MySQL Service Downtime
Posted (October 2nd, 2008 at 6:35 am PST) by JustinWe are experiencing some mysql service downtime at the moment. We are still investigating the cause and working to get this fixed up as soon as possible. It would seem a system-wide configure of the mysql services is what triggered this, with new configuration files not being pushed to the new servers. We do have our admins on the job and will do everything we can to get service restored. Sorry for the problems. When we have further info we will update this status post.
Update: I apologize for the lack of a followup but we actually resolved this Thursday morning a short time after the initial posting of this status report (the admin who did was unable to post at that time).
87 Responses to “MySQL Service Downtime”
I was just about to contact DreamHost about the downtime. I appreciate that you have posted this information here, but maybe you also could have sent a mail to those who are affected by this.
@Jo-
Emailing your users about downtime would be a bit much. It is fair to assume that the vast majority of users will not be effected by this down-time in any way whatsoever and expecting them to advertise their down-time is just silly. I’m just glad DreamHost is on top of the issue.
This is just getting ridiculous how can I run a business when my site keeps going down? My business is in a very specialized niche and I can’t afford to piss customers off and that is what is precisely happening with all these outages.
Cecil
In the 4 years with Dreamhost, this is the first time that my site has been down. I’d say that’s a pretty good track record and totally understand that sometimes things happen ..
Cecil: why are you running your business site off DreamHost then? I mean, I am a happy DH user, but I do realize that DH is only for my “play” sites. My more serious sites all run off a VPS at another company that I can ensure has good uptime, and if it’s down, it’s my own fault. I simply don’t think DH should be used for serious sites like your own.
back up, and all good. It was down for max 10 minutes. Thank you Dreamhost.
GO DH, GO! 
And i am thinking of moving to DH but looking at how many outages they have i am i mite move…
Do whats good for you; leave dreamhost. It was the best thing I ever did, and really painful to come back here and see you all still suffering. Trust me leaving was the best thing I ever did, and my life is much less stressful now as all of my websites and e-mail are always up.
While I understand that issue like this can happen, our application just had been mentioned on TV a few hours ago :(((
Still down. Going on an hour. Also looking at my webstats there is a four hour whole last night. Lets hope they get to the root of this soon…
Happy to see a official note in here, now we wait for the solution, like someone say, go DH go! XD
Mine is a political blog, people are probably happy it is down.
I’m going for a beer, call Moe when it is up so he can let me know.
It’s a small business that hasn’t even officially opened yet so I can’t afford high bucks for a web site, right now I’m spending every penny on getting inventory. This used to be a reliable place, but for the last 6 months or maybe a little longer it’s outage after outage.
Commercial sites need to use MySQL and PHP so this outage might not affect someone which has a home site but it kills a commercial site.
Nate; where did you end up? Like it or not I will have to move which again is a huge delay in opening with loss of income associated with it.
Cecil
thanks for the note I was already freaking out thinking I messed it up again.
Hope you resolve it soon. Fighting!!
Funny, my sites are all up (and all of them are heavy users of MySQL services)
It seems this is not such a “system-wide” bleep
I’m completely in the same boat as you Cecil. We just launched a product this past Friday and considering our customers cannot run the program unless it is verified by the DB I figure we’ll have a few pissed off customers soon. But at least the problem has been identified and is being worked out. I’ve noticed that the majority of the problems have been on the new servers. I have another account that’s pretty old and I’ve never had any problems on it.
… but now its up 
so great work DH!
… Good work guys.. just hope it doesnt happen too often … 
Thanks DH
hmmm, still down for us …
I am skeptical of Lillian’s claim that her site has gone down once in four years. This is the beginning of my second year with dreamhost and they routinely have multiple crashes a month. Most of them are very short, but they add up. I agree this is not the place to host a mission critical website.
In a year I had 99.886% uptime, while that sounds great it still equals over 10 hours of down time in a year.
Such is the life of cheap shared hosting.
http://www.krkeegan.com/archives/90-Dreamhost-Uptime-99.886-percent,-Down-Over-10-Hours-a-Year.html
I agree with Cecil. I’m a very small business and need every waking hour of my site to be up and running. My customers are not savvy internet shoppers. They are very nervous about purchasing online. So when we have these interruptions, they back off from purchasing. They think their personal information and cc# are out there just waiting for someone to steal. I’m doing my best to reassure them it’s all safe and that I’ve taken the necessary lengths to keep it safe. This simply doesn’t help.
