Reminder: Network maintenance tomorrow night! (Updated)
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/06/18/network-outage-july-11/
This is a reminder about the network maintenance we will be performing July 11, 2008 starting at 10pm Pacific time. All of DreamHost will be inaccessible during this downtime, including email, websites, jabber, streaming, mysql, etc. No data will be lost during this time, and email will be deferred until the network is back online and delivered over the course of the night by the sending servers.
Update 7/12/08 12:32am PDT:
The network was back up briefly before being taken down by an unexpected hardware fault on one of the central routers. It’s currently coming back up and with any luck, things will be returning to normal shortly.
Update 7/12/08 2:58am PDT:
Everything’s been back up for a while now and we’ve been monitoring everything very closely. From what we can tell, the previous issues are all gone and everything’s running smoothly. We’ll continue to monitor the network very closely over the next 24 hours to be absolutely certain no strangeness pops up.
July 10th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
*whine* *cry* *bitch* *complain* …ad naseum…
What!!! My (business/clients/life) will be ruined!!!
Now that the obligatory rant is posted, thanks for the heads up. Any idea of the potential duration of the outage?
July 10th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Don’t forget the ever popular…
“Other hosts don’t have this happen to them”
July 10th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
It would have been nice if there was something sitting in front of this router that could serve up a page telling people (web visitors) what’s going on instead of just darkening the entire network and having people try to load sites and get timeouts (or worse.)
Just sayin..
July 10th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I don’t mind being down, but it would be nice if you guys served up a default page such as, “The Service that hosts this website will be down for X-Y-Z.”
Is that possible?
July 10th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Arron: Yes but it would require you redo all the apache configs.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
@Paul,Arron - I agree. A simple “Temporary Downtime for Service Updates, Please Try Back Soon” message would go a long way to let visitors know it’s intentional (and even a positive, if spun well). Nonetheless, I’m grateful for the early warning.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Aww, shucks. I was going to use this as an excuse to move my mail hosting elsewhere but I never got around to it.
Anyway, good luck, and I hope you’re able to keep the downtime to a minimum.
(PS: Could you prioritize the spunky mail servers?
)
July 10th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Why isn’t there a customer wide email to announce planned outages? Or unplanned outages for that matter. Yeah yeah, RSS for dreamhoststatus.com, blah blah. I don’t want or need to have to read every post here, I just want what affects me.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
any chance you will also take advantage of the previously schedule downtime to take care of that tiny little dns vulnerability announced this week?
July 10th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
@nicole:
AFAIK, DreamHost’s caching DNS servers use djbdns and the authoritative servers use PowerDNS, both of which have been “fixed” for years.
The other servers might have vulnerable clients, of course..
Anyway, the only full solution to this is DNSSEC. The recent improvements only make it more difficult.
July 11th, 2008 at 6:24 am
Whats the estimated downtime? Can’t schedule downtime and not estimate for how long….
July 11th, 2008 at 7:13 am
Downtime estimated at 30mins in original notification.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:23 am
I wish you good luck!!! Go DH!!
July 11th, 2008 at 11:31 am
hmmm. it says this will happen tonight…but my email is down right now ( has been since last night) Is this a related problem, or something new?
help?
July 11th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Ah… thank god they post a reminder… need to get my Pay Per Clicks paused for tonight.
July 11th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
BTW, is Dreamhoststatus.com going to be down to? It was my understanding that this page was inside DH’s network, right?
July 11th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
No, dreamhoststatus.com is on another network, so that when Dreamhost’s network is down, users can still get status updates….
July 11th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Comments on the other post said that ns2 is on the same network as the status page, so DNS hosting won’t be totally down either.
July 11th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Yeah, some email notifications for known downtimes would be nice. I had to have a reader of my website notify me we were down, then come here just now for the scoop.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
AHHHHHHH PORCO DIOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!
TA TUDO FUDIDO NESSA PORAA Q BOSTA!
July 11th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
I hate DreamHost
July 11th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Still down
July 11th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
oh noo….down again
July 11th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Thanks for that, Barry. Sometimes I wonder if the people who always seem to post the first few comments complaining about people complaining are really just DreamHost employees trying to make themselves feel better about how much they suck.
And, for the record, I’d thought I’d check out your website that you posted there … only it’s obviously hosted on DreamHost, as I could not access it. Good luck with that.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Yep, email would be very appreciated. Please consider emailing clients when there is a planned outage. Just makes sense. Push instead of pull.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
C’mon DreamHost, we’re sitting here dead. Send us an email warning next time.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
I’m paying a ridiculously high price for a DH Private Server, too. It sucks
July 11th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
So, I guess it’s finally time to get some sleep, then? ;D
July 11th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Agree with Nathan and Lemuel. Turns out I hadn’t been mantaining one of my sites and decided to upgrade wordress and suddenly I get timeouts. I completely understand and think its great they apply the fixes, no problem with the date really or time… just that an e-mail would have been nice (since it has taken down all servers).
