Private Server Host Instability
Posted (November 21st, 2008 at 8:05 am PST) by KyleThis morning a large number of Private Server hosts started misbehaving around 4:30. The affected servers required a reboot and most of them are already back to doing their thing. We are investigating the cause of this issue to avoid a repeat of this mornings event. If you are still experiencing an outage contact support with as many details as you can muster and accept our apology for any inconveniences.
Update 9:55 AM PST: We are still noticing outages across various PS machines. Our admins are diligently working towards pinpointing the root cause of this issue and implementing measures to prevent future occurrences. Again, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused and appreciate your continued patience. Please check back for future updates.
Update 2:15 PM PST: This appears to be related to some issues with our security daemon and recent changes to the Private Servers. To be honest, this was a hard issue to pinpoint — but the tech who has been monitoring our network for the past few hours has assured me that PS’es have stabilized. If you see issues moving forward, please let our Support Team know right away and we’ll gladly do what we can to drill down on whatever problems you might be seeing.
210 Responses to “Private Server Host Instability”
It was unstable in the early am (4:30 cst). I rebooted and now apache won’t come up. I get nothing.
Additionally, no response from tech support.
I have 48 sites down. and MY customers are screaming at me.
Is there a chance I can get an answer for them?
Thanks.
Its back. YAY!
I’m still getting a connection refused error on my sites. I put in a trouble ticket on this several hours ago.
This must be the problem thats affecting my PS - Hyper
Still down.
I’ve been down (at LEAST) almost two hours and repeated messages to support have gone unanswered.
Nice to see the money I’m paying going toward good customer service.
ALL DOWN !
From 8 hours my 12 sites are down….is incredible 
All down again…
Xcache configuration coming on and off without reason, intermitent responses on ping, intermitent responses on port 80… i’m becoming crazy! =X
I can’t even up the resources or reboot my PS.
Ah ha. This was what was effecting my PS. I’m good now though. But I was wondering why it was totally messed up when it was up late last night.
Website down. SSH down. SVN down. down. down. down.
As Least I know I am not the only one.
yup, my PS (quifflet) is still down
All my sites are down also… since 8 hours+
PS5222 now down for close to 10 hours.
Refund anyone?
Same here…
All my websites down, and my costumers asking why…
This is why:
top - 08:14:33 up 57 min, 1 user, load average: 12.29, 25.11, 32.44
Tasks: 64 total, 2 running, 62 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 36.6% us, 3.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 59.2% wa, 0.3% hi, 0.8% si
Mem: 823296k total, 236580k used, 586716k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 460800k total, 0k used, 460800k free, 0k cached
====
top - 08:18:32 up 1:01, 1 user, load average: 54.11, 31.16, 32.50
Tasks: 170 total, 1 running, 168 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 25.2% us, 0.2% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 74.4% wa, 0.1% hi, 0.1% si
Mem: 823296k total, 823296k used, 0k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 460800k total, 151240k used, 309560k free, 0k cached
====
top - 08:24:33 up 1:07, 1 user, load average: 159.42, 107.77, 66.44
Tasks: 260 total, 1 running, 259 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 29.3% us, 9.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 13.4% id, 47.7% wa, 0.1% hi, 0.4% si
Mem: 823296k total, 823296k used, 0k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 460800k total, 453284k used, 7516k free, 0k cached
The problem is recurring.
Memory use hits the roof - 10 times normal use and still logging errors. CPU load goes into 3 figures. Dynamic pages die. FTP dies. Site dies.
That cycle is taking about 30 minutes from the time it was originally “fixed”.
Right now I’d just settle for a damn explanation instead of being ignored.
It’s not hitting all the PS’s though, I know someone with a PS thats been running fine all day.
I wonder if we are all on the same ‘real’ machine?
Agreed… Eastern time, we’re almost at noon and people are a little aggravated (okay, a lot). 50 sites down and now our competence is being questioned. I don’t even have anything to tell these people. For the money we pay each month, I would think we would get a little better service than the general $9/mo plans. I had better response before we made the switch to PS.
PS. I am generally NOT “that angry customer.” This is just over the top.
I am on bonanno server and my site is down.