My site frequently is down. More than I’d like to think. It’s frustrating because I may loose a potential sale and student.
It would be nice if DH would credit us for the interruptions! LOL Not going to happen. It’s hard to stay positive when being so frustrated! Please hurry DH.
@Mumsie- But even a very small business needs to make smart decisions. If your site is critical to your business, doesn’t it make sense that you would at least choose a hosting company that has an uptime guarantee. You CHOOSE to take the risk of not having guaranteed uptime when you choose DH.
“It would be nice if DH would credit us for the interruptions.” On my plan I pay $10.95 a month. In a 30-day month there are 720 hours. So for each hour of downtime that’s approximately $0.015. The entire time I’ve been with DH, including the power outage fiasco a couple of years ago, my total downtime is about 40 hours. So they owe me about 61 cents. I think I can live without it.
This is my second year with dreamhost
last year I had interruptions for approximately 14 hours in the year.
This year I go already like 6 hours of interruptions
but I worry much because my Database structure faltered and I cannot already gain access to my Databases hope that they should solve the problems soon.
Jose
Is this affecting email accounts hosted by dreamhost?
All my websites still have MYSQl issues….. al 20!
I have several sites down… everything that uses a database is down. several PPC campaigns pointing at these sites… didn’t realize until too late… ouch.
Leave it to DH to time their botches right when I don’t need them.
My sites were only down for a few minutes, maybe 30 at max. Yes its true i see outages happen to everyone here at dreamhost, however i think ive been very lucky that i havent had much downtime this year..I did however experience a whole month of slow site loads until they finally decided to change me to a new server which has been great till now…
only sites that use MySQL are down. are you using MySQL databases No Way?
My site is up but my WebDav is out and no http://FTP. I’m assuming these are related?
I appreciate that they have acknowledged the problem and are fixing it. However, after 12 hours and it is still down an update would be nice, a solution better.
Mine have been up and down like the proverbial for the best part of the last 10 hours
Still struggling now. Getting to be a bit of a habit 
…wow.
I’ve been with DH five years. In the first four years there were maybe two significant outages. But today my sites have now been down for 12 hours. This last year it seems like there are constant problems. Halloween is a big holiday for me - well, it would have been if my sites had been up. Not a single reply to contact, no call back, and no update here. From what I can see, the blogs on mySQL are running - but nothing else is. I must sadly agree that it might be time for anyone with a serious business site to look elsewhere. Myself included.
Ooooh, is this why my browser keeps telling me that the server doesn’t exist? And then it does? And then it doesn’t? Is this really all related to MySQL?
needs new versions
hmmm I’ve now been up and down for 2 DAYS. With a private virtual server and Private SQL server… No response. No answer. And even though up this morning has been down since around 10 am.. over 12 hours.
I’ve been a “decent” customer for years, and I’m wondering if they lost all the good administrors, or if I’m just getting the guys/gals who don’t get it.
I have 3 Joomla! sites currently down. Is that from the SQL server?
They just came back up! But my question still stands: when a Joomla site goes down, can that be caused by the MySQL server issue?
@Stan Hirson
Yes as joomla needs mysql to run.
My site is down, it’s now the 3rd…. way too long for this to be not working.
And it was working this morning!
Yes “M” they were using mysql…they are all up and have been since yesterday but wow…there is still people with their sites down for over 12 hours…thats way too long. should get credited with a whole month free of hosting or the equivalent of $9.99 or about….
I’m running on their PS’s and I’ve been down the better part of 2 days now. This is absolutely ridiculous and unacceptable. Time to start looking for a new hosting company.
I bet for you and I am practically lost
but it is necessary to be in the good ones and in the bad ones
fortitude DH you they can solve the problem.
although skylight waited for a discount at least for the days that I take without service counting this one
forgive the writing
I write with a translator that I speak Spanish
this is the end of the line for me, i’m changing my hosting company sunday night / monday morning (the only time any server should ever be down). i cannot run my business on these unstable servers. time to go!
twice this week i’ve been down, (many times in the last month) and some people hosted here have been down longer than they have been up this week. we pay for cheap servers and thats exactly what dreamhost offers (unstable crap). if you are new here, expect many days like this ahead.
oh well, i just thought i was getting a good deal on webhosting.
thanks to dreamhost, some other hosting company will be getting more money each month than i spend here. (pay for what you get) sad, sad, sad
why won’t anyone answer me? I need to be able to tell my customers what is going on besides are host has fucked up and won;t communicate with us for the last 24 hours? I have lpooked at our databases and they are all pretty m,uch corrupt right now or there are problems that I can not track down but I would not know that since NO ONE THERE WILL TELL ME ANYTHING ABOUT WHAT IS GOING ON AND YOUR STATUS PAGE HAS NOT BEEN UPDATED FOR A DAY NOW! WTF!?
