Spacey filer problems

My blog is down at the moment due to this outage. Thanks for the heads up, and hopefully this gets fixed soon!

I love the hardware names…. totally made of win and awesome.

Oh yeah, Dreamhost’s transparency is pretty cool too

Thanks for letting us know. I have two sites hosted on two different hosting providers… and the communication you guys provide is greatly appreciated.

My site is down, so I presume it’s on the spacey server. How do I check that for sure?

Yonatan: Comments posted here may not be viewed by DreamHost staff at all. Please note that this is not a way to contact DreamHost.

Harvey: Click the ‘Account Status’ tab at the top right of your panel, this will display what servers you are on. (http://panel.dreamhost.com)

Whats interesting is even the simplest PHP scripts are frozen but html works just fine. I’m thinking this isn’t a network issue.

John, I can’t get .html files to load from my server. Are you sure that it’s not just your cache?

i can upload to my http://ftp... but any files i change or edit cant be found by google or yahoo. the ones i havent changed are still there. I hope you fix it soon….obviously… im on the spacey server.. my other sites with you guys are on different servers and are fine…

all sites are down

hardware: seltzer

This is a problem. We have an e-commerce shopping network on here. And it’s close to Christmas, so I hope you guys will resolve it soon!! This is about the 10th time this year, that we have had you go down on us, and we use another server as a back up.

my site is html only — and its down. no PHP.. so its not just PHP stuff that is affected.

William: Nope, I have a test script its down too.

Everything down as of 7:30 PM ET.

Server: sunkist.

oh yeah. now i see that my other sites are gone as well. awesome.

Weird: I work on several servers on calpico, one is down, several are up and fine…

It would be awesome if these servers didn’t go down easier than a $5 hooker.

Imaha: Problem is web hosting is expensive. If you were to have a server all to yourself using dedicated bandwidth they would need to charge you at least $200 a month just to cover bandwidth, hardware, electricity cost. You pay for what you get, yadayadayada. The dreamhost PS solutions are a bit more reliable. But if money is on the line why are you paying just $10 a month for your web hosting?

network solutions is pretty good. i have a couple client sites with them. they have good phone support. i recommend them. dreamhost isnt horrible. just today sucks donk*y b*lls. i mean donkey balls.

My webserver is sunkist, my email spacey, and somehow all of my websites are down.

Can we expect a credit for this outage?

Guys this has been down for quite a while and hardily qualifies as being resolved soon.

I use crush and I can’t get a hello world php script to work, but static pages show just fine.

We’re down too, even though our mail server is the only one hosted on Spacey.

three and a half hours of not being able to work. has anyone heard an update? all my dreamhost sites are down.

Does anyone have any recommendations for sites with guaranteed uptime. I definately want to keep using dreamhost (they are dreamy) but I have a few sites that uptime is critical for and apparently from my research even dreamhost PS has no guarantees .

My site is still not back up. It was working fine about 2 hours ago. Now it is not. So is there a time frame on when it will be fixed.

I have 24 websites on spacey, and all are down

Ive been with Dreamhost about 2 years, and I really havent had many problems. If this was a misson critical site, I would be paying as little as I do for the hosting. I dont do mission critical sites, because I dont want the worry. So I will be patient and know it will be up soon.

Thanks DH

@John: lol, are you serious? Go look at virtually any host and you’ll see that none guarantee 100% uptime. It is usually 99.9%. It’ll be okay man, go grab a burger and releax.

Will this also impact getting to the site admin?

I have to answer to client’s now and cannot just tell them that “they are working on it” any longer. An update would be nice.

Maybe there was an outbreak of bird flu? That would seem to be the only reason they couldn’t at least post an update. I can live with the random big issues like this for the less expensive hosting packages like this.

However I am really annoyed by the lack of updates and given the size of the outage it is really discomforting to go this long with no updates. Gives me time to make eyes at other hosting packages.

If you’re looking for something a bit more reliable take a look at http://www.pair.com (Pair Networks) but you will pay more per month and get fewer features. I was with them for about 5 years, was paying about $16 per month for my handful of sites but didn’t have access to any mysql databases!

DreamHost is a great provider with great features at a very reasonable (if not downright cheap) price. I’ve been with you guys for nearly 2 years now and have only experienced 2 outages including this one - KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK

Those of you who have complained about no updates, you do see that little piece up there posted at 5:19 PST , right?

Id rather thay work on the issue instead of sitting around a computer and post updates. DH doesnt want to loose any customers, so I know they are working hard to get the issue resolved.

Jim: you can tell them “I only pay $10/month to host you and all my other clients.”

Dan: your rhetorical question doesn’t help your point. Is it worth $200/month to you that potential employers can always reach your résumé? If so, then pay that much.

I love DHl It makes my heart go buh bump buh bump. <3 DH

I personally find it mildly entertaining to sit here and watch the complaints and arguments that occur.

@Paul. I’m only paying 10 a month? Someone call a cop.

How many days will REPAY?! This deserves ONE MORE DAY of service, why not move the end date?!

an outage of this magnitude form a server provider that has plenty of failovers (or should) is absolutely unacceptable.

Not even with Geocities or any other lame free web host did I ever experience an outage of this length. To all of those who say ‘why pay $10 a month and then cry that it’s down?’ Last time I checked I didn’t set the pricing for this hosting, nor did I create the marketing materials that caused me to choose this hosting. I expect my website to be up at any price, whether its the one Dreamhost charges, or someone else.

With the extreme number of servers that Dreamhost has on hand, it’s completely ridiculous to assume that anyone should experience a 10+ hour outage because of some hard drives. MOVE SOME SERVERS AROUND AND FIX IT ALREADY. YOU HAVE THIS VIRTUAL SERVER TECHNOLOGY, THOUSANDS OF CLIENTS, HUNDREDS OF SERVERS, SO LEVERAGE THEM TO ENSURE THINGS ARE RUNNING PROPERLY. You have everything ready. To think only one person is working on this issue is also a problem since there are clearly a lot of customers affected.

The lack of communication on this issue is a problem from Dreamhost. I am very dissatisfied and will be changing web hosts in January when my contract is up here. There are plenty of web hosts at this price that have far better performance that actually DO communicate with their customers and care when theres been a multi-hour long outage.

Haha, and this is exactly why i’m not renewing my subscription.

orangebang
the file server is working but web server is down.
why????

Everyone who is whining about down-time on their shared hosting servers, please do the rest of us a favor and turn off your computer and go read a book. If the “work” you need to complete is on that tight of a schedule that you’re wigging out on Sunday night after several hours of down-time then it would serve you better to use this time to research dedicated or even virtually dedicated hosting plans…or if you really feel as though you could do a better job at this stuff, how about building your own system and running it from your home.

@Rance - please don’t even try to make the geocities comparison…that is just laughable. You’re expectations for $6-$10 per month in hosting are just not realistic, it does play into the equation, even more than your penchant to jump for shiny marketing and try to blame it on other things! You also got your DH states waaaay wrong, bub and your suggestion of “moving some servers around” and “you have virtual server technology” proves how little you actually know or understand about this business. I think you should definitely go back to geocities in January! DH doesn’t have thousands of clients and hundreds of servers, they have hundreds of thousands of clients and thousands of servers!

Now, everyone repeat after me:

I’m sorry,
Please forgive me,
Thank you,
I love you

Capitalizing words for emphasis is annoying. GNAW MEAN

Mine has been down since 7am PT. I certainly can and am counting.

Updates please guys, sitting here waiting waiting waiting…….

(Business hours in Australia by the way)

In the four years I have been with Dreamhost I have been very satisfied, however, the past two weeks have been troubling. Last week the mail servers were swapped, or something, and my email accounts were deleted/moved to a new server. I lost a day’s worth of emails. I understand things happen and am willing to look past occasional issues…again not many in 4 years, but now this. I host podcasts here and start getting complaints when my clietns cant get their podcasts. I dont have the volume, or income for dedicated hosting, and I agree with Rance that if a company is promising uptime for $1 or $100, then the sites should be up. Obviously this is affecting many customers. Should I look past this issue also? Hmmmm, I’m starting to take notice of downtime now. I have moved hosting companies in the past for what reason? Reliability and uptime. If my clients aren’t happy, I have to do what I can to make them happy. If that means a move, then thats what I do. DreamHost, you have captured my attention. Any more downtimes like this and it may be time for another move…..

You know, there are good VPS with high volume of bandwidth also! I have many different servers, some are VPS and others are shared. DH provides lots of storage and space, and I use it to serve up my media. Last time it failed for me was back in February when it was down for 5+ hours. As many people said, when it works, it works fine; and when there’s a failure, it hits us hard.

Btw, FourYearCutomer, just take a look at this host (I am not trying to advertise):
tinyurl.com/nynoc

EDIT: i can’t even post a link?!

Thanks William. Always good to keep options open

Yeah it might be Sunday night for you guys Lulz@Joo, but my sites have been down in Sydney Australia since I woke up this morning (7am) and it’s now 3pm Monday.

Prime ecommerce time, and prime internet time.

An outage of a couple of hours is understandable but this has been all day on a business day.

I understand that shit happens but your smug attitude helps no-one.

@Cheryl: Ya but its cold and snowing in America…you guys are working on your tan.

Hmmm… Yes…. All very valid points fellow Dreamhost Downtimers. Let me put an Australian slant on it…

We here down under have overly inflated local hosting costs. So nearly everyone here who has half a brain looks overseas for hosting solutions. Hell most of our web hosting companies are outsourcing to the US anyway.

Its now monday afternoon. 3pm. I have had downtime since 9am this morning. I could not have asked for a worse time than 9am at the start of the week for all of my web sites to go down. And stay down. For a very long time.

I have been very satisfied with Dreamhost over the last 3 or so years. But this is too much. I will have to give my clients some sort of re-imbursement for nearly a whole business day of downtime so close to Christmas and go back to being rammed up the sphincter by our local service providers whom I can at least reach and slap with the back of my hand if/when the same sh*t goes down.

Hi guys,
usually Dreamhost also mention the approximate time for solving the issue…
The only indication we have this time is “soon”.
I will also soon be married… but I sincerely hope to get my website up before to get married.
More info about approximate time would be useful… 4 people cannot work because of this… it is costly..
Rgds
Julien

Hm, four hours since an update?

Stay professional, DH..