I guess today they have problem in bonanno server too.?
Dreamhost probable have MONSTERS like Dual Quads (or even more, is possible, i dunno, lol) with 32GB ram… then we was pick on the “who will be shot today?”
I want a refund!! I’m a customer for 20 months, I asked my PS almost 2 months ago, had 6-7 weeks of PURE INSTABILITY, receiving replies like “will be moved soon”, “ordering more hardware”, etc.. and after a week running fine with 2300MB guaranteed (and an average use of 350MB), the server become to use 800-1300MB, and next day went down for SIX HOURS until now…
I doubt if new customers are being put on common plans when signup for a PS!
:@@@
Wow. No explanation. No response. Perhaps they’re busy fixing this? I hope so.
I have a Korean fashion site growing in popularity. I hit Korean national TV last month. We take kick-ass pics. I just attended an industry event with top models, designers, and buyers, where I handed out around 1,000 freshly-minted biz cards. People were very eager to see the first site in English on Korean fashion. Event ended around 8PM Korean time. Go home, site’s just DOWN for the first time ever. I’ve had slow sites, but never this.
Also, Harvard University is featuring several pics from our site in an exhibit on Asian fashion and design subcultures. They’re displaying our site address with them. It’s something to brag about in the fashion industry. The exhibit is TODAY. Major linkage already for the event, people will be coming to it this evening.
SITES ARE DOWN. Thanks for ruining the PERFECT STORM that we’ve been literally working MONTHS to build, Dreamhost. MONTHS. On the most important day for us since the launch of our site 2 years ago, we got a site that ain’t slow or sluggish — it’s just NON-EXISTENT. GONE.
Not for like 10-15 minutes. That’s forgivable. ALL NIGHT? And potentially ALL DAY stateside?
How many free months of service is going to cover this? I’d have turned down 5 years of free service to have had my site up over the last several hours. I handed a card to one of Korea’s most famous designers this evening. How dumb do I look if she went into the site after she got home?
Thanks, Dreamhost!
I am still down after 5 hours or so.. Opened a case 2 hours+ ago.. still not even a reply..
Please, do something quickly…
Back again. Hope it don’t go down again ¬¬`
you are lucky..
haven t seen a single (even error 500) page from my sites the past 5-6 hours!
Up then down again, Frick this is annoying… i think its time to swtich providers, any suggestions?
True Dedicated hosting with a good SLA? 
Please tell us something!!!! ANYTHING!!!!!!!!!
Mine went from giving an error number to not having anything happen to it. WTH?
My site just came back up but I don’t have a lot of faith that it’s going to stay that way.
It’s already done the up and then down dance three times this morning.
[quote]LavantiS Says:
you are lucky..[/quote]
Spoke too soon!! Dowwwwnnnn again
I really hope they offer at least a cut from all our bills this month….
For vps plans, I have a list of alternatives…
leaseweb.com/en/products/dedicated-servers/packages/34/
easyspace.com/virtual_servers
galaxyvisions.com/unix_vps.php
sectorlink.com/html/lowcost.php
ovh.com/fr/particulier/produits/rps3.xml
amen.es/
vpsland.com/xlseries.html
http://www.silicontower.net/servidores-vps/comparativa-linux
alphared.com/vps.cfm
gogax.com/servers/virtual.html
I will probably make a switch to one of these, if no response is given.
From 4:00 AM till now is a lot of time to be left with no response.
um.
hey, i don’t expect a call - never do. but email? not even an update to this post? something? anything?
tastespotting is a food and recipe site. Thanksigivng is NEXT week. how will everyone brine their turkeys?!?!
it’s on you, dreamhost.
Sara, thanks for the list and you intentions but it’s not too hard to find other VPS alternatives.
Actually, I run my own VPS on Quad Cores with 8GB Ram in L.A. but I don’t use then for hosting, I use it mainly as SMTP servers for some companies newsletters. All you will get is a post deletion.
When a $300/month P.S. has more outages than a $8/month shared plan, that’s a real problem.
My PS has been unresponsive for at leasat 3 hrs, and support is a black hole.
My PS has gone down weekly since the past 4 or 5 months. It was fixed by a restart via panel.
