Spunky and Central Move

What? Again??

Was there some sort of heads-up given for this that I missed?

damn, guess I’ll stop working tonight then

I agree, it’s time to stop working and go to bed.
Does Dreamhost have folks working 24/7?
J

I was wondering why a cb_login module was taking so long to get installed. Now i know why. I feel stupid, i shoulded knew that if i was doing something important the server was going to go down :).

and just to point out to some of the posters - its 3pm here.DH has customers that are _not_ from that tiny country USA.

We should all play Super Smash Bros. Brawl while our sites are down. Friend codes, anyone?

There was a post here a week ago warning everyone about this downtime. Everyone doesnt read this page, but atleast they did that. I forgot to tell my users about it though

Are you guys drunk? This is the 8th time i’ve had some issues this company!
My grandmother has her cooking site on here and she is so pissed right now. I’m literally not allowed to go out anymore!! She’s grounded me! For christ sakes please can you get the servers up and running right now.

Indeed, an e-mail for planned outages like this should be sent out as a courtesy to your customers.

Aff my site off

Pardon a stupid question, but why can’t this be done by mirroring an old server onto a new server at the new data center and then doing a network switch? If you don’t want to commit to that many new machines, then do it a few at a time. Switch 10 to new machines, move the 10 old machines to the new data center, do another switch, continue until done.

I find it difficult to believe that considering how much you use network storage that you couldn’t have done this move with only minimal downtime (e.g., seconds).

I understand you need to upgrade your infrastructure on occasion, but how about doing a bit more thinking about how to do these things without impacting customers? Much less impacting them for HOURS of downtime! I really like you guys, but most hosting companies would be embarrassed by this much continuous downtime, planned or not.

Good luck, hope you guys get it done soon, I am working on some scripts for my game. So hopefully it will be back and running by the time I have to upload them.

Aff my site is off.
Hosting bad, very bad

If anyone was interested about being notified of such things, they could have subscribed to the RSS feed … over 600,000 domain hosted does *NOT* make email a good way to do this …. srsly!

An alert on the control panel or something would have been nice.. 12 hours on a friday night/saturday? Are you shitting me?

Oh and I absolutely LOVE how people can still sign up for service but no one can contact Dreamhost..

The Hosting this very bad

Furthermore.. couldn’t they at LEAST have redirected all traffic for those servers to a generic page saying what is going on? All of our users have NO idea why we are down and it is freaking annoying.

Hmm that domain isn’t registered.. yet.

The list of servers affected in this move is not accurate. My sites are not on the list, but are all down right now. I can live with the down time, but please, please make the list accurate.

Nice warning!! Man, DH is pissing me off. I think I’m switching to http://www.hostmysite.com/. Time to get out of DH. Been using DH for years, but this is getting too bad. Thanks DH for your years of service, but good things have to come to an end sometime.

A) There was a warning put out A WEEK AGO, people. A WEEK AGO. WAKE UP.

B) THEY TOLD YOU ALL A WEEK AGO.

C) AN ENTIRE DAMN WEEK.

Also, my site is down, whaaa!

Nobody with a brain would ever recommend hostmysite.com except for spammers that work there.

Nice service, Dreamhost. Of course I chose to try to make a blog post tonight of all nights. It was working fine one minute, then everything’s broken, even panel.dreamhost.com is down. Makes you guys look real unprofessional. I just got my renewal bill yesterday — looks like I’ll be doing some shopping in the next few weeks…

Waaaaaaaaaaaaa!

I’m sure the internet will survive 12 hours with one less meaningless blog that only exists for the sake of saying “I blog.”

And it doesn’t make them look unprofessional since they gave you a week of notice. You could have bored the world with your pointless blogging before now. That way, your readers would all still be asleep and wouldn’t even see this downtime.

Is it up yet? Is it up yet? Is it up yet?

Geez, I was in the middle of a shower and suddenly my site stops working? I got soap in my eye here, Dreamhost!!

Well, it’s the weekend…which means another server outage.

MY SITE IS DOWN. ITS OFFICIAL. BE BACK ON SOON (HOPEFULLY).

Happy Easter!?!?!

Actually, as a side note, I did in fact know about this move and scheduled downtime about a week ago, so I suppose they did put out a warning, if not as good as it should have been, it was still there.

RighteousIndignation Says:
March 21st, 2008 at 8:42 pm

Oh the agony of a misplaced comma - real satisfaction during such times can be found at:

http://fuckdreamhost.com

I love that song……

Did you guys mean to take out DNS for all of the hosts that are still running?

[yoda]$ nslookup http://www.google.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

I’d report this in the panel…but it seems to be down.

My site is down, ftp is down, panel is down; can’t report the problem to anybody. Suggestions?

be quick!
be quick!

“Truckload of fail brought to you by Dreamhost.com”

asses.

I do think that in the case of super-critical things like this, that are scheduled, an e-mail to users who have content hosted on the affected servers would be a good policy to consider, in the future.

First the billing goof-up where DH charged all their customers. Now this! Someone needs to be fired from their executive team.

Shawn,

We didn’t get a notice. I check my panel everyday, every night, there was nothing. Nor did I ever get an e-mail, phone call, etc.

So, you looked everywhere, except for where you’re supposed? That makes you an airhead.

Instead, you come to place where you ARE notified, to claim that you haven’t been.

Send Dreamhost a support ticket telling them it’s their fault that you’re too stupid to figure out the RSS subscription that keeps everyone with a brain up to date. They’ll send a tech right out to flip the switch on the back of your head to the “On” position.

We’re not stupid

Yes, actually, you are. Very.

Know how you can spot the ones that aren’t stupid? They’re the ones that stay up to date and don’t come here claiming there was no warning, when there has been for a week.

Another funny thing about you illiterate morons that think email is the way to go, is that you’re the same people that would be dumb enough to use your dreamhost email address for receiving them… and you would be here complaining about not getting an email telling you when your mail server is down.

http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2007/05/03/dreamhost-sucks-at-hosting/

You already attempted this move a week ago, what happened? Why are you bringing down sites yet again? Why don’t you have a plan that leaves websites and services up while you’re making your move, as most competent web hosts do?

This hosting company is turning into one of the worst out there. Constant headaches from mistakes, downtimes, what’s next?

No Shawn, I’m not that stupid.

Maybe, maybe not. You don’t speak for all the stupid people, though… and they would be here doing exactly what I said.

I think such a *big planned move* requires that dreamhost emails about the planned downtime to the affected webmasters.

I take it your reason for thinking that is because you’re not too bright?

Looks like I was right, because you prove it right here:

Not everyone subscribes to the dreamhost status alerts.

They’re called, “morons.” If you don’t want to be alerted, you won’t be.

You illiterate little babies have all the time in the world to whine here, but no time to check an RSS feed? Idiots.

would all of you donkeys trying to send support requests (why isn’tmy site working? what move?) get the fuck offline so the people who are trying to access the panel who read the big announcement in red a week ago can go about their work?

you dumb shits — quit your whining and pay attention to the status blog every once and awhile.

Shawn, seriously, stfu. You really think that the DH team you are defending want you in here pissing off the already pissed off people? Did you even read this blog post about you?

http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2007/05/03/dreamhost-sucks-at-hosting/

What does an almost 1 year old, irrelevant, whiny blog post have to do with me? Or anything else for that matter?

Besides, anyone that actually read up on that knew that moron was abusing the server. He’s almost as stupid as you, for thinking he was getting a dedicated server for $9/month.

Shawn:

you f’ing moron. it takes just as much effort to send an outage notice to the same damn mailing list they do the newsletters as it does to make a blog post on this site.

am I wrong, but when I pay for a hosting site, I expect uptime and reliability, and I don’t want to have to go check a stupid fucking rss feed or website every day just to know if I need to make other arrangements for clients. not to mention the fact that either way you look at it, I can’t give them a new email address to reach me at every god damn week because MY REAL MAILSERVER IS DOWN! and as was said earlier, it’s more effort than it’s worth to try and weed out all the stuff that doesn’t affect the individual user, given how many daily posts there are about the DAILY PROBLEMS!

fuck this. unbelieveable.

I wonder if this will FUCK up our google rankings?

They’re called, “morons.” … You illiterate little babies

Very mature. By the way, maybe you should how to use commas before calling others illiterate.

Anyone else think Shawn’s fanatical DH defense smacks of astroturfing?

Melissa, it’s a 12 hour downtime that only started 2 hours ago. You might need more coffee.

1) If there’s a problem be proactive. Send me an email. Don’t expect I have time to check your service blog every week.
2) Planning for downtime is a plan for failure. Instead you should have planned how to make the move with minimal or no down-time.
3) You have thousands of sites hosted on these servers and perhaps millions of visitors that have no idea why a particular site is offline. I can deal with the outage because I know what’s going on but all my visitors don’t get that benefit. The least you could do is put up a maintenance note for all these sites that are offline.
4) Having dreamhost.com itself offline is a kick-in the face to anyone trying to figure out why their site is down.

https://odr.bbb.org/odrweb/public/GetStarted.aspx

Using an RSS or an email alert is, as many of you point out, a personal choice. You chose to use email, fine. That’s your choice. DH uses an RSS alert system, that’s their choice. If you don’t like it, fine, go somewhere else that does use email alerts for downtime rather than RSS.

I don’t like getting letters in the mail; I hate leaving voice mail. That doesn’t stop important letters that I MUST deal with from coming to my mail box. I still have to leave voice mail for my employees as to their instructions for the week.

Don’t like something, tough. Deal with it or move on.

Welcome to life.

Someone shouldn’t have to subscribe to a feed where 99% of the fucking posts won’t apply to them just to ensure that they can see one message that should be highlighted and sent directly to them, and it’s more than a little ignorant to suggest that they should.

The only complaint I have is that the note they posted a week ago said that the outage would begin at 9pm, and they started it 10 minutes early with an “immediate shutdown” command. That’s not cool.

https://panel.dreamhost.com/ is not opening ………. :~ :s

nd what about Web Server “electra” ..!! why electra also down :

First SQL, Now our email server is down. At least the website can host a static page till DH get their act together. *sigh*

Its a shame these comments are turning into a free-for-all. I’m really unhappy about the fact that our servers (outside the affected clusters) are going down!

Moreso, I’m unhappy about the ridiculous comments on here - it would be useful to know if anyone outside of spunky/central are going down?? Less useful are the childish complaints and attacks!

*3 hours of unplanned, unnotified downtime & counting*

OMFG!!! This is happening everyday now, time to say goodbye to this fucking piece of shit host. Somebody should sue them for giving such a bad service. Dreamhost FUCK YOU!! I’m starting a blog against you so i can manage to make people stay away from you as many i can. again FUCK YOU DREAMHOST you are good for nothing.

Read the affected servers carefully the DNS servers are on the list that means unless you use ip address all servers are affected in a round about way my site is not hosted on dreamhost but my url is a subdomain of a dreamhost hosted site so therefore my site is unreachable help if you understand how DNS works

Shawn is a fat nerd who has never had sex. He likes to wear nappies and be called a naughty baby… Post this in 10 dreamhost support threads or he will come to your house at night and poop in his pants.

Oh yeah. That adds some serious class to an already rapidly deteriorating thread.

Well it’s annoying sure, and I’m loosing money. But these things happen.

God Damn! I am paying for tons of clicks on PPC and they all went to 404!!! You could adjust your warning systems and place a warning in the cpanel!!

Why the constant bringing up of intelligence? Do you seriously think your intelligence is higher than those who have countered you? Some might argue that by replying to their messages actually shows pettiness and stupidity.

As for me, I don’t harp on about intellect and make no claims to possess any, for I am Mr Bean.

I repeat:

Shut up Shawn, there is poop that needs to be wiped from your already soiled diapers.

Love,
Mr Bean

Ah…DH what a nice post-birthday present to give me…

Why?

Definitely considering switching hosts again after a major downtime with no warning like this. Could you at least tell us about these downtimes in emails or something?

