DREAM HOST IS SLOW, don't sign up.

Dreamhost has become very unreliable lately, they have extremely slow speeds. I would not recomend signing up.

Other customers who agree with me post "agreed".

until they confirm this in public and what they are doing about it... and that it will never happen again (it has before) I would almost say I agree.

Just got 30-40KBps uploading to my FTP site.

I just figured out how they can afford to offer 1TB of transfer a month - there's no way you can move that much data at these rates.

Is it so freaking hard to give an explanation? Or are they keep luring clients with *dream* hosting options so that they can find out that it's some slow crap?

It's really annoying that they're on denial!

In reply to:
Just got 30-40KBps uploading to my FTP site.

The problem does not seem to be network wide, I just used WGET to do an upload test on my server 'Bixel' and obtained a result of a little over 1.5 MByte/s.

Connecting to download.microsoft.com[205.161.7.56]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 24,265,736 [application/x-msdownload]

100%[====================================>] 24,265,736 1.64M/s ETA 00:00

20:29:03 (1.58 MB/s) - `dotnetfx.exe' saved [24265736/24265736]

Mark

Why should I care if it's network wide? It's still pitiful, and it seems from the thread in the troubleshooting forum that I'm not the only one having problems.

In reply to:
Why should I care if it's network wide?

I was just adding information that I thought may help to pinpoint the issue. I was not trying to infer that the problem does not exist, or lessen the importance of having it fixed.

In reply to:
It's still pitiful

Agreed, I know from previous experience that these things can be extremely frustrating.

In reply to:
I'm not the only one having problems.

I didn't think you were. As I have said in other threads, there are enough people reporting speed issues to know that the problem is a very real one, across many servers.

I think DreamHost has dropped the ball somewhat on this issue, a simple statement to the effect that they know there is a problem and are working on fixing it would go a long way.

Mark

Mark,

If DH servers have asynchronous bandwidth, then there's no reason to expect upload and download speeds to be comparable. Indeed, people are having problems downloading from the servers, not uploading to them.

In reply to:
If DH servers have asynchronous bandwidth, then there's no reason to expect upload and download speeds to be comparable.

I understand this, as an ADSL user I live with this reality every day. :(

However, I was replying to grussell, who apparently was seeing exceptionally slow speeds uploading to his server.

Mark

You know, customers don't care about what speeds wget is able to acheive. They care about what speeds *they* are able to acheive. If the guy's upload max isn't 30-40kb/s, and he is able to get a higher speed on another site, then I believe DH has the responsibility of fixing the problem, or at least give a reasonable explanation of it.

Tell me if I'm wrong somewhere.

You are completely right! STOP DOING WGET TESTS! they are so dumb. Who cares if your server is connecting to dreamhost fast! My site users aren't connecting to my website through a server they are getting there through thier local ISP.

Comcast, Verizon and Patriot Media Cable are all slow connecting to dreamhost. And there are probably more, those are the ones I have tested.

In reply to:
STOP DOING WGET TESTS! they are so dumb.

In this particular case, the WGET results showed that my server at DreamHost, 'Bixel', was not subject to the upload problems reported by grussell.

Of-course, this doesn't help solve the problem experienced on his server, but it does indicate that the upload problem at least is not common to all DreamHost servers, so therefore is unlikely to be caused by DreamHost's pipes to the Internet.

DreamHost has indicated that the problems users are seeing are related to load issues on particular servers. This would explain why some DreamHost servers, such as mine, do not seem to be affected.

In reply to:
My site users aren't connecting to my website through a server they are getting there through thier local ISP.

Yes, but the traffic to your users originates from a DreamHost server, which is exactly what I was testing with the WGET command. Of-course, I didn't test download speed from 'Bixel' with WGET, but whenever I download from my sites, I see a fairly constant 150KByte/s, which is near the limit of my ADSL connection.

Mark

In reply to:
DreamHost has indicated that the problems users are seeing are related to load issues on particular servers. This would explain why some DreamHost servers, such as mine, do not seem to be affected.

Judging from the fact that there are atm 107 replies to the "Everything Slow?" thread in the General Troubleshooting forum, I'd almost say that being slow is the rule rather than the exception.

In reply to:
Judging from the fact that there are atm 107 replies to the "Everything Slow?" thread in the General Troubleshooting forum, I'd almost say that being slow is the rule rather than the exception.

Yep, agreed. The problem does appear to be widespread.

Mark

Has anybody considered the possibility that some of the thousand users that don't post here could be getting a good speed...?