Up, Down, Up, Down. Like a stripper on a pole dance. Except no fun for anyone.
I’d love to have a solution to give my customers.
We’ve been up and down all morning, mostly down, and down right now… let’s go guys…
“The Internet is down!!!”
at least our little corner of it is….
Suggestion? Maybe write today off. Don’t bill PS customers for the day? I know i’d be happy.
I don’t want my money back, I just want it to work
it’s interesting that even the manage resource graph it’s stucked to 02:11 when my downtime started.. but no fun at all..
//I don’t want my money back, I just want it to work//
I felt that way two hours ago…now I want my money back.
Maybe they are bankrupting… they had < 30 signups for more than a month (see their homepage… some “unlimited” plans not sold yet). Hahha!
Not fun =(
Hey Eve, give your refund for me! I would love.
my resource graph is stuck at 02:18
So we pay more and get less? hmmm.
It’s not that I don’t have what to do with the money, but I expect to receive some good hosting services here, not refunds
My sites are up now.. hope they stay this way.
The clock on my resource chart froze at 01:20 Pacific Time.
Rob Safuto, mine at 01:22 
It would be nice to have WebFTP working again. Been down since about 9:30AM PST. My site is back up, but no WebFTP.
Any response good or bad is appreciated. ETA would be nice.
Judging by the last update time, we’ll get another update in one hour.
Mine at 2:36 - can’t of been me who started this all off then! lol!
All sites down since this morning, WTF? The only problem we as customers should ever experience are if some network issue crops up.. Otherwise it is DreamHost’s fault and they need to hire some competent system administrators!
Up for about four minutes and then back down again.
Dreamhost should have an emergency webpage being displayed that lets visitors to sites know that the site is here, but unavailable for a short time.
And down again… 
I just sent out a plug for my agency and a resume for a job offer, and this is what i get.
This is pathetic!
I totally agree with what Anthony said above about there being some placeholder pages for our sites to let our visitors know we’re not down for good
I should usually say that a maitenance page would let DH admins waste time pointing ours domains to it, but I had never experienced a major outage like this (hey, 8+ hrs already!!), it is probably a good idea now.
I wonder if I has something to do with the php caching. I have had constant outages whenever i get spikes, because I reduced my memory limit because I didn’t need as much anymore do to caching. But even though the past 2 weeks I’ve had my memory limit back to the stable limits before using caching, still when I get any spike at all its just completely down. I bump it up several hundred more MB and whatever I set the limit it just stays full memory during that downtime. Many dhapache processes but no user shows much usage.
I’m experiencing problems with DH php.ini. Using custom php.ini/wrapper the PS stays online for more time when it comes back. I can see the load growing from 0 to 100, and my mem usage on 1gb-1.2gb… when using common dh php my PS mem usage grows to 1750mb (1300 guaranteed + 450 “burstable” — swap) in 1-2 minutes and seems to come unresponsible before the machine itselfs goes down.
Lol… just clicked Darrel name to open his website! =/
@Renato. What?
Nine sweet minutes of up time and now it’s dead again.
I’ve noticed that this perl command always seems to be near the top of the top command output when the memory spikes and the server dies.
8130 root 13 0 12788 9624 2956 S 0.0 1.1 0:00.13 perl
No update in over two hours? That’s just bush league.
Backup and running!
I wonder what had happened?
14 hours and counting.
@Darrell,
forgot what we are discussing for a while and clicked to open your website. What I got? “Page could not be found”. Haha.
@Mitch,
I always see a “find” running (and the perl too), from the root, near to the top.
My sites are still down, down, down.
What really bugs me about this is the fact that my resource graph indicates that the outage started about 01:20 and the post says they first notice trouble at 04:30. I would hope that the dream team would have tools that could tell their admins when a vps goes out in a timely manner.
my resource graph went down at 02:18, precisely when I get an e-mail from my monitoring service teling me that my sites were down.
I’m on GMT time so started to have problems about 09:00 AM, and finally have all my websites down about 10:00 AM.
Right now is 20:30 GMT and I’m really mad with dreamhost.
I even have a popular newspaper website with thousands of daily visitors, that could not be updated today because of this.