As for me, I don’t harp on about intellect and make no claims to possess any, for I am Mr Bean.

Never claimed to be intelligent in the first place due to my identity of Mr Bean. Wait - I can do a mean parallel park in my Mini. I win!

How totally unacceptable! Downtime like this definitely warrants email notification.

You shouldn’t have to monitor your host’s RSS feed to know your host has planned significant downtime.

I used to use Dreamhost for hosting — now I just use them for domain registration. Every time I come back I’m glad I switched.

12 hours? Really? Whaaat the…h*ll?

#150
James Says:
March 21st, 2008 at 10:49 pm

Whiners poop their pants. Dreamhost rules. DONT READ THE RSS???????????????? ————–> its your poopy pants!!! babby’s.
*let out massive fart* *slowly turns to imaginary camera flashing the metal sign*

-Shawn

Those that are too stupid to read RSS are also too stupid to change their name in the field while pretending to be others.

Are you sure you want to keep pretending you’re not a complete dumbass after that one? Because I’m pretty sure at this point, no one will believe it.

OMG JAMES FROM THE…omg….INTERNET? NO WAY! Hey man, how you doin?! Can’t believe it’s really you!

Representing Team Shawn here

Ugh… right when I go to begin promoting a blog… like literally - karma I guess…. bah - okay, please e-mail next time you have a major move - I also don’t check this site unless something goes down.

… and I obviously missed the email giving me a heads up for this so I could post something on my site. Thanks… Dreamhost, an email would have been great. All my emails (3 sites) are down and my site is losing business. I assume I’ll be given a credit for the time lost.

Lol, nice one Bleaourgh

Shawn did you just admit to repeatedly trolling DH support threads?

No I admitted that retards repeatedly try to be me when they quickly run out of material. Life will seem easier once you learn how to read.

Nice. I guess flipping burgers is a step up from your own pastimes. Judging from Burger King being the first thing you thought off I guess there’s not much else to do when you’re too fat to get out the house…

Is that your idea of not trolling? I see your weak brain needed to reword my post, but you didn’t quite have the energy to pretend that you’re me. You must be another one that’s too lazy & stupid to grasp RSS.

It popped in my mind because I’m dealing with clueless idiots and they often end up working there. If you work there and it offended you, feel free to pretend I said McDonalds if that makes you feel better.

FUCKING MOTHER FUCKING DREAMHOST!!! I DONT KNOW WHAT FUCKING JEWS OWN THIS COMPANY

Why all of my websites hosted at Dreamhost are up? You can check http://www.kojakdirectory.com its up here

Ditto for all the comments on getting an email about something like this - I subscribe to the feed but somehow when I see “spunky cluster” it doesn’t ring any bells - I have to dig down through a big long list to see if it applies to me. Plus the post title should emphasize “12 hour outage coming!” that should get more people’s attention.

I think an option to get an email or text for any planned outage more than 1 hour should be provided.. It wouldn’t really cost them that much. Lets face it 12 hours is an instant downtime hit of 0.14% over a year. So for a huge number of customers DreamHost just blew any chance of 99.9% uptime for the next year - let alone 99.99% - that by anyones books is a major outage.

Oh well…

Even so I’m still a satisfied DreamHost customer.

Moschops: I’ll fuck your mother in her skull if you say you’re a fucking SATISFIED customer. Is that a fucking hosting which is always down EVERY NIGHT?

So, anyone got any recommendations for a good host?

Shawn and other fucking assholes, take your fight somewhere else and suck each other cocks or spoon each other, you fucking fags.

This kind of sucks.

Hmmm Shawn what you said indicates that you make a habit of getting into arguments with ‘retards’. Nice hobby

It is nice, when you compare it to your hobby, which is being one of those retards.

Who am i kidding, you’re not here to contribute anything useful but to vent your frustration at the sordid, worthless joke that is your life. Cheers.

I can’t say that I’m surprised that nothing you said makes any sense.

You forgot to point out your useful contributions. I actually did contribute by telling some of the dumbasses to subscribe to the feed if they ever get tired of being clueless.

You’re just another moron that’s crying because you can’t be a little baby here and not get called out for it. Go cry on your mommy’s shoulder if you need to be comforted. It’s not going to happen here.

I agree about the email thing too…would have been nice.

@tara (#184): I’m on PS and my servers aren’t listed in the massive server list. Way more than “a handful” are affected by this… but with DH’s track record I fully expected it for my stuff.

@hex (#165): class action? hardly. try reading the TOS before you decide to talk lawsuit and accuse them of false advertising. It’s budget hosting, what do you expect. Their colo customers aren’t affected by this outage.

@Mike (#135) It would help if you actually read the note and understood DNS yourself. DH has (at least) three sets of DNS servers (primary, secondary, tertiary). Primary and Tertiary are being moved now, secondary is handling all the DNS duties. This is why your host will still resolve to an IP address, and again, non-shared-hosting customers’ sites still work.

Dreamhost! I was performing cardiac surgery on the Vice President using my webpage and now it’s down and he’s dead. Thanks for not warning us at all! I’m starting an anti-dreamhost blog because that will certainly show you!

Shawn, you obvously need more business if you have the time to constantly check RSS feeds. What is easier, a push email or having to check RSS? Email is a constant for most, if not all of us. The volume of complaints in this forum suggest that you and your attitude are by far in the minority.

Guys anyone on Bazooka? My sites are still down, can somone on Bazooka reply?

@hex (#165): class action? hardly. try reading the TOS before you decide to talk lawsuit and accuse them of false advertising.

Right on the money — and just to expand on that, read the TOS at ANY host. It’s not just a Dreamhost thing.

@Shawn True. Again, this is budget service. If you’re expecting 99.9% uptime, it’s unlikely to happen over the course of a year.

Today is absolutely a big day!!! In Taiwan, we have the 12th president election today. In US, my blog is moving to a new home now. Hope the cluster moving can be completed as soon as possible. I just voted for my ideal candidate this morning. And I’ll update the latest news and election result on my blog if the services is back.

Keep going and good luck!!!

FYI Dreamhost, if anyone is listening…it’s not just spunky that’s down, MYSQL is down on sites that are on different clusters.

As for the email requests - yes, that would be smart business. It’s really ridiculous to expect the average web user to even understand RSS much less have to subscribe to it to get a critical update. Just because someone has a website doesn’t mean they even known what RSS is. And no, that’s NOT the fault of the customer.

DH needs to respond to the needs of its customers, not remain in a techie fantasy utopia where people should use RSS. Most people DON’T use RSS. They use email. Send critical downtime alerts IN EMAIL.

It’s not like DH sends out a big warning email when you sign up that you MUST subscribe to RSS to know what’s going on. I found my way here by accident. I can guarantee you that my friends who use DH have no idea what’s going on right now.

DH needs to respond to the needs of its customers, not remain in a techie fantasy utopia where people should use RSS. Most people DON’T use RSS. They use email. Send critical downtime alerts IN EMAIL.

Wouldn’t someone that can’t do something as simple as subscribing to an RSS feed be an idiot for choosing a host that uses one?

Again, this is like complaining about no phone support, then choosing a host that doesn’t offer it.

This is not new at all. This is how it’s been for a very long time. And it only affects a tiny handful of people that can’t follow directions, so it’s far from a catastrophe or breakdown in communication.

@shawn

This is not new at all. This is how it’s been for a very long time. And it only affects a tiny handful of people that can’t follow directions, so it’s far from a catastrophe or breakdown in communication.

But just because it isn’t new doesn’t mean they shouldn’t email the affected customers. Policies can change.

I _did_ read the RSS feed. Looked for my server in the extensive list they put in the email, and guess what? It isn’t there. If they can email for things like billing, they can email for long pre-planned outages like this. I’m not suggesting they bog down mail servers for every little outage, but a DC move is pretty significant and they had the time and resources to send something out for this one.

Yeah, I have 10,000 pissed off people mailing nonstop about their missing information. >:(

Does this outage include hypnos? I’m on hypnos and my sites down too,

@John (and anyone else): If your stuff is down, chances are it’s part of the outage.

It’s worth repeating: a planned service outage of more than a few minutes needs a notification email. Moreover, such urgen notifications need to be sent a couple of times. A 12-hour outage is more than an inconvenience, it is a genuine problem.

I was badly burned by the billing debacle. This experience is leaving a very bad taste in my mouth.

While DH may host 600,000 domains, there may only be 200,000 accounts behind those domains. 200,000 e-mails, mostly to their own internal servers is no big deal.

It wouldn’t matter if it was only 5 accounts, it’s still their policy.

And it shouldn’t be going mostly to their own servers because people should be using email addresses that aren’t hosted here for that.

plz make our website online ASAP, it is down for so long time!

Shawn is obviously not on Oprah’s book club reading Eckart Tolle’s A New Earth because if he was, he’d know that his ego was wayyyyy out of control here.

Shawn, who cares what the policy has been. If enough customers request it, the company should respond by sending out email alerts. Nobody reads the fine print upon signing up that they’ll never get a notice by email and by golly they better use RSS or else. WE WANT OUR EMAIL ALERTS!!

(Quick, somebody start a petition!)

@Shawn: My mail server (spunky) should be affected, but that would mean that everything else I’m running should be fine. It isn’t. It went down at 9:00 when the outage started. The list is obviously incomplete -or- only includes the names of the physical hosts and not the virtualized hosts that they use for sharing and PS.

They gave us a week’s notice, which isn’t too bad except that the info is incomplete. I looked at the list of affected hosts and thought at first that my websites would be unaffected. Then realized that because it’s my “personalized” feed, I must be affected otherwise they wouldn’t have sent it. Anyone subscribed to the status blog as a generic feed wouldn’t have been able to make that realization.

For updates to the blog when unexpected problems happen, the RSS feed is a great resource. It’s timely and allows DH to push information out for us to pick up in a timely manner.

The only time I’m advocating email is for long-lasting _PLANNED_ outages. There’s been a lot made about the fact that it’s a discount service, $10 a month or whatever. I’m on PS and pay about $40 / month in PS fees. For that kind of money, an email for a 12-hour PLANNED outage isn’t outside the realm of feasibility. Is the current policy to do blog-only? Yes. I’m advocating an amendment.

Well that’s nice for you all, I’ve scanned all my mailboxes and junk..high and low, and not found a single email warning about this downtime..

It’s an extremely LONG time to be down…I have no mail, no websites, nothing.

Agreed that an email should have been sent. I do subscribe to the Dreamhost Status blog in my feed reader, but when a post starts with “Resolved” I quickly scan past it as it appears it’s not an issue any more. Maybe they should remove the “Resolved” prefix from these feeds, or at least make them reflect some meaningful status instead of confusing us. Of course, an email sent to everyone affected would have been incredibly easy and helped a lot of folks out.

Why are these things always done at the peek time? The weekend is the most important time for me business wise, and the servers are always off, down at these times

@Peter - Heh… yea. Ya think?

well my site is down and it IS affected. this sucks. if i could easily move a 200GB site I would.

Down too long time!
Maybe I will change my host to other company.

Shawn, who cares what the policy has been.

You should because you agreed to it. They don’t force you to host here.

If enough customers request it, the company should respond by sending out email alerts.

Notice the majority aren’t complaining about it. They did change it to what it is and only people that can’t follow directions have a problem with it.

Nobody reads the fine print upon signing up

Speak for yourself. Anyone that doesn’t read and understand something before agreeing to be bound by it is a dumbass.

WE WANT OUR EMAIL ALERTS!!

Then go to a host that uses them. Seems simple enough to me.

The whiners ALWAYS overestimate their numbers. The majority of their customers are smart enough to follow directions and not cry in blog comments about not getting enough babysitting for their hosting payment.

The majority aren’t complaining HERE Shawn because they don’t even know where this status page is…OR they have lives and are asleep. Unlike you. That doesn’t mean they are satisfied customers.

Gosh Pete, what are you hosting on there?

