if your depending on the income you are loosing from your website being down for a couple of hours
maybe you need to find a new source of income…

I am soooo angry.

I’m taking my business and going elsewhere.

…wait.. no I’m not. I love Dreamhost and all you guys do.

Thank you for being on top of things and awesome.

James Hatton
inhislikeness.com

I don’t think there are really any excuses that can be made for how Dreamhost handled this, so why defend them?

They said things were resolved when they were not.
They said it was a “hiccup” when clearly it was a “problem” or an “outage”. (What do you picture a hiccup to be? Certainly not a long and slow dull pain…)
They mis-characterized the severity level.

(Additionally, they had a planned effort and didn’t mention it but maybe it’s not their policy.)

If Dreamhost is going to go on record and post status messages to their clients they can’t be doing it this way. Better for them to say nothing at all then to make misleading statements (at best) about the situation, causing a whole slew of clients to waste their time on a false premise.

There is no excuse. Only apologies. E.g.:

“We’re sorry, we didn’t know how big the problem was. Next time we’ll determine its size before saying it’s small”
“We’re sorry, we didn’t realize the problem wasn’t resolved. Next time we’ll make sure it’s resolved before saying so”
“We’re sorry, we used the wrong terms and severity levels. Now we’ll have a rubrik for rating each problem.”
“We’re sorry our status messages have been unprofessional. We’ll make sure to keep things clean and accurate from now on.”
“We’re sorry we don’t post regular messages about planned maintenance. That is not our policy.”
“We’re sorry we don’t give frequent status updates. We wait for status requests to be logged. That is our policy.”

Let’s see some of these from Dreamhost!

People are complaining about complaining about the money it costs… How is that the issue when Dreamhost says they’ve got 99.99% uptime? If they were straightforward with their numbers, then we’d understand that we’re NOT getting a deal at all. We’re getting what the market can bare. Without knowing the true risks, why shouldn’t customers be upset?

As for “better communications during outages”, Grant. I think your ticket should be more explicit, There are many great examples in this thread of what Dreamhost could actually do in the future. Also it shouldn’t be “during outages” if they are planned. It should be “before planned maintenance”.

What the people who are posting to dreamhoststatus need to understand is that if we *see anything* up there, it will calm things down because we know things are getting worked on. It’s when we see nothing when clearly there are problems (which happened first), and when we read falsehoods (which happened next), that we have every right to get really teed off and an argument defending Dreamhost holds no weight.

Sorry but NO NO NO

My website still have continuous downtimes

Downtime Duration
08-ene-2008 18:53:56 2 Mins 7 Secs
08-ene-2008 18:43:34 5 Mins 31 Secs
08-ene-2008 17:07:40 1 Hrs 16 Mins
08-ene-2008 16:55:53 5 Mins 50 Secs
08-ene-2008 8:41:01 6 Hrs 14 Mins
08-ene-2008 8:04:36 5 Mins 28 Secs
08-ene-2008 7:33:19 5 Mins 25 Secs
07-ene-2008 20:43:58 38 Mins 3 Secs

All CET times