Aquaman is sleeping with the fishes
Posted (January 4th, 2009 at 4:39 pm PST) by DreamHostIt would appear that aquaman is currently having issues with serving up some content. Customers have been reporting issues with not being able to see JPG, PNG, GIF, CSS and JS files, amongst others. This means that sites on aquaman will appear to be missing images and theming for the time being — but two members of our admin team are working on fixing this. Updates will come when there’s news of what’s going on.
Update - 6:20 PM, PST: In order to help expedite the resolution of this matter, the server will be inaccessible for the next couple hours. We understand that having a site where people can see some of your content is more desirable than not being able to see anything at all — but I’ve been assured that this will help resolve most issues that customers are seeing.
Update - 7:40 PM, PST: I’ve just received word from the admin in charge of this that all files on aquaman should be served correctly now. If further problems persist, please let our support staff know and we’ll do what we can to make sure you are taken care of.
109 Responses to “Aquaman is sleeping with the fishes”
Aquaman needs to wake up. I jumped on the promo code and been trying to figure out this problem all day long. I hope this gets fixed soon.
Quite an inconvenient time for this to happen. Loads of new customers and most wondering what’s wrong, hope they find they’r way here.
I am, in fact, a new customer and yeah, I was getting frustrated not being able to figure this out. Thanks for the update, hope it gets sussed out quickly.
Well, I am glad to see this announcement. Would have liked to have seen it a bit earlier of course, as I, like others it seems, have been trying to work this problem out all day!
Hopefully it will be fixed soon!
I have to say, it doesn’t look too good on dreamhost for new people such as myself who find their sites suddenly not working properly, and find no contact number anywhere on your website. You should consider setting up some sort of support hotline, as godaddy.com has.
Responce emails, even automated, are a nice touch too, showing that the message at least got to you.
I’m glad to know this is being worked on, I hope it’s fixed in a timely manner.
Well that explains a lot! I’m a new customer that just signed up today (heyya promo code!). I just thought I was a total idiot or something.
Maybe send this out as an email blast to all people who set up accounts in the past few days?
Hopefully it gets fixed soon. Thank you.
I can finally breathe a sigh of relief. I have been pulling my hair out and mulling over what could possibly be wrong with my images/coding all day. I’m looking forward to this thing getting back up and running. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me! 
I am a new customer too; this is pretty embarassing having downtime on the first day of service. You get what you pay for, I guess.
Heh, glad to see it’s being worked on. I’ve got a lot of experience working on dreamhost servers (my employer uses dreamhost for low-requirement hosting) and was perturbed when I ran into these issues after transferring a personal site into my personal account (previously the site had been hosted on dreamhost under my employer’s account)
Here’s hoping to a speedy repair 
- maybe you could move me onto mclaren? (where it was originally ^_^)
Another new hosting service purchaser here experiencing the exact issue others are seeing on Aquaman with our site. It looks un-proffesional to my clients that our new host is having issues on the first day.
Hope this is resolved soon.
Thanks for making this post! Good to know that it’ll be fixed soon.
First day as a Dreamhost customer and my server is down already!! WOOOO great value!
Hi, Aquaman is not responding at all. I’m not mad at you or anything (I think the promo is great!) but I would love to know if this has ever happened in the past or might happen again in the future. Debian is one of the greatest distributions ever, so I’m guessing it’s a hardware problem.. hope so.
am i retarded or is this also affecting SSH access?
The whole box is down
It would have been really nice to get an email on this or some other communication when it was all happening. I wasted a good afternoon trying to troubleshoot what appeared to be a simple ftp upload of my website followed by a DNS change with my domain registration.
I did go back - at least temporarily - to my original host. Of course, waiting for the DNS to propogate again through the ‘net is adding to my frustration level.
Well now I know why I can’t even get ftp access. Just as I get DNS pointed to the right place nothing works.
hi. i cant add domain :S, please report
everything’s down
I can has notification?
No? sigh… I mean its not like you don’t have my email or anything.
seems to be back up and running just fine.
you want a contact number? o.k. lets make it a 1-900 number because im not paying more to subsidize people calling in about problems dreamhost isnt responsible for, like installing 3rd party scripts.
you want automated email? ok ill give you that, that would be nice. but by the time you got the email the problem would probably be resolved.
some way to contact support? there is. the panel.
you want a way to be notified of problems? your looking at it. infact if you go in to the panel there is a place to get a RSS script JUST for you. thats right. you can get an rss feed that will update and show notices of problems with servers YOU are on. instead of globally.
ive been with dreamhost now for 2 years. i moved from bravenet. if you want a company that hides there problems. erases any negative information about them from there message boards. has there entire system in php safe mode so you cant run the most basic of script and want very limited options for the SAME price your paying for dreamhost. than move to bravenet or some other shotty host. means more room and data transfer for me. have a WONDERFULL day
good to know this was, in fact, a server issue. my first day as a customer, as well. but glad everything’s fine now.
