Curious about Lack of Support

I am curious about the lack of support. My VPS has been down for over 8 hours. All I can do is submit a support ticket. No once has yet even responded much less resolved the problem.

Normally DH answers your support tickets as soon as they know what the problem is and have it solved, even if it takes a few hours.

Jan

I'd change *curious* to furious - the majority of VPS users have been completely ignored for 48 hours - FORTY-eight!

Amazing, the amateur freak show that is DH can't even get their sh*t together for 48 hours.

In reply to:

---

I'd change *curious* to furious - the majority of VPS users have been completely ignored for 48 hours - FORTY-eight!

Amazing, the amateur freak show that is DH can't even get their sh*t together for 48 hours.

---

From whence do you speak so authoritatively?

My server is fine, as is everyone else I know who has a VPS at Dreamhost. Admittedly, that's only one person, but hey, at least I'm forthcoming about that fact.

Now seriously. I doubt your support ticket has been completely ignored. As Jan said in the reply four hours before yours, Dreamhost has what I think is the bad practice of not responding to your support ticket acknowledging the problem until they've fully investigated and solved the problem. This means that you're left thinking that they're ignoring you when they're actually working hard to fix your problem.

I hope you don't ignore my post as you've ignored Jan's. And I do hope both your and Tom's problems are resolved as quickly as possible. Were these problems due to their reconfiguration of their servers? Was it a result of the server naming change or was it the change to PS servers using raid 10 from raid 6? Or was it just some other unfortunate problem?

Use the 3DOM50 promo code for 3 extra lifetime domains and $50 off
More Dreamhost coupons here!

Affiliate troll...

I speak with the same authority as DH as it is THEY that provided this information:

>>>>>>>
Hello,

There was a **** large scale issue **** with our Private Servers this morning that unfortunately seemed to affect your PS as well.

I actually understand how frustrating this must be. I host my personal sites on a Private Server here and I've been none too thrilled that they've been intermittent thru the morning and early afternoon.

Anyhow, our admin team has been great about posting updates on this issue to our status blog (BS - last 'update' was 32-hours ago!!!!). The entry for this issue has all of the gruesome details of what's been happening, so I suggest you check it out when you have a moment.

http://dreamhoststatus.com/2008/11/21/private-server-host-instability/

I'm also quite sorry that I had to use an impersonal canned message in order to respond to you. ***The volume of support that has come in because of this issue has been ****absolutely staggering*** - so a bulk reply was really the only way to effectively get back in touch with everyone seeing problems.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

BTW. this was sent out 12-hours after the complete outage started (not intermittent) and NO-one has received a response in the last 36-hours. That's a total of FORTY EIGHT hours downtime affecting HUNDREDS of VPS servers. DH just walked away for the weekend. No response, no support, nothing.

If you can't help, save your breath and do not question people who obviously are far better informed than you are.

Your website works fine, but by all means yell at other customers.




How To Install PHP.INI / ionCube on DreamHost

It works intermittently at best - on condition that I reboot the server every 20-minutes and crank the RAM to an ungodly amount.

The fact of the matter is that DH, true to form, walked away for the weekend knowing there was a major ongoing outage. Read their email and read the status post here: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/11/21/private-server-host-instability/

When you made your first post earlier this evening, I checked your site and it was up for me and running fine. It still is.

Obviously you are frustrated that you didn't get the attention you feel you should have gotten, and you have the right to feel that way. That said, you did receive the communication that you shared above, and your site is now online and functioning. What exactly is it that you want to hear from support about the situation at this point? Let me know, and I'll pass that on for you!

And by the way, I can assure you that DreamHost did not "walk away for the weekend" - there are technicians on duty 24/7/365. Granted, they may have prioritized replying to you about your functioning site lower than working on the sites of those users who are still down, and communicating with them, but to say that "NO-one has received a response in the last 36-hours", is just not true. It's highly likely that those whose sites are back up, and have had a response during that time, have better things to do than post status blog comments, but who knows ...

What is for certain is that you know not of what you speak when you claim no one has had a response in 36 hours.

--rlparker
--DreamHost Tech Support

No what is certain is that DH totally dropped the ball ... read the 175 posts on the status post - are you saying all these people don't know what they're talking about?

If you're a DH support tech, you can check my outstanding tickets.

DH tickets: #2800870, #2800215 & #2799582

See this Digg post for a similar story from another users:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Dreamhost_EPIC_FAIL

Dozens of other VPS users have also posted similar tales of zero response from support.

And for the record, less than half my site is functioning - several WP installs are still completely inaccessible and offline and have been that way for 48-hours.

Well, so much for you being informed!

As I stated earlier, the fact is that DH did not "walk away for the weekend", and repeating that misstatement a dozen times won't make it any more true than it was the first time you made it.

Here is some information for you; just a friendly "heads up" here! I can see that you have put a lot of work, into your *********.com site (nice job, btw), so I just want to warn you that you are running a highly insecure and exploitable version of WordPress. From your source code (using only "view source" from the browser):

In reply to:

---

meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.5.1"

---

This version is very easily exploited, and I wanted you to be aware of this so you don't find your site destroyed when some miscreant, or script searching for such exploitable sites, visits.