On top of that, I’m a designer and I have some of my clients sites hosted on my account.
I cannot afford having a whole day downtime.
2 hours would be acceptable, more than 4 is extremely bad service.
About 10 hours of downtime (and still waiting) is outrageous for a VPS.
I’m glad this happened now, because at the end of this month I’m going to a self managed VPS, and by bye dreamhost!!
.. still down.. 11 hours now
It’s been nearly three hours since the last update. I know that it will be back when it’s back but in the interim it would be nice to know what’s happening on an hourly basis.
I switched to PS specifically to avoid downtime! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Ditto. Please update and respond to the support tickets.
After the last 3-4 day outage, I’m thin on forgiveness for this recent “Instability”
Exactly. One would ASSume that PS and the increased costs would give us just a little more reliability and response. Hmmmmm.
is anyone having problems with mysql on precious?
So glad I “upgraded” to PS. I want a refund and the money I would be making from my sites
Darn. My PS is back on sucking wind status.
Nice load average…
And 802 sleeping tasks?? wtf…
top - 13:17:50 up 27 min, 2 users, load average: 321.68, 200.94, 96.66
Tasks: 803 total, 1 running, 802 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 25.1% us, 0.2% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 74.7% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 2597888k total, 2597888k used, 0k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 460800k total, 460020k used, 780k free, 0k cached
argggggggggggggggggg !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I upgraded to PS too. I want a refund and the money I would be making from my sites too. Hours without a response.
The latest update sounds hopeful but my sites are still throwing a connection refused network error.
Still down, going on 19 hours. No response from the support ticket sent out 6 hours ago.
Still Down.
Got a response to my support ticket, which pointed me to this topic!
I too received the canned response. And here we are.
The blog post and the canned message both advise us to contact support if things still aren’t working. My sites are still down so I’ve put in yet another ticket.
It’s “good” to know that other people are having my same issues.
What I find absurd is the standard email we all received.
if it wasn’t for the fine print, i’d be asking for m ore than a refund right now. This is unacceptable.
My site is up now.
Could it be? Is it true? It’s been a full 5 minutes and things seem to be working….are things now finally up and staying up? Happy day!
Working for me too!
still down… all of them
Still down.
my site down
My site’s still down as well.
My website is up but my mysql VPS is dead.
Scratch that… all sites broken again.. and http://FTP... and shell…
And we’re down again…sigh.
Hey AskApache–I love your site! I’ve used it a bunch; thanks!
It sounds like DH only has 1 or 2 people working on this.. and what is that nonsense about the problem being hard to find? BS, they changed stuff for the PS servers having to do with file/access permissions or resource allocation and it broke everyones PS because any handler like php doesn’t work correctly. They should have had this fixed 30minutes tops, but apparently they are still trying to locate WHAT THEY CHANGED that is BREAKING ALL OUR SITES. Seems to me that they should KNOW WHAT THEY ARE CHANGING before they change it. Or at least test it out on a couple PS servers before unleashing the changes on the whole system… tsk tsk this is very bad administrating.
@ Adam
Thanks bro! I’d check your site out but…..
My sites are up again.. The manage server graph remains stucked at 02:11am..
Hope for everyone everything to be OK soon, if not already! and no more 15 hours downtime again.. and especially from a bad applied security patch..
For me it’s currently 14 hours down…
And I’m still down.
still down. -_-
oh yay. it’s up. (if this happens again, I am definitely going to change hosts…)
Been back up for several hours, but SLOW, SLOE, SLO, SHCLOOOOOOW
Was up… now DOWN.
We already decided to (and signed a contract to) change hosts today. We just can’t continue with this type of downtime. Unacceptable.
My server is still down. They made it seem as though this has been corrected, but I have been down all day today. Can we get some updated information? I have tried to submit a ticket as it says … “If you see issues moving forward, please let our Support Team know right away and we’ll gladly do what we can to drill down on whatever problems you might be seeing,” but, unfortunately, the category of VPS on the ticket is greyed out, and I can’t select it. What’s up with that?