Oh well… gotta bookmark this RSS feed and learn about every outage affecting me or not (whine whine, cry cry, etc.).
Still, keep up the great work guys!
July 11th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I guess all of you idiots missed the whole “Get status updates that only affect you!” thing in the panel, eh?
Oh well. The commenters here are usually morons anyway…
By the way, I use Dreamhost (have for 8 months) and it hiccups and burps a few times, sure; but it’s $10 hosting. It’s cheap and affordable for what it is. (Also, my server’s back up.)
July 11th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
It’s not so bad. Despite the occasional upgrade or fix, uptime is 99.9%.
Try living in Africa for a few weeks. You’ll realize that 99.9 is pretty good.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Hey MK☆! *waves*
Nice to see a fellow dutchy and friend over here
Guess we’re stuck in the same boat, because things are still down. I guess I might as well go do some groceries.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Wonderful. Here I went for the past 26 minutes wondering what the hell is going on. All I knew is that all of my sites shut down without warning and dreamhost went completely dark.
Way to let a customer know.
It isn’t as if you idiots don’t have my email address. You send me that monthly dreamhost newsletter. Don’t you think you could have sent a warning to all of us to let us know you were doing this?
Sure, I could have come here every three or four hours to see if you are planning on shutting our service down, but I am too busy working on my own site.
I am glad you are doing maintenance — JUST EMAIL US AHEAD OF TIME AND TELL US!
July 11th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I hope you can fix this soon.
I understand this takes a lot of work, I also have only one server and it requires maintainance frequently.
Good Luck
July 11th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Allyn: They gave a months worth of notice (give or take a few days). Hardly once “every four hours”… and even then they recommend adding it to an RSS reader.
It really isn’t that hard.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
@DJ Allyn
Your site is down.
I was going to go there and spend $hundreds. When will it be up? Please, hurry, I need to spend all my money right now on what you’re selling there.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
It would have been nice to know of the planned downtime thru an email notice before it happened.
But at least this is a planned downtime compared to something wrong happening.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
You should *seriously* consider letting people know about a planned maintenance.
My site is still down. Any ETA?
July 11th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
how much longer?
July 11th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
They initially stated 30 minutes when they first announced this downtime.
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/06/18/network-outage-july-11/
July 11th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
My site works fine, why?
July 11th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Then it’ll be an hour and a half.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
I was going to update my resume, but I suppose I now have a good reason to go finish this new David Sedaris book!
July 11th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Damn, I donno what to do in this free time, thinking of patching up with my parents. Lemme give a call back to my gf and apologize for everything.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Good for you. Too many people become engulfed in flames waiting for their site to come back up.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
“Thanks”
July 11th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
“You’re welcome.”
July 11th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Hmmm… was wondering what was going on. Not upset, but would 2nd the suggestion for an email in these situations. It’s just good customer service to do that. Got the feed for this now.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
I’m down, is it related to this maintenance?
July 11th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
let me guess, dreamhost runs the iphone activation servers too!
July 11th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Luiz F. G. Deitos, you are a hilarious man and I love you.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Cityhunter
Why don’t you translate what Luiz said in English for us?
July 11th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
“On July 11, 2008 starting at 10pm we will have a brief network outage to restructure our routing tables. We are planning two hours to deal with any quirks that may come up, however our Cisco network engineer estimates the total downtime to be under 30 minutes.”
An hour and five later and still no service.
C’mon guys, Extract the digit please. It’s not 11pm at night for all your customers.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Its back up.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Yeah. It’s 14:13.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
It was funny because I was just trying to read a friend’s blog and it didn’t work. I then realized they probably use DreamHost and it turns out I’m right.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Hah, I’ve been receiving over 4k+ traffic spike from an article that got stumbledupon and then .. splat!
July 11th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
My site is still not working.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Bad luck Jennifer!
July 11th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
well i dont care what anyone else says… i think dreamhost f’n rocks… i rarely have issues and the services are outstanding.
i knew about this outage a a while back.. and i made the proper preperations.
thank you dreamhost and keep up the good work!
July 11th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
How long will this go on for?!?
July 12th, 2008 at 12:08 am
thx!!! DH Staff
July 12th, 2008 at 12:10 am
My site’s still not working. Mine seems to be the only one…
July 12th, 2008 at 12:23 am
Mine’s back, too.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:28 am
My site’s back up,
July 12th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Was up for 90 minutes and now back down.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:30 am
Now this is pissing!