New costumer here… This has been a little inconvenient, but anyway, it seems to be working ok now!! I do like the fact that things seem to have gotten fixed on a Sunday afternoon. Cheers!
Site appears to be up; but no ftp access as of 11:12pm eastern
Yeah, I was just coming to comment about that. Hopefully it’ll be resolved soon enough.
I third the no FTP access…
still no FTP access…
still no http://ftp….is this five now? But thank you for resolving the issue: I too spent the afternoon trying to fix it, glad to know it was not something I did!
Was just able to access http://ftp.
I kept trying to access FTP and was successful after a few times.
If it’s appropriate, I would be interested to hear more technical details about the cause of this problem…
btw, FTP is working for me now…
Thanks!
I’m still encountering problems with my site not serving up the files required for theming. Going to sleep and checking back tomorrow…
Good luck!
Never mind, the images are there now.
Thank you Dreamhost. Good night.
[aquaman ~]$ uptime
21:18:03 up 1:54, 30 users, load average: 14.28, 13.40, 12.01
… *sigh*
its not working for me. i just tried to upload wordpress using filezilla however every file uploaded encountered a critical error. is anyone else still having issues?
Looks like they are still working on it. Worked like a charm for a few hours and now is completly down.
Still having problems…
Response: 550 /*.dreamhosters.com/: Read-only file system
bah :\
ah well cant complain for 3c a day.
hi dreamhost, i just got:
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
hope you can fix this soon, thanks.
Yes still having problems … i can`t upload anything
The same problem here! I can’t upload anything!
Please fix file permission on our home directories (FTP error 550 here) 
I cannot get to my web site at all. It seems like it’s not there.
still getting 550 error Read-only file system when i upload throw ftp
same here. read-only error.
Still getting read-only.
GRRRRR! Server is down again! Not another day of this. I realize there was probably a large influx of new customers due to the promotion that could lead to these issues, but this is definitely not a good first impression.
my website is down altogether..panel works…webftp works..but the actual website is down/….is this related to aquaman?
Read only file system still - unable to do a tap. :(
My site is not working. Your server is down, or not connecting. This is getting ridiculous.
Fix it.
This is not good service.
Good thing I have not yet finished the move and I still have my account active on godaddy. I should for no reason have to reroute my DNS back to my old host, once I decided to switch to here.
i have problems registration domains. please change server ¬¬
550 error, file system is read only — cannot upload files currently. Have been member for one day… not a good start.
Can we get a real update please? I have seen too many “Outage Resolved” notifications. The server connectivity has been intermittent at best and now the service has been down for over 2 hours. Is there a plan being put in place to spread the load across any of the non-impacted boxes?
As many have stated above, this isn’t a really good first impression.
FTP: Read-only file system… please fix!!
…”Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server”
Calm down guys.
Alot of people have came, Dreamhost probably wasn’t expecting it.
It’s not even been 24hours since this problem arose, just give it time.
@Pod: When you are loosing money due to this, 24 hours seems like a century!
Indeed, this is ridiculous… wow. I don’t understand - I know I only paid $25 bucks or whatever, but the idea is presumably to hold onto me as a customer AFTER the next 2 years - and yet why would anyones stay after such a horrible start? Come on guys, kick it up a notch. You obviously dumped all your new customers onto a single server to compensate for the discount - and that’s obviously not working… hint hint?
Website still down since yesterday. FTP works, www hosting does not. Support ticket has been submitted.
Filesystem is currently read-only and I can’t write anything to it.
Still broken.
FYI, I signed up with the 202 promo a couple days ago, and I was not assigned to aquaman. The server I was assigned to has been working perfectly since I opened my account (though it took several hours to sign up with that promo, as the signup page was intermittent at best). Just saying, not all the new customers have been added to aquaman.
@ryan
whats your server called? is it another cool name like aquaman?
Heh…Aquaman. I have no doubt the Batman server is running on all cylinders.
It seems that Aquaman is not back up yet. I didn’t sign up with the 202 promo code, still got stuck on Aquaman. Not exactly the start I was hoping for guys :-(. Glad you guys are working on it.
I’m on aquaman and mysite has been alternating between completely accessible and throwing ‘read only file system’ errors from passenger all morning. Please fix this!
My site is down a this time: 11:36AM(-5 gmt)!!!! what’s up??
Back down again?! What the heck is going on people? I’m trying to get things done here and I can’t! Hope there is something good out of all this!
Still problems on acua-sucks, please fix the permissions problem.
Now my website on aquaman seems ok: both ftp and http works.
Ssh seems fine, too.
Website is back online now. Hopefully it stays this way…
My customers are seeing the following error:
Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /PDF/SanFrancisco/ on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
This is not good service.
Everything seems to be working at the moment…
the uploads are working via ftp, prob go down again with everyone realises tho lol
Me thinks Wonder Woman was involved… =) Great work guys.