I run a number of sites thru four servers and things are ok. While I see there are problems here and there I would not advise people to not sign up (on the opposite, I had as friend sign up two days ago and he is more than happy) because for years Dreamhost has been a good service and the fact a thread with this title is still here shows a way to work that I appreciate.

I hope they will resolve their problems but the fact that they are trying to grow isn't bad as itself. And while I hope they'll improve communication on these issues you must admit that 107 replies in a thread are a small number compared to the number customers that this company has.

For example: here I read about delays in account activation. My friend has been approved right away. Another friend had to wait 48 hours. But how many people are signinup and we don't know anything at all about them?
I don't think we can consider this forum as a good start for a survey. We don't represent enough people.

Another example: MySQL servers. While many people here talk about slowness of their MySQL applications blog, some very famous blogs Google sightseeing for example) are hosted on Dreamhost and I find them really fast.

So, personally I still beleive in Dreamhost. Just I hope they'll also start offering VPS services soon or later :)
Anyway for now Dreamhost service is the nearest thing to a personal (real or virtual) server you can get. And I'm not payed by them :)

107 replies is in fact the longest thread in the entire DH forums by far. While there certainly are happy customers who haven't posted, there are also unhappy customers who haven't posted.

But anyway, simple solution: DH has a 97 day money back guarantee. Sign up and see if it works for you. If it does, good. If it doesn't, ask for a refund and look elsewhere.

It still takes time to signup but you're right there is a guarantee and from what I have read they are very good at honouring it.

I have been following many of the posts in these forums about slow response times from our servers. A few servers still have issues with high loads, but this problem is not system wide. Also, our network is not saturated, nor are our uplinks.

We would like to ask everyone that is experiencing slow speeds to please send in a traceroute to support. We're hoping that this will help to isolate a problem (a common link in the path for instance).

To run a traceroute in Windows:

- Open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> type 'cmd' and click ok)
- Type 'tracert yourdomain.com' and press enter

To run a traceroute in OS X:

- Open a terminal
- Type 'traceroute yourdomain.com' and press enter

Please entitle your message "Traceroute - slow load times" and send it to support@dreamhost.com.

Thanks!
Patrick

In reply to:
A few servers still have issues with high loads, but this problem is not system wide. Also, our network is not saturated, nor are our uplinks.

Hi Patrick and thanks for the update, I am sure it is much appreciated by those experiencing problems.

As my server ('Bixel') does not seem to be affected, I didn't think the issue was system wide or related to DreamHost's upstream links.

But, as a said in a previous post, given the number of users experiencing the speed issues, it does seem like more than a few boxes are affected.

Anyway, I am sure that, with some user input, DreamHost will isolate the boxes affected and the problems will be resolved.

Mark

It could be NFS. The NFS system is on its own network and it could be network congestion on that or an issue with distributing the load on the NFS.

digitalrundown.com
Promo Code: WJD97 - $97.00 off any new DreamHost plan (except month-month payments).

In reply to:
Judging from the fact that there are atm 107 replies to the "Everything Slow?" thread

Just remember that 107 replies doesn't equal 107 unhappy posters. A lot of the posts are from the same people.

If most people are actually happy the thread would have died a long time ago like many other threads. As things are right now, it keeps growing (112 now). Maybe some are from the same people. But other threads also had many posts from the same people. It's just no use trying to cover the fact, which is that a lot of people are experiencing slowness on their sites one way or another.

However, since a DH staff member responded to both this and the other thread, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and hope people will start seeing improvements.

In reply to:
If most people are actually happy the thread would have died a long time ago like many other threads.

How do you figure that? If most people weren't happy, there would be a lot more than 107 replies and they'd be from a lot more people than there are posting in that thread.

I'm not saying that there isn't a problem--just that the size of it doesn't seem to be as big as some think.

The point being that 100+ replies aren't from 100+ people. If I start a thread that says, "Dreamhost is perfect and never had a single problem," it wouldn't be true... even if I replied to it 500 times.

I'm sure the problem exists. Did anyone say it doesn't? But a thread with 107 or 112 replies from a few people doesn't mean that someone shouldn't sign up with a company that has thousands of happy customers.

Dreamhost isn't perfect, but it would be silly to think that a thread with "don't sign up" in the title wouldn't be challenged by people that aren't having problems and are actually happy here.

In reply to:
I'm sure the problem exists. Did anyone say it doesn't? But a thread with 107 or 112 replies from a few people doesn't mean that someone shouldn't sign up with a company that has thousands of happy customers.