Its DOWN!
July 12th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Yes more downtime!
July 12th, 2008 at 12:33 am
now Database servers are down.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:37 am
And it’s back! Only down a few minutes that I know of this time but could have been as much as 30 or so.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Mine’s been down for over two hours straight
July 12th, 2008 at 12:57 am
My site is down since two hours ago, it is not resolved yet??
July 12th, 2008 at 1:17 am
Thanks for the update DH - much appreciated. Looking forward to seeing my site online again
July 12th, 2008 at 1:40 am
My sites seem to be back up, but the panel is down.
And I was going to sign up a friend, but the signup section is down.
More funny though is the time the signup site will be down:
That was a year ago, and still isn’t back up. Bit longer than 60 minutes I think
July 12th, 2008 at 1:58 am
My site is not down. My database is not down. Actually it’s a little faster than normal. Oh how I love Kroner, and have done for years.
July 12th, 2008 at 2:13 am
I think it’s just different servers not working at the moment. One of my sites seem to be dragging a bit and my webmail won’t work.
July 12th, 2008 at 2:15 am
My site’s up, finally! Woot! Thanks Dreamhost
July 12th, 2008 at 2:17 am
For all those people requesting E-Mail notifications: Just think about the number of customers DH has, probably something like 200.000 ? Then think about the time the mail server would need to send those messages. It would take longer to send all those messages than to fix the issue. But please, don’t stop requesting E-Mail notifications, you’re funny.
July 12th, 2008 at 2:31 am
when the work can be done?
I need accurate info.
It was told 2am 12/07/08, now it is 2:31am still not working. What’s up?
July 12th, 2008 at 2:35 am
do not sleep IT guys, it was daytime and peak hour for my web.
July 12th, 2008 at 2:48 am
i second the suggestion about emailing clients about such major events well in advance!
it’s not like we come here every day to check on stuff beforehand. i normally only check here after being affected by some problem..
July 12th, 2008 at 2:52 am
Agree, an e-mail from Dreamhost wold be helpful in this case, I guess that would be a relief for the support team too.. plus a “down for maintainance” message to visitors.
July 12th, 2008 at 2:58 am
Not yet problem resolved ???????????????????????
got my site down for last 3 hrs….
when it will resume !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
July 12th, 2008 at 3:32 am
It is still not working!!!! When I manage to log (usually it times out) to my admin panel it looks like a mess! (just like yesterday)
July 12th, 2008 at 3:44 am
same here….. still freezing.
July 12th, 2008 at 3:49 am
Perhaps part of your message yesterday needed to be a reminder that you informed us of this (upcoming) outage like three weeks ago, responding to much feedback about needing warning of such activity (or lack thereof). Thanks! My only failure was in regard to the time zone of it all.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:01 am
All our sites are still down. Now for almost 6 hours. So the problem isn’t solved.
We pay both for VPS and mysql server and this affect us.
July 12th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Sites are up but something has changed with the Apache settings and one of domains without an htaccess file won’t show index.html as the home page. The directory listing comes up instead.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
“zylox Says:
July 12th, 2008 at 2:17 am
For all those people requesting E-Mail notifications: Just think about the number of customers DH has, probably something like 200.000 ? Then think about the time the mail server would need to send those messages. It would take longer to send all those messages than to fix the issue. But please, don’t stop requesting E-Mail notifications, you’re funny.”
Hey Zylox - an email IN ADVANCE is what was required. I suppose you opt not to receive one of Josh’s newsletters that’s dispatched without problem every month by the hundreds of thousands because you want to save an electron tree? Idiot.
July 12th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
My site’s down again.
July 13th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Down again too. Cheap or not - if it doesn’t work it’s hard to justify the TIME spent in getting these sites up and running, let alone the immediate cost. I’ve spent hundreds of hours here toiling away getting six non-profit organisations sites up for people (hence them wanting to host here) and I then have to defend my choice to put them here. Hmmm… I’ve had no problems for four years and now I have a very slow and unreliable server I’m plonked on - Electra. Are support getting time to read support requests through the normal channels? I’ve told tham my sites were down hours ago and no response. This issue says “closed”. Closed it aint!
July 14th, 2008 at 6:48 am
For people asking email about outages… Why can’t you use a program like Newzie or other “client-side” RSS reader? It checks your RSS feeds and give a popup when something changes.
You have the same “user experience” that you get with email. There’s also a RSS reader built-in in Thunderbird..
And… before getting DH account I was on an italian hosting: got outages and no way to get informed on what’s going on..