Paying customer - very curious about DH

#1

I read this forum for a few months, liked what I read, purchased space, and took my time to migrate and test my existing site. As dumb luck would have it I just hit the DNS on Friday to have the world point to my tiny site an sure enough the DNS situation got whacked here.

So now everything is working with web hosting (pages, forum, blog, other packages and databases, etc) but our email is still not working. We’re hosting email with everyone.net so DNS from here should point over there. DH made an announcement that everything was fine, but it wasn’t. Today it looks like another announcement says it’s fine, but some people indicate it’s not. I don’t know if our email issues are because of DH name resolution problems to outside servers or if I just didn’t set the MX and CNAMEs right. In any case, I just pointed DNS back to my former/working DNS servers until this can be resolved.

I’m curious about where we can get the REAL story about what’s working and what’s not. I’m curious about what DH intends to do about the communications issues it has with its client base. While I appreciate the unconventional lack of stuffy professionalism here at DH, I feel a little wierd looking at pictures of people playing ball when there are so many people complaining that services and customer relations are getting worse here. I’m curious why there isn’t a forum to discuss system problems, only “General Troubleshooting” which implies there’s something wrong with individual sites and not with the services. I’m curious how they can let a single point of failure kill services for so many clients. I’m curious why there are no backup/redundant services running. I’m curious how they can let so many clients go with unanswered tickets and without more frequent notices on the announcements page at a critical time when people need information the most.

Yeah, I’m curious about DreamHost. I’ve plunked down a little money to see what happens and now I’m curious to see if these guys have the technical prowess to EARN that time on the b-ball court, or if they’re talkin the talk without walkin the walk. I need to get my answers soon or I’m going to have to get curious very quickly about other hosts.

#2

The reality of the situation is that there are a lot of different clients and each of them is frequently in a unique situation. I think DreamHost does a decent job of getting the word out about the status of servers and such. They have a very transparent, manual process. Do I think they could have an even better automated solution? Sure I do.

I find it refreshing. It seems like you’ve read the blog posts. They seem very willing to tell us all the gory details of their problems and their screwups.

BTW, it’s not clear to me that their services and customer relations are getting worse. I’ve had my share of the system-wide problems, but have been fortunate enough to avoid the specific problems you’re describing.

Hey, that’s a good suggestion. The only downside I can see is that a lot of times people will say: “the panel is down” and it’s actually that they have to clear their cache. Nevertheless, it’s a good suggestion.

You mean with the DNS services, right? It’s actually a somewhat complicated problem in that problem wasn’t in the DNS servers, but in an administrative process that went and deleted DNS entries. And because the redundant DNS servers are kept in sync, it merrily deleted the entries everywhere. It’s just like if you have a mirrored filesystem and you delete files - they are deleted from both physical drives.

I’ve actually kinda gotten used to the problem where tickets for a systemwide outage are classified as “systemwide” and sent do /dev/null. I know that’s really bad of me and that I should expect a boilerplate notification that there’s a systemwide problem and that after it is solved I should submit a new ticket for my problem if my problem isn’t solved by the systemwide fix.

I’d be all for that.

I hope you don’t mind my reaction. I think you have a lot of good ideas but I have to say that though your good ideas do lead me to think that you’re intelligent and want your troubles resolved so you’ll stick around and continue to help the community, some of the phrasing seems a bit hostile - which makes me feel combative in turn. :slight_smile: I try to remember that problems aren’t solved by making people know how mad you are, but by making them sympathetic to your problems.

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#3

You’re absolutely right on all points and I appreciate your demeanor. My inquiry is intended to be compelling to get DH to be proactive at a managment level about issues and get them out of the reactive mode that they’re undoubtly in now.

After resetting DNS back to my old host with MX pointing to mail services and everything else pointing here, it seems we’re getting email here, so while I’m looking right at my other NS/MX setup and my DH setup, and they both look the same to me, I’m inclined to think that I’ve done something wrong for my particular setup. When DH confirms that everything really really should be back to 100% functional, I’ll hit the switch again and see what a combination of luck and skill may bring.

That said, I’ll stand by my points, which while expressed at a moment of frustration, do express my overall concerns for the bigger picture.

Regards.

#4