Janky email issues

Since earlier this morning, we’ve been experiencing slowness on the ‘janky’ cluster due to a file server problem (see your Account Status on the panel’s upper right corner to see if you’re affected). This mainly affects email access, but there are some high loads on web servers too. We’re working on resolving this as soon as possible, and appreciate your patience.

Update Mon Jan 14 15:11:45 PST 2008: The slowness with janky should be all better now.

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32 Responses to “Janky email issues”

  1. 1
    alex Says:

    ugh.

  2. 2
    Antonio B Says:

    Well….my email is down. The panel is down. My site is super slow.
    Ahhh…

    Well I know you are all working hard on it!
    Good luck!
    Pull another fast one Dreamhost! ^^

    You guys are great.

  3. 3
    Jake Says:

    come on guys- my site’s down, the panel’s down, 2nd outage in a month. :( Whats going on over there. I still love you guys- but I also love it when my website stays online.

  4. 4
    Jeffrey Says:

    Yeah, what’s going on here.. the whole web panel is down, but there’s not mention of it here on the status blog! Hmmmm… anyway, h ope it comes back soon… I have work to do!

  5. 5
    Adrianb Says:

    Mail and panel are down for me two, this is the first outage i’ve noticed with DH and i’ve been a customer for around 5 years I think.

  6. 6
    Madison Says:

    I’m also effected by the email outage, completely, site is unreachable as well, and I can’t believe the whole panel is down with no mention here. Hurry it up! ;)

  7. 7
    hiveminds Says:

    It seems this is vry serious. Nothing is working including the dreamhost sites

  8. 8
    Antonio B Says:

    Be supportive, that crap is difficult to work on and it dosnt make them want to work harder when you insult them.

    Just give them some supprt. They work hard for you.

    Note: Noe one besides the first post was really complaining but…we know it is coming

  9. 9
    Jeff B Says:

    I’ve been with you guys for a really long time and am generally happy…

    Do you think maybe it’s time for some redundancy? Even a VM host for MySQL and such to failover to would be great! Slow is better than down.

  10. 10
    Vincenzo Says:

    panel.dreamhost.com is down for *everyone*.

    I’m sure its been three months since I last was hosed like this.

  11. 11
    Dave Says:

    Well, we’re not on janky but our email is down. And of course the panel. The new year had been off to a good start, too. How about shooting for “Most Reliable E-mail in 2008″ instead of “Corporate Blog?”

  12. 12
    Dylan Says:

    What constitutes High severity?

  13. 13
    Thomas Says:

    My account has been slow, but it works fine. Patience is a virtue.

  14. 14
    Lady Says:

    Dylan - I’d say that an entire server killing itself would be in the high severity section.

    I just noticed that my email and everything was down so I headed over here for a look-see.. At least DH has this site, because I’ve had hosts never even attempt to contact anyone about issues such and worse than this. I’m not complaining!

  15. 15
    Patrick Bateman Says:

    Webmail down is unacceptable. Many of us rely on webmail for access.

    I am sick of the apologists here. Frequent failures and a lack of redundancy are NOT acceptable.

  16. 16
    Lady Says:

    Patrick - Whoa dude, calm down. I understand that you need your webmail (as do I), but wouldn’t you rather it be fixed and be down for a little bit than it constantly messing up because they didn’t fix the problem? If you really want to go complain about it, just try to get ahold of the staff and see what they can do to help you.

  17. 17
    Pandrake Says:

    Website not down, nor any other service. Only webmail down (dunno which is my server, but it’s not Janky), but POP/IMAP access still working. Appears to be a SquirrelMail issue - wasn’t there testing of another webmail app going on? Maintenance on SquirrelMail at all? Hmmmmm…. very boggling, tho I’m not all that borked by it since I don’t rely on webmail-only access to my email.

  18. 18
    Patrick Bateman Says:

    “Patrick - Whoa dude, calm down. I understand that you need your webmail (as do I), but wouldn’t you rather it be fixed and be down for a little bit than it constantly messing up because they didn’t fix the problem? If you really want to go complain about it, just try to get ahold of the staff and see what they can do to help you.”

    I would rather that they actually fixed it after the first 50 times it happened, i.e., put in place technology and procedures to ensure than when one piece of hardware or software fails another one seamlessly kicks in and the user notices no problem. That is how a real hosting company of the scale of Dreamhost should work. It should not be a backwoods process of “it’s broken, we’re fixin’ it”.

    In fact, I think it’s only a matter of time before someone sues them. You can’t offer commercial hosting and have this much downtime, you damage people’s businesses.