I have 15 clients on my account and they only come in at 10GB I feel your pain with moving though, its why I have been procrastinating about moving too… and then I finally set aside time to do it this weekend, and …voila

@KumaZatheef and @shhhhyawn:

I agree, a very possible reason for such a move during a long downtime window is due to lack of infrastructure or time to do a gradual migration of servers.

> UPDATE — Sat Mar 22 00:12:05 PDT 2008 –
>
> Most central functions are back up. Dreamhost.com and panel.dreamhost.com are working again. We are currently working on webmail. The spunky cluster move is still
> underway. We’ll post more here later.

Still no sign of warhead being available. My website is still gone, and of course, no email. Isn’t a big part of the point of distributed servers so you can move/change a few at a time, keeping the whole of the group up so any system-wide downtime is largely invisible?

Kuma, my impression (and I could be wrong) is that the staff here is young, idealistic, and a bit inexperienced. As in, the 50 year old conservative IT guy who has some sense and a long resume probably wouldn’t want to be working at Dreamhost.

A physical move CAN be done without downtime.

It’s simply accomplished by having the secondary location up and running (synced with the data from the original).

You then load balance the incoming request to both locations.

When you’re ready to move, just take the old location out of the load balance rotation.

Kuma, my impression (and I could be wrong) is that the staff here is young, idealistic, and a bit inexperienced. As in, the 50 year old conservative IT guy who has some sense and a long resume probably wouldn’t want to be working at Dreamhost.

Young, yes, but wrong about the rest. They have more experience and have been in business a lot longer than most hosts out there have been. A host is lucky to survive a year. Make that an hour, if they try to compete on price with the big boys.

Dreamhost wrote their own control panel before a lot of these guys even paid for their first CPanel license.

Off the top of my head, I doubt I could name 5 other hosts that have been around as long or longer. There aren’t even many that are bigger–and that’s worldwide, not just in the US. I don’t count on them passing biggies like Godaddy/Wildwest, but they certainly haven’t stopped growing.

oh, it’s only 60GB. I think of it in terms of DVD storage media, so that’s about 12 DVDs. i guess i could move that over a week or two……

Alex, that’s exactly what I was thinking, and why this 12 hour downtime is just bad business practice and laziness on the part of DH.

A physical move CAN be done without downtime.

It’s simply accomplished by having the secondary location up and running (synced with the data from the original).

You then load balance the incoming request to both locations.

When you’re ready to move, just take the old location out of the load balance rotation.

That’s not simply a physical move and you’re not going to find any budget hosts that are going to buy two of everything to do that, when the point is to move hardware–not just accounts.

if they can screw all my cloaking last week (without an email letting me know, one of my colleagues emailed me about it) then they can do a 404 redirect to a “sorry we’re down for awhile” page.

Seconding you Kuma…and here’s the thing. It’s a lame excuse to say that DH can’t afford to buy new boxes for this move. If they are growing in leaps and bounds as Shawn seems to think, then they’ll need extra boxes soon enough. So there would be no extra cost in getting new servers to mirror everything, since the old servers would be re-used for new clusters. Right?

Let’s see Shawn talk his way out of this one…only, I’m going to bed. Have fun!

@Shawn
>That’s not simply a physical move and you’re not going to find any budget hosts that are going to buy two of everything to do that, when the point is to move hardware–not just accounts.

They didn’t have to “buy two of everything” if they did a gradual relocation and repurposing of the servers (which would have taken more time, yes… but at least it would be less downtime).

Further, the You Get What You Paid For excuse is a very poor excuse. Only an idiot would attempt to run any business with that model. Yes, DH is a budget host, but that doesn’t mean it can be excused for not being attentive to the needs and requests of it’s customers.

We’re the customers who are worth 100 customers to DH. We tell the newbies and others where to get their hosting.

Can someone explain why melrose is down too, Shawn?

@Shawn
Comparison to others is not an excuse because just as things are worse out there, things are also better. And yes, I realize there’s a price-point for trade-offs.

Comparison is part of shopping and choosing. If you want to go somewhere better, go. No one is forced to be here. Everyone that whines about Dreamhost and how they do things chooses to be here over every other host out there, so either it’s not as bad as they pretend it is, or they’re trying to take stupidity to a whole new level.

You are a correct, a physical move cannot be done without downtime, but 12 hours seems a bit absurd. My first thought would be to back things up to a development setup, then test the transfer to the new servers. This transfer would involve mirroring, tweaking, then flipping the switch and patching any holes. If there is an anticipated downtime of more than 5 minutes you throw up a global redirect to a “server maintenance” page as has been suggested. But also has been mentioned it just sounds like an “unplug, load the servers in the van, drive ‘em over, plug ‘em back in” … and *that* is where the unprofessional problem occurs

You basically said the same thing as the other guy… and that’s not going to happen with a budget host, expecting them to buy two of everything and way more labor.

You are not going to get that in this price range anywhere, unless you go with a host that has 1 server and doesn’t mind buying a single spare.

12 hours might be super-fast for what they’re doing. It’s hard to say without seeing just how much they have to move, how far they have to move, etc…

What they’re doing is a lot more complicated than helping a neighbor move a couch and a few lamps two houses down. I’m sure they want to get it done and go home, so they probably haven’t picked the slowest way to do it.

Notification or compensation, your choice Dreamhost!
Some of us run businesses off these domains, how about some notification?

Someone’s getting a visit from Ted the Lead Pipe.

Notification or compensation, your choice Dreamhost!

How about neither. Read the TOS.

Some of us run businesses off these domains

Your business has already failed because it was never worth more than $10/month.

how about some notification?

Okay, you can have the notification you got a week ago when they made the original post. Glad I could help.

“If they’re fine with that because they know they can have another sale and sell twice as much for half the price than so be it …”

If DH screws up enough times and pisses off enough influential customers they will find they can no longer go to that well. It will have been poisoned.

People,

Shown is for sure an employee of Dreamhost that is working now to protect this absolutely ridiculous action!

What is he saying is: “You are not going to get that in this price range anywhere” and “12 hours … super-fast”! In other words, people, you all got a very cheap hosting, you all are loosers because you can’t pay more, and that is why you have to live with 12 hours downtime! That is what they tell us.

This is a highest disrespect to not even notify by email about such incredible downtime that was planned! They do it on Easter and posted the notice on blog only, hoping people won’t notice that!!

But everybody should know, you’ve lost your customers for 12 hours, and this what they can do for you!

Shawn, go to bed. We’re here because we have issues with the businesses and sites we’re running. If you’re going to heckle people and pick apart arguments with terrible business logic, without providing any help, then start your own site. Maybe dreamhostrules.com? Just don’t host it on dreamhost… OH NO HE DIDN’T!!!

Seriously.

I concur with Jerry.

FUCK YOU!!!
Not to dreamhost, but to the miserable beings who are such fucking idiots who act like complete arseholes in this blog.
Fuck you all! Dreamhost notified us of this, what seems like ages ago, and you all rock up and start fucking crying! Get fucked, every single one of you! As a business, unfortunately you can’t chose your customers, so to all those fucking idiots who like to come here and bitch about things that are totally their fault (that’s right, IT’S YOUR FAULT you don’t read week-in-advance warnings!), SHUT THE FUCK UP!! If you chose to pay $10 a month, then don’t expect 110% uptime and a red carpet, fuck, do you want them to wipe your gigantic arsehole too? Get fucked!

——————————————————————————————————
(Glad to get that off my chest after years of reading what these children post!) - I do apologize for the profuse amount of vulgar language, but perhaps it requires speaking at their level to get through to them?

@Darcy - Dude, need a hug?

Darcy, that are true words. Paying for a train ticket but want travel in a learjet.

OMG…sites down for six hours..
you should have email users..

Shown is for sure an employee of Dreamhost that is working now to protect this absolutely ridiculous action!

Yeah, they hired me to come here in tell you pussies to go host somewhere else. Saying I work here would be like saying you’re smart.

In other words, people, you all got a very cheap hosting, you all are loosers because you can’t pay more, and that is why you have to live with 12 hours downtime! That is what they tell us.

Wrong again, dumbass. But I will call YOU a loser for spelling loser wrong.

You don’t have to live with the downtime, you can take your sites somewhere else right now. Let’s see if you can put your money where your mouth is or if you’re just here to cry like a little baby.

Oops! There I go again, obviously being an employee!

No one is crying. We’re rational business-men looking for solutions.

12 hours without notice and NOT on sunday night/monday morning IS unacceptable and deserves a major re-think by DH.

We’re here because we have issues with the businesses and sites we’re running.

You have issues because you’re incompetent — not because I’m here.

If you’re going to heckle people and pick apart arguments with terrible business logic, without providing any help, then start your own site.

Wrong again. If you want to be a whiny little baby and not get called out for it, then YOU go do that on your own site.

No one is crying. We’re rational business-men looking for solutions.

Now THAT’S funny! Rational businessmen aren’t whining on blog comments. In fact, they’re not even dealing with downtime right now because they’re not stupid.

Viva Dreamhost, they are cheap, offer amazing hosting packages and a friendly service. What do you want more?

@Shawn

fleshlight.com, xbox.com, kdice.com, etc.

Visit any of these sites. You might have more fun on a Friday night. I’m not even going to attempt logic with you.

yeah, fabulous! mission accomplished!! yay!! hurrrrah!! hossanahs in the highest!!

They’ve probably been down for 12 hours.

@darcy

“building tedious email scripts”

It’s not that fucking hard. 1 SQL query at most. 30 lines of code. Less if you pick your language right.

Shit, I’d write one now. But I don’t work for Dreamhost. I work for another mob.

Dreamhost: top-class features, piss-poor performance. What a dilemma. Anyway, at least this move looks like it may take less than 12 hours.

Too bad MediaTemple is so expensive and Hostgator uses cPanel (yuck).

Oh wait 7 hours. 5 more hours to go. Prolly on a beer break posing for new front page screenshots.

@Daniel- Spunky, just like Spacey before, and others they have or will move, are clusters. Now I could be mistaken, but the general idea seems to be that all those machines are tied in together; it would be like having your DVD player and TV set in different states. If that’s accurate enough, you couldn’t just do a partial physical move like some people are suggesting.

LOL @ Not Me… that’s the general idea, yes.

Matt

@darcy

My IQ is just fine thank you. Unlike some, I’m pointing out that it’s not hard for Dreamhost to implement these features. But hey, keep taking pot shots at people.

@Not Me
Clusters don’t have to be in the same room, or even in the same state. A local University’s cluster is spread out between two cities.

blah, blah, blah, blah……

For 20 bucks a month Dremhost gives you:

557.23 GB Disk (Grows 2 GB / week)
10.82 TB BW per Cycle (Grows 40 GB / week)

Just were the hell do you get such a good deal from any toher host. You can do ANYTHING you want with your account… rewrite the php file, cron job it, stack it, sub domain it till the cows come home, Mysql db’s till you overdose….. etc… etc… etc….

And you n00bs still complain. I hope ALL your sites goto hell.

One week notice and you’re blaming some else for your ignorance.

Classic.

Good luck Dreamhost dudes…. keep up the good work…..

Yeah, you all think you have problems. My server’s never listed in their “these are the servers we’re fucking with” listings, yet it’s always fucking affected by every little upgrade Dreamhost decides to do.

In the past, it’s been just a few minutes here and there, maybe an hour or so of downtime, no big deal.

This time, my site has been dead ALL FUCKING DAY. Now, I realize my site’s not your ordinary “grandma’s cooking website” garbage… it’s a high traffic file hosting site that I’ve shoehorned into a cheap Dreamhost web hosting plan. But now this is ridiculous. I don’t make near enough from that site to warrant any better service, and hell’s I know that the bandwidth my site uses isn’t that much (although I’d love to get some insight into the CPU performance of my scripts).