An update would be nice. Even if it is to say, “We are restoring backups and believe the process will take several more hours.”

no - no email of any sort

Sebastien… out ear mate weed say…

“Up shit creek in a barbed wire canoe with out a paddle, watchin the swag float down creek with ya tally-hos and ya tallies smash on the rocks.”

Damn. So much for trying to spend the day getting a ton of code in. AJAX just don’t jive all by itself locally.

More and more I think I’ll go live after beta testing else where, perhaps a VPS? Trying rolling out something new and going down for this long? Customer does not give a damn why, just that a fine Sunday of prime time internet use is gone.

That’s the problem with being the code magicians when the damn rabbit will not come out of that hat. If only the rabbit would provide an update.

Any updates?

Any clues when it’ll be back up?

Moreover, any clues why anyone should pay for this level of service?

Updates please?

This better be fixed by tomorrow, that is 12:00AM PST.

Perfect. I have my web master over for dinner, then expected to sit down to do several hours of work and ZIP, Zilch, zero.

Attached is receipt for the dinner items. Please refund me the money.

This is one LONG outage.

What did you guys have for dinner?

come on fellas, it’s been 4 hours since a last update. The site admins must have a few drives around or something, or get your Vendor on the phone stat. Let’s get this thing rolling.
And all those on this post who are about to unleash on me….please spare me the all the drama about how no one knows how tough it is for the site admins, and what a wonderful service this is for so cheap..and “you just don’t understand” crap. There’s a point when we go beyond a reasonable amount of down time and begin getting concerned that the engineering team is not on this like glue. Support team - give us an update every ten minutes please so we know you are freaked out even more than your customers and you are working on it.

Well thank god the boss is out of the office today!

We have had no emails since 9am and we are about to go home……

Sweet F.A. achieved…..

Internal emails working fine….. Emails in or out to third parties are still not working

@Dave

A few xtra drives!!!! They should have a whole cabinet of them!

This is seriously rediculous downtime for an apparently simple problem

Great another entire day of work wasted!!!

This is the 3rd… 4th… 5th time… I don’t know I lost the count :_(

I’m on blingy. You people should count yourselves lucky after what happened last March.

Good luck … I need my friends online sites or if things are not bad for me …

“HERE’S MY CONCERN, they’ve lost the data somehow and they are desperately trying to figure out how to recover.”

Well, our files are safe - you can still log into yaur FTP (Or, at least, I can.) I just hope that the mysql database info is okay - but hey, I just made a backup this morning.

I would appreciate an update, though, myself. I’m very patient, but I also had plans to get some work done today which would be very difficult to do without the servers working.

Fantastico, shmantastico…

Thankfully I’m only using DH to post sites I’m playing with. Certainly not production ready. To our friends at DH, I understand cheap hosting. Certainly I’m a fan. But if you’ve architected your system so as to not be able to recover from an outage in less time, you may want to consider some alternatives. I certainly would expect to be fired if I suggested that I may be down 8+ hours at a time, ever.

WHAT I CAN’T UNDERSTAND IS HOW UTTERLY STUPID YOU PEOPLE MUST BE TO CONTINUE TO PAYROLL THESE FUCKNUTS WHO LAUGH AT YOUR NAIVETY. I GOT OUT AND WENT TO ANOTHER HOST WHO HAS ONLY ONCE BEEN DOWN FOR MORE THAN 15 MINUTES IN A YEAR, AND THAT WAS FOR A SCHEDULED UPGRADE THAT TOOK ABOUT 40 MINUTES. I PAY JUST UNDER $15 A MONTH, BUT IT’S WELL WORTH IT CONSIDERING I ACTUALLY GET WHAT I PAY FOR! MY HOST DATABASE ISN’T COMPLETELY FUCKED EITHER. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR, BUT IN DREAMHOST CASE YOU DON’T EVEN GET THAT.

F U C K D R E A M H O S T

Sheesh, play fair with DreamHost techs. Just ’cause you want your site online right here and right now, doesn’t mean that they are your servants. Who cares if you lose some sales on your store website? Or perhaps some traffic? Chances are, they will come back to buy from you. Just give DreamHost some time, they are working their butts off fixing this.

Comments posted here may not be viewed by DreamHost staff at all. Please note that this is not a way to make delicious cake.

Mine are

Your File Servers:
shiteabrick
Your Web Server:
nervousbreakdown
Your Email Server:
bitchhere
Your MySQL Server:
whatthe

Does than mean anything?

Have you ever lit your fingers on fire?
Are you being racist?
Is there something in my teeth?
Got any popcorn?
Have you ever gone streaking?
Do these jeans make me look fat?
You wanna get high?
Would you like that super sized?
Where’s the bathroom?
Anyone got a light?
Need a lift?
Where’s my wallet?

Don’t feed the trolls.

Why don’t you all open a support ticket that asks for more regular updates. Thoes they read.

DreamHost posted here may not be viewed by comments staff at all. Please note that this is not a Dreamhost to contact way.

You almost made me crazy

Don’t worry, Cristi, I’m from the internet.

@JIMMY Z/ZIMMY J: First, please learn to press the caps lock key. Okay, good. Now, if you want educated people to take you seriously and respect your opinion you should at least type appropriately. You can’t expect someone to actually consider what you’re saying when you’re acting better than us and acting like you know everything.

Shit happens. That’s life and get over it. Either people will deal with this dilemma and stay with DH or they’ll leave and find a new host. It doesn’t really matter. So, to come on to a downtime blog post and criticize us is just wasting our time and your time.

In fact, since you’re host is so magnificent why don’t you go and work on your site since it must be up 100% of the time and bugger off.

Gotta say, while I generally like DH, and sometime recommend them to others, their multi-day downtimes are inexcusable. After the first round of major issues at the beginning of the year, I thought they had improved, but this is clearly not the case… Last time we had DAYS of downtime - now we are coming up on 12 hours (in the middle of a work day in my time zone) and its just too much.

I seriously doubt they have yet sent the right tech (just the on-call entry level guy on night shift), or don’t have the replacement part in stock - hence the lack of updates - WHY would they say “geez, we have 6000 hard drives in our data centre, know that they fail regularly, but didnt keep any extras on hand for just this sort of problem - tomorrow we’ll be sending bob over to best buy to pick up a replacement so we can get you all back on line”

I’m curious about failover - anyone hanging out waiting for DH to actually fix this problem, anyone use multiple DH accounts for failover?? Any config instructions you would share?

Incidentally, it seems this would be a HUGE benefit for dreamhost to offer to their customers! i’d pay 2.5x my hosting to dreamhost to have 1x control panel, 1x set of shared servers and some automated DH script to dump the contents of the webserver & database every 24 hours to another account in a different data centre… then have some DH admin console magic to ‘turn on failover’

Cheap shared hosting with internal, automatic failover support - that way the only way my site goes down is if both DH NOCs go down (they have 2 right?) or if somehow all routers into their buildings fail, or their dns goes down (which I have yet to see happen…)

Sure, for 2.5x I can try someone else’s hosting - and hope its better (ok,it wont take much!) but I know what dreamhost has, know their flaws and dont have the time to experiment with another potential dreamhost - I’d rather just address dreamhost’s biggest failing - ability to cope with downtime in a reasonable way!

Any comments? Jimmy Z, care to SCREAM something my way? Did you find a host that offers something like this?

see… i went, read a chapter or 2, had dinner then drinks and came back to this… no one really listened did they??? poor souls… get over yourselves… read up on some buddhism, umberto eco and david foster wallace, maybe some thoreau too… once again, i’m guilty too… but at least i’m admitting i am bored…(a bit drunk)

side note* my website is my livelihood…guaranteed more than most, so i get it…

There’s an update for you all. It’s late. Go to sleep and all will be better when you wake up.

Well, thank you for that

Now is working time in Europe zone. Down for 10 hours. Great!!!!

How will I know that I belong to that group

And to think I had just paid for another year…

My blog (running on genovese) is also having serious problems with the database connection (on barbaro:cubias)!
Actually only my cached pages are being served (very slowly)! I’m unable to create any new post or to moderate the comments…

it’s just lack of professionalism… no I don’t have a commercial website, but rather an NGO database.. for us, reputation is above everything and just on the verge of an important monday (in GMT +2, GMT +1, GMT), dreamhost is acting lazily (maybe because it was midday sunday in US or now it’s midnight…)

did we have any kind of SLA with dramhost or something?

“Comments posted here may not be viewed by DreamHost staff at all. Please note that this is not a way to contact DreamHost.”

http://panel.dreamhost.com and fill out a ticket. But its pointless because they’ll just refer you this information at the top of the page.

ELSE IS RELIABLE GO. COMMENTS POSTED HERE MAY NOT BE DELICIOUS CAKE.

ok let’s take suggestions

i absolutely need ssh / command line..

which host should be my choice?

Site is stil down, but also the mail has now been down for the past few hours. It worked before..??

Guys this is unacceptable; I can’t believe we just shelled out for a two year agreement. I have been waiting patiently all day long and watching the crew attempt to calm the masses here. Sure people get what they pay for, but you guys should be keeping us updated hour-by-hour when you have a massive outage like this. My web services have been down for the entire day NYC-time and it is 4:49AM and they continue to be down.

This needs to be fixed and we need to be compensated and I’m not talking about extra days on a volatile service. For everyone else: Don’t post here, nobody sees it — get on Twitter and start complaining. Get the word out.

http://twitter.com/johnbellone

Yes I am also looking at Hostgator.

>> Annoyed but loyal DH User (until now!) Says:

>>Incidentally, it seems this would be a HUGE benefit for dreamhost to offer to >>their customers! i’d pay 2.5x my hosting to dreamhost to have 1x control panel, >>1x set of shared servers and some automated DH script to dump the contents of >>the webserver & database every 24 hours to another account in a different data >>centre… then have some DH admin console magic to ‘turn on failover’

I agree.

+1

Guys my site is down webserver , seems like an issue with apache

I think there’s a huge difference between a 100% uptime hosting and a 12 hours down hosting.

if i was paying 3 dollars a month, maybe a half day (for now) outage might be acceptable.

but if i am payinh 119.95 for a year, i expect problems to be solved in 2-3 hours.

no, 100% uptime servers are not for me, i am just running a website for an NGO, and some downtime is acceptable, but 14 hours is totally bull..

Our webs are out and our clientes are very disappointed

Hurry up!!!!!

you are right onur. there’s a huge difference between a 100% uptime hosting and a 12 hours down hosting

Made a typo and can’t seem to edit.