I have been a loyal customer for about 5 years now and feel at least a response of “we don’t know” would be justified
Going on 24 hours, some things are working, some are not. Of course, one of my best earners is down. Most of my traffic is to my blogs, half of them are down, people check blogs daily and will just move on if they are down another day or two. And still no contact or word from DH at all. Nothing is showing any ssi files - which carries my navigation and ads, so it may as well all be down far as my income and customers are concerned.
Welp, looks like all my sites on DH are still down. Good thing I have about half my sites on GoDaddy, say what you might about them, but they keep my sites up.
Sad thing is, my DH site about two weeks ago was redirecting to some weird site for a whole day, then magically stopped.
And just like that, they’re back up. Looks like my above comment fixed the problem.
Is everything working? We have having tough uploading still!
we are still having problems and are not getting nad real information dreamhost, just one email so far saying sorry we haven’t gotten back to your yet. freaking thanks
If you have a support issue with dreamhost, file it with the BBB instead of their useless support system if you want actual results. here is the link.
http://www.la.bbb.org/BusinessReport.aspx?CompanyID=13131294
im already losing a lot money here. MYSQL have been down for almost 3 days now.. !!
they just wrote me and told me everything works. I had to email them all of the sql errors I was getting on their phpMyAdmin So basically they just typed in my url and said hey look the site is there but didn’t bother to notice that nothing was wroking as it shoudl or really look at the database which is what I havebeen complaining about not the my site is not there.
Same here - first it was, oh your sites are all up. No, they are not. I sent a list. Then they wrote to tell me it is MY FAULT because of a mistake in my htaccess files. The htaccess files that have been just fine for five years. But they fixed it for me, oh Great Big DH nobility. So, again, all my sites - according to them - are up.
They fixed it all right - not an ssi file showing anywhere on thousands of pages. This means no navigation, and no ads on any of my webpages. No. Ads. And just on a quick run by and I can still find pages still not loading at all.
Yet one site (knock on wood) set up just like every other site I own has not had one second of downtime and everything is running perfectly on THAT ONE SITE this whole time. Same .htaccess file on it as on the others, BTW.
But really - the moment they wrote back and told me it was all my fault (okay - so how did I break all you other guys websites too?) I was done. I don’t play that game.
Best of luck to all of you in all your endeavors.
Yea one of my friends site giving off a error 500 and he does not have a htaccess file on his site 
————————————–
Temporarily Unavailable
The web panel is temporarily unavailable while we perform maintenance on our database.
[Sources: dreamhost]
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:((
ZenPhoto 1-click install hosted by Dreamhost, across all my domains, are down as of 11:36pm Oct 3rd. This is the 2nd time in 6 months MySQL-tied sites have been down. More power to the team at Dreamhost to solve their technical hosting problems.
Is this problem still ongoing? My blogs (both using wordpress) were fine yesterday, but are both down this morning, with Wordpress saying it cannot establish a database connection. This is a bit frustrating because one was only launched on Monday and I’ve been doing a ton of promotional work this week!
Do we have an estimate on when everything will be back up and running?
Thanks,
Ali
I run a small business using PHP/MYSQL. I recently moved to the DH PS solution. Before that I had a great service, I had only been with DH for a few months but overall I was happy with the service. I did have a couple of preformance problems during this time (due to other users on the same box hogging resources accoring to DH support), so after reading the PS blurb I thought “great using PS no-one else will be able to kill my service - I’m happy to pay the extra 20 bucks a month that stability”. Silly me.
Since then I have had serveral issues and periods of outage mostly down to MYSQL being down or being slow. As i type this my site is down again, has been for hours and no response from DH. My online store has not taken a sinlge oder this week. I have had dozens of people wanting to buy but being unable to. Its only a small business but we normally turn over at least $400 per week. So I’m not really interested in refunds or credits from DH as they would be so miniscule compared to the cash I’m losing.
