I don’t have time to check RSS feeds. its only on my browser so that when my site is down i can try to get an idea when it will be back up and let my regular clients know. via e-mail.
Does it affect you that I’m pointing out an obvious caveat in your irrational approach to the downtime, Tyler? Does it affect you that Dreamhost informs its customers in various areas of their web site, by making suggestions as to how to stay informed — and in what ways that would be most efficient?
So, should Dreamhost send-out a mass mail which would in essence take quite a while to happen (you shouldn’t really burst off mass mailers in one shot, because it bottlenecks the servers). Yet, you can however get the information from one readable source — an RSS feed, for which Dreamhost has kindly offered up as a necessary service to customers.
I’d love to know just how far advance this outage was planned. If the plan existed for more than a couple hours I certainly would have appreciated some sort of notice.
I would like to know a reliable host? Are there any for someone who doesn’t want a dedicated server?
DMcD - Dreamhost is a reliable host
[scarcism]
in strictly business plan didnt work…. hmmm strictly business no no no
tambien en strictly business estan abajo por 2 horas eso es mucho para el mejor plan de dreamhost.
If Dreamhost was down for an entire day, I’m sure Daniel would find some excuse to defend Dreamhost with.
I’M BREAKING OUT THE DoS
THERE GOEZ ED
BYE BYE
DONT DOS ME
FUCKERKGHJIJGEG
hypr: quick, go buy dsl!
My site with DreamHost maraland.net is down and I’m not complaining. I wish they are working hard to fix it. Every hosts have this downtime…
We are lucky that we can vent our opinion through this DH status site. Thanks.
My experience thus far has not been positive with dreamhost. My email doesn’t work consistently (e.g. all day today) and my website goes down too often for comfort. I need to find a host that can support my business. I heard Laughing Squid was good.
I love how we were all pissed enough to find this site. Unfortunatley I am bound to this crap excuse for a hosting company due to a heavy network of php databases ect. Oh well, at least I’m not running a major site otherwise I would be shopping for a new host right now.
btw it says to slow down on the comments, how great is that?
No time to check rss, if you have time to check your email…
I only hope this fix the recent downtime issues in the last month, because every week my sites was down at least 3 hours.
DreamHost DOWNTIME FTW!
Oh, my site is down. I hope it’ll be up as soon as possible. This is my first outage since my subscription.
Kirby, take a look at the main page of this site — you’ll see the announcement — still labeled in RED.
As for everyone else — it’s simple. You had two options to plan for your working on your sites tonight. You could have either read it through the RSS feed — or — you could have simply taken a look through the main page here on the site (which is the same information as what’s listed in the RSS feed!)
Now obviously — a planned downtime announcement WILL be present here. Which, by all logic and reason, should have allowed you to be aware — and plan for this outtage. Correct?
And obviously — if this was an UNPLANNED downtime, then chances are — we’d all, including Dreamhost, had been caught off-guard.
That makes looking at this site’s list as perhaps a prudent thing to-do in the future then, when planning work on your web site. Correct?
@Daniel
Tyler is merely pointing out that NOT EVERYONE IS AS RSS-MINDED AS YOU.
I don’t check my RSS feeds every day, nor do I expect everyone else in the world to.
You just have to cool it. Not everyone moves along with technology at the same rate. Heck, I know people that still have a rotary phone line.
@Jesse: Actually, you’re right. I was used to it working, but it seems to have almost as many unrelated stories as the main feed lately. Huh.
Awww man, my php nuke and phpbb where people from all over the world with no life come together to trade illegal software is down. What will I do?
Mari, I just pointed out that the EXACT SAME information is listed here on the MAIN PAGE of DREAMHOSTSTATUS.COM!
If you don’t believe me, that you have TWO distinct options of how to obtain that information — then take a look for yourself! You don’t NEED RSS, but it’s there! You can also just LOOK at the web site here and get a pretty idea of what’s planned.
Which translates into your own planning!
My server hasn’t been up for more than 20 days at a time in the last 5 months. I don’t think the router problems have anything to do with that…
I’m just saying. This won’t help me. When my site is down, its due to a server reboot and someone elses runaway scripts.
I think it is a waste of time posting here, So why post so much
Comments posted here may not be viewed by DreamHost staff at all. This is not a way to contact DreamHost.
what! U can install zebra on dd-wrt…
1 hour and 45 minutes, 15 minutes to go!