8760 hours * .15% = 13.14 hours.

That is so insanely small guys. And in my 2+ years of having DH this is the first time my site as been down this long. Something happened and they’re trying to fix it.

Last year my site was down for 90 minutes.

i don’t think that saying `oh they’re working as hard as they can` is an excuse for dreamhost. that shouldnt take that long.

and rider.. they already spent %0.15 of their downtime allowance… what do you think the expected uptime for a $120/year host? I would expect a %99.9 uptime, but will gladly accept %99.5 .. however, as they’ve already spent most of it, will they hit that benchmark ever?

please, tell me why i’m not going your website? it always time out… zzz fine, i think this is time to move new hosting provider

nikker, i am in a support team, and our way of seeing a `support year` is calculated based on rolling average.. like `in any consecutive 365 days, your system will be up and running %99.99 of the time`

i’d hope everybody does that in the same way.

I have to love the people sticking up for this. First off if you say you never had significant downtime here you are extremely lucky, a liar, or work here. I haven’t had significant down time for a few months but earlier in the year there were major problems with email that lasted over a day, there was a major amount of down time on the servers themselves. They blew there load on their downtime there. Second, its funny that you guys complain about complainers, isn’t that a double negative. Third, the people paid for a service, let them complain they are not getting what they paid for, there sites have been down for over 12 hours and these is the one medium they get to complain its not like they get phone service. Fourth, if all these people knew they were getting “hobby” hosting then DH would be out of business because only a handful would use it.

you don’t need any maths how a `%99.9 uptime guarantee` works.

if a host cannot meet its uptime guarantee, it refunds `all your money` back.

i agree, if you earn money from your websites, and cannot stand seeing them `down` go for a better hosting provider (read: not DH)

but i have a simple website that registers applicants to an NGO conference, i dont need my site to be 24/7 up, but what i just want is a reasonable amount of downtime.. like everyone expects…. it’s been 14 hours, and read the update: `we cant solve it, senior admin is on the way`

aaaaaahhhh you must be completely joking.

I don’t work on a support team, but it’s nice to know that it should work that way.

Anyways, I’ve waited too long. Goodnight!

HAHAHAHAHAH!!! Just ready the pathetic status update at 3am!

DID I CALL IT OR WHAT!?!?!

>> Annoyed but loyal DH User (until now!) Says:
>> I seriously doubt they have yet sent the right tech (just the on-call entry level guy on night shift)

DAMN THAT ANNOYS ME! DH HAVE LOST MY BUSINESS NOW! That it takes 14 hours of downtime before you escalate the problem to a senior tech is UNBELEIVABLE. How many $10/month runts and how many $400/month PS users are on this cluster? I’d not be surprised if DH earns over $50k a month on this cluster but yest, when its down for 12 HOURS (UNBELEIVABLE!!! AND AGAIN!!! - THIS HAPPENED LAST YEAR TOO) yet leave the $5/hour intern to fix the problem.

BAD DreamHost! BAD!

i liked what i saw on hostgator.com … i don’t know if they actually provide what they promise (like their %99.9 uptime guarantee) but may worth a shot.

I really think dreamhost should have backup clusters for all the money we pay, this is taking too long… Redundancy is pretty easy nowadays…

I can’t afford another business day without emails or web sites for my clients Dreamhost. 20mins - cool. 2 hours - ok. A whole busines day and night - Very very bad.

Not even Hugh Jackman on your home page could save face with the Aussie Dreamhost users now…

Getting pretty serious for us now. It’s the middle of the day in the UK. Any idea on how long?

I know that your’re on doing your job but…this is too long. It made me surprise that you don’t have 2nd or 3rd backup plan for problem like this in case of cannot fix it in time.

My site stopped responding around 12:10 am.. it’s 10:20 AM right now in Brazil, so it will be 12 hours down in 2 hours…

Assuming you haven’t lost EVERYTHING, what you really need, at a bare minimum, is some way for us to post notices on our respective sites telling people that this is a tech problem with our hosting service and not the demise of our businesses. Meanwhile, without a better backup plan, the answer to the question posted on the front page of Dreamhost–”When will it end?”–will likely be “very soon.”

those are the same guys who billed us twice last year.

These comments are great to read over, especially the ones from Rance Costa - those are priceless. Why don’t you go play outside for a bit and i’m sure everything will be fixed by the time you’re done. I don’t think Dreamhost wouldn’t be doing everything they could to get the server running ASAP.

Please, UP SERVER!!! URGENT!

I have been here through thick and thin for the past 4 years and applaud the effort the DH teams put into keeping things running. I can not imagine having 600,000+ sites to worry about.

I have 52 sites down including some that are tied into a schools curriculum for handicapped people.

Am I concerned? Yes
Is this part of what we have to deal with to be in the technology field? Yes
Will it get resolved? Yes.
Will complaining about it make it happen any faster? NO

My day is about to start and it is going to be a rough one but everything will get fixed and all will be well again. Thanks for the effort guys and keep us posted.

Oh and by the way, Have a Merry Christmas DH Team

Wow, just a few days after another Spacey issue: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/12/10/spacey-file-server-issue/

Come on DH, this is too long, at any price.

@Rance Costa

You may work for a CDN, but you obviously don’t understand the biz.

Failures happen, for static content such as that which a CDN generally deal with it, simply replicating the data to many places and failing over to ther servers is fine. For dynamic content such as that which DH customers generally use its not so easy.

As to the fact that failures of this scale ‘don’t happen’: they do… obviously you weren’t around when ‘The Planet’ DC in TX went Boom! Downtime was measured in days and that was a far more expensive service than then one you are using here.

If you are desperate to maintain uptime in the high 99.999s then you really need to have many servers in many places. With that comes the issues with keeping them in sync, its not a trivial problem.

I would also probably guess than most of the people complaining here haven’t got backups for the data they host. Take responsibility for your own data!

landon, i agree with all you say but see this:

“Is this part of what we have to deal with to be in the technology field? Yes”

actually.. No..

i keep backups just in case my computer fails.. i have an older laptop just in case my current laptop gets stolen… i have double backups of my precious photos in DVD’s and external harddisks..

those are all for `in case technology fails`.. we know that there are very advanced tecniques to ensure sites are running 24/7.. no, i know how much these hardware / software costs.. I don’t expect active/passive failover systems. But in this age of virtualization, it’s just very easy to keep live backups, and move virtual servers around.. i don’t get what it takes to wait for 14 hours and then get a senior admin at 3am (it’s 1pm in london now)…

hobby hosting my horse.

I’m defintely looking for alternative host. My PS is down, clients go crazy and I am loosing hundreds of dollars already. Better off with a vps or dedi…

Always liked dreamhost, but this is just too much.

give the technicians double pay.

I really need my site back up. It’s been down tooooooooo long.

I have arround 22 domains with Dynamic Content, I need them all UP and with my BackUps!!
Bay the way… I Pay!

Hello, DreamHost, you can put an Screen about Coming Soon y all Our Sites..
Please help us a bit!

(*&@#($ Thank goodness for SVN, but ain’t backedup that SQL instance for a month.

Doing a parity bit dance… hopeful.

Unless I get a 2 year credit, I’m moving ALL my domains to media temple

Media Temple haven’t got a brilliant rep themselves, although they seem to have done better over the last few months.

Even so, its twice as expensive as DH and far less space and bw.

This totally sucks. My newspaper is down on a Monday, the worst thing that can happen. Although I’m thinking on switching to a dedicated server or buying my own machine, it’s to expensive. So, for 10 usd per month all I can say is … GRRRRR FIX IT ALREADY

Spacey seems to be kicking the bucket every two months.

Just look at the older news concerning Spacey: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/index.php?s=spacey

Dec 14: down
Oct 27: problems
Jul 27: failure
Jul 4: new hardware
Jun 25: problems
Apr 8: downtime

And the list goes ever on.

?? ANY News yet? I just had a big article run in the Times here and now no one can link to my website?
its been 24 hours, and i am actually dependent on my email for work?

this is terrifying.

it’s not nice to see how many people are affected by this …

hours without being fixed or an update? WTF????

Please, Do you know when my site will be working? we have users complaining…

I’m living in Austria (Europe) and all of my customer websites are down (about 50 sites..) the whole day. Mailserver (spacey-mail) is down as well.
No new update from DH?

I’m still amazed how few people bother with backup options.

Even worst case, static content on Amazon S3. just create a bucket of the same name as the domain, and then cname the domain to [domainname].s3.amazonaws.com and it just works.

While its true that DNS propogation times can be a pain, you can create domain with DH that you only use as a placeholder. ie example.com

Then for each real domain you want to create, create unique.example.com (where unique is a unique subdomain) and then *mirror* the true domain name to the unique subdomain.

Then CNAME the true domain to the unique subdomain with a low timeout. You gain the advantage of DH hosted DNS (it will cope with server IP changes) with your own hosted DNS with a short TTL.

Its not 100% guarenteed to work forever, but at least when it breaks you can failover to an alternative quickly.

Total cost to do, $8 for a domain + free dns hosting somewhere + S3 usage charges.

For less than a gig of data, if you don’t use it, then cost will be less than $10/yr for a cheap-ass failover option, even if its just a page saying that example.com is offline and will be backup soon.

Well, mediatemple time.

But are the raptor fences down!?

Well, i’m on hiball, and while outages are never fun I appreciate good information as to what is wrong and why things are down.

Those people that want 110% uptime should accept that no hosting is perfect or absolute. Even 99.9% uptime means 8.76 hours of downtime per year. I’ll give up 1-2% uptime in return for good service every time so i’m staying put at DH. Also, complaining about things is not going to help anyone do their job better.

Personally i’m going to go work on some other project while I wait for things to return to normal.

Good luck on a fix.

- Lasivian

Woo my site is back online (despite it not being listed here)

Stop saying people shouldn’t complain because it won’t get stuff fixed faster. What kind of a dumb thing is that to say? People are complaining because Dreamhost has done a shitty job at fixing this problem.

You’re right that complaing doesn’t get Dreamhost’s servers fixed faster. Proper deployment of qualified personnel WOULD!

Yeah I was for a few hours - works fine now since about 2 minutes ago.

My site is still down :((

I’m still down. What’s happening?.

and another note, my ftp is working and I can view and download all my files, just that the website doesn’t display?

That’s it, I#m leaving DH

Arggghhh!