Fact of the matter is, the site’s been dead to the world ALL DAY LONG. Not even so much as a “host is down for maintenance” post linking to the blog or something. That is not hard to do, as I’ve done it before while moving my site to a new host.

What the up is?

@ Tandem - Yea, seems to me the DNS is a little flaky atm… I’m sure it’ll be fixed. I don’t think Abazaba is up yet (wish they’d have done this in Alphabetical order ) They moved 2 of the 3 DNS servers, and the DNS issues would cause any site to be down, even if they aren’t in Spunky… including the VPS’s.

Matt

Darcy

[quote]Dreamhost notified us of this[/quote]

When..? I can’t remember reading anything about downtime..?

[quote]http://fuckdreamhost.com[/quote]

hahaha…

They warned us here:
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/03/14/central-services-and-spunky-cluster-move/

And if you have an RSS feed (as you should) you knew… refer to my previous comment about that :).

Matt

@Daniel - Well yes I’m sure you could, the same way the information makes it to clients for one, but I’d imagine that would really slow things down if say, the file server, web server, and SQL server were all hundreds of miles apart, for example. You could also hook the DVD player in the analogy up to transmit its signal however far you wished, but there’s a difference between “possible” and “practical” IMHO, and I would definitely expect better performance and more convenience in the long run if both devices were say, in my living room.

They warned us here:
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/03/14/central-services-and-spunky-cluster-move/

And if you have an RSS feed (as you should) you knew… refer to my previous comment about that

Why would I look at the status page unless there was something wrong, do you scratch your ass before you get an itch..?

This should have been emailed, I don’t agree with all the bitching and ‘I’m gonna leave’ crap.. what an arse it would be to relocate all my sites and domains.. christ, shit happens… but it’s nice to know anyway possible if it’s going to affect so many people.

Shawn, it’s way past your bedtime! Go to bed now - You can play with your friends in the morning!

Shawn’s Mom

“I don’t understand any good network administrator that would want to stay on top of things that might affect their customers.”

– Er… I meant wouldn’t.

I dont carry a torch for DH. But they really should realize that not everyone does RSS but everyone has email. It works for the newsletter and billing. It should work for a 12 hour down.

So to repeat……email. That’s all it would have taken.

And now back to the foul mouthed defenders of the faith.

@Shawn’s Mom - You should see what I found out your son is up to while I was doing some snooping on the web! http://shawn-is-pathetic.com/ It’s no wonder he’s so bitter, pretty sad stuff.

I’m trying to run a business in France - busy Easter weekend hoping to get lots of bookings for summer season, get up this morning and I can’t get into my webmail - remember you have customers this side of the World as well

NO NOTICE, THANKS!

8+ HOURS DOWNTIME SO FAR, THIS IS RIDICULUS!

@ JAMES -

This is the last time I’m going to tell people to jump into Web 2.0 and get a damn RSS feed… then you’da had notice.

On an unrelated note, these CAPTCHA’s are getting anoying..

Matt

Just logout and back in James. And my email works just fine for that silly newsletter. it’s obvious Dreamhost counts on most of its customer never knowing this ever happened.

C’mon, do you take us for idiots?

Spacey is down as well and it is not in the list of effected machines.

And before everyone shouts me down with DNS rubbish, IP addresses are resolving fine and DNS is resolving fine - just webserver at the end of it.

I was aware of the down time but was not warned it would effect my site as well.

@ Matthew: Here I am talking to myself, but do us all a favor: SHUT UP.

If they were to be screwing around with DNS, they should have told EVERYONE via EMAIL, not (as Darren says) scratching your ass before it itches and watching a blog for outage shit. When there are about a thousand downtime posts on this blog a day, and only one in a million actually applies to you, do you REALLY think it’s worth keeping in my tabs just to watch for never-coming failure? NO. IT’S CALLED EMAIL. USE IT.

As it is, I use a Squid proxy that seems to cache DNS entries to fucking infinity. And thanks to the fucking money-grab asshats at DNSStuff that took out the VERY BASIC free DNS lookup tool, I can’t even try a second testing point to see if I’m getting a stale DNS result. Man, fuck the internet.

Falcon

If they were to be screwing around with DNS, they should have told EVERYONE via EMAIL, not (as Darren says) scratching your ass before it itches and watching a blog for outage shit.

You need to learn how to read, I was the one that said why the hell should I keep tabs on a page, I actually said I would have prefered an email..

Christ, I’m outta here this is pointless drivvle…

“Indeed, an e-mail for planned outages like this should be sent out as a courtesy to your customers.”

What he said. I’m pretty miffed by now, I was affected by the last move too with no warning - and I always seem to be in the last 1% of accounts that are not working properly when work is over.

Seriously, a heads up is REQUIRED in when offering uptime as a service.

I hope this quoting thing works…

@ Darren:
[quote]You need to learn how to read, I was the one that said why the hell should I keep tabs on a page, I actually said I would have prefered an email..

Christ, I’m outta here this is pointless drivvle…[/quote]

Uh, I don’t think I’m the one that needs English classes… I don’t know where you got that idea but that is EXACTLY WHAT I AM AGREEING WITH YOU ON. Wow, you know the internet has sunk to a NEW LOW when you’re arguing about AGREEING with each other. Fucking hell.

And I just confirmed that DNSStuff DID, in fact, strip ALL free tools out of their system. Not even a DNS lookup tool anymore. FUCK THEM.

price web server still down
Good luck DreamHost Team!

I migrated a client’s website on Friday, no how fucking silly do I look, still good thing the email isn’t working either.

I still can’t believe you chose to do these things a peek surfing time and a holiday weekend to, I losing business guys. Have you never hear of Parallel running? It makes me wonder if you where ever seriously hit with a problem, we would all have an outage of services get your self some mirror servers, that way when you are working, all our services will still run.

No doubt you are using what servers you have to get more customers on board, look after the one you have now.

I’m with out any service until 5pm (GMT) that a whole days of business gone for me.

@Shawn

I’m here because I’ve gotten messages from clients all night about sites being down. Why are you here? I beg you, PLEASE, humor me, tell me why you are here right now. I’d really, really love to know what reason you have to tell OTHERS to get a life.

[Quote]
When there are about a thousand downtime posts on this blog a day, and only one in a million actually applies to you, do you REALLY think it’s worth keeping in my tabs just to watch for never-coming failure? NO. IT’S CALLED EMAIL. USE IT.
[/Quote]

Well, when you get the chance, go to the webpanel, bring down the System Status Drop from the right hand side at the top, and you’ll see that their is an RSS link at the bottom there. Add THAT to your reader, and it’ll only show you things that APPLY to you… I get maybe 2 daily… usually none. This was there though.

Matt

@gammo “Voila!.. Everything is back to normal”

ummmm…. no…. it isn’t. electra is still unresponsive. a server that, according to their entry above, shouldn’t have been affected to begin with.

formosa is still down.

Yeah, whatismyrdns.com, as well as falconfour.com, hostfile.org (my main site in DH), and blockbusterforum.net (for sale!11), are all hosted by DH, and are all down. FAIL.

Actually, they may or may not be down. In lack of a friggin’ DNSStuff DNS lookup tool, can anyone verify that the IP for hostfile.org is 208.113.190.37? Strangely, http://blockbusterforum.net (also hosted on the same server) is working fine for me. Maybe it’s a stale DNS?

My Site Back

Nate, all my sites on formosa are running, Webmail not, but i think is in another machine for all webmail (IMAP also down)

In the interest of fairness, there is one thing I’d like to point out. When people have complained about the timing and the time zone, the same people who have been telling those who prefer email - which have been the overwhelming majority here - that they shouldn’t expect anything except for what DH prefers, suddenly turn around and say that DH has to go with the majority of their customers on these other issues. The point is still moot I suppose because the only place for people to actually address that is through the Suggestions section of the panel, but still, I couldn’t resist pointing out the double standard.

Wrong. The US majority & timezone thing is real.

But you are calling a tiny group of people whining about email in blog comments a majority, which it is not. The real majority are the thousands of customers that aren’t here whining about email like it’s some new problem, because they aren’t baffled by simple things like RSS. RSS isn’t going away. Quite the opposite. I’d get used to it.

Not a single smart person has trouble keeping up to date and dealing with this stuff. Read the comments and honestly tell me how many smart people you see complaining here. It’s mostly just kids throwing tantrums under multiple names. Half of the posts are just idiots that aren’t even reading and show up just to announce they didn’t get an email, or morons that think I’m a troll, but think they’re brilliant for flooding this place with garbage under my name, or just making other dumb names, etc…

Dreamhost is probably one of the few companies that can post a blog about a multi-million dollar billing error… and still not look half as stupid as their customers replying in the comments section.

Crenshaw is STILL down, no mail, no http no http://ftp….

Come on DH, lets get’er done.

jabber on grand is still down.. can’t IM. v annoying.

Falcon : I think there is a routing problem as your IP is in the same IP block as my site 208.113.*.*

Doing a local trace route seems to be no route to 208.113.*.*

ATLANTIC IS BACK UP !!! WOOHOO!

It’s Saturday in South Korea. It’s SEOUL FASHION WEEK, and we run Korea’s first online street fashion magazine, and are doing fairly well here. I and my partners, over the last 2 days) gave our business cards to the editors of Vogue Korea, Elle Korea, as well as similar writers and correspondents from Taiwan and Tokyo. I interviewed Hwang Jae-bok, one of Korea’s most famous fashion designers and also the head of the Korean Fashion Designers Association, as well as several other major figures in Korean fashion.

They’re going to have been going to my site anytime today, or possiibly tonight. HOW F*@#ing professional do I look right now? I don’t even get an internal server error or anything — the site just plain doesn’t exit right now.

AN EMAIL WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then I could have said somethng like, “Please check on Sunday. Our server is undergoing maintenance and will be down tonight.”

But no, I might get 30 seconds of some busy Ms. Really Important Someone’s precious time, and if they even think to go into my site, I get nothing.

THANKS FOR THE PROFESSIONALISM, DREAMHOST! I’m SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO glad you give us monthly little emails detailing everything you do there, along with the silly “homey” style that’s supposed to be disarming yet engaging, but YOU CAN’T EVEN SEND US A WARNING EMAIL so we can warn clients and contacts?

I won’t curse here, since it’ll just get my comments banned. Let me just say you owe a lot of people at LEAST a year’s free service.

I can understand downtime and emergencies. But not even a mass email, when you obviously have the capability of making one!?!?!?!

This is ghetto-ass. Seriously.

I’m sitting in the press room in Seoul, Korea talking about how great our magazine is a fashion writer from Taiwan and I can’t even get the site up, and am surprised as she thinks I’m incompetent.

THANKS, DREAMHOST, FOR A WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL DAY!

I’ll remember it always.

@ shawn “I’d imagine most should be up now… and it’s not even 8 hours into the 12 hour window.”

ummmm… not the case. in-fact, i’m on electra, which has been down all night, and it’s not even on their list of servers to be affected.

Electra is reachable, and not on the list, so if your site has an unrelated problem, you need to take that up with support.

I also said most — not all.

All of my dreamhost accts are down. So at least 3 boxs have been down for over 8 hours by my watch.

