Worst hosting company I have ever worked with

Turned off our service with one day notice citing a script that was consuming too much CPU which had been running fine for 6 months.
Asked them to turn it back on.
3 days later finally turned the DNS back on
However they removed all our files so the service still doesn't work
Customer service responds in days and it is now 5 days since our service was down and we still don't have a resolution

Hm....

Fortunately, I don't get those problems so far. How many hosting company you ever had before ? And why you switched to DH ?

Dino

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Turned off our service with one day notice citing a script that was consuming too much CPU which had been running fine for 6 months.

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Yeah, it sucks when a script runs amok on a shared server . Good Luck, I hope you get it sorted sooner rather than later.

Do you have a question, or need any help, or just expressing your frustration?

--rlparker

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Turned off our service with one day notice citing a script that was consuming too much CPU which had been running fine for 6 months.

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1. Have you verified that it was a well-behaving script that wasn't using too much CPU?
2. Did you recently experience an uptick in popularity that triggered the extra CPU? I mean after all, an inefficient script that is only called once a day is very different from an inefficient script that is called once a second.
3. Did you write the script yourself or is it part of a package? If the latter, what script is it?

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Asked them to turn it back on.
3 days later finally turned the DNS back on
However they removed all our files so the service still doesn't work

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Did you tell them that you were going to rework the scripts to play nice on shared hosting? If you just intend to turn on a script that support feels has a deleterious effect on your shared server, they're unlikely to just leave you in a position to do so easily.

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Customer service responds in days and it is now 5 days since our service was down and we still don't have a resolution

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Being down is an awful situation and I feel for you. Are you looking for advice on how to:
1. improve your working relationship with DreamHost support?
2. optimize the script in question or find an alternative?
3. determine if DreamHost support was correct in their assessment of the impact of your script?
4. proactively monitor your resource utilization to prevent this from happening again?

BTW, I know I'll get slammed for this, but *if* this script was having a bad effect on the server, then shutting it down until it can be fixed is just the right thing to do to help those folks like da1prophet over in over in this thread in the General Troubleshooting forum. Was this script getting hit a lot between 10am EDT and 3pm EDT? It's a long shot!

Anyway, I do feel for you in this situation and hope it works out. Let us know if you need any advice on how to proceed or with debugging and optimization, etc.

Well if your service gets popular then would be concerned.

I have been using hosting services since 1992 when there were about 4.

They were recommended by a consultant we were working with

Yeah but I doubt that is the case It is more likely the site got popular. We would have been happy to move to another server or a dedicated server but we were given a DAY and then they shut it off!

Can't verify what isn't runnin. Ran for 6 months just fine. Could be getting more traffic, but would have been thrilled to pay or a upgrade had we been given the choice

I would love to know how to get someone on the phone. We could probably resolve this in 10 min. No one answers the phone as far as we can tell

Another consideration is security. Check your access logs, if it was a brute force attack or bot then that should clear your site as the cause of the problem. A lot of the malicious spiders and other bots are poorly developed, if it gets stuck on something it can easily end up in a loop. It doesn't clear your account but should remove any concern about restoring your files.

If your site supports user uploads, posting scripts, or in some cases images, then check the raw logs. DH should give you access to the backup to download for local testing, rip it apart and figure out what happened.

I can't think of anything else, beyond the suggestions above.


-MegaBurn

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Turned off our service with one day notice citing a script that was consuming too much CPU

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That's horrible! They should have just let it go, so the hundreds of other users on the server could be here posting threads like this!

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I would love to know how to get someone on the phone.

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Talk about an odd coincidence... they don't offer phone support and you can't get support on the phone.

If your account comes with call-backs, you could request one of those. Otherwise, it's ticket-only.

They didn't say it was impacting anyone else nor did they provide documentation as to how much CPU.

As I said we would have fixed or paid for it to be moved to another server had we gotten the chance!

No you can't get *anyone* on the phone even someone to get us a better server.

Yeah the ticket system works great we are now on day 5.