DH CostMonster $38/month, Downtime Priceless. For some things money can’t buy, for everything else, theres DreamHost DownTime
Maybe DH is doing this work to backup systems in place and make the service more reliable. Hopefully this is included in the “take care of as many things as we can” part of the post. Redundancy would amazing. Every August, I produce an improv festival here in Toronto. People were trying to access our website for info on shows because we were getting a lot of media coverage. The servers were down, and instead of working on the production of the festival, I had to setup a backup on a separate hosting company’s servers, under an account owned by a friend of mine. Next year, we’ll be ready for to handle this by setting up 4th, 5th and 6th DNS settings that point elsewhere than DH, as our own back-up. That just makes sense… only, what would make more sense is for us to not have to in the first place. Vented.
But you must check, like a responsability, the status of YOUR host company at least once a week and take a look for issues and see what’s happend.
OMG!
:
I would love to see the statistics on how many people actually leave DreamHost after an outage, every time there is a post like this, half of the posts are people stating that they are going to switch hosts, yet I doubt hardly any actually do. I have yet to experience a host with even half as much care as dreamhost puts into your user experience. I love how everything they do makes perfect sense and designed so you can do what you need to do and help you do it quickly and easily. A little down time is a small price to pay for such great hosting.
Thank You Dreamhost!
@Daniel.
Why is it so wrong for us to ask for an email? then we’d have THREE options.
I agree, people can subscribe to the RSS feed for this site
but to have so many websites not loading with “timed out” is really unprofessional
DreamHost should have set it up so that all sites on all servers point to a page that says “Uploading Servers until ___ AM PST”
Like everyone else I request an e-mail. An RSS feed of a blog is not the same. I subscribe to many, many RSS feeds and something as critical as this should get a high, high priority and be PUSHED to me. I shouldn’t have to read about troubles with Janky through an RSS feed if I’m not on the Janky cluster - email those people. We shouldn’t have to be pulling it through a RSS Reader or checking this website twice a day to see if something is planned… It takes no extra effort to e-mail us and it’s free. There’s no reason not to do it.
I’m more concerned about the timing of the maintenance. 10PM PST is too close to high traffic. As someone mentioned 1AM PST/4AM EST, would minimize traffic for all the affected parties. You could even do 12AM/3AM.
Oh and now it says that I am posting comments too quickly, yet this is the first and only comment I’ve ever posted here.
Ya that is so true…no one has any thing to do for 2 hours so we they might as will post here
I though it was my internet connection but now i see… yesterday was the same thing.
When is this going to end?! I was in the middle of something … o_O!
@Jason
I would prefer a direct link to my brain as a free service, having them send me notifications in the Robot voice from Portal, new game out from Steam, Included in the Orange Box, Buy Now!
Daniel-
You’re missing the point and being rude. The fact that 90% of the posts here are people asking to be emailed means that Dreamhost should consider emailing people, as that’s the preferred communication method for many of us.
For a hosting company that has a lot of customers, the correct line of action is to email us, just like they do with the newsletter, since that’s what people are asking for. Being aggressively rude and telling people they’re wrong to be upset is an insane approach to a simple problem, and I hope that you don’t have a customer facing role wherever you work.
I for one would love an email before a mass outage. I’m not interested in having to scan a constantly updated RSS feed every day when most of the updates on it don’t affect me.
waa, waa, waa … the #1 way to identify people who haven’t the FIRST CLUE about what it takes to run an operation of this scope for such CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP PRICES is to look at who is whining loudest.
If you’re unhappy, STFU and go set up your own LAMP server on your home broadband connection; that way, YOU can be in complete control at all times — yeah, I bet *that* will help your uptime.
Oops, you don’t even have the first clue what LAMP means, and yet you whine and cry like a little baby.
The value of DH is that it is possibly the only host of this scale whose number one value add is TELLING THE TRUTH when stuff is borked.
Every other “name brand” host has all the same kinds of problems, but they hide behind layer after layer of third tier support morons equipped with intricately scripted lies.
Even if it takes ALL NIGHT to get this right, you’ll still be TRILLIONS OF TIMES better off with DH. There nothing even close in terms of bang for the buck.
No, I don’t work for DH, don’t own stock, or have any other inside interest … just a LONG TIME industry veteran who knows the value of Uncompromising Truthiness in Hosting.