Also these boxes are not listed in

“abbazaba absinthe achilles adams admiralty aero alameda almalibre alondra altoid alvarado archibald arrow atlantic avalon aviation babyruth badillo balu bandini barranca barry baseline bazooka beaudry bellflower beverly bixel blowpop bonbon bottlecap bounty bourbon boyd broadway brownie bubbleyum bundy burton butler butterfinger cahuenga caramello casamento catalina centinela century cerritos cheeto cheezit chex chiclet cienega cognac colbert compton cookie cordial crackerjack crenshaw crunch cupcake dingdong doheny dorito drumstick dumdum edendale euclid fairfax fc23 federal fig fireballs firestone fletcher flower foothill formosa frito frontseat fruitland fudge fundip garland garth garvey gobstopper goober good gower grand granola grappa gumdrop gummi haven heath heaven highland hillhurst hillmont hoho holt hoover hope hops hyperion jalapa jawbreaker jefferson jerky juniormint jurupa kidsgames kiki kitkat krackel lankershim larchmont laurel lemonhead licorice lifesaver limbo-spunky3 limbo-spunky4 locust look lucas malt manchester mariposa mayo melrose mento milliken mills monroe moorpark mounds munchies nash necco nerds nilla nougat nutrageous oakdale ocean olive olympic ord oreo ouzo overland oxnard paramount payday pernod pez pico planters plenty pocky popcorn poprock powerbar pretzel price pringle rampart razzle redhot redondo reeses rexford ritz rockyroad rodeo rollo roscoe rosecrans rossmore rum runts sake saltine sanborn sawtelle schnapps scotch selma sepulveda shocktart skittle skor skybar slauson smores snicker snocap soto sourpatch spree starburst sugardaddy sunset taffy tampa temple tequila toblerone toffee tootsie topanga torrance truffle twinkie twix twizzler union vanowen vermouth vine virgil warhead washington western whittier whopper wilmington wilshire york zagnut zuma”

I think they are understating the issue.

Darn it! Yesterday was not a good day o join dreamhost, i must have tried to do a one-click wordpress install 3 times: and NOTHING appeared.

espresso wasn’t on the list but it’s down!

My site is still not up and neither the hosting server(eggnog) nor the mysql server are affected apparently according to that.

@ Michael Hurt

As another disenchanted DH customer I totally agree with you. Your story echos my own.

DH should have emailed about this one.

None of you know anything about how shared web hosting works.

Your sites will be back up soon. If you don’t like your sites being down in the middle of the night on rare occasions, get a dedicated server somewhere with redundant auto-booting backups and pay a few hundred times what you are now — no one is obligated to keep a Dreamhost account. Trust me, DH is much better than most shared hosting providers; and you’ll never, ever find one that offers 100% guaranteed uptime and lives up to it. This is the life of a shared hosting account holder. Deal with it.

@vinic “If you don’t like your sites being down in the middle of the night on rare occasions”

13:08 here

My sites on jawbreaker are still down, as is my email. I got NO email alerting me to this half-day outage. NOT a happy camper.

Some of my domains are working, some not. The ones not working are in the 208.113.*.* range that keeps being mentioned. I have to say I don’t understand why those ones aren’t working when my others are, when they’re all supposed to be on the same server (fanta).

After the credit card charge nonsense, you’ve made a huge mistake by not thinking of sending out a warning email.
I think you blogged about it a while ago but not everyone follows the blog.
Emails were absolutely necessary in this situation.
Please sort this out asap!
If your blog post has a ’severity’ of ‘high’, then why not automatically email everyone?

Yes… My MYSQL server is up and running again!

After more than 3 hours of frustrated waiting… well, at least we are back online…

Next time, plase send us an amail to farn us upfront….

Ibo.

@Vinic

None of you know anything about how shared web hosting works… etc.

Not the point. It’s about letting your customer know that the service they are paying you for is about to be temporarily discontinued.

Posting it on a blog one week before is not good enough. Direct email notification is the very least one could have expected.

Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Can’t connect to MySQL server on 192-.–.–.–’ (4) in /usr/local/squirrelmail-1.4.9a/session_mysql.php on line 61
Can’t connect to 192——– as squirrelmail
MySQL Error: Can’t connect to MySQL server on ‘192——–’ (4)
please hurry up!

Can you send out notification emails before you do anything like this?

My sub domain (shop.ourdrl.com) is down for about half an hour already…

My sites still seem to be down along with webmail. I wouldn’t have minded so much in the past except I now run my business from one of the urls.

Hopefully you guys will sort it out real soon. In the past when I’ve filled a support ticket on such issues the response has been swift.

“Not the point. It’s about letting your customer know that the service they are paying you for is about to be temporarily discontinued.

Posting it on a blog one week before is not good enough. Direct email notification is the very least one could have expected.”

This is utterly ridiculous. With shared hosting, occasional downtime *is* what you’re paying for.

Again, if you want no downtime, ever, you have to be paying upwards of a hundred times what you’re paying Dreamhost. Redundant auto-boot backups are extremely expensive.

Hello ? please repair you server… my all site is down, my bussines dead… caman… rapid reapid server plaesee….

and visit http://www.hoteles-bariloche.com down….
Repair hosting plaseaaaa

I’m on daedalus (janky and tweety) and my site has been down for nine hours - anyone else on those??

After the credit card charge nonsense, you’ve made a huge mistake by not thinking of sending out a warning email.

One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.

Why are you idiots still making us pay for your service?

You’re paying for a service you’re not happy with and think they’re the idiots?!

Keep sending those payments. You’ll show them! Maybe throw in an extra $50 on next month’s bill to show them you really mean business.

my email (squirrel mail error: “Error connecting to IMAP server: localhost. 111 : Connection refused”) has been out since sometime around 8pm last night…related or not?

Well still waiting.
Ok some things take time. i really hope when it goes live again everything will work.
You are so lucky you do not have any ISO certification on quality management though.
From what I see here you would have lost it within a day due to customer complains.

I believe so.

aww man, i had some meshes to post, my first ever too SOLVE IT QUICK, PLEEZE!!!!

>:(

Animo boys !!!!

Look Guys,

Some notice would have been helpful. This is wrong. I have clients using this site to distribute their Red Sox season tickets, and opening day is a few days away. They are paying top $ for this service. Timing could not have been worse. Having a heads up would have at leased given me time to let people know that this weekend they would not have access.

This is not about a BLOG this is about business, and I am losing money when my users cannot access the site as I will have to rectify the situation with my clients, financially.

Because of you I look UNPROFESSIONAL.

Most of my sites are up, but mail seems to be down. Also SSH is down, so I cannot check email directly.

James, the fact that you did not receive an email in this situation rather implies that in today’s world, truly important information will NOT always come to you via other means. Welcome to the 21st century, where I’m afraid you’re going to have to get yourself a feed reader, and manage your information diet by only subscribing to important feeds. If you can not understand such a thing, try reading “The World Does Not Revolve Around You And Sometimes YOU Will Have To Do The Work To Keep Yourself Informed”, by me.

I’m through with DH. The last time this shit happened, by servers weren’t supposed to be affected, and they were - and they were down for 12 hours. This time, they posted a notification of the impending outage here (a week’s notice) but did NOT send an email notice. I get my renewal emails, my billing emails for my domains - I’ve never had a problem getting ANY emails from DH whatsoever, so don’t tell me the problem is on my end. They should have sent MULTIPLE emails beginning three weeks out. If the decision to do this wasn’t made until a week ago, they should have been sending notifications DAILY.

To everyone who posts a snarky comment about bloggers bitching about this: fuck you. Not everyone who’s complaining here are pointless bloggers. Some of people are able to pay their bills with blogging, some have thousands of readers. Other people, like me, use our sites to *gasp* MAKE MONEY - and 12 hours of downtime… oh, wait, make that TWENTY GODDAMN FOUR HOURS of downtime this year is unacceptable.

And don’t tell me that because this is shared hosting that it’s okay or that if I want true consistent downtime that I should be on dedicated hosting. That’s not an excuse. The industry standard is 99.9% uptime - my sites have been down for 24 hours this year (so far), which blows that right out of the damn water - and we’re only three months into the year.

So, good-bye DH. I’ve been a customer for over two years, but the past three months have seen more outage than the previous 23 months combined. I’m moving on.

To everyone blindly supporting DH for this, all you DH fanboys - open your eyes and look at the situation critically for a change and stop toeing the company line.

Hi Artie,
Where did you see that a couple of machines did not survive the move?
It seems i am missing some posts.

Daniel: do you know any better hosts? I’m not saying anything, just asking as the most advertised hosting companies are shit, they’re extremely expensive and don’t stop offering you spam through the mail. What host are you going to switch to?

I agree: Daniel: Better service?
Oooh! Maybe hostinf with Windows!!! eeew, or better still: GODADDY! Wheeeeeee

I like DreamHost.

I agree with: “With shared hosting, occasional downtime *is* what you’re paying for.” Maybe if you need to be in total control of your server and plan your downtime, you should buy your own web server and host your stuff at home. Of course, when the thing suddenly goes haywire, you’re the one staying up all night pulling your hair out about it — or calling Dell and suddenly wishing you’d sprung for the more expensive service agreement. I’d rather just leave that stuff to Dreamhost. They administer the server 298,763,487 times better than I could.

I don’t make money with the stuff I host on DreamHost, but I would definitely not be buying shared hosting if it were my income on the line.

But my site is back up just as DreamHost had planned. I’m happy. Now I think I’ll go have some cereal with my daughter and find excuses to delay working on our taxes.

123 test

What a waste of bandwidth and database storage: allowing people to bicker in comments, to exemplifying their stupidity. Go to bed or go and whine about all the wrong doings else where in the world. STOP USING ELECTRICITY if you want to make the world a better place.. or not.

(this comment is equally as useless… delete it when you have the chance, please)

I have to say I was a little surprised there wasn’t an email for scheduled downtime, considering that that wouldn’t be soo difficult to do (after all we get newsletters, why not use same system to email about scheduled downtime!)

Shawn, people have a right to vent their frustration if its affecting their business, no need to get personal.

0833 CT Saturday 22 March. Most of the rest of my sites are accessible now, but cannot maintain my databases via phpMySQL (”grunt:asakura” MySQL Server). Just got a load of updates. Waiting…

f3

I see one of my sites http://www.TheOrangePaper.com accessible now (incl. emails) … waiting for my other sites to follow

hrrm ”;!–”=

All of ours are still down? This is the third time this week.

I really would have appreciated an email notification. Couldn’t you guys have at least put it in the Dreamhost newsletter? That’s just inconsiderate to your customers…I’m not going to switch hosting services because Dreamhost has been great to me in the past, but this really sucks.

Getting close guys — but my sites think the date is 12/31/01!

I don’t know where I’ll end up yet because I’ve just started looking for a new host this morning - I haven’t needed to look for a new one for over two years, so I need to figure out what everyone’s current reputation is.

Shawn: fuck you. You don’t know me. You don’t know what I do. I’m not up for paying a hundred bucks a month, or more, for dedicated hosting yet, but that doesn’t mean I’m not making money. I’m not rolling in dough - yet - but it’s not an insignificant amount. So, fuck you. Get your head out of DH’s ass. I can’t believe you’ve wasted as much time as you have simply insulting members who are affected by this. You offer no solutions, no helpful advice, nothing of any value to anyone. Go crawl back under the rock you were spawned from and let the grown-ups talk.

For the record, there are some things that can’t be argued. While I understand that shared hosting has risks and that downtime is to be expected, companies advertise 99.9% uptime. That’s 9 hours a year. My DH sites have been down for 24 hours this year. In fact, DH is one of the few sites that doesn’t advertise an uptime figure… they can’t, of course, because they have ridiculous amounts of downtime.

Defend that, Shawn. Better yet, don’t bother. I’m going out for a few hours, and I expect my sites will be up by this afternoon and I’ll have my recommendations for a new host that I requested from the groups I’m a part of. I expect I’ll not need to check the status here, so enjoy living in your own little world. I’ll not need to visit it again.

Okay, so i look “harry potter” LOL
and wait………..

Incidentally, regarding RSS - real companies don’t rely on one avenue of communication with the customers. Real companies post a message to the RSS feed, send out an email, and mention upcoming planned outages in the monthly newsletter. DH chose, this time, to post only to the RSS feed, which is probably the least-used method by the customers.

Don’t insult the customers by saying we’re all dumbasses for not subscribing to the feed and checking it daily, just admit that DH is fucking stupid for not utilizing all the available methods of communication. It’s not like it costs a million bucks to send out a goddamn email AND post to the RSS feed. There is NO reason not to do both. NONE.

i just read Kris’s message about the datebeing off: I hope that doesnt end up causing problems with billing

9am CST here and all my sites are still down… guess I picked the wrong Saturday morning to tidy up some backend stuff…

Argh, I can’t register new domains since this latest server move happened. Anyone else? I keep getting an ‘internal server error’.