Hello,

My file server and Fiji, but my sites are off the air too.
Some estimates of return?

It’s okay - I’m not really trying to run a business and it isn’t really the last couple of days to get orders shipped to make it to their destinations by Christmas… no worries!

Wit Says,
“That’s it, I#m leaving DH”

Oh honestly, thats so old now. If you want to be cool you need to do something like:

“That’s it, I’m buying 3 more subscriptions to DH and upgrading to their PS service and maybe i’ll donate some money to charity through my panel too!!!”

let’s act together.. We can get a bulk discount if we all move to a competitor…

Actually, this downtime has been nice to me. Makes me feel less guilty when I play games all night then neglect my website.

is there somebody here with any technical knowledge?

Is our data safe in any case?

Funfact: The admins have a live feed of the comments to their phones and each time you say something mean about leaving, they get a little less motivated to fix the servers and they work a little slower (perhaps shedding a remorseful tear or two as they go … )

leave, leave, leave… this is unacceptable!!

People listen up…
I have been with 9 different hosting companies and so far DH is the best in customer service and price/value.
Can anybody tell me about another company that will actually open a board for critics when a server is down???

Happy switching…and happy coming back once you saw whats out there.

in turkey we have a good reason for every kind of failure / mistake / outage:

`this is a one-off issue`

i think DH can tell us `this is a one-off issue` and continue their life right away.

@Dave Anderson: My day is pretty good so far. My Colts won again yesterday and I’ve been enjoying my games and family.

Hope your Delta Airline problems are sorted.

We just updated our site and all the sudden we are getting hits like mad. A few days later, this happens. We have webmail but no websites. This is costing me money and I wonder if D.H. is gonna compensate us, Probably not. I call bullshit. It’s not even shenanigans at this point, nor tomfoolery, just plain old bullshit.

@Michael

+15hours of downtime is too much.

Hi, my site is down and its been down for over 24 hours…. is there a faster way to solve this problem and gets our sites back ?

getting the following error message…

ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved

——————————————————————————–

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://ririanproject.com/

The following error was encountered:

Read Error
The system returned:

(104) Connection reset by peerAn error condition occurred while reading data from the network. Please retry your request

And no response from my email to D.H. What the hell.

Just under 22 hours now.

Funny how this happens when my rego is about to expire (33 days).
Now that the AUD has plummeted, I’m not sure if I’m ready to plop down another investment like this lol

Dear team of DREAMHOST,
my site is still down but I thank you again because I know for sure that you are striving to do all your best to solve the problem as soon as possible.
It’s so humiliating to read such a trivial language and lack of elementary education in many customers’ notes!
THANK YOU ALL at DH, I KNOW YOU ARE WORKING HARD!
Ciao

Hmmm How are people getting their figures (15 and 17 hours) ?

I am taking the current time stated on the top right for me

Current Time Is 12:21:59 PST

Minus the posting time

Posted (December 14th, 2008 at 2:25 pm PST) by danwy

So 22 hours.

Maybe they are getting shutdown by the gov.

“Lashkar-e-Toiba responsible for killing 200 people in Mumbai has a website hosted in America. Jamaat ud Dawa, a front for LeT has their website registered from Pakistan and hosted by dreamhost.com, a web hosting company in Los Angeles. Chances are America doesn’t even know about this.”

I have problems with my sites from friday afternoon.
Maybe now server is working, but about 15-20 of my
sites are still down.

Ticket: 8hrs

Dreamhost… please start hosting, not dreaming

all web site are down, I don’t undestand. How long I will out of all my sites. Please I need work and make money too. I stay alive withou my computer for long time.

no web, no ftp, no e-mail…. I can’t wokr!!!

I don’t work when the servers are up

I love this little blog.
I have stores too…but getting mad wont get me anywhere.
YES I AM MAD…but hey we have to make the best of it.

I’m starting to see how much all of us are tied up to this technology…
I was watching Jeff Bezos intervention at TED (look it up on youtube) and he explains so well what technology means to us…
Hes a clever guy.

@nadie: I cant work either!!!

here’s your update: It’s still down.
what good is the updates?

@Canio Rosario Maffucci

+1

@Freddie

Hey, that’s not a bad idea!

@nadie

I can’t either, I’m making good use of my time by watching Office clips on YouTube and reading this thread! Good times!

I was thinking that if firefighters acted the same way DH is acting, there wouldn’t be too much of us alive right now. Imagine for a minute… The building is on fire… but that’s ok because the local firefighter department just sent its best new recruit… Turns out the fire propagated to 4 levels and the “best new recruit” only has one fire extinguisher. He calls the central, which says that it should be ok and shouldn’t take too long to take control over the fire. 10 hours later, the fire is larger than ever and the central station finally realizes that it may be time to send another best new recruit to help the first one, with maybe 2 fire extinguishers this time….. Two hours later, realizing that 2 best new recruits are clearly not enough to control a fire that has spread over 5 buildings on the block, the Chief FINALLY makes the clever decision to send his top team that has been sleeping all night long. When the crew of 5 trucks and 25 firefighters get there, it’s almost too late as most people in the buildings have either perished in the flames or jumped through the window (9/11 style) to not die of painful burns. Either way, it’s too late!

I’ve never been glued to blog-comments since Dave Barry’s interactive blogging making fun of “24″.

— Another suffering soul with a dozen down websites

Erm well the reason we are all ‘crying like babies’ is that some of us are running several businesses and now have had no emails for over 24 hours, no websites for over 24 hours and no access to FTP sites. Some of us are suffering loss of business due to Dreamhost incompetence to get something sorted out. I am sorry but 26 hours is plenty long enough to sort a problem out.

Shall be taking my business elsewhere after Xmas.

I´m waiting from 18 hours and the problem is not fixed. My clients are little angry… How much more we have to wait?

I decide to close my account,media template rock’s

@ Sebastien

Hrrrm interesting. I see this DH situation like the story “Lord of the Rings”. We are all the little hobbits of the shire depending on the rangers (admins) to protect us from evil (downtime). But then one day a evil power arises from the East (bad drives) and overwhelmed the Rangers and Elves (senior sys admins) fight this power at first to no avail and suffer serious setbacks (that guy from Ronin getting shot with orc arrows). But in the end they are saved by Gandalf the Wizard (uber-admin who knows everything and fixes problem in 10 minutes) and the simple hobbits rejoice with a festival (bawls and cheetos). I just blew your mind.

@ Frolixo

Except 10 minutes translates to 22 hours when you’re not a citizen of Middle Earth.

@ Mick Lauer

That’s because Gandalf hasn’t woken up yet. He is still recovering with the fight from the Balrog (wicked hangover).

My terrorism website has also been down for 17 hours now. Unacceptable. I can no longer detonate my twitter bombs. Get this up and running!

I haven’t been terribly impressed with DH and I’ve stayed with them for a while simply b/c I’ve been too lazy to move hosts. But now I’m starting to think it’s time to seek out greener pastures.

Does anyone have recommendations for better hosting providers?

It’s very amusing to see people wanting to switch to other hosts who can’t guarantee uptimes. Isn’t that why you’re leaving DH because he can’t guarantee uptimes?

Epic fail on comparing this situation to a burning fire. lol

Another update should be coming soon, posted 4.5 hours ago… so where is it?

PS - My grammar are sweet.

You _REALLY_ need to post updates more often then every four hours.

We don’t require DH to be 99.99% uptime . But this time we do have the reason to complain - it has been down for more than 24 hours until now .

Not all of us make websites just for interests or entainment .For production environment ,so long downtime is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE

I still don’t have email - you posted this update nearly 18 hours ago.

@ Rider

EXACTLY MATEY!

Any chance to figure out what servers have corrupted or damaged files?

The bill to update my account expires in two weeks and this will definitely make a point to take.

TIA

@Fredrik Sørlie - Jesus says you lose.

god, you people are whiners.

if your work/job/life depends on 99.999% uptime, you shouldn’t be hosting your site on a shared server now should you?

yes it sucks that the servers have been down for over a day now, but your incessant complaining doesn’t help anyone but yourself.

if you are unhappy then do something about it.. I come to this page to find status updates, not to listen to idiots venting because they cheaped out on their webhosting and are now paying for it.

/rant

you lose too, Aaron.

I’m on aquafina, my mail is down but my sites are up. I wonder how that can be. Also I can send and receive email between accounts my domains.

Wish I hadn’t prepaid for 2 years. The reason the other folks have a 99.9% uptime is because they use similar hardware, take snapshots of the drives, have backup raid arrays and SANs, and route their traffic with go figure… routers. Either spacey is a bottleneck or a VM server. Since it’s not up it’s probably not a VM server. It only takes about 2-3 hours to build a server and another 3 to restore backups and that’s on older technology… all of the newer stuff is much faster. I guess if DH charged more they could afford decent redundant hardware. The fact that one machine brings down a whole network (and this has happened a couple of times now) should be a clue that there needs to be something done about the network structure. Consider having a network architect take a look or is this just a hobby?

Luckily I use other hosts as well. No sense in putting all of my eggs in one basket. Will have to consider a host with customer service professionals as opposed to a blog that tells people they’re losing money.

@postex

I’m sorry that you are not having a good experience.

In my opinion, the less than $10/month means I don’t get to complain when my site goes down occasionally. Especially since it probably is up more than 99% of the time. But just in case, and in return, I don’t give Dreamhost my business for anything where up-time is critical (or even slightly important).

If you want Dreamhost to improve, vote with your dollars.

Does anyone know if we switch to GOOGLE APPS for email NOW, during this outage, will it work smoothly? Obviously we won’t get existing messages on dreamhost servers but will it allow incoming mail?

Many thanks.
Probably losing clients today…

paul, I don’t KNOW about GOOGLE apps BUT i SUSPECT you DESERVE to BE losing CLIENTS. Jesus xxx

It’s very nice that you mention this subject. Your explanations are enough.

Hi Roger! I bet you wish you spent more than $10 now!
I remember this one time that I was having a drink with Judas and he was complaining about the quality of the loaves and fishes he was eating - he wasn’t even paying me $10 for those so I guess that makes him more of a prick than you.

dreamhost has crushed my dreams. thnx.