Since when have I said not sign up? If you read my posts above you'll see I said "try for yourself since there's a money back guarantee". And have you even checked slightly how long the next longest thread is? In the "General Troubleshooting" forum (which is the largest forum btw), the next longest thread has 29 replys. There is indeed quite a difference between 112 and 29.

Indeed, I was looking at the forums of my new host, and realized that there are next to no negative threads, or at least all negative threads were resolved in a positive way very quickly. This is indeed quite in stark contrast to this forum.

And remind me why we are doing a scientific analysis of thread length again? Why don't we both just agree that there are fairly major problems that DH has to get fixed.

In reply to:
Since when have I said not sign up?

I said it's in the title of the thread--not that you said it.

In reply to:
And have you even checked slightly how long the next longest thread is? In the "General Troubleshooting" forum (which is the largest forum btw), the next longest thread has 29 replys. There is indeed quite a difference between 112 and 29.

Actually, the word association thread has 321 replies, so apparently DH has a major problem with word association.

In reply to:
Indeed, I was looking at the forums of my new host, and realized that there are next to no negative threads, or at least all negative threads were resolved in a positive way very quickly. This is indeed quite in stark contrast to this forum.

This is a user-to-user forum, which is (or at least should be) known to everyone here. If a DH employee happens to post here, great, but this is not where support issues are addressed.

At least DH leaves the negative threads, which they could very easily delete. Do you think that all hosts do the same?

In reply to:
And remind me why we are doing a scientific analysis of thread length again?

I'm the one that said the number of replies in a thread are meaningless. But if the number is as meaningful as some seem to think, then I just proved that a game of word association is more important than any problems that some users are currently having.

In reply to:
Why don't we both just agree that there are fairly major problems that DH has to get fixed.

I haven't seen enough to say it's a major problem--only enough to say it's a major problem for those that it affects. If the server next to mine self-destructs, it's only a major problem for the people on that server, not for the people on the tons of other servers surrounding it.

I'm sure DH will resolve the problem no matter how tiny or huge it is.

I've gotta say, i e-mailed DH's sales team regarding the slowness, and they didn't take longer than 24 hours to answer... They asked me to point out the slowness i was talking about, and i referred them to the thread in the general troubleshoting board.

Overall, i'll be happy to join in a while, when they isolate the problem :)

Edited by Ziggy on 03/02/06 07:18 AM (server time).

Good news everybody!

First though, some bad news. It was bad news that it took us so long (possibly as long as 3 weeks) to really recognize this was a system-wide problem and to begin to narrow down the cause.

The good news is, we believe the slowness affecting some servers has been fixed for good as of right now!

It turned out that the ether channel between our core1 and core2 routers was maxing out at 1Gbps. This was weird to us because it should have been able to hit 3GBps, but for some reason wasn't.. and it wasn't dropping packets either like you'd normally see when a port becomes saturated.

It turned out the router card itself could only handle 1Gbps, even though it had 3 gige links going out of it! And, it was just queueing up packets rather than dropping them.. resulting in slowness overall for people on servers using core2 as their primary router.

We now switched to using our fiber channel cards which DO support over 1Gbps and things look okay. Right now it's doing about 1.6Gbps.

We're really sorry about this ongoing issue, and we're really happy it should be fixed now! If anybody could verify things seem better now from their side it'd make us feel more secure about our fix too!

Thanks!

josh!

YES! its working great now! 250 -400kbps again! YAY!

I can release a new video on my website tonight!

Here testing from europe gives me about 300KB/s (captial B = Bytes) so about 2.5Mb/s good enough for a shared host.

It's great that you fixed it but how could it take so long to figure out? I'm on Catalina which was affected. I can't say for sure.. Maybe it's just my luck but it just feels like everything's unstable here at DH.

I could have loved this place just as much as the next guy but crap like this I can't ignore. Especially when I'm a new member so I'm moving on. Good luck everyone.

-Joon
{ dvessel }

I think we've all been bitching here in the forum for weeks. Please check the forum more often DH'ers.

Nice to know you found something though. Back to work everybody.

Thanks for the feedback Josh, good to hear you guys have found the problem, must have been like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

In reply to:
Dreamhost has become very unreliable lately, they have extremely slow speeds.

DreamHost has been fast for me. No speed problem for my website.

I recommend people ignore the thread title and sign up if interested. DreamHost is very good value for money.

DREAM HOST IS SLOW, don't sign up.