10:20 EDST and my site on daedulus is still down

44hq.com is down. In the spacey cluster.

Please fix asap.

thx.

BAM is apparently down, even though it’s not on the list.

The person posting as “Shawn” is actually a DH employee! I have irrefutable proof on http://www.shawn-is-a-loser.com/ that I can’t post here because they will just delete it.

Ok, site is up BUT according to my blog it’s now the year 2002. WTF? Get your shit together.

I wonder why two of my domains hosted at DH are up and the rest are down… I believed that when server ups all domains will go up and when down the same… ¿?

I’m on server ‘union’, anyone here withe domains hosted on server union?. Share your domains status please!

Nooooooooooo…I am on 208.113.xxx.xxx…

I want my money back. !

Yeah, this is starting to get frustrating. My site’s still down. I’m not angry because I’m losing all those Adsense millions that could be rolling in (yeah, right), but this is a really long time to be down and it’s the second time in just a couple weeks. I just want people to read my site. It’s not just a “hey, I have a blog,” site and even if it were (thanks for the condescension, jerks) this would still be annoying since yes, people become attached to their websites.

And email notification would be nice in these instances. Dreamhost can just send it from a non-reply-able address, so they don’t get bombarded by angry hate mail, which is why I assume they don’t do that.

My site is still down. Has been since about 10:30pm EST last night. Bad timing since it’s a group that just switched over from Yahoo to forum format. Change is tough for some people, and this is like a nail in the coffin for them. Could even make the board fail after a strong start up.

Shawn, Actually they do. Nowhere is it written in some holy ‘law of businesses online’ that one MUST pay for a dedicated server host for their business.

I never said anything had to be dedicated. You can pretty much hit near 100% uptime with two shared accounts & failover for hardly any money. If people can\’t do that, then they\’re site isn\’t the least bit important. Period.

Even two crappy 99.5% hosts aren\’t likely to be down at the same time. This has been explained more than once here.

And when other similar sites offer the same deal, but with potentially less downtime, guess what, the one with better service wins.

Dreamhost does, because you whiners are here and aren\’t going anywhere. Any other tough questions?

Clearly you’re very defensive of Dreamhost to the point of being a fanboy troll, which is rather sad and pathetic.

Right, anyone that is too stupid to figure out RSS, or doesn\’t cry like a 3 year old non-stop, must be a fanboy. And of course, those that do cry non-stop and get stumped on the most basic things, are real geniuses and definitely not pathetic at all.

Thanks for clearing that up. You\’re really smart!

but fanboys like you give us DreamHost appreciaters a bad name

If I can give you a bad name, then you didn\’t have much of a good one to start with.

I can only assume you must be a teenager still as I find it hard to think an adult would conduct himself in the way you have in the comments.

Are you saying that only teenagers can tell that you\’re an idiot? I\’d have to disagree because I\’m not one and I can tell.

*waits for the obligatory childish response back*

Try being honest for once. You knew what you were saying was stupid and you knew you were going to get called out for it. Those disclaimers are as meaningless as when a troll says \”I\’m not a troll but…\” then goes on to demonstrate exactly what defines a troll.

Ooooh, lemme try lemme try! Why put any thought into anything when I can just put something retarded like this:

*waits for yet another clueless reply that will contain nothing useful, yet refer to others as trolls*

this has been 7 hours already righT?

gosh this shucks

aww this is sweet, keep up the good work, PAL!

What is going on with these two remaining networks that are unreachable from the outside world? It’s like they forgot to publish two ASN’s.

I learned all about ASN’s while getting my technology education at ITT Tech. ITT Technical Institute prepared me with real world skills and I am now making $45,000 a year in the high-tech internet industry!

Also, you people commenting are jerks. You should get a life like me and sit here getting trollbaited all night long.

For fucks sake…..

The router config issue a few weeks back cost me about $60, and this f’n disaster is running me $300 or so and counting.

Prior to that, DH had only borked me once in 2007…..in the range of about $50.

I think it’s time to explore my other options.

45.000 Joke-Papers called Dollars

Nice, its not much fpr “High-Tech-Ind.” :):):)

FOR LOVE OF GOD MY WEBSITES ARE DOWN FOR 12 HOURS!!! FUCK YOU SON OF BITCHES FIX THE PROBLEM YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES

*yawn* Good morning. My sites are mostly up. The rest will follow. Hope y’all had fun shopping around and reading all that tiny print.

Here’s to you, DH.

So, one hour past the last update and I’m one of the lucky ones who has websites in that block. What’s going on? Have you got it fixed yet? Will we be credited for the time past the maintenance window that you’re still down?

lol, gotta love shawns effort to try and wind people up by constantly posting on these comments.

we are touched that you care about how we feel soo much

poor boy, he has nowhere else to play, must be a lonely easter for him

What is going on with the 64.111.xxx.xxx or 208.113.xxx.xxx subnets?? The post makes it sound like it’s nothing but my sites have been down all day because of this!

Ok my site is back and online now but i am unable to connect to my FTP Do you have the same problems?

Hahaha.. is this you Shawn..? followed your scent.

http://www.shawnsyms.ca/content/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28

Shawn’s after my job - Waaaaaaa!!!

you people are such idiots

what kind of stupid person spends their entire day hanging around with idiots on a blog calling them names, investing soo much time and effort in reminding them of their stupidity…

..oh wait thats me. doh!

My site still isnt up… I hope that you can resolve this mater really really quick……………………………

My site http://www.info-mac.org and all of it’s subdomains have been down for about ten hours now (since midnight central time) which is just ridiculous, embarrassing, and costly.

I’m the real Shawn.

No I am the real Shawn. Idiots.

Look at me! Look at me! I’m the real Shawn! People are mocking me on the Internet! I’m so important! You’re stupid!

Dan, you’re one of the unlucky ones with a 208.113.*.* ip address. So am I. krazydad.com and coverpop.com are still down, and you said it: Costly, and embarrassing.

The longer term costs, in terms of losing repeat business and losing faithful visitors, are still unknown. Meanwhile, Media Temple is looking more and more attractive every hour…

Can I just point out that…

Oh, yeah, they gave us forewarning of this. A [url=http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/03/14/central-services-and-spunky-cluster-move/]full week ago[/url]

Bitching and complaining, meet the search function.

Meet paying attention.

Thank you!

Over an hour since the last update to the problem - any chance we can get an estimate of how much more time this will take?

Idiots. All of you, if you really think I’m going to sit here for another 12 hours reading every post so I can think of a nice sarcastic retort while playing with my cock, you must be joking. Idiots.

Actually I have had so much fun calling you all stupid idiots for the last 12 hours that I am going to stay here for another 12 after all.

Artemis: They announced it, but my server (which has been down for 12+ hours now) was not among those listed in the announcement.

What is with all the X rated activity here.

If dreamhost cancels my account because of my orientation, that is discrimination and I am going to sue!

We have another Fake Shawn alert. Everyone knows that to get cybersex action, you have to PayPal me first.

hmm - my IP address starts with 66 but it’s down and been down for 12 hours almost

@Dan Palka

Like attracts like. The troll Shawn has succeeded in attracting his own kind.

Sigh!

The way this outage is affecting me is that my sites work a bit slower than usual, and my FTP is Not working. These outages are getting more and more common with you guys. What’s up with this? I use to hear only good things about dreamhost, but that is changing lately.

THESE GUYS ARE JOKERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ya me funciona http://www.calle17.net!

w00t! My website was only down for ten minutes

why they can’t fix it quickly? my sites been down almost 12 hours…

i’ve been recieved hundreds of emails that people ask for downtime.

when will they fix the problem?

You guys made me pissed off!
We’re recruting students this week, are you insane?
this article looks sooo cool! How can you keep this calm?

Do you know there is a wokr called APPOLIGIZE????
our website is still down.

This is the first time that ALL of my websites AND FTP access has been down for those that are on the Medusa server. Strange because the Medusa server is supposed to be one of the ones that are not effected.

I suppose that it is time fo me to consider a Macminicolo https://support.macminicolo.net/jvmx_secure_signup

yes Larry, DH offer an 50% of down-time guarantee monthly…

I have about 100 websites on DH and can’t have access.

Was woken up by a client in the morning telling me his site is not opening, thought
it was one of those downtime until another sms me.

I guess there is what we call customer support and we have the right to be notified
when things are going on here. What if all my clients come online today? Do you know what
woulda happen to my phone?

Please get done with this on time.

can someone plese tell me how to find the name of the server I am on

OM MY FUCKING GOD I AM SO FUCKING PISSED!!! 12 HOURS AND STILL DOWN SUE THIS FUCKING JEW COMPANY

Okay, my site it back up now - was in the range 208.113… well done in fixing it.

my websites are all up now (1 on 208.113…) and php seems to be working for some of the stuff but when I try to access my counter I get:

“Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in….” so is this corrupted php files or just because the servers are not fully functioning yet?

in defense of Dreamhost and for all you donks whining about not getting a heads up in time, here’s one: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/03/14/central-services-and-spunky-cluster-move/

it’s one week old. You were warned in due time, so please put a sock in it.

/lmss

This sucks … Host up, mysql up. But they changed the damn IP of the host and so far, none of my domains have switched to the new IP yet and the TTL is 14400 (4 hours).

Guess what … they haven’t started apache on my box yet (fudge), so even those to has their IP converted … none of their site will work and I don’t know how many sites are share on this box.
Suck … sucks .. sucks … I don’t run a business, but I expect better communication for a major outage like this.

“but our status site, of course, will remain up and running.”

Is there any way you could have our sites point to the status site while down, so anyone visiting knows it’s a temporary outage? Thanks.

Sweet, my site is now back up

Looks like almost 7 hours of downtime for me. Thanks GIGRIB

# From To Downtime
1 04:16:45 11:03:33 6h 46m

Mine is still down

Looks like the 64.111 netblock just came back online.

@PCK
50% up-time? Are you sure?

@Ryan A

yeah, sure

FTP status???? ANYONE???? ANYONE?????????????????????

Whatever Nick #2 … bluehost never seems to have these problems. I have an account there as well and they’re always solid.

am online again….

HOPE IT STAY ONLINE

My site had AT LAST gone online after three days off… and then… DOWN again!
I relly hope stability comes back to Dreamhost, otherwise it’s worth changing to another hosting service.

Add my name to the list of those who would like to be emailed when such downtime is scheduled. Yes, I could have checked the blog or an RSS subscription to it, but I don’t get to every RSS feed in a week. If we were supposed to depend on that for our information, why was an email apology sent after the billing mistake? That could have been a quick post…
And 600,000 domains hosted does not mean 600,000 customers. I have 30 domains “hosted” here, and I’m guessing the average Dreamhoster has more than one, as well.

the hosting is fucking gay here just bought a site and its closed. wtf assholes.

my site upped after 8 hourssssssssssssssssss…
please send a notification emails to ur customers…

Thank you, sites and email are back up on Crenshaw.

Hopefully smooth sailing here on out now that the most intensive part of the operation is done and over with.

Cheers from way out in Pakistan =)

if you want a freaking email just go to http://www.rssfwd.com/

(wow, it’s amazing what you can do with one minute, and google ….)

PHP is still not parsing correctly on one of my sites (traffic counter, some #includes/dynamic stuff etc).

Anyone else having PHP errors being thrown up for no reason?

GRAVY!

@Nearly everyone: I understand that you are all upset and angry because of this downage, but if it was not necessary, it would not have occurred. It was wrong of Dreamhost to not issue some sort of a warning to all those who would be affected, this is true. However how people acted during the past 19 hours was just unbelieveable, as well as unacceptable. Comments such as “F*** Dreamhost” were just completely inappropriate, and incredibely unneeded. Also, this particular comment, (number 574) “12 HOURS AND STILL DOWN SUE THIS F***ING JEW COMPANY” whoever posted this, you need to grow up you immature little kid. Anger as one thing, but bringing it down to blindly using racism? That is just pathetic.