[Cerebrl]
Damn.. Things on my PS became even worse after they sent me the email. Before it would be up and down.. now it is just down..
hallelujah, it’s back up…wow, that was a crap day…I hope we get an explanation as to what caused our sites to be down for an entire day (and some sort of reassurance that it won’t happen again).
I’ve had more downtime and slow-downs since switching to PS from the cheap solution… worst decision ever… I should have stuck with the budget deal, because now I pay more and get less…
I’ve been offline for 12 hours so far, and am still offline. What compensation will we be getting?
I spoke too soon. It’s down again.
Still down, despite the “fix.” Embarrassing.
Yup… still down.
It is 10:00 PM EST and our sites are still down. I don’t even know how I can start to explain this issue and the severity of it to my clients. Is there an update that tells us straight what to expect and the timeline we are currently working under????
On the day I expected 10,000 page views and over $100 in ad revenue this happened and this the worst it can get….
The server is still down and no ads or content are serving up.
DreamHost is now more than a nightmare.
Sites are still throwing timeouts and 500’s. This is clearly not resolved, and they’re back to ignoring support tickets. What’s the point of having this status site if it isn’t providing the correct status? Grrrr.
this is killing us…internet radio stream links originate from our website for itunes, shoutcast and real. audience number way down.
Dreamhost - Fix the problem. This is going on way too long. Fix it. Your silly support blog announcments aren’t up to date and not helpful. We’re paying you for a VPS and getting hosed. FIX. NOW.
Anybody care to start a discussion of better hosts? No better place than here or now.
I get about 30 minutes of uptime and then boom…
Our Servers are also still not reachable since around 1 pm.
We had a short window of about 5-10 min after rebooting twice but the machine is gone since then again.
Resource usage (if you can believe the panel stats) skyrocketed within these few minutes to max but no services (ftp, http, others??? ) are accessible.
Will the 1 day downtime now become a monthly feature with Dreamhost?
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Sort it out and do it quick please
How about some kind of update on the problem. I’m glad that they think it has been fixed since 2 pm. WTF?
Cliff Same here… worked for about 45minutes, then now for no reason my server is back to being totally down.
Because this is affecting MySQL PS’es, every time the server suddenly goes down tables are breaking, which is requiring constantly monitoring of when the server returns, so that the tables can be manually repaired. Over and over. Who should I bill this time to? “The tech who has been monitoring our network?”
This is beyond ridiculous. 19-hours down time. 3 completely inaccurate claims that the outage has been fixed. No updates for 8-hours. Now 10pm in California. Chances this will be fixed before Monday looking extremely slim.
Way to go DH!
normally id be a fanboy here but. i do tend to agrea that when you pay more for a “dedicated vps” you should be getting a higher level of service even if it dosent cost as much as a dedicated server. unless ofcourse you maxout on every thing in which case it would indeed cost more. this is why i havent went to a vps for my sites. if im going to be paying that price i want a gurantie. and a money back one at that. so for once ill stand down on my bantering.
This is riDONKulous! I’ve never heard of such massive outage and no updates, it’s SUPPOSED to be “fixed.”
I think a year of free service would not even make up for this.
site comes back at about :40 past the hour then goes down at :10 past in the next hour.
heh…now even the DREAMHOST web panel is down.
Still down for me too… I have to stay with this until its back up.. I almost got fired today and probably will if they don’t get this up!
my sites still down, rebooted twice no fixy.
did anyone notice switching to private server dropped incoming traffic by a factor of about 4x?
great now i pay more for hosting thats down alot and get less from adsense. yippie! wholly crap
Same here. After ca. 18h now we sometimes get a 500 error but that’s about as much response that is.
Moved to PS to get less brown-out, down time now its at least the same.
Furious
Not fixed for me.
More then 24 hours down in our case…and no news…just great…what the hell happened
Very Good job.
Still down…
Just tried rebooting - nothing.
It states above: “If you see issues moving forward, please let our Support Team know right away and we’ll gladly do what we can to drill down on whatever problems you might be seeing.”
“If you see issues moving forward” !!!!!
Oh please! I thought Dreamhost was above this kind of awful business-speak.
