Dreamhost is down. All of it.

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2009/10/12/dreamhost-network-is-down/

by tlrobinson • 17 years ago

33 33 17 years ago

I am not very familiar with Dreamhost, although I've heard of them many times, but if they're big enough, shouldn't they have failover for everything?

niyazpk• 17 years ago

But even after all those measures, shit happen sometimes. Then the only thing that matters is how you respond to it and how transparent and honest you are about it.

johnnybgoode2• 17 years ago

Are you saying they did have failover set up for everything? I'm just curious. I do agree with your point, though.

andrewvc• 17 years ago

Good news, my DH hosted site just came back up sometime in the last 2 minutes.

whatusername• 17 years ago

mines up as well

Mystalic• 17 years ago

My site's loading...and websites loading is a good thing.

noonespecial• 17 years ago

It looks like our core router lost its BGP session which took down our entire network (as far as we can tell). We have our network administrator heading to the data center now and should be there in 20 minutes or so. More updates to come.

Umm core router?! One? I'm thinking they'll revisit this strategy now.

dangrossman• 17 years ago

Significant downtime throughout the entire history of the company doesn't seem to have caused them to revisit any of their strategies. Nothing will change, changing would cost money they clearly don't need to spend, or they wouldn't have retained their customers.

vaksel• 17 years ago

works fine for me

jonursenbach• 17 years ago

Funny that this happens the day I start looking into a hosted Wordpress service.

alexandros• 17 years ago

First Microsoft/Danger/Sidekick, then Apple, now this. We need a computing paradigm that does not suffer from single points of failiure, or at least fails more gracefully.

mseebach2• 17 years ago

You've got it. Call IBM and ask them about managed hosting. You can use the Dreamhost prices as a reference, just add 3-5 zeroes on the end.

If you buy a $500 car, never service it, and it breaks down unexpectedly, do you call for a new paradigm of personal transportation, or do you say "rats, well it was cheap and served me well while it lasted"?

Is avoiding 33 minutes of downtime worth tens of thousands of dollars to your business? Didn't think so.

nuclear_eclipse• 17 years ago

I switched from DH, where I had constant outage problems, to Slicehost and Linode, both of which have never had outages (for me), for only $15 more a month...

madaerodog2• 17 years ago

I liked this comment on their status page

"shabooty Says: I wonder if this site is hosted at media temple?"

epic

schammy• 17 years ago

Shit happens. Even Google has outages (Gmail, anyone?). Life goes on.

uriel• 17 years ago

Other than search and google.com, the reliability of Google's services is truly awful.

colbyolson2• 17 years ago

Now I know downtime is normal for a host. Yes, even Google.

But when you visit the homepage of their status-blog[1], don't you think that's a bit too many updates a little too frequently?

Or should we commend Dreamhost on being super-transparent in their network/uptime issues?

[1] http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/

colbyolson2• 17 years ago

If it's of any concern, Dreamhost is also the host for two of my websites.

madaerodog2• 17 years ago

what is funny about the status page is that it isn't a day that they don't run into an issue ..

timdorr• 17 years ago

Given the number of domains they host (nearly a million: http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/DR...), I'm shocked they don't have more outages to report. Perhaps they do. They've got enough hardware that system failures are bound to be a daily occurrence. And I'm sure software problems stack right on top of that.

dflock• 17 years ago

DH are mostly just very transparent about downtime - more so than most hosts. They are also very cheap. If you would like more nine's, you will need to pay more. MT, rackspace, etc... are all considerably more expensive.

aw3c22• 17 years ago

They are just very bad. I am so glad I moved away from them a year ago.

bcl• 17 years ago

I always appreciate transparency in support issues. I'm much happier knowing that an issue is being worked on than sitting in the dark wondering if anyone has noticed.

I also see that they host their status blog outside their core network. Good idea :)

timtrueman• 17 years ago

Semi-unrelated but if you're curious about BGP, this 2004 talk—although absurdly long—talks about some of the issues with BGP (an many other issues with hosting content on the Internet). The speaker is Tom Leighton, one of the founders of Akamai.

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/199 (BGP at ~10 minutes in)

gorm• 17 years ago

Quick fix for such a problem. Dreamhost support is pretty impressive, but sites can be a bit slow.

whirlycott1• 17 years ago

"We have our network administrator heading to the data center now and should be there in 20 minutes or so. More updates to come."

If they host a million domains, why isn't someone on site 24x7?

Retric• 17 years ago

My guess is they only have low to mid level support 24/7.

sjs• 17 years ago

Anyone with serious uptime requirements avoids DreamHost. It sounds strange considering their size but it probably just isn't really in their budget. I used to have a DH account and it's pretty good for what it is. Now I have a VPS though.

aw3c22• 17 years ago

My site was slow and support told me that this was due to the long travel the packets have to go cross-atlantic. Yeah.

st3fan• 17 years ago

"""We have our network administrator heading to the data center now and should be there in 20 minutes or so."""

Huh. He could not dial in to login to the router? No emergency DSL line for maintenance?

Dreamhost is down. All of it.

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