To be honest, for the way some of you acted during this downage, you don’t even deserve to use the service Dreamhost provide.

@Jason P (and others)

I’m hosting a conference paper submission site on euro - submission deadline *was* Friday at midnight. euro wasn’t on the list of affected sites, so I figured I’d be OK.

Problem #1: mysql connections starting failing at around 6:00 PM, three hours *BEFORE* the scheduled downtime. DH support had no idea why (remember, this was *before* the scheduled move). They guessed it was due to a load problem. In hindsight, it was probably screwing with the routers in anticipation of the move.
Problem #2: DH made my site unavailable during the move, even though it wasn’t on the list of affected machines, thanks to router troubles.

Result: Deadline is now Monday at midnight, and the conference looks like an amateur-run outfit. Although, given that we’re using DH as our hosting outfit, I suppose our Web site *is* run by amateurs.

Anyone supporting DH on this one should realize that DH took down *far* more sites than they said they would. This is *NOT OK*. Reading the status messages and planned move info did no good, since DH didn’t make good on keeping up the machines not on the list. If you’re going to kill all the web servers, say so.

Well My site is up now, I am at perrier for web, rosebud, and spacey I tried to search this server is affected or not, and in result their is no my server name, so I figure it that my server didn’t affected with this maintance may be DH forgot to include my server though since DH is big hosting company.
But their is some funny thing when I submit the ticket, for critical issue, in status they said, “people are dying” that funny since there is impossible to people are dying if their site is down ^_^. I know many of DH user had very important site their running, but please give DH a break since nothing is prefect, I think this outgate is not DH will, but it’s for maintance.
But DH, if it’s possible just tell you coustumer if their site is affected or not, so they know what happen, only that I think what DH mistake, they forgot to put a few ip’s and server that affected with this event. but with time report and their fast jobs to solve the problem I think I can forgive what happen. well we are human right? nothing is perfect though.

And thanks you DH for hard works and fast respond although it’s must be crazy situation when a tons people submitting their ticket with “people are dying” status ^_^

still sucking now it says at capacity. i thought this was an upgrade?

Anyone else with e-mailed content from php scripts arriving hours after they were sent (like 7 or 8 hours)?

Thanks for Your professional service. Everything works again and seems to be faster and smoother. Greetings from Costa Rica.

Hi!

As I am in Europe, and my domains are here, too… the whole day was without e-mail (while it was night there…)
And we survived!
Congratulations!
I am sure, it was a difficult action… and it seems all are up and running.
I am with you for another 2 years…
Greetings,
Tamas

Re: 632 & 633 — Me too, created a trouble ticket

Anyone else having trouble with mail (contact forms and responders) now too..?!?

Email and webmail react faster now, thank you DH.
My websites are on a differerent VPS because I am located in EU and I need faster ping time.

I don’t recall them mentioning which datacenter they were migrating those to, but if it was LAX that would explain it. The same thing happened with Spacey; it seems the effort to track down the source of the problem is still ongoing…

Now we have a lot of problems with the migration, lag, bad ping, and error sql all time…
thx you for support

Connection Problems
Sorry, SMF was unable to connect to the database. This may be caused by the server being busy. Please try again later.

Hey. Those people fussing about getting an email from dreamhost try this:
go to http://google.com/reader sign into your google account if you dont have a google account you can create one with your CURRENT EMAIL it dosent even have to be a GMAIL account! then add a subscription to dreamhoststatus.com . If you set everything up right you will recieve the posts in your email! that simple. Then you can spent your time fussing at someone else!

Dreamhost cant help that the system goes down. But they always have it back up promply. I have 3 sites hosted on the FOX webserver and one on the ZIHARK webserver. They have never been down and I have been with dreamhost for over 4 months now. Com’n If you really need your site up 24/7 then you need about 3 different hosting companys then point your nameservers to all of them. Or even host your own website, then if it goes down you can fuss at yourself! How great would that be?

Thanks dreamhost for the updates & being a great host!

JOSH

Well, we found the notice about an hour and a half before the outage, we had time enough to warn our members.

The 12 hour outage ended up being only 10 for us - when 12 hours generally means 14 in the IT world - so we were pretty impressed with the whole thing - even if it did happen within 24 hours of our site officially opening. Stuff happens.

We now have the blog RSS feeding directly into our Admin area on the site so we will be up-to-date on any future events that are advised in this manner.

While an email would have been nice, I agree that it would have been ridiculous for 600k clients to be notified in that manner.

Be proactive, folks

I can understand people not subscribing to the feed nor wanting every little thing from it emailed to them either, but still would appreciate an email for something of this scale - as long as they aren’t the same ones threatening to sue every time their server reboots. This didn’t affect me anyway, but I wouldn’t want clutter over every trivial little tune-up either, just for something that I would actually care about to pop up there once every five years at most, long after I had already tuned it out. Tying it into the site sounds like a great idea though, that way I don’t have to bothered with it directly and can always just blame everyone else for not reading it!

600k isn’t really that phenomenal a number, especially when you consider that they can just dump the messages into the local, dreamhost managed mailboxes

Great idea. Put the important messages where they’re least likely to be accessible when there’s trouble.

Switching to RSS was definitely the right move. Anyone can claim “I didn’t get an email” but it’s harder to claim “I didn’t look at the same site/feed as everyone else and that’s not my fault.”

All the people that didn’t get, or deleted email, would be here complaining about how Dreamhost isn’t using a more appropriate and reliable solution………………. like RSS.

For those that are curious about how other hosts handle this, and don’t realize how well Dreamhost did, this is from an email I just now got from another host I use (4 days in advance). They’re just one piece of a failover setup, so it doesn’t affect me, but…

Midnight, Friday March 28th. At that time, for a period of up to 48 hours, there will be service unavailability. It is not certain when your account will become unavailable or how fast it will come back up. Please allow ample time for us to make the move safely and securely.

Oh, and that’s a host with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which people that don’t know better consider an important feature to look for in a host (everyone else, including the hosts, knows it’s just a marketing gimmick).

Like ALL uptime guarantees, there’s usually something funny in there, like:

at least 99.9% of the time during any 12-month period.

So, all you have to do is log all noticed downtime (they probably won’t count the server moves anyway) for a year then see if you’re owed a credit, then jump through hoops to get it. Yeah, I’ll get right on that for enough money to buy a Big Mac.

So, is 48 hours (bet it’s longer) with 4 days notice better than 12 hours & 7 days notice, right?

Of course, that’s life and it’s not a big deal. I’m not canceling the account, bashing them all over the net, or anything else. Instead, the sites will be failed over and I won’t see the downtime. Poor me, nothing to whine about. I must be doing something wrong!

Guys, the AVERAGE PERSON is not a techie like some of you. They do not use RSS. They will NEVER use RSS. This does not mean they don’t have sites hosted here. Many people have sites hosted here that other people developed. I have developed sites for others that are hosted here. Once I put the site up, I don’t take responsibility for the hosting afterwards.

Let me reiterate: The average person is not going to be able to figure out how to use Dreamhost RSS feeds, much less figure out by wading through these messages that they can use a “simple” solution like piping the RSS feed through some sort of feed to email service.

Some of you are obviously living in a tech bubble. Dreamhost should use email AND RSS. it is not an either/or. People should be notified via email because that’s what most people expect and judging from the comments here, that’s what most people want to.

I regularly get EMAILS not RSS feeds from my Internet provider when they are going to be doing networking maintenance. Trust me, they have more than 600,000 people to email too. Somehow they manage to do it. And if I did not get an email from my Internet provider about downtime, I’d dump them.

USE EMAIL + RSS. Get with the program, Dreamhost. Stop listening to geeks who are out of touch with regular people.

LOL there are folks down in the Blingy post talking about triple redundancy and lulzsuits for consequential damages, wouldn’t that be more fun than trying to argue whether SUV’s are better than pickup trucks because they’re newer? There’s such a thing as personal preferences you know, not everybody jumps on whatever’s considered trendy at any given moment. What about Java, wasn’t that supposed to be the next big thing too? I still see a few applets here and there even today but it sure as hell didn’t catch on fire as advertised, but back then one could have just as easily been calling everyone idiots for not using it; that’s just not the way things work though. IMHO, RSS feeds are great if you want to watch something like a hawk, but if you can live with two hours of unscheduled downtime yet would like to know only about the one time in a very long time that there will be scheduled maintenance of that duration, then they are not so good.
Incidentally, you might note that they did not mention paying clients, only that they’ve developed sites here for other people; there are such things as hobbies and/or favors. Why all the assumptions just for the sake of calling people names on the web simply because they have a different opinion than yours?

Shawn, guess what? Email isn’t going away. And RSS is just not accepted or the standard. I don’t care if it’s newer, There are a lot of people who cannot use RSS. Just because someone is not technically inclined does not mean they are STUPID or useless people. People have different types of intelligence and the fact is the AVERAGE person does not use RSS unless by accident (i.e., they use it through MyYahoo or Facebook or something, because it’s built in to the app.)

You can do a quick search on Google and see the stats. One study (though this was in 2005) found only 3% of Internet users were using RSS. I found a more recent article, that is New Zealand specific, but is probably indicative of the whole:

http://diversity.net.nz/5-reasons-why-92-of-new-zealanders-dont-use-rss/2008/03/19/

This article discusses how 92% of New Zealanders DO NOT USE RSS. I’m sure that applies worldwide.

So Dreamhost can continue to offer only RSS and piss off probably 80-90% of its users who don’t even know what RSS is (let’s assume maybe a slightly higher percentage of geeks here) or be smart and offer email alerts as an option.

Your argument is otherwise ridiculous. This is not about people “not being able to follow simple directions.” First off, DH never gives people simple directions on how to receive support updates in the first place. Second, customers are demanding email alerts and that is the main reason why DH should provide them.

As for your ridiculous insult that somehow I should be providing FREE ongoing technical support to people I’ve done websites for in the past, without a regular maintenance contract, when otherwise maybe they are updating their site themselves or having their brother do it, no, I don’t take responsibility for a website for years after it’s done when I’m not being paid to maintain it.

I do tell people to just check in with status.dreamhost.com regularly to see what’s going on. That’s what *I* do. I don’t even subscribe to RSS. I don’t want to have to set it up and get a separate app going that I need to check just for DH (the ONLY company that asks this of me), and so I just bookmark this page and check in manually. But I should not have to do that. I should get email directly from the company.

So, you call all of your friends clients?

I was referring to

I have developed sites for others that are hosted here.

which does not mention anything about clients, which it turns out they are at least in some cases but they responded to that already, still at that point you were just making an assumption in order to build a straw man. It’s no matter though, your opinion is quite clear, anybody who doesn’t like the same things you like and dislike the same things you dislike is obviously an imbecile, and that’s the end of the story. If that’s what makes you happy, fine. I’m content to be a moron then, because I laughed when laserdiscs came out, and so many other things too; not every new technology is the lightbulb or the automobile. Also there are some that are on that level or at least nearly so, but only in a certain niche. A computer is more advanced than a hammer but I still wouldn’t drive nails with my CPU; increased sophistication does not make something the most appropriate solution for every person and in every situation. What I meant about RSS wasn’t that you have to watch the feed like a hawk, but that it’s awesome if you really want to see every update to something, and yes the people who whine every time the server they’re on reboots would be wise to subscribe, but IMO the trouble is there is no threshold - I wouldn’t want to be emailed 99% of what would come through the feed either. Maybe that’s just me though.

It’s no matter though, your opinion is quite clear, anybody who doesn’t like the same things you like and dislike the same things you dislike is obviously an imbecile, and that’s the end of the story.

The imbeciles are the ones that don’t even agree with their own opinions–not mine. If your opinion is that what you want is the opposite of what Dreamhost does, then yes, you would be an imbecile for paying to be here. No surprise that these are the same people that can’t figure out RSS.