Given how helpful everyone else has been on these boards I am surprised by your attiude and approach. Do you work for DH?

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They didn't say it was impacting anyone else

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If it's hogging the CPU, then it IS affecting other users. That's why it's called shared hosting.

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No you can't get *anyone* on the phone even someone to get us a better server.

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And you think that seems to clash with their no phone support policy?

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Do you work for DH?

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I guess I must if I don't say exactly what you want to hear, right?

(Free Clue: No, I don't work there.)

You get to use the same ticket system as everyone else, unless you upgrade your plan through the panel to one that includes call-backs. Saying you want to chat on the phone doesn't change anything.

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They didn't say it was impacting anyone else nor did they provide documentation as to how much CPU.

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How about? http://wiki.dreamhost.com/CPU_Reduction
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/CPU_Resources_FAQ

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As I said we would have fixed or paid for it to be moved to another server had we gotten the chance!

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You had a chance... your site is offline, but your logs are live... you can analize them to see what was happening... also if the cpu log was active, you will know what was eating the cpu... I think we need to read some of the wiki and forum threads that talks extensive about cpu usage.

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No you can't get *anyone* on the phone even someone to get us a better server.

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Well in the comparison table when you sign up is stated that there is no phone support... so you got what you pay.

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Yeah the ticket system works great we are now on day 5.

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If you provide same info as here in the forum Im not surprised not having answers on five days...

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Given how helpful everyone else has been on these boards I am surprised by your attiude and approach. Do you work for DH?

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No, but I get surprised every week with people that signs up, expecting using things like vbulleting or other some intensive cpu script on a 9USD shared hosting... that offers no phone support...

And the ticket system really works, but one need to provide as much information as possible... DH in fact provides no support for 3rd party script, provides hosting... so all these info you're asking to DH, you must know on beforehand!

Regards.

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citing a script that was consuming too much CPU

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What did your script actually do?

Again no proof and no data was provided this is just what they claimed. BTW there are lots of technologies for throttling CPU usage in a shared VM environment is there some reason you don't use them?

No I think it clashes with an emergency situation where someone's business has been impacted and quick phone call would have yielded new business for you guys, but clearly that isn't of interest

No you must because your attitude and lack of respect for your customers is clearly common at DH. Just yesterday we got another email where the tech tried to claim that DH didn't take us out of DNS they just shut off the offending service. Of course we have records that show otherwise.

We finally got someone who could help and we paid the $69 to spin up a *brand* new service which is what they told us to do. Of course that was yesterday and we are still waiting a response back on moving over to that service. I should also note we offered the solution of moving us to another service so we could troubleshoot on Tues the day they said they were going to turn it off and recieved (big surprise) no reply


You should consider the fact that a customer must be pretty desperate for help to reach out to the discussion boards in hopes someone from the company sees this and makes it a priority. Of course to recieve snide and rude comments like yours just reinforces my point the worst hosting company I have ever worked with, by far and lest you think I have no experience in this area I was part of The Little Garden the first ISP in San Francisco.

What chance did we have? We got notification one day before they turned it off.

We said we will do whatever makes sense and we filed several tickets and only yesterday got someone who said here is what we can do to resolve the situation. Had someone said "all we can do is move it to a dedicated machine" we would have said okay! Lets see that is 5 minuts of phone support for a $395 sale.

We would have been happy to pay for phone support and just yesterday I paid for an entirely new service just to get this resolved. Payment isn't the issue we just need the opportunity to do so.

As I said before the script was running fun for 6 months

DreamHost doesn't offer phone support - you should have been fully aware of this when you signed up. Failure to do proper research in your hosting company beforehand is not your hosting company's fault - it's yours. Don't bother to mention phone support ever again in this discussion thread, you're only disproving your other points further by doing so.

To me it sounds like you need to use a completely different hosting provider if you feel that phone support will get things resolved sooner. I suggest, instead of continuing to pay for a service that doesn't offer what you want, put some research into a company that does offer it and go with them. Your complaining here about no phone service and DreamHost's answering your request, only tells me you're an extremely impatient individual who'd be better off with a different service that caters to such needs specifically.