One of the things I find most frustrating about DH is that if you ask them something trivial their tech support has an answer real fast. When you log a call stating your site is totally down, I hear nothing for hours and hours, pretty much into the days range. All I get are automated messages about how important I am and they havn’t forgotton about me!
In addition I have lost $48 worth of PPC activity this week. Each time the site is back up I turn back on my PPC only to find out that the site has then gone down some hours afterward.
I wish this would get resolved as I have been happy up to 1 week ago and don’t really want to move hosting companies. However, if my site is not stable by next week I’m going to have to make the tough decision and move even though i will be writing off at least 6 months of prepaid hosting with DH. Chritmas is coming and this is our busiest time!
Please fix it soon!
Glen
Going on 36 hours of down time here with no response. DH, I get that you may be swamped due to large system-wide outages, so you can’t reply to each ticket individually. But for the love of Pete, come to a public place like this and at least update the stinking status page!
Websites in the same shape (oddly my WP blogs are almost the only things that are working) but now I have no email. Checked here hoping for an update. Guess we’ve just been abandoned. If they ignore us, perhaps we’ll go away.
If you are on a PS and are still having downtime try restarting your PS in the panel. Restart both your PS and your MYSQL server. We were down for over 24 before we tried that option, and 2 minutes later, we were running like nothing ever happened.
And YES, we definitely agree that DH should provide at least a free month of hosting for everyone. 24 hours down breaks the 99.9% uptime on any hosting service. Oh, and before DH begins to say people should have tried restarting on their own, remember DH, that you did not tell anyone to try restarting. You did not say anything at all other than the fact that everyone was down and that we would have to wait.
We did not know how long we were supposed to wait. We tried a restart on our own . We were not sure if it would solve the issue or make it worse, but we were at the point that we had to try something. Luckily, it worked for us.
We stand by you DH, but you must do a better job of communicating. A simple “ooops we *^&%$ed up” is not enough. You need to give updates and options; otherwise, your claim that you are different because blog out issues and problems makes no sense because the blog is no help for anyone. It is just a delay since the administrator writing the blog should really be working on the issue.
Happy Halloween everyone!
GO DH, GO!
Looks like all my sites are up now!
Thank God I have a backup server hosted in Canada, go Z-Hosting, and perhaps go DreamHost when things are working LOL
I am using DreamHost private server. MySQL has been down 3 times within 7 days. Right now is the third time, it has been more than an hour MySQL server is being down. Please fix it ASAP!!!!
I don’t think the problem is resolved. I am getting: “Error establishing a database connection” error on my website
The return of the problems, servers down
Ups… back to up!!!
PD: good reboot
Still down accross all my sites / DB’s
The return of the problems (again) servers down!!!!!!
thanks for reboot.
Database server down again
The problem is back if you ask me… I’m on a PS and several hours no connect
and NO response from support whatsoever so far (+3hours after sending a ticket).
Hello! Big problem Very often unavailable MySQL, several times a day. The problem is on my blog - BrokenBrake.biz
Ticket does not work.
P.S. Account #415847.
Now, 12 october, the problem STILL exists. I think I know what it is, it’s a routing problem,
no domain hosted at dreamhost (nightmarehost comes to mind) is allowed to connect anymore,
although it worked nice before! (other domains or Ip’s can connect without any problem)
Support, please fix it!
Still down. Now it is MY fault according to support. Wonder how I made your sites go down too? Moving to a new webhost. Best of luck to the rest of you. They are losing a customer that signed up with them in January of 2002.
No MySQL for me. This is costing me money. Am seriously considering leaving DH if this problem lasts another 24 hours.
I have several websites down right at this time. Please fix it. All websites that uses databases with mYSQL are down.
I’m closing my account today. This has cost me untold amounts of money due to my websites being down, partially functional, or up but with no ads and no navigation. I see some of you are still having problems, too. Golly - DH support told me that this was ALL MY FAULT. I wonder how I broke your sites, too? Yeah, whatever. I’ve been a DH customer since 2006. They were so great when I first signed up but have been going downhill for the last three years. This is the last straw for me. Best of luck to everyone in all their endeavors.
Заебали уже Опять MySQL DOWN! Database unavailable. Пиздец.
thanks.
thnks
GO DH, GO!