Downtime, how common is it?

I just got started with DreamHost, and although the support is great, i can't help wondering if i made a mistake.

I've only been active on my account for a couple days, and i have already seen multiple downtimes, connection issues, and general lag. Then i go to their DreamhostStatus site and i see downtime listings basically every day (though i did not go way back.. just a weekish).

So whats with this? Did i make a mistake? Is that how they can offer good deals.. with downtime hosting? At the moment, i don't have anywhere near 99% uptime. So whats the deal? Any comments from experienced users? Has this just been a bad couple of days?

From my experience it isn't normally like this. I don't do any detailed uptime monitoring of my sites, but I know it's usually more than 99%.

Downtime is suffered by all web hosting companies. DreamHost makes no specific guarantees about uptime, but it is among the best of the business. DreamHost is extraordinarily transparent about what goes on, so although the list of problems on the status blog looks a little alarming, I can assure you that it is quite typical of comparable shared hosting companies (who prefer to keep this sort of information a secret).

The last couple of days have seen specific problems relating to hardware, which is currently be looking into. Over the course of a year, I am certain that your uptime will be well over the typically-quoted number of 99%. I've been a customer with DreamHost for 3 years, and the total downtime has been a fraction of a percentage point.

Thanks for the reply guys.

I am aware all companies suffer downtime, but its just a question of how much effects me. In the case of the last few days, its all effected me.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and hopefully not feel screwed. Their support is great, but with the plan i got it sure had the feeling of "Too good to be true", then ofcourse, i get hit with the past couple days of downtime.

At the very least i have 3 months moneyback to decide. So i'll give them time.

Thanks guys, and thanks to anymore replies.

daily downtime, usually

wth?

The last 3 months or so have been particularly bad for DreamHost, compared to the previous year. I started monitoring the uptime for the site in my sig in early March and the overall uptime figures since I started monitoring look like this...

Since: March 12, 2007
Outages: 5
Total Uptime: 99.771%

Granted, the monitoring I use only checks the site at 30 minute intervals, so smaller outages might not be reported. However, I don't think the results are too bad, considering the problems experienced by DreamHost during this period.

Mark

In reply to:
daily downtime, usually

That is complete nonsense. Some servers experience more downtime than others, and it is possible that rjodwyer2 (who only became a forum member today) has just been unlucky.

Or perhaps he's one of DH's competitors? I forum troll? *gasp*

No downtime for me today at all, and after some random PHP issues which I resolved myself, I've experienced next to zero downtime. I do have an external registrar however that uses its own nameservers, but DH only recently seems to have started having problems with their DNS servers in general, and according to the status blog they've been working hard to secure a means of redundancy for even that smile

This is not atypical and you can probably count on a major outage (multiple hours of downtime) at least once a quarter. Also not atypical was the way this one is playing out: the severity levels assigned to problems are sometimes laughable and I sometimes wonder if anyone keeps an eye on things after they declare them "resolved" - you know, just to make sure.

DH's focus doesn't really seem to be on network robustness and upgrades to the network are not proactive but rather the result of "firefighting".

Sometimes the lack of redundancy is shocking.

I've long ago moved any sites that need good availability off of DH.

I registered today because i forgot my other password, i registered JUST to post that, ive been with dreamhost over 2 years and there's DAILY problems.

I have been with dreamhost for 5 years. They are a fantastic host. The DNS issues that happened today is something that can/has/will happen to other hosts.

There IS NOT daily problems with each and every server at Dreamhost, there isn't even daily problems with ONE server at DH. Dreamhost has thousands of servers...lol rjodwyer2

In reply to:
i registered JUST to post that, ive been with dreamhost over 2 years and there's DAILY problems.

You've been at a host for over 2 years, that has problems every single day?

You would either have to be lying about the problems, or just incredibly stupid to stay with a host that bad. Which is it?

No one here has had problems every day for two years.

I call shenanigans. Troll.

I've only been with dreamhost for a little under three months and have had one major slowdown of my cluster (that NFS thing from back in March), a one-day-someone-on-my-server-has-a-runaway-script-using 200% of CPU "outage" and one other slowdown/outage that I recall, and one major DNS DOS issue (I think).

I too run one of those "ping your site every 30 minutes" services and do notice periodic slowdowns where my WordPress site becomes slow for one of the pings every week or so.

One thing that everyone should keep in mind is that this a multi-clustered environment that is getting larger and larger. At some point, there will be a problem on one of the servers every day, but since the problems are spread over a larger server base, your individual chances of experiencing a problem remain the same (and hopefully go down as monitoring gets better and various architectural improvements occur).

hey guys.. just a quick question related to this DNS problem... I am sure the incoming emails are affected too because of this. Are we allowed to setup backup MX for our domains hosted through DH? Anybody have any experiece in setting that up for DH hosted websites/domains?

Downtime, how common is it?