Down for 36 hours now, ETA?

#1

Hi, my website on the oranjested server has been down for 36 hours, this is a HUGE problem and there doesn’t seem to be much response from the Dreamhost team. They have posted noting about it on the Dreamhoststatus website or anything.

Look at the angry crowd on twitter, hundreds of sites down: https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%40dreamhost

This is getting ridiculous now, absolutely unforgivable, does anybody have any idea if there’s an ETA on this thing, or if they are even working on it at all.

I contacted support, I got two very similar canned emails, both telling me the same thing, and to contact support if there’s any issues.

Any issues? How about my site has been down for 36 hours & counting? Does that not count as an issue?

I’m getting increasingly nervous about this. All I want is my files so I can put them on a new, better host that I’m ready to roll with.

What have Dreamhost been doing in 2012? two MAJOR outages and it’s only July. There’s also the issue that their email servers are on spam lists and filters.

There’s no point in being with Dreamhost anymore.

#2

What I don’t really understand is that there doesn’t seem to be any contingency plan for such events in place by Dreamhost. Not even the display of a message like “site under maintenance” but 500 Internal Errors.

My site has over 1,000 visitors daily, and I’m getting a growing number of emails from worried people, but I cannot even display a maintenance message on the broken website.

From reading in this forum, it’s the third or forth server in the last couple of months which broke down. Once it lasted 10 days to get it back!

#3

Almost 40 hours of downtime now and counting.

For those who for some reason plan to stay with Dreamhost after this, don’t forget that due to the ‘100% uptime guarantee’, you get one day of free hosting for every hour your server is down, this is classed as ‘unplanned’ which qualifies us.

So far everyone on the oranjested server is entitled to at least 40 days free hosting.

How many people have accounts on that server? This must be costing them a fair few years of free hosting, if there’s 1000 sites on there, that’s 40,000 days, which is over 100 years of free hosting.

A contingency plan or instant live backup server would cost them less.

#4

Although I’m very very frustrated by this situation one has to remember that things have the unfortunate habit of breaking down. Who hasn’t experienced their car breaking down just after coming from the garage?

All the other time, I have always been a happy Dreamhost customer, and experienced an excellent service and support.

Therefore, I will quite likely stay with Dreamhost, but learn my lesson and investigate into a backup solution as an “insurance”. This means to find a provider who will be backing up my sites every 24 hours, so that I can switch to an emergency service in cases like this.

#5

I have to admit that I was a happy Dreamhost customer for almost two years until 2012, this year they have gone downhill BIGTIME, I’d already considered switching, earlier this year because of the big downtime a few months ago, and I discovered their reputation for hacked sites, spam websites and IP’s, which is something I really don’t want to be associated with (their email servers are on the big spam lists too).

http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/dreamhost.com

But now, this major outage and failure to communicate has just confirmed my exit, I’ve already signed up for another, smaller host with better technology, uptime, the proper cpanel and more personal support, I did a full day of research and due dilligence on a host.

When I signed up for two years with dreamhost it was the second one I looked at. I’m ready to go as soon as I can access my files via FTP.

There is no reason to be loyal to a web host that does things like this, things do break and technology does go haywire, but what I’m most annoyed about is their silence in this situation, the fact that they have made no public comment whatsoever on the situation, and tech support has done nothing but kept their paying customers in the dark. All that adds up to being a host that you can’t trust.

The customers and webmasters are going through a nightmare and panicking, whilst the @Dreamhostcare twitter page hasn’t tweeted a thing for 17 hours, it takes ten seconds to send a tweet out with a quick update, why have they not done it? Isn’t that the whole point of that twitter account?

#6

I dont even know how long my sites been down. Has to be 30 hours or more by now. Im on VPS host server ‘homie-vserver157’

#7

I went through the Dreamhost TOS to see if we have a leg to stand on since we’re paying for nothing right now, we don’t.

“DreamHost Web Hosting makes no warranties or representations of any kind, whether expressed or implied for the service it is providing.”