Do you really not see that it’s the EXACT SAME stupidity as the geniuses that whine about no phone support?

The irrelevance of all your technology comparisons makes me wonder if you even know what RSS is. Comparing a hammer to a computer might make sense if I was comparing cotton balls to hand grenades, but you can’t really apply it to something as similar as email & RSS.

What I meant about RSS wasn’t that you have to watch the feed like a hawk, but that it’s awesome if you really want to see every update to something, and yes the people who whine every time the server they’re on reboots would be wise to subscribe, but IMO the trouble is there is no threshold - I wouldn’t want to be emailed 99% of what would come through the feed either.

Then you setup a custom feed that doesn’t send you every single thing. The directions on how to do that were in the same newletter that explained how to have alerts sent to your inbox.

It’s no surprise that the “gotta have email” crowd was too stupid to follow instructions that were MAILED to them.

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/V9.05_May_2007

Of course that would require someone that cares about their account status to click on the big “ACCOUNT STATUS” link in the control panel and see the custom RSS feed that cuts it down to their servers.

Even for someone that’s not smart enough to get the newsletter, or ever click on the account status link, a 5 second wiki search on the wiki brings it up.

That’s also why all the geniuses that are talking about how they HAVE to offer both are totally clueless. It’s up to you how you want to stay on top of the feed, but there is no need for anything more than the feed from Dreamhost. Thinking otherwise is just stupid.

Several people have linked to RSS info throughout this while cryfest and everyone was just too focused on being clueless to learn anything.

It’s not a “techie thing” by a long shot. Anyone that can’t figure this out really is just a moron.

The ones that are even bigger morons are the ones saying they need to offer both. Why the hell would you need email and RSS when you can get the alerts in your inbox? There hasn’t been a single intelligent argument for the necessity of email in this entire 14 page pile of garbage.

Really Simple, duh, I’ve been using it since it first started, but I don’t use it for DH for the exact reasons Chad mentioned that you think are so far off.

### Really Simple, duh, I’ve been using it since it first started, but I don’t use it for DH for the exact reasons Chad mentioned that you think are so far off. ###

His reasons arent reasons he just doesn’t know what hes doing. The ‘really simple’ part funny because of how many people cant figure out how easy it is even if you want email or only alerts that are about your server and not every post

Maybe this will help, I will spell it out.

Scenario #1 - Site goes down unexpectedly, and it will take 45 minutes or something to replace the hard drive = It’s already offline so I can’t put a warning on the site, or use an admin section to email warnings to members, and even if I could it would be fixed before anyone notices anyway. There’s absolutely no point in me knowing about it at all, through any channel. This is the “typical” situation anyway, and despite what some claim, even this is rare.

Scenario #2 - There’s some supermassive, practically once in a lifetime project of some sort which is going to take things offline for a substantial period of time that they know about well in advance. This I would like to know about, and it’s only happened once in the four years I’ve been here, which isn’t bad at all. The problem is, why in the world would I want an RSS feed or stream of emails all the time, that will only tell me something I actually give a damn about once every four years at most?

ZZZZZZZZZZZ:

Exactly!

Using the RSS feed link on my web panel would also give me a whole bunch of crap that I can’t do anything about and probably wouldn’t notice because this is Scenario #1.

Looking at all the RSS feeds on the status blog, no matter which category, I would get a whole bunch of crap I’d never read or care about. Even “Major Outages” has a lot of entries, and it’s kind of a misnomyer. There’s no “once in a lifetime we know this sucks but it’ll totally make you love us more after the move!” category, like in Scenario #2 that ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ laid out.

“You get just the warnings that affect you in your email. Piece of cake!” - I do NOT see how this would be possible. I think I’d get to see a LOT of warnings I don’t WANT to see no matter HOW I managed the RSS because of the categories. Or maybe there’s extra filtering things…but you know what:

Since I look at the site once a week I’m bound to see:
1: Any big problems coming up.
2: Quickly see if Dreamhost is getting better or worse.

So *that’s* a piece of cake for me, Chelsea.

So basically, yes, RSS is useful for people and people love it. However, I don’t care about it and it doesn’t make my life more productive, it doesn’t fit under how I manage my information overload. So call me old fashioned or whatever, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not trying to agrue about how you think the world should get it’s information and content pushed using this RSS fad.

The people that DON’T use it because they don’t know how or haven’t heard about it most likely DON’T check the status page. But they DO check their email. EVERYONE does that.

Dreamhost says users should bookmark and check the page. It’s the users FAULT if they don’t.
But in this 12 hour downtime, a good PR package could have been sent using an email the same way they promote things using the newsletter. This would have been good for DH and all customers.

“Get email alerts but if you lose the mail or have a mail problem and can’t check you can go to the feed”
1. The issue we’re talking about is one that had a week plus of notice that I knew about a week in advance and was FINE with because I am HAPPY about more capacity.
2. I’ve never “lost” email in my entire life.
3. A DreamHost mail problem would prevent this RSS feed from getting to me, in which case, I check the status site. Why would I go to the feed when I can go here and read comments on the site the way I was supposed to experience the site?
4. I don’t want email ALERTS, but I think email notices about Big Not Going To Happen Very Often Events would be helpful for the MOST people.

“Email is not that reliable because of spam filters and people that delete accidentally.”

Uhm…Well, those sound like a USER errors to me… and those same people should setup a RSS that they’ll ignore or not read very carefully just like they do they’re email?
That’s a good plan.

Oh, and YES, putting the status updates in the dreamhost mail boxes would be stupid. I agree. I, too, understand that you cannot check your dreamhost mailbox when dreamhost is having downtime.

But we’re talking about the week NOTICE of the problem, which would have been able to be read through email, and more folks would have been able to read.

Email > status blog > RSS feeds of status blog

You had a week of notice on this site already. You cant be bothered with checking the site, cant be bothered with an rss feed, cant be bothered reading email alerts. I get it now you just want to complain.

I had more typed up and it says waiting moderation but anyway you are still not getting it. You spend more time complaining here than it takes to delete alerts you don’t want to read and its not that many.

Anyone that wants to get the emails just follow my easy directions above. Dreamhost system give you all 3 of these options if you follow the directions…….. email, rss, check this site.

“You had a week of notice on this site already. You cant be bothered with checking the site, cant be bothered with an rss feed, cant be bothered reading email alerts. I get it now you just want to complain. ”

Chelsea, I said above, that I got the notice a week ago, was fine with it, and was happy they were moving.
Again, what we were saying, was that RSS isn’t the best way to communicate this, nor the blog, nessesarily, for most of the customers.

Blog = Here’s why this isn’t working. Go watch TV for an hour and come back later.
Email = Hey, this isn’t going to be working in a week, so go out and see a show or something. But it’ll be awesome when we get it all moved! Yay us! Wooo!

But what do I know. I “don’t know what I’m doing”.

Yah, this is lame, heh… you’re right.
I just wanted to stick up for people who were being called stupid for wanting an email notice for something like this. It’s not like they’re crazy. They’re just people.

*Sigh* Why all the condescension over a difference of opinion… Neither of us needs “walked through” anything, with live bookmarks I can just stick any feed I want right up in the toolbar in less than a second, and do when it’s something I need to follow that closely. None of that is the point. I don’t want a feed of trivial things, NOR do I want EMAILS about trivial things. I certainly wouldn’t mind an email about really major planned outages though, how does that make me stupid? Why am I going to hover over my little DH bookmark every so often for the next four years at least before there’s anything there that would be worth preparing for? What do I need to “read up on” which will make me see the light that shines upon you great infinitely wise people? They can email me a newsletter once a month, so how much harder can it possibly be to send an email once every few years?

LMAO you’re really that insecure that you need to spend your life fisking posts on DH status to make yourself feel superior, well if you wanted to make me cry you’ve nearly succeeded - not through the elementary school level insults, but because it’s like seeing starving African kids on TV during Christmas. Funny how the stupid people have no trouble comprehending and even agreeing with the opposing point of view except on one detail, but since you really believe that talking like a third-grader on the web makes you look brilliant, I suppose I should let you have one of your scarce moments of self-worth.

Hey, look, another long post that says nothing, further showing that’s exactly what you know.

LMAO you’re really that insecure that you need to spend your life fisking posts on DH status

Yeah, your security is just shining through… almost as much as your amazing ability to grasp the basics. Explain how your time here is well spent, because I’m not seeing it.

And you really told me with “LMAO.” It’s a good think you were able to express chatroom emotions like a 12 year old while talking about elementary school insults.

to make yourself feel superior

It’s not that I stand out as being superior to you, it’s just that you stand out as inferior to everyone else that can grasp the simple things.

If it was superiority on my end, I’d look down on all of you equally, but I’m specifically pointing out that you stand out as being stupid, even in 14 pages of people not knowing what’s going on. Even Chad realized how lame this crap was, admitted it and stopped. That makes him better than you.

The reason they’re better than you is because once they see the way to stay on top of things, they’ll implement it and learn from it. You’re too busy being lazy and arguing against common sense to learn anything.

You and Chad were the only two that argued with her advice, but even he backed away from that. You’re the only person here trying to make it look like deleting a few emails is a lot of work and not worth the end result, which is always being warned when something like this happens.

but because it’s like seeing starving African kids on TV during Christmas.

Is that your example of being mature and intelligent? Is that the goal I should be shooting for?

Funny how the stupid people have no trouble comprehending and even agreeing with the opposing point of view except on one detail

That’s how you see it in your head, but the reality of it is that you don’t even grasp the basics enough to be able to agree with anything, beyond maybe throwing in a lucky guess.

Seriously, explain to everyone how being too lazy to delete a few alerts at the risk of being clueless and uninformed makes you the smart one in the bunch.

Other than crying and being stupid, the only other thing you’ve done is argue with the girl that gave good advice and tried to help everyone out. Meanwhile, you had done nothing but whine and weren’t even capable of contributing as much as she had, and still couldn’t even just let that go without issue.

but since you really believe that talking like a third-grader on the web makes you look brilliant,

Smart people know to communicate with others on a level they can understand. You give yourself too much credit if you think it’s 3rd grade.

I suppose I should let you have one of your scarce moments of self-worth

Blah blah blah… more nothing. Is that you’re clever way of saying that even you finally realized you don’t have anything worth saying? There’s a difference between having something to say and having to say something.

Maybe you can be twice as mature while showing you have to reply to this by using “ROFL” instead of “LMAO.” That will show everyone that you’re much smarter than me because you “LOL” louder with each reply. No one will notice that you have nothing to say if you throw enough of those in there.

Also be sure to keep playing make-believe psychiatrist. It’s a great distraction from how every post you make indicates you don’t know how things work. No one can see through that act and everyone will believe that someone that can’t grasp the most basic things is able to give an accurate analysis on human behavior.

wiki.dreamhost.com/V9.05_May_2007 - A tiny drop of useful content in a sea of garbage.

Oh and I forgot to mention - ROFL

All that time and you still couldn’t come up with anything worth saying? Not like that was predictable.

I see you still don’t realize that the reason you miss that one important email is because you choose to not receive it. That’s 100% your fault–not Dreamhost’s. Everyone that wants to, does.

Your “every time someone moves” example makes no sense since you can only receive alerts that apply to your account. Count how many of those posts even exist here and that’s the tiny number (not a flood) of alerts you’d receive. Yeah, hitting the delete button 5 times a year is a real hassle. Definitely not worth it just to not miss important news.

Just like those suckers that read the newspaper, even though the news isn’t about them. They should be at the newspaper site whining on their blog about how they only want newspapers sent out when it has news about them.

That number is the exact number of emails you would receive if they switched to email. What gets posted here would be an email. Nothing changes.

You’ve spent more time here not being clever than it would take you to delete irrelevant alerts for 10 years, so you seem to be a little off on calculating how important your time really is.

thanks
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