Historical uptime

Hi. I've been considering DreamHost for some time, as so many of your customers seem to be outspoken fans. Now that you've revamped prices and added features, DreamHost looks like a fantastic value. So, my only remaining question is this: what has your uptime been (as a percentage, days down, whatever) over the past year? I'm currently with Hostway, and while I'm tiring of their continually weakening customer service, they basically never go down.

Thanks in advance.

The historical downtimes got reset when they changed to the new control panel, but I'm showing 99.60% uptime for http, 99.85% for smtp and pop3, 99.83% for telnet, 99.83%
for ftp since then on my largest site, very similar numbers for other sites.

That includes planned downtime. Among other things, they recently *physically* moved from one computer room to another. Planned downtime usually occurs in the wee hours of the morning when my users and all other sane people are asleep.

I wish I had that kind of reliability in my telephone, electric, and cable TV service, but hey, they're monopolies. Dreamhost has to *hustle* to keep webmasters happy - and while not perfect, they've done pretty good for my sites.

Thanks, Deke. One point of clarification: the phrase "computer room" makes me extemely nervous. I assume you mean datacenter? If we're just talking computer rooms (as in the back closet of someone's office), that doesn't bode well.

Not to worry.

Dreamhost offices are in Huntington Beach, IIRC, and their servers are physically located in Marina Del Rey. Since the IP netblock my servers use is assigned to SoftAware (who has a Marina Del Rey address), I assume that they are in what you young whippersnappers would call a data center.

I started programming in 1969, and it's still "computer room" to me. It's not like I'm not the only old geezer either; I've gotten core dumps from CGI abends, even though they haven't made computers with ferrite core memory in three decades.

"Back in the good old days, we didn't have computer languages. We had to program in 1s and 0s. And sometimes, when memory was tight, we had to program just using 0s."

Ahhh... gotcha! Thanks, Deke. :)

deke,

I do think we have pretty good uptime, but recently I became suspicious that those panel numbers may not be very accurate, or at least they don't show what I thought. A few days ago we had email problems, and I saw RED/DOWN on the panel, but a couple days later the 7-day uptime was back to 100%. Now, maybe they are not using a running 7-day average (rather Wed-Wed or something), but it made me wonder.

Also, DH just yesterday announced a ~half our Network Disruption unplanned outage due to their upstream provider, but this also does not seem to be reflected in the 7-day average.

So, I'm not saying the uptime is not good, but I don't know what those panel status numbers are really saying. So, I wouldn't put too much stake in them right now.

Cheers,

Following up...

Our email uptime was reset because we were moved to a new server.

If problems are outside DH's data centers, then they don't count as downtime.

Uptime is tracked for the server and its services "working", not for particular customer or site history. So, (in theory) a site could be down due to setup or other problems, but the server could still be "up."

Statistics are somewhat unreliable (damn lies) , but they're the best we have.

I think DH has relatively good uptime, but I was previously an atHome customer.

Here was a recently slashdotted article about costs and difficulties of high uptime.

Cheers,

Bob S.