To the person who wrote that: please, no-one is impressed by that kind of wording - next time, just write “If you are still experiencing problems”
Judging by the time in California (now 1.50am) and previous experience with DH, I have a sick feeling we’re out of luck for the weekend - or at best Sunday morning my time (East Asia). That’ll be over 36-hours downtime. Stunning.
In the past DH has at least shown a more concerted effort to fix problems and post *accurate, timely* information about what needs to be done and give an ETA on a fix. Like a lot of other people on VPS, I moved here for greater reliability and an expectation of more responsive service. Obliviously I was wrong.
I’d even settle for just FTP access so I can grab my files and move to a host that won’t walk off the job leaving it’s highest paying customers completely in the sh*t for two days.
this is funny, lol
ridiculous though
My websites are working, but I am already moving my files to another host.
My site is still down.
It’s 25 hours by now.
Absolutely disastrous for us. This is our main selling season. I have several expensive ads running, a mailed-out (early this week) special offer promo and in general a heap of pointers to the shop - which is down.
I think this may just be the last straw for me as far as Dreamhost is concerned. Quite what the matter is with this host I can’t work out - but they sure as **** can’t run a reliable service, even with paying the considerable monthly cost of a VPS (which they sold me as a solution to the downtime we were having).
I hate to even think how much money and reputation we have lost. Just what we need right now.
Karen, if it’s any compensation, at 4.06 PST your site was accessible here in China. Not sure how long it will last or if you have any customers in China 
This is unacceptable. We have to take legal action.
Online !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Still doesn’t work.
Panel http://panel.dreamhost.com doesn’t work
Load average on Gambino is 199…
Site coming up again… Fingers crossed this one has more stamina than the 3-minute crew on the night shift (what night shift?!?)
database on PS gambino doesn’t work….
24 hours down.
3 tickets sumbitted.
http://twitpic.com/nb8x
ZERO tickets even responded to.
This sucks.
People still off?
Ok here for ~10 hours.
Just waiting they send the complaints tickets to thrashcan, then I ask a refund or move out.
Dreamhost Disaster Again… Fuck-YOU!
Error establishing a database connection!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why Dreamhost Operator’s dont reply??????
Wow. I really didn’t think there would even be a chance that my site would still be down today. I’m really in shock right now.
Mine’s still down - I see some others are fixed, and others aren’t . Please fix it ASAP. My site was just starting to get some hits and users joining yesterday (mine was slow to respond, but would load then). Now it won’t load and only gets 500 Internal Server Errors. I’ve rebooted both VPS’s (MySQL instead) with no luck
huh….? seems to be working now (well, now atleast)…..so confused
It’s been down for 5 hours for me, and *just* came back up
It’s really funky today. When I looked in the resources it had gone up to 255 megabytes of memory. “Instability” is too nice a word for this mess it’s completely out of control!
Swear words seem too weak for this !@#$%^& situation!
Mine has been down for more than 30 hours.
I’m just trying to pretend like I don’t own a website at the moment…it doesn’t seem to be working though.
I am still down. Still getting server not found errors. What the hell. We need some information. My server has not been up at all, I would take slow; it’s better than nonexistent.
[Cerebr]
Trailer, your’s is working
My site has never been back up, is still down. I’ve not only never heard of ANYTHING like this, even from Dreamhost, I’ve also never seen such complete and utter silence about this. Update? ETA? Talk to us? I hate to get rude, but this is so fucking ridiculous. Not just the intolerable downtime, but the lack of communication.
Our site was featured at a major industry event the night before this happened — a university student fashion event at which new designers were shot by us, along with their models and other folks in the Korean fashion industry — and we were recruiting interns. Guess that’s scratched.
Harvard’s Graduate School of Design also featured our site in an exhibit on Asian fashion and subculture — our site was down all day before, during, and after that.
Our Flickr and Facebook members are writing in, thinking we’ve gone out of business, that we’ve thrown in the towel for no explicable reason. If THEY’RE asking “Do you guys even exist anymore?”, what do you think about the many new users we were exposed to yesterday, who may have come in and checked the site? Think they’ll be back? Think they’re be monitoring the site to see if anything ever shows up there?
Months of our hard work — both for the fashion industry event and Harvard’s exhibit, in which 50 of our images were displayed on 20X30 prints with our site’s name under the credit — DOWN THE DRAIN.