@casey, you can’t have a %0.2 downtime in one go. this is a complete `no-no` in current industry standards. no it doesn’t have anything to do with 10$/month. I am paying £1/day for the tap water in my house, (a liter of bottled water costs the same here) but I would never bear with a water outage for anything lasting longer than 2 hours. it doesn’t mean anything to me when someone says `thames water is desperatly trying to fix the problem` or `i shall move to nyc`.. this service level is not acceptable.. full stop.

if i was running a mission critical application i would aim %99.99 uptime, not a puny %99.9 one. more critical businesses seek %99.999 SLA’s you know? (See london stock exchange & microsoft) (not that I mean we need 99.99 or 99.999, but yes we need 99.9 for a decent life)

i luckily have accounts in 5 different hosting companies, one of them is very `posh` if you know what I mean, the other 4 (including DH) is sub-200$/year hosting companies.

this is the single most horrifying outage in my 8 years of web-development career. maybe it’s the result of virtualizing and consolidating everything and anything into a single shell.

Christmas is canceled.

My web sites are hosted on sunkist, yet they are all down, presumably because of this issue. Except for the fact that I don’t host my email with DH, so I don’t understand the connection.

I have contacted DH support three times over the past 24 hours and have heard back not once from them.

Hi Jesus!

When you are not an expert and when you have small money to invest for your business, if an expert advices you to take DH because of its reliability, your believe him.

Then, having downtime of few hours (like it happened many times) is not a big deal…. but more than 1 full day and again with only four updates so far is not acceptable.

So keep your little story and go back to see your friend Juda the prick, I am sure you’re doing good with him.

Roger

@Frolixo

Nicely done.

I’m as frustrated as anyone else with this extensive outage, but, if you’re running a mission critical site on a $8/mo. shared hosting account, that’s a problem in-and-of itself.

DH has had stability problems in the past. This is the first big one since I signed up. I’ve been happy until now. I was with mediatemple before and had issues with them as well, even though their service is twice as expensive as DH.

But, seriously, we need more updates. Being in the dark for hours is one thing. The lack of information (read: customer service) is quite another.

Lovely of DH to supply this meaningless forum to vent on.

Especially for the nutcakes… keeps them off the streets.

I am taking positive step here. I wanna ask whether GoDaddy is good or not. I will be switching to them

I wish I knew where to go from Dreamhost…

This is seriously out of hand… I was pissed off by the new “Backup User” thing vs “Disk Mode” billing… I mean seriously what good is a rsync user that cannot use ssh keys…

Oh yeah, and for the record — while I have friends and former colleagues who work for DH (and a friend who is a long-time customer reccomended them to me) I have no other stake in DH. Yes, I’m annoyed that my mailbox is dead right now (and I’m going to be moving it for other reasons not related to this outage), but overall, I’ve been more than happy with the service level provided by DH, especially with the considerations provided. I used to work for a hosting provider several years ago, and still work in high-performance/high-reliability IT, so I understand well what they have to deal with.

my friend told me to invest all my money in magic beans - I don’t know anything about finance or beans and couldn’t be bothered to do research so I did what he said. What a mistake-a to make-a!

bluknight are you lost when doing math if the numbers go past your 10 or 11 fingers (I assume some inbreeding may be there). You want us to times 24 hours * 7 days a week * 365 days a year to come up with the hours in a year. You must be the brightest of your uncles/brothers.

@bluknight, if you work for those areas, you SHOULD know a year has 8760 hours rather than 60.000 something.. you can have more accurate results with this fact.

(like 18/8769=%0.2)

and no, i am not asking for 99.999 (serious business, 2k/month), not asking for 99.99(business 100/month) i am asking for 99.9 just a regular uptime, that many other hosts can provide easily at that price. DH even cannot promise they can provide that (and shame on me, that I understand it now)

LOL…that was great Dreamhost Admin

All, you might want to go and make a cup of tea - ETA for full restoration of services now at 12+ hours.
DH

Peter: OMG no, godaddy is one of the worst. It has decent uptimes, but they don’t let you do anything.. No shell access, even if you try you can’t make a process last more than a minute, and the big kicker most paypal IPN scripts don’t work unless you use the ones that use curl. And their database is very very slow. Sure I’m forgetting some stuff. Essentially they lock you out of the ability to do anything that might even remotely task their servers, but their servers stay up

Look at hostgator or bluehost.

Following up on my previous message, I would note that I would be prepared to pay more for reliable service and meaningful updates on issues, but it is obvious from the comments of others that paying Dreamhost more does not get you that.

Re-read the word I use to describe the name of the personn I asked.

Just never thought you could get that much downtime in one time.

I guess same feeling for many people.

By the way,

All your base are belong to us.

Use the force Luke.

What an unfortunate disaster. I will stay with Dreamhost, but have learned my lesson on having a backup plan.

My sites will be complet recovered?

Wait, can we get official confirmation of 12+ hours? 6 hours ago the last official update said “another update should be coming soon”. Well, I don’t know about DH, but when I tell my clients “soon” on a critical issue, I generally don’t mean “6+ hours from now”

so it’s business time in US..
but there’s no business as usual..

where are all those highly acclaimed engineers & geeks & nerds? why don’t someone dare to update status?

i should buy hosting from UK. at least i can go and beat them whenever i want.

OUCH!!!!
This is really bad timing - I have many, many, many ads running across the web for christmas and my site is down!

Argghhhhhh - why now? This could have happened any other time and I would be fine but 10 days before christmas?????

And why isnt there a status update? Come on people - just Twitter a note or two. Fry’s isnt that far from the Data Center is it?

So what other hosters are suggested by the great wise ones.

Price and selection?

@postexi: I’m more than willing to settle for a couple of days of downtime (actually, if I ran the figures right, 99% would be about 4 days) per year. Why? Because nothing I’m hosting on Dreamhost is a major moneymaker for me. If I’m out for 4 days, I might lose what, $20? That’s about 4-5 cups of Starbucks finest. BFD. I can deal with it. Most of what I host here are project sites anyway, or stuff that takes bulk amounts of BW (thanks, DH — we love you!) but doesn’t require much in the way of huge amounts of uptime. Nobody really HAS to read my random rants, anyway.

The sites that are critical uptime for me? I host myself, with colocated hardware (with a service plan from the manufacturer, thanks!) at a redundant hosting provider — and I pay out the nose for it. Why? Because that’s what makes my money. And then I also work for a regional telecom provider, where I HAVE to provide 99.999% uptime as part of my job. As a result, we spend MILLIONS in hardware, licensing, and support plans a year. Why? So that Grandma Jane can see her pictures of Little Jimmy Junior anytime she wants.

My point still stands — if you want better uptime, feel free to jump ship. It just reduces contention for bandwidth here, and maybe a tiny bit of latency. Just be prepared to pay a premium (say, factor of 10, anyone) for higher uptime somewhere else. Providing high redundancy and reliability doesn’t come cheap.

@bluknight: i think you miss the difference between `earning money from a website` and having a site up %99.9 of the time.

I don’t earn any money from my cellphone but it’s 100% up.
I don’t earn any money from my car, but it’s %100 up (for now - go toyota!)

it’s expectancies.

you may be fine with paying 120/year for 4 days of downtime, but other hosts provide the same service (4 days you are asking for) for about 30/year..

and a2 is providing %99.9 for 7.95/month (afaik), so there’s a price/quality comparisan aaaaand yes a2 beats the hell outa DH.

besides I earn no money at all from my website, because it’s an NGO helping children to get better education. but `RESPECT` is important for NGO’s and havign a complete day offline is no way respect in internet age.

i agree with you if I wanted %99.999 uptime, i would have to pay thousands a month. so I just want 99.9 for 10/month (100 times less downtime, in simpler-understandable terms) and other `proper` hosts gladly provide that.

go for a2hosting or hostgator (i didnt try those yet, but seems nice)

Apparently Dreamhost is also using media temple as this site seems to work.

My site was working fine all day Sunday and even at about 2 a.m. MST Monday, but later this morning went totally dead.

Por favor, llevamos más de 24 horas sin servidor!!!
Y para muchos de nosotros es fundamental!!
No sé la cantidad de correos que hemos perdido!!!

This is pretty bad… paying close to $10/month is not chump change. Google Gmail is free. Does that you would be happy if Gmail went down for 10 hours? Anyways, disappointing. I flew out of Powweb because of their constant downtime and slow servers. It was a hassle moving things out but once you cross that threshold of pain, it pushes you to get your ass moving to somewhere better.

Please repair as soon as you can. A lot of hours and an terrible damage for usª

HEY DH ZENOPHOBES…

THAT WAS A PRETTY CRUDE RESPONSE TO NILO’S CONCERNS.
I THINK IT IS REASONABLE TO ASK WHAT IS HAPPENING AND GET BETTER UPDATES THEN WE HAVE BEEN GETTING-
WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?
WHAT ARE THE REPROCUSIONS?

CAN YOU RESPONSIBLY ANSWER OUR CONCERNS….?

John:

Thanks man. I am currently looking for HostGator. But, not sure how can I move my files from DreamHost to HostGator.

Again. I am okay for short hours downtime (even frequently) of DreamHost. But it’s totally unacceptable for downtime over 24 hours.

Okay, yesterday I was frustrated but patient…today..not so much. This is causing me WAY too much stress, headache and additional workload. This is seriously damaging my holiday sales at this point! I am NOT happy!

I must have missed a status update or two: it looks like the most recent one is from 3:31 PST.

Where should I look for the most up to date information?

“Let’s get one thing straight. Shared hosting is our bread and butter. It’s what we’re good at. We’re pros. The cream of the crop. The best in the biz. The coup d’état. Or something.”

liars.

wait…why is one of my sites up and the rest aren’t? they’re all on the same server…

Wow, this really sucks. Already read a whole book and stll no website. Ok, I guess I have not opened up Treasure Island in 30 years.. Moving right along.

Peter:
One good idea I’ve heard is using a service that is always up but crappy like godaddy or preferably network solutions to host a http://www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com that redirects to site1.mydomain.com at dreamhost or others and having a second server with another host that is replicated at site2.mydomain.com.
If site1 goes down you just change your http://www. to redirect to site2 if the main www goes down you change your dns to site1 or site2 though DNS changes take longer to replicate. That way your uptime is at your control though you may have a small amount of data loss due to switching it should be manageable.

So this is way too long now without any updates and I have let down some clients who trusted my services by being on DreamHost. I know Softlayer is great but expensive, MediaTemple.net seems to be on par with DreamHost. Any other recommendations as I’m ready to leave DreamHost???

What’s the current status guys?

No update in almost 7 hours?

I really need to get my email.

