Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Dreamhost down AGAIN!!!!!! Day SIX!

Dreamhost could really not suck any worse than they are sucking right now. Just when my sites had been up for a few hours (though FTP has still been slooow), Dreamhost goes down again. Naturally their auto-detect problem reporting system claims nothing is down. But then why can I access any sites but those on Dreamhost? Let me guess, what is it now... somebody tripped and pulled out a cable? Rats in the control center? Oh, I know, it's techno terrorism, and they decided to target the least competent web host and take it DOWN. (Who said terrorists were the brightest bunch...)

OK, I am ranting and rambling, but these bozos have set me back almost a week now. And imagine if DMOZ or anyone else chose this week to check out one of my sites. Hell, a week is a long time. It is entirely possible I lost out on one or more directory submissions thick week thanks to the Dreamhost downtime fiasco, and I'm sure I wouldn't be alone. And to think of the time it will take to set up at a new web host. ARGGGH!

Monday, July 17, 2006

Dreamhost in now an "elite" group

I noticed that, thanks to their 72-hour-plus downtime, Dreamhost is currently the 7th most searched tag on Technorati right now, right after Israel, Lebanon, and Bush. Boy, have they made the big time or what!

Well, they say no publicity is bad publicity. (But I'm not buying it).

Dreamhost.com down: Have they fled to Cabo?

So now on dreamhoststatus.com, they say things are getting "even worse". I tried opening even www.dreamhost.com and got a 404 error. Makes we wonder if they've packed everything into a U-Haul and fled to Cabo.

Dreamhost Downtime Disaster - Day 4

S0 it's now been 30 hours since Dreamhost posted any updates on dreamhoststatus.com, my sites are still dead or close to non-functional, and this all started for me Friday afternoon with lack of FTP functionality. That makes this day four - DAY FOUR - with little or no access to my websites. This is way beyond acceptable now, and the response from Dreamhost support has been incredibly slow. A brief, vague update every 10 hours has turned to no updates at all.

If you have been considering switching to Dreamhost, DON'T. The mere chance of this type of episode recurring - 4 days of outage to all sites -should give anyone pause. They have no phone support on their average plans, and thus you are left with their status page, which they are SO slow to update (and now seem to have stopped updating altogether). Ugh.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Dreamhost Filer Disaster Update!

I just got this back from Dreamhost support:

***************************
Hello,

As you may know, we recently had a network filing system crash causing severe downtime. When a filer like this crashes, it basically has to go through each of the it's disks to verify that they are ok, and can accept, read or change data. This takes an extremely long time, due to the sheer size of the machine (two terabytes!).

Once we got the machine up, fixed and serving files, everything seemed like it was ok, so we went back to making sure all content, data and websites were working normally.

Right about then, it crashed again! This time, however, it came back up correctly, so it didnt take as long as it had previously.

That was 6am PST this morning. Since then, we are currently constructing a new filer machine (we had to cannibalize two just to get this current one back up and running) to offload everyone. In the meantime, it has crashed again, however, it seems to come back up in the correct state. If possible, you may want to get any sensitive, or important data off of your account, just to be safe. We are working on getting everyone off the faulty machine, however, as you can imagine, it will take sometime.

We are terribly sorry about the problems related to this disaster and hope to have everything stabilized and working ASAP. Please understand that we are doing everything humanly possible (including working 24 hours shifts, and sleeping in our data center!) to get every site back up and running. If your domain is down, or showing an error, we are working on reconfiguring all of the effected services, and should have them fixed soon.
******************

Just thought I'd post it for anyone searching blogs for updates. This is the type up information I had emailed them suggesting they post on dreamhoststatus.com, but since it isn't there, maybe some other people affected by the current Dreamhost server problems can see this information here and at least have a clearer idea of what is going on.

Dreamhost problems (or is it nightmares?)

Boy, this weekend has been a terrible one for my web host, Dreamhost. All my sites have been alternately down, slow, or slower for going on 48 hours now. My biggest complaint is the terribly inadequate update information posted by Dreamhost on dreamhoststatus.com. I know they are busy fixing hardware, but surely somebody there should take the time to post a cogent update every 2 hours or so during the time they have shut off web server access completely. When my site visitors are getting a 404 screen for 12 hours, I want to know exactly what's up. Instead, they have only left confusing and incomplete update messages, on average one every 8-10 hours. Am I the only one that is frustrated by this? I think not.