I suggest if you are unhappy with what you get FOR THE OBSCENELY LOW PRICE YOU PAY, then just leave … go ahead … you can start the transfer process at GoDaddy right now. Go for it, I’m sure it will solve all your problems and it will certainly solve our problem of listening to all your petty whining.
~ PEACH ~ LOVE ~ REVOLUTION ~
First!
Let’s see, Jason. How about the fact that it’s more efficient to simply run a blog wherein it provides the status of the network, and any planned downtime announcements and explanations — as opposed to using up server resources to send mass-mailing to every customer?
How much time would it take you to come here vs. getting an email, Jason?
Dreamhost works good only in dreams, lol
@Brian: yes, I realize this is happening. It’s happening to me as well, and I’m logged in!
It’s simply a side-effect of the squid proxy sitting in front of dreamhoststatus.com at the moment. I haven’t had the time to iron out the kinks with it, and serving up the site itself is more important than functional comments.
It will definitely get fixed, but not tonight. Once the maintenance window is over, the squid proxy will go away and things will go back to normal.
Sorry for the problem!
We should have been notified by email (email > this.domain), bottom line.
@Daniel
2 days. 6 hours notice. Yeah, let me change my plans last minute. Oh wait, canceling appointments and photo shoots 2 days beforehand is bad business? Like a previous poster said… around here, when they do road work, they have big flashing signs that say something like “road contruction begins (insert date more than 2 days away)”, or “traffic pattern changing in 9 days, be aware”. and so on.
@Tobin … you make a very valid point. Unfortunately, we were typing at the exact same time. Had I seen your post, I would have prefaced my little rant with:
“Yes, DH could surely include an email alert, nevertheless, when it comes to PRICE for PERFORMANCE …” [yada-yada]
Efficient? HAHA The dreamhost newsletter doesnt scream efficiency! A monthly ritual with about 20% relevant info to me.
I’d rather hear about an outage than the next Site of the Month..
Daniel. You were given the time for the planned downtime. It’s an emergency upgrade. What do you want?
Hey all,
I got an idea for the rss feed thing. I got a forum run on dreamhost called http://www.directoryjunction.com sort of webmaster & directory stuff.
We got this thing, that you can add your blog url feed in ur usercp and the last two posts show up next to your username automatically.
So maybe u can just visit my forums every now and then and chit chat and if dh is about to go down, u can see it right next to ur name.
Thomas says:
Why do annoying people not realise how fuxing annoying they are, yet are the first ones to complain about stuff 
Roland says:
ie Thomas
brett says:
I think you have just answered your own question thomas
Thomas says:
sigh
Thomas says:
whats the point
Thomas has left the conversation.
Where’s the feet
Jason, now you’re talking like a strawman shill who’s deflecting the issue onto the newsletter. You know I wasn’t talking about the newsletter.
Come clean, bro. Who do you work for?
@metavalent - I’m definitely not saying that Dreamhost isn’t a good value, or that I want to set up my own server, or any of that. I’m not one of the people screaming that I’m going to swap hosts, or that downtime is unacceptable.
I’m just saying that a quick email to customers, just like they do with the newsletter already, would have been appreciated, and I’m requesting it in the future.
Or, Adnan. People can just point their browser to DREAMHOSTSTATUS.COM?
lol.
I work for the man at the tater farm, he sent his little tots after me!
Daniel,
But it’s run on Dreamhost PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP S
P for POWER
[quote]Daniel. You were given the time for the planned downtime. It’s an emergency upgrade. What do you want?[/quote]
That’s the first logical thing you’ve said. Good point. But, that two days would have been enough time to send out the emails that everybody has always asked for.
I don’t know about you, Daniel, but my email makes a little noise when a new mail arrives, but not when DH makes a new post to a status blog that, I’m guessing here, 95% of its customers don’t even know about. The people here complaining probably have this blog bookmarked. I bet there are a lot of people less experienced, sitting at home wondering why their customers cannot place orders.
I guess I’m just too dumb to realize that sending one small email to all of its customers took up more server resources than all of the other email messages that DH customers send and receive on a daily basis. I guess I should be able to tell that server resources are such an issue every week when my bandwidth allowance goes up by gigabytes and gigabytes. But, now you should probably educate us all, me particularly, on the difference between bandwidth and CPU usage.