For all the people comparing Gmail vs Dreamhost, the biggest difference is that Google pimp your data on every page they can get an advert on. You don’t get that service with DH.

As to HostGator, I take it everyone forgot the 4 days downtime they had at the beginning of the year at ‘The Planet’ in TX.

While I admit that Media Temple haven’t had a long outage for a while, they always used to be famous for doing just that.

Failures happen, the best you can do is prepare for them and failover in a seamless way when it does happen.

I can still log onto the webmail. You can try.

@blunknight

Number of hours in a year: 61,320.00 (24*7*365)

How many weeks are there in a year? 365??? LOL

Number of hours in a year: 8760 (24*365)

Updates? Communicate… please?

To any Dream Host employee that might be looking at this postings, Please call someone to post something! Even if it is “we are still working on the problem.” Tell us you are still alive!

Webmail - You can log in but the emails are not updated - I hope they didnt / dont lose all the data between yesterday at 1 and today.

thank god my contract will be up in a week! I will never sign up for two years with anyone again ever. it been a two year root canal!

Hi there,
I see that a server is down. Please post a more current estimate for resolution. Our company web site is down and our email is down. This is a serious show stopper, we are in the dark to a great deal of communication during a very busy time of the year. Please post an update asap, much appreciated.
Thanks,
Shea
Errigal, Inc.

I need comunicates… My clients are dying!!!

Jerry:

This 24 hours downtime already hit my site and lost all the money that can be generated today. Well. Hell ya. I am searching more information about HostGator.

how often are backups done?
will the new file server be restored to a previous version of our data?

They (DH) obviously don’t care what we think about all of this. If they did, they’d be providing updates.

hey, look at that, an update!!

Update - 12/15/08, 3:31 AM PST: Unfortunately it was determined that if we could save the filer at this point, it may take longer to do that than to replace the hardware. One of our admins is currently handling that. There isn’t an estimate for restoration of service at the moment, but another update should be coming soon.

aw crap, hope to haties you all kept backups!

For the record I pay for VPS at dreamhost, over $40 monthly + up front fees and as mentioned above this is the 3rd downtime that I couldn’t fix with a re-boot of my VPS (which I have to do about twice weekly).

Terrible service… what a pain in the ass to move hosts though.

I couldn´t redirect to another host-backup!
My client wil kick out me!

Oh joy!! I just got a response from the support… waited 12 hours and then they said this:

> My database doesn’t respond, the entire server. Tried re-booting several
> times no change. No response:
>
> http://mysql.xxxxxxx.com/
>
> Please fix this ASAP as it cripples my web site.
>

Hi Aaron, I see that you’ve rebooted the webserver, however you’ll need
to reboot the MySQL PS as it’s become unresponsive.

You can do so from the same page in your panel, or if you’d like please
let me know and I can reboot it for you!

Thanks!
¡Brandon!

Is this a fucking joke? I’ve re-booted my Mysql virtual private server a dozen times since last night to no avail… and your great support after 12 hours suggests… that I reboot the server I’ve allready re-booted a dozen times?

And your support ticket system gives me ZERO ability to keep this ticket open and respond?

It’s not like they forgot to update. They just either have no idea what’s going on, or have bad news and want to make sure they don’t say anything they can’t take back. An update along the lines of “everything is going terribly, we’ll let you know how fucked you are as soon as we can” wouldn’t go over very well.

What’s up? It’s been almost an entire day…

Information please!

Hey, it´s back!

my sites on sunkist server are also down, plz react fast!!

I like turtles

@Blackened

No one likes turtles like I like turtles.

OK this is p*** poor.

I doesn’t make any money from my sites, but 10+ hours of downtime is just bad no matter how you skin it.
I was hoping the worst was over after the last massive down time, guess I need to have a look at alternative hosts.
Anybody know if you actually get any refunds after 97 days? AFAIKS you get a refund to be used at dreamhost, what a lot of good that will do

incredible…the absolute insanity about this is, there’s probably only a few guys running this company as indicated (or deduced) by listening to this stupidly insane and poor customer service phone message (213) 947-1032. It’s the only phone number I found for these dopes.

They don’t want to talk to people because it will be revealed that this guy is managing this site with 1 or 2 hacks in the back room.

I’m done.

Just wondered whether anyone was using Google Apps (Gmail)for their e-mails, and if so, is THAT working ?

I knew they wouldn’t answer the phone… very sad…

EVERYBODY:

CTRL-F this page for “Dave2″, read what he has posted.
======================================================

Remain sceptical of his idea (good!)? Google for hot swappable media, load balancing or server redundancy.

This shouldn’t have taken longer than a couple of hours.

I hope everybody backed up their data, because it looks like IT IS LOST FOREVER.

@taco

that’s good to here.
what is a filer?

Armar

We have all of our mail redirected through google apps. We are still getting our email traffic.

Aleluia! Is back online to me now!

yeah using google apps (gmail) works fine.

this is really a shame though. i can understand downtime every so often, but 21 straight hours is a little bit insane, and by the time it is resolved it could very well be above 24 hours.

Erreur 2 (net::ERR_FAILED) : Erreur inconnue

my website is now working…not sure about emails.

My email is also still not working.

Please, i want a answer of my ticket! DH is on silent!
And my client very noise!!

@ Aaron and
@ Larry Prevost: Thanks for your replies!

I’ve just taken an account with DH - I know, great timing
The site content is static and not really critical, but I needed to be sure that my emails could get through.

Thanks!

this is a charity that relys on our website and our data base… what the heck is going on?????

All my sites are down as well as the email services!!

Still no email. Can’t you just direct the email to bounce through another server. I don’t care is you lost everything. I just need to get current new messages!!!

Site’s back up. Thanks guys.

Still down…I’m in Boston too…..this is NOT cool.

I am 7up, the first of the list, and i get 4-5 web sites running and others 20-30 down

Appears as if some of my sites are back up (on rockstar). While some recent changes are there on some, other sites are either not there at all or hold a very old version.

And it seems as if I have lost the brand new site I just had designed. So far anyway.

For people getting their sites up. Please inform us if you’re site is as it was when it went down yesterday.

Shoutouts to all the asshats on this thread that tried to ‘call me out’ for being unreasonable.

When does an outage length become unreasonably long? After 24 hours? That’s how long it’s been for us so far!

All of my services are still down.

Just to clear up a couple of things.

A Filer is normally a server that sits on both the SAN and LAN and makes available files on the SAN to Servers on the LAN via NFS, Samba, FTP or some other protocol. If its something like a NetApp Filer then it could cost $100k on its own, having a spare just laying around isn’t an option. A Filers other task is to perform online backups, so if its just the filer that has failed then all the data should be fine.

As to the email situation, if you have gone with Google’s Gmail then your MX records poitn at Gmail and bypass the DH servers completely.
If you still have your email hosted on the Dreamhost servers then you have two MX records, for me both on spacey, and in a reasonably designed system they would be using different SAN backends so no data loss will result although delivery will be delayed. I can’t confirm this is the case, but it seems a reasonable assumption.

Sites on inko are still down.

seltzer looks to be up

My web sites are all back up and running. Everything appears to be current, though the last change I made to any of them was on Fri. Dec 12. Email still down, though.

Everything is still down here, email & sites.

niagara seems to be coming back up.
Most (but not all) of my sites are functional.
Shit happens. I’m staying with DH for the time being.

I have a site on pepsi, everything appears to be working here now, even jabber.

Monday 17.30 GMT — Nothing on Niagara in the UK — been down since 20.00 GMT on Saturday 13th — trying to run a construction business over here so you need this sorted !! — Going Christmas shopping in London while I’m waiting !! — might end up going back to good old British Telecom

web sites on snapple are up
mail - down

All my sites are fine BUT my sites aren’t on Spacey — only my mail server is. Hence, all 70+ of my client sites have been without email since last night. Please, someone tell me the email is all stored somewhere.

Rootbeer is up, my website is working again.

Mine came back for five minutes, but it’s back down.

the mails are not coming from yahoo or gmail. have several clients waiting for an update. please at least confirm the time required to fix this error.

my server is spacey

Also on terranova server?!?!?!

I hate dreamhost!

My mail, webpages, and ssh are still down. NOT happy…

Your Web Server:
eggnog
Your Email Server:
spacey

nesbitt is back via ssh.
www: running
mail: down

It’s been 2 days! My patience is running thin…

Whats going on with gingerale? Post any updates plz!

YOU NEED TO UPDATE STATUS MORE THEN EVERY EIGHT HOURS!

Okay, now I’m just getting mad. I think I’ve been fairly understanding up to this point. If it’s not back up by close of business today, I start host shopping.

Where do you guys look to see what servers you are on?

My issues are regarding one of my VPS servers MYSQL not responding… appears unrelated to this other than the fact that my down time corresponds with this issue.

Please write also terranova on the server list!
I HATE DH, I GO OUT TO ANOTHER HOSTING!

Guys, don’t forget that you are using a shared hosting service…

Ok this not means that we must accept this outages stuff, but in my experience DH still is a great hosting provider (three years using their services).

Scyfox, I agree with you: Pico pa’l Admin!!!

Quote - “At that point we will do our best to send another status post detailing the plan at that time.”

If it takes hours to type a few sentences for an update then no wonder it is taking so long to fix the problem.

Back up now-lost some business today though.

“Guys, don’t forget that you are using a shared hosting service…”

I pay ~$40 a month for VPS hosting and I’ve been down this entire time as well.

We Make a depute to dreamhost?

sunkist is still down

i get:

Site Temporarily Unavailable
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this.

error id: “bad_httpd_conf”

:( :(

I NeeD my SiTeS Up

Thanks guys. I know you are working hard and this is no more fun for you than it is for us (customers). At least you are not asking for a bailout, eh? Happy Holidays. Good job.

i get all fine (website and databases). i am 7up on spacey. but all the email are off

@Aaron - VPS… crazy…

Man…. i hope we all get some compensation for all this downtime…

My site is back up, and data appears to be complete. It even includes a Wordpress post that had been put into my post queue yesterday morning to appear on the site this morning, so if they did use a back-up to restore, it must’ve been a very recent one.

Still no email, tho.

at last
koolaid seems up, db with data ok (i dont’ use mail)

Sites back! Thanks…weird, I have Spacey for email…but I never lost email.