  19. 19
    Matt Says:

    Patrick - I completely feel you. I don’t think most of the people here depend on their website as their entire business. Especially as a startup company, frequent downtime and slowness drive away current and potential customers. I will say that I’m happy DH has this blog, so that at least I know something is wrong, but things shouldn’t go wrong this often. My site has been down 4 times this month alone (as verified by both SiteUpTime and Host-Tracker) due to server reboots and most of those times it is up and down several times in a single day. It is frustrating to no end and I agree, a web host of this size shouldn’t have so many outages. It might not be as much of a problem to the people out there who can’t blog about their new sweaters, but for a new business it is a big problem. I should have noticed when I signed up that they do not have an uptime guarantee like most everyone else I looked at.

  20. 20
    Pandrake Says:

    Yeah, the reason most of us here don’t depend on our website is because we choose Dreamhost for it’s price-to-service value, not a presumed robustness. I don’t blog about my new sweaters, I communicate with friends and family, run Burning Man groups, and show off compositions of pictures, movies, music, poetry, code, or whatever else I dream up. Dreamhost lets me do that cheaply, without banners (like YooToob or MySpace or something) and with a fair degree of the same optimized functions using SQL, PHP, mailing lists, and the rest. If I were to look into hosting for a business, even a startup business, I’d know that I’m not really saving anything by saving money on a shared host; I’d probably look into hosting it myself so that any problems (and there are always problems) can be addressed quickly and specifically for my one business.

  21. 21
    Patrick Bateman Says:

    Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can’t connect to MySQL server on ‘10.3.67.254′ (115) in /usr/local/squirrelmail-1.4.9a/plugins/dreamhost_virtualhosts/setup.php on line 278
    1044: Access denied for user ’squirrelmail’@'192.168.10.0/255.255.255.0′ to database ‘dreamhost’

  22. 22
    Mac Says:

    I’ve played the “I’m pissed off and moving my sites elsewhere” game before. After moving my sites four times due to downtime, broken promises etc., I’ve decided to stay with DH. Why? Well, because moving everything around and getting back up and running is a pain in the a$$! Something that continues to amaze me is people who continue to bitch about how this downtime is unacceptable and how much business ($$$) they are losing. Granted, excessive downtime IS unacceptable. DreamHost is great, generally speaking, but why are you running your multi-million dollar business on a $10 mo. host? Do you have a back contingency plan in place? How about redundancy? If your site is THAT important, then using a $10 mo. host as your sole source is not a well thought out business decision.

    To those who want to jump ship, it’s your right to do so. Lots of luck getting support from “Paul” across the pond who you can’t understand.

  23. 23
    Mac Says:

    Heh, that is why I got out of tech support…

    Gotta love people who buy Ford Pinto’s and wonder why it won’t tow their Bayliner ski boat.

  24. 24
    Madison Says:

    You mean I can’t tow my Bayliner with my Pinto?! That salesman screwed me! I’m never buying a Ford again!

  25. 25
    greg Says:

    seems to be happening again now sporadically.

  26. 26
    Devin C Says:

    down again, dammit!!!!!!

  27. 27
    Noah Says:

    This item says it’s resolved, but I still cannot log on to webmail. It gets to the framset page, but then never completes loading the list of messages. Is this a new issue, or the same one from yesterday?

    I’m also not able to log on to webpanel — browser says “The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.”

  28. 28
    Mickey Says:

    Noah: Are you relying on Webmail? That should be a backup plan at best. Take a few minutes, download Thunderbird, and configure it to download your IMAP e-mail. Rarely do we have problems with IMAP.

  29. 29
    Mitch Says:

    !fixed

    Here it is, Wednesday, and trying to access my email (both local client and Web mail) is just as painful as it has been over the past few weeks.

    The issue is NOT resolved.

    Fix it.

  30. 30
    Mitch Says:

    Here we are, three days after the reported problem is marked “Resolved” and once again, IMAP and Webmail on Janky are unavailable.

    Brilliant.

    This issue is ongoing and is not “Resolved” in any sense of the word.

  31. 31
    Yan Shmatnik Says:

    Sigh,

    Best of luck to you guys, don’t let it get to you.

    It’s super inconvenient but putting more stress on Dreamhost isn’t going to help them resolve the problem any faster. They are great group of guys and girls.

    It’s just funny how this had to of happened right when I got my IMAP all set up lol.

  32. 32
    Sam Says:

    I think ole Janky is having issues again. I’me not recieveing fowarded e-mails and I have reason to suspect ohers are recieveing there’s as well.

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