I can’t even believe what kind of opportunity we missed, and can’t express how horrified and disappointed my people are who also had high hopes for the last two days and what kind of great exposure was possible. I also can’t express how helpless we feel, and how fucking intolerable downtime such as this is.
Oh, I’m sure that legally, with the small print and the user agreement, Dreamhost isn’t liable or legally responsible, blah, blah. I’m SURE that’s all covered.
But this is a disappointment on a far greater scale than that. If I had the technical skills and time to move all my sites — especially the fashion one, with nary a hitch, I would — but I don’t.
And it doesn’t matter at this point. We’ve been operating the fashion site for 2 years, and getting some serious momentum going over the last several months.
This last couple days of our site’s completely disappearing from the planet made months of several people’s hard work and our reputation all for NAUGHT.
Try paying that back with a few apologies “for the inconvenience” and a month or something of free service. Or a year’s.
I can think of nearly nothing in my adult life that has so enraged me to the point of wanting to fucking cry. Literally. This is sooooo fucking unacceptable. Christ.
http://digg.com/tech_news/Dreamhost_EPIC_FAIL
Go digg that.
Amazing … a whole new day … and still ZERO response/support.
48 hours down! No access to http://FTP.
Not sure if this works for everyone … but I increased my RAM to 2,000Mb (ran on 300Mb till this shit started) and reboot every 10 mins. This at least brings the site back for a few minutes. The catch is that you have to keep rebooting constantly … so no nodding off.
looks like the http://bankofamerica.com/ is running down..on DH
our VPS is down. Mysql connect problems. No word from DH yet.
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Too many connections
What’s really galling about this complete lack of response/effort/interest from DH is that they actually provided support and responses this *morning* to regular users experiencing problems with the baseline server (http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/11/21/baseline-benched/#comment-225485).
That was 12-hours ago. Where’s our bloody support???
I rebooted the PS Server and now, we’re back up. I got that advice from HERE — not DH support. Thanks for nothing, Dreamhost.
I’m not on PS, but my sites on shared hosting are all down as well.
Michael’s right. I modified my resources to MUCH higher than normal, restarted my server, and then checked it. Finally, it worked. It is slow, but it works. I then changed the resources back to my “normal” settings, and I will report back if it works continues to work.
[Cerebrl]
Read this response from a DH support tech - not to one of the many outstanding tickets, but to a forum post:
Seems they have time to criticize justifiably outraged customers, but not the time to actually do anything about fixing the god damn problem. This is classic even for DH’s normally pathetic level of ’service’.
My site has been down for 48 hours by now.
No response from customer care. I think I will move to another host.
I got an reply from support :
“Outage resolved: We believe the issue to be resolved.”
And all my databases getting :
“1040 - Too many connections”
I don’t know if I should cry or laugh now …
I am still unable to connect to my psmysql5007 server. I submitted a support ticket 24 hours ago and have received no response or resolution.
http://www.tomkincaid.dreamhosters.com/dh_phpmyadmin/mysql.tomkincaid.dreamhoste rs.com/
Gives a 500 error
If clicking Manage MySQL in your web panel, it just hangs and does not load the page.
If I ssh and try to connect to mysql, I get this error:
ERROR 2003 (HY000): Can’t connect to MySQL server on ‘mysql.tomkincaid.dreamhosters.com’ (113)
I’ve been down for 48 hours by now.
My website is redirecting to the skinner IP address:
208.113.155.122
What the HELL is going on?!
If I’m not getting a reply by tomorrow, I’ll be switching to Godaddy.
DOWN 48 HOURS
This is absurd.
I just received a reply from Support. Wanna now who’s fault it has been? MINE!
“It looks like your web server wasn’t restarted during the VPS issues we
were experiencing the other day. I’ve gone ahead and restarted the server
for you, and now the Apache instances and daemons are running.
Although your websites are using so many resources it’s killing your VPS.
I did a check to see if 2000MB would work for your server, and it was
using far more memory than that. I would suggest increasing this or disabling any scripts that you have running that would cause this”.