The current version of WordPress is 2.6.3, and you really should upgrade to this version as soon as possible. I'd have sent this to you privately via PM, but you have elected not to receive private messages.

--rlparker
--DreamHost Tech Support

There is no doubt that the VPS situation is dire, and the status blog makes that clear - you'll get no argument from me on that. And I did see your comment on Digg along with the others on the status blog.

I'm sorry to hear that you still have support requests pending, and as I said in my earlier post I will pass that on for you!

--rlparker
--DreamHost Tech Support

I'm sorry for the delay you have experienced in receiving responses to these support requests. While I was "off duty" when I saw your forum posts, I have logged into the support system to research your situation.

Of course I am sorry that your server was down. This was the result of a widespread issue, as reported on our status blog, and, while each of your support requests was not individually addressed, you were notified of the status of your server by our support staff in a previous email to you about this situation.

Your site is now back online, and has been so for at least 7 hours now. I have personally checked the operation of your site, and that of each of your databases, and all are performing properly at this time.

As for communications, your frustration not withstanding, please refrain from using foul and abusive expletives in communicating with our support technicians. We are happy to help you but our people will not be subjected to the language you chose to use in your last support request. The fact that your site is actually up and running, while some others' are not, coupled with your language in your support request, is probably why no one had answered you with a personal message until I did. Frankly, given that language, it's not surprising that the technicians on duty elected to answer other users before they answered you.

You said in your Forum post above:

In reply to:

---

"And for the record, less than half my site is functioning - several WP installs are still completely inaccessible and offline and have been that way for 48-hours."

---

None of your support requests have indicated a problem with any site other than the single site you have hosted under the account from which you filed your support requests, and there is no indication in your support history that you have any other site(s) hosted at DreamHost.

If you have other sites/accounts where you are having issues, please indicate that in a new support request, and I, or another technician, will research those problems and do our best to get all of your sites working again.

--rlparker
--DreamHost Tech Support

It's good to know that *at least* on this forum we get to receive some replies.

My site, on private server, has been down for 48 hours by now. It's still down.

I sent three emails, and all I got was a generic standard email.

Do you really think this is a fair and professional way of behaving?

At least it's not just me. My site has been down for 24 hours now. No response or resolution yet.

If they don't reply by tomorrow morning (when the site will have been down for 72 hours), I'll move everything to Godaddy. For real.

Surely, you can do better than GoDaddy. I really like it here, but once in a while, something blows up big. If you're going to jump ship, make sure you research your new hosting provider.

-Scott

Today any option is better than a hosting service which gives no explanation for 2 days off and doesn't even respond to emails.

Emegerncies can occurr anywhere, but what I expect is AT LEAST that you reply to me.

I've been down for over three days. The only response I have received to one of my support tickets is the "We're moving it to another ticketbox".

Hey, computer issues are hard to fix, sure - I would just like some honesty as to acknowledging that there is a huge problem that persists.

Support Tickets:
#2802386
#2801684
#2800401

Support response time is terrible! I have been a customer since 2002 and am thinking about leaving dreamhost b/c of the support issue. The fact that if your site is down or your e mail is down and you have no way to call them or have them fix an emergency issue within a few hours is terrible. I used to pay the same price at another place before witching to dreamhost and they had a number you could call with issues that needed to be dealt with in a time sensitive manor.

Hey guys, I'll add my two pence...

I've been using DH for more than 4 years (could be 5 or even more - time is flying :). The shared hosting service they provide is great. Once I've switched to DH I never considered changing the hosting provider.

About a month ago I switched to PS (private servers) - both MySQL and Web Server. A few glitches during the transition - log rotation settings, and postfix config, but support response was within 24 hours and problems were fixed.

Here is some info about DH response time - when I look back at the last 5 support requests (all for private servers), response time has been between 9 - 14 hours.

Now, the problems are with the stability of DH Private Servers. For the last month our web site has been down twice - on the 6th November 2008 (downtime 5 hours and a reboot fixed the issue) and on the 22nd November 2008 (for 30 hours - MySQL server down). And it's not the resources which I've assigned (about twice than the average usage).

More than 30 hours downtime per month is unacceptable for a serious web site and I can blame only myself for putting all the eggs in one basket.

The effect of the last downtime was quite sobering. I researched VPS providers and I am currently evaluating VPSLINK - so far so good (actually I like them very much) but it's been only a couple of days. I will evaluate also RIMUHOSTING and share the results too.

For the present moment I am still keeping DreamHost as the primary hosting provider but the next time there is a downtime I am planning to set them as a backup or simply drop them from the list.

Bottom line - swearing won't solve the problem. Look around and be prepared :)

I hope this post will be helpful to the guys that search the forum, before they make their mind whether to switch to DH Private Servers.

Regards,

Dean


NetoMeter Edited by didocus on 11/25/08 03:46 PM (server time).