Thanks again,

M

I have one website up but not the other. Luckily, it is my main site that is back online. I hope it lasts, unlike my patience.

hi-c up at the moment, sluggishly. Thanks for your hard work techs. I still look forward to seeing the full resolution of this issue.

No email.

Site back up, was down almost exactly 24 hours.
DH, I love ya and host many sites here, but this was unacceptable. Where is the redundancy systems so I could at least post a “Site down come back later” page?

I’m backup - move email to google, it’s free.

Dreamhost - please let us know if the current sites being back up is something we can depend on or not, or if you expect it to be temporary.

My sites are back up! Performing a back up right now.

site back….yeyye

VOLTOU! A PORRA VOLTOU! Hip hip hurrra!!

sunkist is not back up yet ;(

My sites are back up yipee! FYI i am hosted on koolaid

This totally stinks. Second full day plus outage in at least a year for me.

I would love recommendations on similar services around the same price (or even a bit higher).

Is there anything similar hosted on EC2?

Realmente ya da lo mismo, ya empece negociaciones con otro hosting.

Sólo espero que el culiao del admin no borre mis archivos de puro maricon. Ya vimos como trata a los usuarios y si realmente le importa un níspero perder clientes, solo les deseo lo mejor.

Nus vemos.

SillA!

Yeah this is ridiculous.. I don’t even know if my VPS problems relate. Hard to tell.

Either way I submitted a support request informing them I’d attempted to re-boot my server several times and 12 hours later I got a reply saying “I see you’ve re-booted your web server, try to Re-boot your MySql server.. thanks!.”

I can’t believe the incompetence. I had rebooted my MySQL VPS several times before sending that request.. and the person who replies after 14+ hours of downtime doesn’t have the ability to see that I had already tried that several times?

Now I have to re-submit ANOTHER ticket since you have no re-course to respond to an open ticket…. probably wait another 12 hours… I put “PLEASE FORWARD TO AN ACTUAL SKILLED TECHNICIAN” in my support request this time.

looks like my sites are back up as of 12:30pm PT. only 28 hours of downtime. [sarcasm]TOTALLY WORK MY $10 a month![/sarcasm]

This is not the first time that my site went down… I wish you’d do something about it… because we pay a lot of money for this host, specially me, that 1 dollar is about 3 of my money.

Everyone here realizes that 98% uptime (which is awesome for the cost) equals 7.3 days of downtime, right? That 97% uptime is 11 FULL DAYS of downtime?

If your site is so important that NORMAL SHARED SERVER DOWNTIME is unacceptable, please please get a dedicated server and stop posting in the comments! Dreamhost is an amazing bargain for the price.

Dreamhost - a more verbose conversation here would be appreciated by those of us who know how to be appreciative. Thanks for working hard to get this back up!

hi-c back up. Thank you Dreamhost. I agree with what Steven says.

noone has to appreciate anything. it’s not a charity. it’s a business. and they will pay for what they cost us.

Website (on FIJI) up and running but popmail is still out. Earlier today the mail client logged in but did´nt recieve any mail, but now it can´t login…

BTW to all of those saying “Just use Gmail” - I personally cannot stand Gmail so it is not an option.

Gmail does not allow for inbox zero - I use webmail constantly and much prefer my Roundcube setup with my 20 or so folders and filters going into each and the ability to MOVE things out of my critical Inbox.

The day that Gmail adopts folders, I will happily move over… but until then, I’ll stick with roundcube and an empty inbox where everything is organized.

Some mail, at least, is not being accepted (although presumably non-SPAM senders will retry). A test message from my work email server has not been accepted for several hours, despite multiple retries. If the outage is fixed today, not too much mail should be dropped, depending on senders’ configurations.

Jenelle: Clearly you don’t know how to use folders. Labels are the same as folders. You apply a label and “archive an email and it is only visible when you view those labels.

Más vale tarde que nunca
(Better late than never)

Gracias
(Thanks)

everybody.

PLEASE dont sit on that bullshit.

cancel / refund your account and transfer NOW.

no proper business will learn from its mistakes unless it pays the price (big time)

My email is back up and running now.

Was a bit of a long time to wait - but I am not going to start hate mongering or trying to convince people to cancel their account and move to something else. I am satisfied with the service I get with DH. I am sure lots of people are - if you’re not then keep it to yourself and just leave.

Cheers,

JP

Email was working for some minutes.

DOWN AGAIN…

maybe you’re not aware of the term `collective action`

i think everybody is mature enough to make their own decisions, and wont be manipulated by a fool..

Will e-mails sent during the downtime be recovered?

Email is down. That is frustrating.

Dreamhost ought to be ashamed with this one. A few hours here and there. I hope there is no loss of email

I’ve been with these guys for nearly 3 years. I get a ton of bandwidth (which I use) for next to nothing in terms of $. This is 1st time something bad happened. Pretty good deal if you ask me.

to: onur & the other enfrothed

thank you for your internet tough guy talk. it proves humorous reading during these down times. thankfully, DH has things like service agreements that you acknowledge when signing up to prevent silly things like “collective actions”. at least in the framework you’re talking about.

i was actually worried for a bit that DH wouldn’t survive the Frightful Fat Finger Fiasco a year or so ago (something that WAS actionable, unlike this). lots of internet tough guys were typing scary things then. that was a far greater crisis for DH than this. but they thrived. and more cool things appeared on the cool control panel to boot!

the services affected are shared hosting. any responsibility for mission critical sites are squarely in the hands of those who decided to host those sorts of sites and services in such an environment. if your web bidness or e-mail makes you a living, then buy a box and rent a cable to stuff in its backside. real businesses pay leases for real property. if you dont like your site in a sidewalk cart, buy a shop.

i’m on my second year now and the money i’ve paid for the service so far has been less than one month of dedicated hosting. i’ll weather this storm with the help of perspective.

on a last note, my day job is at a major regional university and we’ve had our online registration die for two days during a critical time. we had a quarter of the IT department scrambling (30+ people) to get it back online. that was with direct access to spare hardware, physical network and all systems. occasionally, you get hammered. some heads rolled afterwards. lessons were learned. vendors also changed as some things were out of our hands. i’m sure the same will happen in the background at DH if warranted.

my web sites are working now, FWIW. i don’t use old fashioned e-mail anymore. for those who do, there’s this thing called ‘gmail’. google for it. works great.

cheers.

Scevrog… you are VERY lucky then.

I don’t post on these boards much.. but in my experience hosting a few sites with DH here. It goes down quite often. I’ve been looking into other services, but am reluctant to have the downtime of shifting over a few sites and having dealing with all of the mail transfers.

It’s sad, because I live the vibe of DH and want to have faith in them. but I’m just constantly disappointed in the inconsistent service, and non-existent customer care.

I hope this all gets resolved soon, But I can tell you that this lack of open communication is mighty discouraging for us (users who have previously had shaky service with DH).

sunkist is still down

everything is donw, email… everything…

Email just started working here.

@ttp.. no SLA can prevent me from switching servers, and encouraging others to do so. aye brother? collective action does not necessarily mean `legal action` (which i’ll never deal from here in UK, us legal system… brrrr.. )

*****NOTICE*****

This post is to let the rest of you know that the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be getting brighter.

I am on 7up. My websites and email were down.

My websites came back up a few hours ago. Wikis and blogs are working, etc.

I received an email from 1pm at 2pm.

Now, a half hour later, some spam from before that email is coming in, as is some legitimate email from as early as last night.

In other words, email isn’t being lost forever and stuff is getting taken care of.

*****NOTICE*****

Keep on fighting DH team … I’m with you!

John A:

e-mail can be stored (spooled) at different points and often comes through in the end, or the original sender receives a message from their sending server that it was unable to deliver the message. it may still be sitting at the sender’s end or waiting in a spool at DH’s end.

at my place of employment, we’ve had mail server hickups that have prevented delivery. the listening service spooled many 1000’s of incoming e-mails that were eventually delivered to the appropriate internal servers when the issue was fixed on them.

this always amazes me… i’ve been at other host companies before and the server/price/functionality of DH is way better…

it’s been 24hrs since they announced that there was a problem. if this was any other domain host company i would just now be getting a response back from their customer support with the companies usual line about how “we’re working on it”. At DH we get pretty reasonable updates on the ETA for repairs. it’s been 24hrs and my email is back up (still loading all the messages from today). i couldn’t be happier right now… (well i could… but you get the point… haha)

I forgot how to check what machine or server name dreamhost use for a specific domain hosted with DreamHost?
Can someone tell me?
We host several domain with Dreamhost but no idea on what would be the machine name or server name?
Thank you

Jacques

i just can’t lose any of my data!!! if i get it right, they are talking they can’t recover the data from that ‘peeler’ file server??

The question is, would using the new backup services have helped in this instance, (not the backup user, the ‘take an archive of the site’ one) if you haven’t downloaded the files produced?

If not I would seriously doubt the effectiveness of the feature.

Luckily, I’m not on the affected filer and also I take daily backups.
Although its likely that they will be a little more frequent from now on.

Does dreamhost backup our sites/data? If not, are we expected to do this ourselves in the case where their file server hosting our site dies?

“Not optimistic”? Come again? Do you seriously mean to tell me that the data in our accounts has been irretrievably lost? That there is _no backup_ whatsoever? Am I understanding this correctly? OMFG I hope that is not right. For your sake. There will be hell to pay.

I can’t figure out what is up. I’m on riptide, and none of my sites or email are working yet. What is on the “peeler” server… I don’t even see that in the list of problem servers.

If you don’t have your own websites how did you upload them in the first place? The sites should be backed up either by DH or yourself but who do you trust more; yourself or DH? Don’t blame DH for something you should be doing yourself. Why should they do something you wouldn’t do?

We are working on it and don’t have an eta we deeply apologize for the fact we don’t actually have a system inplace to deal with this quickly nor do we plan too because we know that most of you are too cheep and lazy to move all of your sites and so we can afford not to upgrade because when everything is running fine you will forget about this nightmare and carry on just like us and it’s worth it for us to loose a few clients and not spend the extra money on staff or new equipment that does backups and that means more money for us! :O) well im off to maui for xmas to spend my extra money I make from it all .. well I hope you backed up your data cause we sure didn’t he he sorry ..sucks to be you have a nice day DH

@Sebastien: log into your panel and click on “account status” in the upper right hand corner. that will tell you what web server you are on, mail server and mysql server.