I checked my new hosts TOS before signing up, they have a guarantee.

#8

Same here.

#9

I noticed mine was down at around 10PM on Monday night UK time. Someone told me they were working on theirs at the time it all went haywire, and it was a couple of hours before I noticed mine was down.

Now it’s around 3:30PM on Wednesday here and it’s still down.

From the info I’ve gathered, the outage took place around 41.5 hours ago they had issues with a RAID controller and had to replace hardware.

They are copying and pasting the data from the backup to the new machine.

I’m not sure of the specs of the machines, but they said that this process is taking up all the CPU power. Unless the CPU is ancient, what would be making it take the most time surely would be the bus speed of the motherboard, the speed/amount of RAM and the read/write speed of the drives.

#10

Copying and pasting data. Ugh.

I can’t believe they don’t have swappable drives. Put them in a new machine and reconfigure. I know it’s probably not THAT easy but it also probably shouldn’t take 40 hours, unless the problem is larger than we’re being told.

#11
    • 11.5.2012: 10 days outage webserver ‘kuwaitcity’

6.7.2012: ‘draco’ down

9.7. to ???: ‘oranjestad’ down

#12

I just read that other thread, I never knew about those other problems that have been going on in the last month. A ten day outage? TEN DAYS?

I sure hope that oranjested isn’t down for 10 days.

TechCrunch or someone needs to write about this like they did in the last major outage earlier in the year, Dreamhost need to come out, own up to the problems, and let everybody know what’s going on.

I can’t look at the Dreamhost homepage without cringing with all the spiel about them being awesome on there.

#13

Curious that out of 13 messages, I cannot find the URL of the sites that are supposed to be down. Did I miss something?

#14

? heres my none existent site www.reef-geeks.com

#15

Here’s mine: http://www.soccerwidow.com/

#16

Mine: http://goo.gl/AhfzL
[hr]
I’m still reeling from the news of the ten day outage, that takes the uptime for the year down to 97% alone, couple that with the big outage earlier this year when everything went down, and other random outages and maintenance throughout the year and that HUGE downtime, worst host of the year? At least they haven’t deleted this thread to try and hide it even more than they have tried to cover it up!

I feel let down, only 93% uptime over the last six months for some on Dreamhost.

Over what time period do they calculate uptime? A ten day outage would be:

One day uptime: 0%
One week uptime: 0%
One Month uptime 66.66%
One Year uptime: 97%
Two Year uptime: 98.6%

Either way, all those stats suck.

#17

The two URLs I saw seem to reflect possible configuration errors, such as Internal Server Error, rather than a hardware issue. What am I missing here?

#18

This is what people see! It’s not misconfiguration. My site was wonderfully working until Monday evening, with real 1,000 visitors and 3,000 page views daily - plus sales, and income, and Top10 Google ranking, etc!!!

Dreamhost’s email:
[i]Due to issues with the RAID controller, we are replacing the hardware for this server and will then restore all data from our backup server to the new hardware. During this process, the data on the backup server will be mounted directly over NFS to allow your hosting services to remain online for the duration of the process.

We are working on setting up the new hardware now, so your sites will unfortunately be down at this time.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this unplanned maintenance. [/i]

Site has now been down for over 42 hours!

#19

They are trying to serve sites from the backup from which they are copying and pasting, and it’s FAIL!
[hr]
Are they watching this thread? Shortly after I posted the stuff about them saying the load was on the CPU, they have changed the wording on the warning notice when you log in to “a higher than normal load on the new machine”, instead of details about the CPU being overloaded.

I’d love to know the specs of their machines.

#20

New notice from Dreamhost:

We are experiencing some difficulties with the backup server, which is causing a higher than normal load on the new machine. This in turn is affecting your site performance: you may be down for extended period of times or seeing time-out errors more often than expected. We are looking into alleviating the load. We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing, and we appreciate your continued patience during this process.

Some!!! It’s a lough!

Inconvenience??? It’s a disaster!