Everything seems to be working great now. Got this more detailed explanation from DH:
Very sorry about the problems you experienced with your sites yesterday and earlier this morning. We discovered that the machine your site was set up was missing a crucial partition, that is why you were having issues seeing certain files. To fix it, we had to take down the server, hence the extended downtime. You can read more about this at dreamhoststatus.com. Please bookmark that page for future reference.
Then, this morning, the raid card failed on your machine, so we replaced it with a new one, and rebooted it again. It has been smooth sailing ever since, but feel free to let us know is there is anything else we can help you with.
Again, apologies for the inconvenience this has caused.
Is it down again? My site is no longer loading.
Yes, down again…
My site is down as well(again)
Mine is now down again.
Site down again!!!!
Same here.
Signed up less than 24 hours and have been struggling ever since.
Site currently down again. All ping requests timing out.
Very frustrating first day.
Not a great first impression.
Back down again?! what the heck is with this?! I was up all afternoon and back down for more time! Crap!
The problem seems to have been solved! Hope that everything will run smoothly from now on! However I am not moving all my sites to DreamHost yet, since I am a bit scared… They must prove themselves!
Was pleased it was a new-server-shouldn’t-be-up-yet issue, and was pleased it was all working now. But now it’s down again.
Hmm, still needs to be down. I can’t really complain though, every other feature Dreamhost has seems amazing. I’m really enjoying the service when it’s up though! I just hope it gets fixed soon, otherwise Dreamhost may as well be the best host on the web!
Site and ftp access (both through client app and webftp) still down, as of 6pm EST.
Came back up last night after yesterdays outage, and now it’s back down again.
Garbage. And from such a reputable hosting company, too…
OMG… is it down again…???
Guyz, do something about it…
I feel like bringing up another server and loading the last backup would be quicker than this? Is there any way to request to be transferred to a different server?
@Matt: I’d be interested too, but I don’t think that something like this can happen!
Everything is up and running now, thanks Dreamhost!
We’re still down.
4 days and I’m still counting.
This is absolutely pathetic, horrible service.
Everything is working here (web, ftp) and I really hope that it’ll last…
Looks to be up as of 6:15pm CST, and still hanging in there:
TIME LOAD STATUS LOCATION
16:12 0 NOK AT
16:12 0 NOK US
16:44 1447 OK AT
16:44 176 OK US
17:15 0 NOK AT
17:15 0 NOK US
17:45 0 NOK AT
17:45 0 NOK US
18:15 456 OK AT
18:15 204 OK US
18:45 575 OK AT
18:45 1270 OK US
18:47 532 OK DE
19:15 1224 OK US
19:15 586 OK AT
19:45 1175 OK US
19:45 577 OK AT
19:52 564 OK DE
20:15 159 OK US
20:15 464 OK AT
20:45 211 OK US
20:45 1492 OK AT
20:58 539 OK DE
21:15 456 OK AT
21:15 1201 OK US
I got the same msg from dreahost, this is crazy not only are they not fixing the problem. But now they are sending the same bull**** msg to everyone. If this keeps up im going to ask for my money back & go to someone that can fix my problems……
Very sorry about the problems you experienced with your sites yesterday and earlier this morning. We discovered that the machine your site was set up was missing a crucial partition, that is why you were having issues seeing certain files. To fix it, we had to take down the server, hence the extended downtime. You can read more about this at dreamhoststatus.com. Please bookmark that page for future reference.
Then, this morning, the raid card failed on your machine, so we replaced it with a new one, and rebooted it again. It has been smooth sailing ever since, but feel free to let us know is there is anything else we can help you with.
Again, apologies for the inconvenience this has caused.
10:37pm jan 5 09 EST time
I registered yesterday, over 24 hours ago and was assigned aquaman. What a headache and a disappointment. I’m still getting 500 Internal Server Errors and cannot pull up anything from my initial registration subdomain. Help, plz fix.
Service Temporarily Unavailable again.
Down again.
Still down :<
Just keep it down untill you’ve fixed it for real this time. Can’t take all this up down up down randomness anymore.
Down for me too!!!
It’s not working properly.
My site on this host, but access is slow, and sometime not accessable.
They did not get all fixed in the last two days.
yes … again doesnt work
aquaman dead again? I can no longer ssh or ftp to it (both work fine to servers elsewhere) and needless to say my www isn’t available either.
This is day-2 of my experience with DH and so far it’s been a 60% failure.
Thanks,
Steve
Still dead, and now I cannot access www, ftp, nada.
Sucks to be us, I guess. Who woulda thunk that offering such an attractive discount would attract so many new customers to disappoint?
PR Disaster ftl
Down again.
Down since 3:15am CST.
I am fully priced user, feel really bad this time.
Down again.
Looks like the mod_security module just let very fewer connetion passed.
That’s great news. The fact that you are fixing it, that is.
I believe it is because of the surge of customers signing up with the promo code - they have all been pointed to Aquaman.
Good to hear.