Oh, well being without email is anyway very very bad.
I’m think about writing an article on dreamhost wiki.
Basically when i figured out that the problem was taking much longer than expected i did as follow:
1) Registered for google apps
2) Created some vital account (sales, support, etc etc for your domain)
3) Changed mx record for the site to the one for gmail

What’s the good here?

It seems that dreamhot doesnt’ delete your old mailboxes, so when the problem is solved (about 1 hour ago) you can put the things as they were, keeping your email.

Infact all the emails wasn’t lost, but just deferred, so i think the number of lost email was very very low.

I know i haven’t explained very well, but, with some courage and a bit of techincal knowledge, everyone here could make his pain a little more hurting.

Sorry for my bad english
Hope it helps

can connect to http://ftp. can’t connect to database.

spoke too soon. still no ftp, no database. c’mon guys. please sort it. at this point the downtime is secondary, data recovery is paramount.

some of my site are already up, some not but I can connect to ftp and db. I start the backup about an hour ago and now have more than half from ftp and all of the db (include the down site)

I understand downtime; that’s inevitable at some point. However, I cannot understand data loss! My PC crashed a few months ago, and I do not believe I have all 6 of my domains fully backed up. This is ridiculous.

OK- I am on boba- it does not appear to be back up. I have good backups, so no problems there. Does anyone know what will happen to all of the email when this is reolved?

backups? do you have any comprehenion when it comes to the sheer volume of tapes to do backups on the number of terabytes they deal with? in my 9to5, we have purchased and are in the process of moving to only online mirrors. 2 physical systems, half of the servers running off one, half off the other, and they mirror the respective volumes to the other system. a full backup over gig links takes the better part of a workday (about 15 tb from one system to another, times 2). while DH has built a nicely homegrown solution to the storage issues, it *IS NOT* a trivial system (go read up on it in the wiki if you have half a brain, you might grow some respect).

as others have mentioned, this is a cheap solution, shared, etc. etc. i’m not going to defend them necessarily, but unless you have been in their shoes, you might want to think twice about blowing off steam. i know from the ones i’ve spoken with via email that they aren’t like simon (google bofh), but you never know when someone will go postal.

back to the backups. a decent sized tape system to perform backups based on what i’ve seen of their setup would be in the 200k ish USD. add to that probably about another 75k or 80k per year in tapes assuming prices are still the same as the last round of 100 tapes i bought ($100 PER TAPE) which each only held 200g compressed (IF LUCKY). and they MUST be replaced at least once per year, and you have to have at least 4 full sets for most disaster recovery plans. not to mention data/bit rot, and the normal tape failures in EVERY single backup/restore.

next best solution is a full mirror (double cost. period) do you want to pay more for nothing?

Emails seem to be up for me……. well, slowly getting there

Emails are coming in in dribs and drabs (including ones that were meant to be delivered yesterday)

They are arriving with the correct timestamps….. so things are looking up.

Thanks for your hard work Dreamhost!

Please let me know when my site will be back up. I received an email saying I need to re-upload the site. I can do that, but right now, I look to you guys to take care of that. Thanks, hope you get it resolved soon.

lol @ Mel

Epic fail Dreamhost…… someone upload the email so I can see it please

Everything was going great till just now…

Site Temporarily Unavailable

We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this.

error id: “bad_httpd_conf”

Is anyone going to bother to update the status. I’m on Mug and my site is up but the FTP access is not working.

So after all this waiting for my FTP to come back up, I went ahead and sent in a trouble ticket in. Almost immediately I got this response:

Hello,

I am so sorry for the problems! I went ahead and restarted the FTP
service on mug and you should now be able to log into http://FTP.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help!

Thanks!
Elizabeth L

All set now.

well done guys! Long time, but appreciate it even if all the files are gone.

I guess that teach us all a lesson: do backup more often.

Terms and Conditions are written for a purpose: we get what we paid for and the very cheap hosting solution from Dreamhost obviously can’t come with 100% availability and constant backups.

It is upsetting and annoying. However the grade of the solution we all purchased is not as high as dedicated servers. So Dreamhost is not to be blamed for this.

To make a comparison: we did not buy an iphone here, we bought an entry level Nokia, so we can’t complain we can’t browse the net with Safari or play with Google Earth.

Whew. No data loss on Peeler, and all of my email appears to have arrived safe and sound. Thanks DH for all your hard work….downtime I can accept, but data loss would have been much more painful. I guess I’ve learned my lesson about doing regular backups. Even as I type this, files are already copying across http://FTP.

nicely put foozle

its winter but i think i feel sunshine somehow :D

Guys I realise you want to say “THANKS FOR THE HEADS UP!!11″ and other such things but please make sure that what you are saying has some information or purpose, otherwise it just makes it much harder for people to find solutions/ advice for problems that they are experiencing.

Will it be possible to get a post mortem on what happened?

Been with these guys for 3 years. I get a ton of bandwidth (which I use) for a dirt cheap price. This is the first downtime in three years. In spite of it’s annoyance, it’s still an excellent deal.

> Peeler is back up without data loss.

WOOOHOOOO!!!! <3 dreamhost
Thanx guys!

eeyartee: “I don’t have time or resources to rebuild my databases that were on your servers at this time. ”

Your database in on a separate server, it most likely was spared any corruption.

I was able to see my old data and it looks good. The stuff that I didn’t have current locals of is downloading as I write this so I’ve got no issues of note there, I’m patient enough to wait for things to settle down on the new server so I can repair what needs be repaired.

That said, I just logged in to my “new” mail server and have 2 whole messages. I checked the old data and there’s no record of anything I had there either. Is the IMAP store gone? That would hurt. Bad.

Ah sweet, when I log in via SSH I can see my data as well. Will start making backups now.

The hallmark of a professional is not to lose your composure when under pressure. Sadly, we didn’t see much of that in evidence, did we?

Folk’s - shit happens; and tech problems take time to fix.

Those of us with “mission critical” websites hosted here made the decision to stay here. Whether we put conscious thought into the decision or not is moot - it was OUR decision, even if it was by default. Live with it. Learn from it. Leave, by all means, if you must, but take responsibility for your actions. DH is not responsible for our business continuity planning.

As for DH being too stingy with its resources - well please remember that even Google, with its multi-gazillion dollar resources and distributed data centers had a GLOBAL service outage, not too long back. Are our memories that short?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/systemwide-gmail-outage/

Also, while I don’t think anyone finally lost their data, did you all just place your and your clients’ data in the hands of your provider and hope for the best?

Whose job is it to safeguard your client’s data? In the end, DH did its job. Did we?

Preaching to others is easy. As I said - Live with it. Learn from it.

Christoph Says:
Ah sweet, when I log in via SSH I can see my data as well. Will start making backups now.

PLEASE TELL ME HOW TO DO THAT??? What’s SSH? I can’t see any of my data and haven’t got a recent backup. Slightly stressed, I’m wondering if anyone can confirm if / when my most recent content will be up again?

meneer:
You can use an SFTP client (e.g. SmartFTP for Windows or Cyberduck for Mac OS X) to connect to the server using your old login information. For example, I used to be on the server barqs, so I connected to barqs.dreamhost.com with my main FTP credentials.

Everything seems to be there.

“Update - 12/16/08, 00:30 AM PST: Peeler is back up without data loss.” — Lies, Damn Lies

I just got an email saying all your data is lost.

TJ: “To web-admin the DBs requires phpmyadmin (on your domain) which is not likely functional. If you need to hit the DBs now you can configure it manually and go to town. It’s a pretty painless install at around 5 minutes. I’m holding off on that level of futzing.”

A much easier solution is to add your local ip to the ip address list
(go to goodies->mysql-> click on user name, add your ip address in the line under %.dreamhost.com)
Then download mysql query browser at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html
Its not perfect but it works.

I was on peeler. I’m back up on commisky. No sign of any of my data, but, thankfully, all my MySQL DBs are there, and I was able to download them with no problem and up them to my new MediaTemple account.

I’ll be keeping my DreamHost account (if they offer the proper incentive once this thing is behind us), but it will be for non-critical sites ONLY!

************************************************************************************
ATTENTION TO THOSE WHO WERE ON PEELER

Here is how I was able to recover my files:

FTP to sunkist.dreamhost.com (or whatever your previous Web Server (NOT file server) was

See all your pretty files and download them!

I’m not too concerned with getting mine back up onto DH, since I’m switching hosts for my production stuff, but you could probably turn around and upload those to cummiskey.dreamhost.com, or whatever server DH has moved you to.

Also, phpMyAdmin is working 100% for me, so I was able to export my DBs

We’re making progress.

since peeler’s data has been recovered, does that mean they’re going to append our inboxes to what has come in since we were moved to a different server?

Well done DH. Thank you.

You guy have some really cool server names… i wish my site was hosted on horchata or tang.

我很氣忿
我的英文不好！
一整天都進入不到自己的空間

got like 4000 people waiting

For those of you willing to use a shell account on the server, you can use the wget command to transfer your files directly from your old server to the new avoiding a slow upload from your desktop:

wget -r –level=10 ftp://username:’password’@old_server_name/mywe3bsitedirectory

You may have to hand upload a few files such as the .httpaccess files

Also I noticed I had to give specific access to my server to the sql for it to connect (see allowed host in the mysql user edit as some parameters from old server may not have been transfered)

Cheers

still waiting for data.

I SSH’d into my old server (silk) and zipped up my sites using tar. FTP’d from ssh to the new server (server to server) much faster then server to computer back to server. Only have to transfer it once.

Then unzip the files on the new server, and bam.. sites are up. Databases connected just fine.

Call an it guy to work with you if you have no idea what I am taking about.

this is the first major problem i’ve had with dreamhost after two years. my first reaction was one of anger and disbelief, but since then things have been restored and all my websites are up and running and i’ve finally calmed down. things like this happen, it’s a lesson to all of us to take more caution in the future.

good work dreamhost team!

derek

My site is down MYSQL db is not wokring,, even I am requesting for db back as azipfile and support dont respond it is a mess here. They dont have a phon number to contact.

Suggest what to do?

I check this frequently. As of this moment (12/19 8 AM EST), nesbitt is still down. so I’m assuming restores are still in progress. was hoping to see some kind of update here. Good luck y’all.

The dreamhost support said to me that my backup would be back last friday.

Until now, all my files are not in my account.

What has happened with mu backup ?

Did they lose it ?

How many time I will wait for my backup ?

It will be possible to recover it ?

I need an answer, but support does not show me it face.

thnks