Whats minimum response time?

I joined dreamhost more then a month back initially I was so happy with the service but starting from 3rd jan 2009 till today 7th jan 2009 my website got down 3 times.
FIrst time it took almost 50 minutes to go up.
second time it took almost 30 minutes..
This is the third time of the outage and I have raised a ticket which got responded within 20 minutes by saying that there is nothing wrong and I can still see my website down and it's been more then 1.5 hour.

Responding to 2nd ticket the reply which says

"Sorry about this. It seems that you are on a new machine with a lot of
new users on it and they are adding and removing services at a much
faster rate than established machines. It seems someone added a user,
then deleted it and the apache crashed because it was trying to reference
a user that no longer existed. I reconfigured the apache and now it is
back up again."

I understand it happens once in a while and just 4 hour after my website is again down and is still down.

Whats the solution to it?
Am I going to get zero downtime service ever?

I don't want to move to new host now but seems like I'm left with no option as I can't tolerate another website downtime. :(

Welcome to the world of newbies on shared servers. New machines take such a hard hit from people going crazy with new accounts that it's pretty rough for everybody. The good news is that it gets better.

I had similar experiences, but it was mostly high load averages, and it *really* settled down after a few months. Now I *rarely* have an outage and I sometimes hit weeks with 100.00% uptime. It's usually 98+%, but I suspect the "downtime" is caused by too slow of a response. I can't recall that last time my server was down for the count.

-Scott

I understand and probably I'm not complaining about it and I know how the shared storage environment work.
but the only thing is if DH are including lots of new subscriber with new promo codes why dn't they increase the number of technicians so that we will get response in realtime and site downtime will be fixed as earliest as possible.
before these days I was literally very happy with there services and I even added 2 reviews for them on my website but the kind of service which I'm getting from last 3 days making me Irate and I'm sure it would have made you if you were in my condition almost 3 hour of downtime.

Anyways Now my website is up and I expect that DH staff will look into the issue and from next time they should maintain there uptime ratio.
~P@r@noid~

There's no rational way to increase the number of technicians to handle a very short term of new subscribers. It takes too long to train temps, and all of the rest of the techs are already allocated; at least I hope so, or there are a bunch of people getting paid for sitting around waiting for something to do.

I've been fortunate to not have been on a problematic server, but when there is a problem, be sure to contact support. That documents your experience and if after a reasonable amount of time, like a month, you're still having problems, ask to be put on another server.

-Scott

In reply to:

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I understand it happens once in a while and just 4 hour after my website is again down and is still down.

Whats the solution to it?

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Well, Dreamhost continues to refine their monitoring and support system over time, so I suspect that they'll improve their ability to monitor the status of apache on the shared servers given recent problems.

A lot of automated monitoring relies on coding for yesterday's problems - like the fire code where over time, the rules get written to prevent problems from recurring. It's pretty hard to predict what people will do with their accounts. Anyway, over time support gets better and the automated tools we have get better. I suspect this is the route to better uptime rather than just hiring more support staff.

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I've always been fairly happy with the response times. I do agree when there is an outage then of course they're slammed. Although, normally I usually receive a response within 4 hours. This rivals most other companies I've dealt with in the last.

For the price, I have no complaints. Good luck!