Or maybe I’m the asshole here.
Silly me for not looking at the status blog every day. As a business owner I try to give others in similar positions a bit of slack, but this situation is really ridiculous. Regardless of the fact that the information was made available via this blog, it is poor customer support in the extreme that there was not some sort of email notification of this planned outage. If DH can send out a newsletter every month (okay, they barely manage that, but I digress) certainly they could have notified their how ever many thousands of customers that there would be hours of downtime this evening.
Daniel, I print cards for a living… but I still know what customer service is..
In your words ‘using up server resources to send mass-mailing to every customer’ lets do this, put the newsletter on a blog and then we can cater for these planned outages.
Why are you so against an email?
2 hours yahhh its still down!
@Daniel: I’m tired of you, troll. I will not be dignifying your rudeness with a response again, and I encourage everyone else to similarly ignore you. The fact is that a RSS feed - particularly a customized one that DreamHost “claims” to be providing - is more system intensive than an e-mail, because RSS readers will be checking the feed every fifteen minutes or so, while a system-wide e-mail is sent out once. Any fool with math comprehension beyond second grade can see that 1
Umm, Daniel. That’s basically what I’ve been pointing to the entire time here — yet, you all continue to argue the point. Thus, how can I not feel compelled but to sit here and combat the irrationality?
Email next time, please.
@tobin - i’m totally down with request and would support it entirely. my rant was only directed at some of the earlier pure WHINERS. they know who they are.
@Daniel: If that was your point… why did you never make it? Backpedal a bit more, please.
So what you guys drinking? I’m cracking open the last of a batch of homebrewed IPA, but next up is probably the IPA from Michigan Brewing Company, or some semen. Not sure yet…
That explains why I can’t get my email, lol or get into my webpanel or webmail or anything and everyone is down? Sucks, but I’m sure they will fix it - I NEVER have downage so this is the first time really in the years I’ve had my acct. Trust me, its worth staying!
Jesse, an email is sent in mass by the server — which has the potential to cause bottlenecks and tap resources. Whereas on the otherhand — an RSS reader is sporadic and served in an efficient text-based organiation much in the way that web sites are viewed (only much much faster, without all the overhead!)
If you’ve ever run a server of your own, you’d probably understand this. But then again, I highly doubt you ever have based on what you just stated to me.
@Kevin: Nothing beats a 2 year old bottle of Flying Dog 120 Minute IPA. Too sweet to drink right off the bat (for me). I, for now, am drinking only Dr. Pepper.
@ DreamHostLover
2 hours = estimated time
+ hours = real time with + “oh, something goes wrong”
Comedy…
Go Trojans!
woohoo! sites coming back online … RIGHT ON TIME.
*OUTSTANDING* Emergency Operation, Team DH!!!
im up!
Daniel: If there is a worry about bottlenecks I can gladly donate 99% of my ever increasing bandwidth… as my site never uses it!
So now we have a deal? we can get our emails right? haha
Oh, also…. didn’t they say they were going to post updates? ||scrolls up||. Yup. They sure did. kitchen? any updates for us?
Dreamhost. Be proactive. If you can email the newsletter each month, you can send a short text email letting everyone know about a planned outage. I have better things to do than read the status blog or an RSS feed. Avoid a bunch of angry comments by giving fair warning next time.
It is ok now, thanks to DH!
Why should everyone be expected to check this site ahead of time before working on our websites? Should it not be expected that the network will be up? Why are we coming to expect that the network could be down at absolutely anytime? Do we check everyday to see if the road is open before we head off to work; no we expect that it will be, unless there is a disaster. Accordingly the post says it was again related to some sort of an emergency! I am astonish at how many emergencies and failures dreamhost has; if this is all common planed stuff then I wonder why dreamhost uses the terms emergency and high severity, which leads me to believe this is a major problem.
Hey, my site just came back up,
remember the rss feeds guys, http://www.directoryjunction.com/forums/
take care
Site’s back up — bye bye then. I have work to do…
And Jesse. You can easily come to this site and read the messages prior to planning your work, can you not? I mean, you did so anyway once you figured out there was an issue?
Anyway — I’m out. Have fun complaining about a planned downtime. It’s back up (within the estimated time communicated, no less.)
I’m starting to think Daniel invented RSS. Oh well, sites are coming back up, mine included. Guess we all have to go now, so we’ll never know.