This is ridiculous. My resources have been stable at 188MB, and it has ALWAYS worked fine.
River. That is funny.
That is the SAME excuse they gave me after all that time.
No help what so ever.
Really,
after 2 days downtime, they should AT LEAST, say Sorry. At least.
But here they’re saying that it’s our fault. Unbelievable.
P.s. Actually, it’s more than 2 days.
My site is still down.
Amazing, I don’t have a private server, but I got a similar response:
“It seems your scripts have been getting automatically killed by our
Process Watcher script due to your sites going over Memory limits on the
shared server:”
What the hell is going on with these guys?
Affiliate Confession,
that is exactly what they told me 4 weeks ago sugesting to switch to private server.At the time I only had 2 websites down “due to CPU limits”
After 2 weeks on waiting list, they moved me to PS and just 1 day into it i have total of 16 websites down.6 have HTTP 500 error, the rest unable to connect to the database.48 hours and still nothing changed.
destin tile,
This is about the 10th time I’ve had more than a 2 day outage since I’ve been with Dreamhost, but this one takes the cake. This is clearly their problem and they’re blaming it on the customers. I can’t believe these guys are still in business.
Seems like using Dreamhost is like playing Russian Roulette. When it works, it works very well. However, if you are one of the unlucky ones who fall into one of these common Dreamhost fuckups, you’re DEAD
I know this will happen, I shifted to new hosting, and now can relax. but still in my dreams my blood pressure go high, as I Dream about my 48 sites hosted on DreamHost
move on man….
Three days offline.
Dreamhost SUCKS, I have 2 days with all my webs down without any Answer from Dreamhost Team.
I have over 50 sites down
please help
It is pretty ridiculous how they’re not giving any updates or explanations through all of this. I was down for all of Friday and most of Saturday, back up for all of Sunday, and now I’ve been back down for all of today. I’m assuming that all of my former visitors to the site just think that TrailerSpy has gone out of business.
Trailer: I’m down since friday morning.
Guys all my sites are seo based and now all are down, you know what Google think about downtimes…
My sites are now offline again. I’ve been understanding until now, recommending Dreamhost to people as I’d not had many problemes before.
The problem is that due to a couple of promotions we are expecting visitors - today!!!
I’m now considering moving everything to a different host.
All my sites are down again, and have been down for over 2 hours. No respons from support yet. My patience is running out. I have had nothing but trouble with DH, both when i was on shared hosting, and on PS (wich i am now). The PS server has been a disappointment. I have been a customer for about 2 years, there has been nothing but trouble. I can’t stand it anymore. Looking for another webhost.
maxed to 4000 on my PS, I shouldnt be having these problems
Makes me glad I spent the money on a dedicated server and moved away. Zero problems in 18 months.
Moved everything to Godaddy.
Sorry, but Dreamhost has been very unprofessional. My site was still down yesterday: 4th day off.
The last down in dreamhost did spread around the world.
Imagine that I’m in Singapore now and on major blog here everybody are laughing at dreamhost.
My friend, instead to publish that rubbish blog.dreamhost.com where your latest purchase of iphone and stupid news around, spend your time to improve your reliability.
I’ve been tempted for too long to jump to some other webhosting.
Today IT’S THE DAY!
Bye Bye after 3 years.
Between my and my friend’s one, we have approx 17 account with you!
Today Dreamhost will lose 17 account.
Maybe peanuts for you, but at least you have to pay for the damage you have caused us during last week.
And… of course, I will publish about you all around the IT community here in Asia.
I don’t want anybody of the people I know pass through what our group of company received in this last 12 months!
Fed up !
wow… this was some serious read… i have to admit that i didn’t read every post, but quite a few.
the overall impression i get is that ppl aint happy. some more unhappy than others, because the personal effect was greater. i feel very sorry for all of u guys. i hope that everything will be resolved soon.
jfk
Moved to linode. Thanks Dreamhost!
Slowness resolved on one the site that was misbehaving since the PS issues were ‘fixed’ (the only one of my sites with a static IP & ssl).
Looks like they moved it to the ‘tastesgreat’ file server.
Hey Eve, give your refund for me! I would love.
Is there any time estimate for when they all will be rebooted?