For those who are saying “it was planned and ON the dreamhost status page.. I have to be honest, i didnt even know this page existed.
I dont log into the dreamhost site often.. as i dont maintain my websites from there.. So i had NO clue what was going on.
An email would have been preferred. Since i know what is going on now, i am not quite so worried. Good luck DH guys/gals and hopeuflly things will be in working order soon.
I shouldn’t have to check an RSS feed for something that ‘might’ have an issue that affected me. I ’should’ get an e-mail saying ‘hey! your sites going down!’.
Was down for a bit. Thanks for the well-detailed blog entry. Although for an outage of this severity, it would be nice to have 12 hours e-mail notice.
My sites work again.
happy:
We hope continue in this way.
@ Daniel, (which is my middle name!!)
While I have the patience to brew beer, I could never cellar it for two years! Bottoms up from the dirty mitten!
Hey everyone, now that we’re all back up, come check out http://noobtoob.com for some sweet gaming podcast action.
Oh, and Daniel is a douchebag troll with less technical knowledge than my grandma. Have a good night!
Why dpo people kep saying about how cheap the service is and we should be happy with that because there is nobody else like DH? Yes they are cheap and you get alot of BW and space for your money! There are many other companies offering services like that though I have found a few…Its not about paying little money its about quality of service….were not saying DH are s**t we are complaining about lack of notice about this planned work….as soon as our services are affected it is upto us at all times to go searching for the reason why! Even on this huge scale like today! They should have contacted us all via email or had a big notice on CP saying that it was planned and for how long. My ISP lets me know of all work being carried out even if it does not affect me. I woyuld pay a little more for a little more info and feedback. Every little blog, forum, wikii and whatever else DH have set up they tell you it is not a way of contacting them, its not a way to be answered by them, its not monitored by them and so on…and yet this is the only way we find out what is going on! Im not saying I want a different host or that DH are s**t I just want more INFO and Communication from DH when it comes to problems! Is that too much to ask? It would stop alot of people moaning I think! If we use our accounts to host other peoples sites then it makes us look bad too and thats not good for anyone.
Is there any place to see the queued actions in the panel? I’m particularly interested in whether a database restore went through. Thanks
Chris, what’s the difference if you’re checking an email or checking this site, or its feed?
It’s all the same thing — same action…
And Trish? Well there you go… Now you know, even though it’s pointed out several times in Panel and the Knowledge base.
“As planned, we are beginning our emergency core router maintenance right now.”
Wew…. that’s a very nice plan guys.
Ruin all of your customers’ sites ‘eh?
How come I didn’t know about this HUGE PLAN?
SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Daniel, are you the author of this blog? Or perhaps are you the guy from Dreamhost who suggested having a status blog instead of sending out emails?
If not, please stop telling people they’re so stupid because they don’t check this website every day. Some of us have lives. It’s simply obvious a lot of people still prefer actual correspondence as a notification. We’re not talking about the physical ability to know where to go for info, we’re talking about customer relations. Having as many notification options as you can is a very good idea.
And to whoever said this is not a way to contact Dreamhost, you’re right. Everyone who wanted an email about this, please suggest that mass emails be sent regarding planned outages through the Dreamhost Panel when it’s back up. If enough of us say we want notifications of major planned outages in the Panel, then Dreamhost may just pay attention.
I’m outta here. *sigh* This is just like DIgg. It’s slightly depressing to think that even the comments on DreamhostStatus posts are mostly angry guys arguing over nothing.
@Mari: Great idea about the suggestion. I’m off to do that right now. Thanks.
Though I will say I agree on one point, they should have sent an email and said this was going to happen so we knew and the url to the status page here (I just remembered it by chance) cause if they actually DID send that email, I know *I* sure didn’t get it.
This is why my article on RSS feeds being only for geeks was so popular. RSS Feeds suck at informing people. Try this. A RSS feed is like having to call Bob everyday and ask him, “Is there anything that you are doing that will make my life miserable?”. An email is like recieving a phone call from Bob, “Hi, I am just informing you that I am going to make your life a living hell at 10pm pacific standard time on friday…”. Not only that, the mail box acts like an answering machine so if no one is home the message stilll gets delivered.
Use email. RSS feeds SUCK!!!
Seems everthing is back and up now!
I guess that’s what explains my downed sites…