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You should consider the fact that a customer must be pretty desperate for help to reach out to the discussion boards in hopes someone from the company sees this and makes it a priority. Of course to recieve snide and rude comments like yours just reinforces my point the worst hosting company I have ever worked with, by far and lest you think I have no experience in this area I was part of The Little Garden the first ISP in San Francisco.

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Hey, it's important to realize that the responses here aren't from DreamHost support, but just from other customers.

I'm glad things seem to be working out better for you - and I'm glad that your site itself has gotten more popular and hope that you've been able to monetize its popularity (though that's obviously not the only benefit to popularity).

Actually, the solution you seem to be converging towards does point to a possible DreamHost suggestion: "Flag your account for auto-upgrade to dedicated hosting if excess CPU utilization is noticed". Here's an unlinked url for suggestions in the panel.
https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=home.sugg

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Again no proof and no data was provided this is just what they claimed.

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They're the boss. Don't like it, start your own hosting company and show them how it's done.

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some reason you don't use them?

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Maybe because we're customers--not Dreamhost? This is a customer forum.

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No I think it clashes with an emergency situation

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Again, does it clash with a crystal clear "NO PHONE SUPPORT" policy? That's three simple words--which one is throwing you off? Let me guess... the short one in the beginning?

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where someone's business has been impacted and quick phone call would have yielded new business for you guys, but clearly that isn't of interest

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Your business isn't important. If it was, its existence wouldn't rely 100% on a single shared hosting account. That's common sense.

New business for me? Really? Wow, I didn't know you were going to start sending me money, based on Dreamhost's phone policy. Wow!

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No you must because your attitude and lack of respect for your customers is clearly common at DH.

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So if a Dreamhost tech get frustrated dealing with an idiot, then anyone on the planet that doesn't like idiots is automatically a DH employee? So THAT'S how they got to be such a huge company!

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You should consider the fact that a customer must be pretty desperate for help to reach out to the discussion boards

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Or you could consider the fact that communicating with them more clearly through the proper support channels would have gotten you further, faster. Or maybe the thousands of us other customers just totally luck out? Yeah, that must be it.

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Of course to recieve snide and rude comments like yours just reinforces my point the worst hosting company I have ever worked with,

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Unlike DH staff, we aren't getting paid to deal with idiots. If you want to say stupid stuff and not get called out for it, then stick with private support tickets. I guess "PUBLIC FORUM" is almost as complicated as "NO PHONE SUPPORT," so I can see why you're so confused.

And if you really think they're the worst company in the world, then doesn't staying here and upgrading to an even more expensive plan kinda make you a brain-dead imbecile?

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and lest you think I have no experience in this area I was part of The Little Garden the first ISP in San Francisco.

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As what, a janitor? All that means to me is that they appear to hire people that can barely read. Did you really think a previous job position had magical powers to remove stupidity from everything you say?

George Bush's job is a little more important than yours was. So, using your logic, every single thing he has ever said has been brilliant. Right? How about Al Gore? Another genius? I guess he really did invent the internet, considering he's had important jobs before!

I can't wait to see how brilliant your next post is. I wonder if you'll mention phone support again, which has nothing to do with anything here. The suspense is killing me!!!

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DreamHost doesn't offer phone support

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I think it's important to note that though you can't call them, you can get them to call you:

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While we do offer 24 hour technical support via e-mail, sometimes you just need to talk to a human being. We've all been there. We're happy to announce that most of our hosting plans include a varying number of monthly callbacks that you can request every time you submit a support request. Maybe you work late hours and are only home (and awake!) from 2am to 5am. Not a problem. When you request a callback, YOU tell US when we'll call, not the other way around! Please note that at this time callbacks are limited to our US customers.

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This is the main reason I'd considering upgrading to a Level 3 account. Hmm. I wonder if they'd consider making it a promo-codable extra (not that I could take advantage of it ofr myself)? I bet people would consider it pretty valuable!

Nice now we are to calling people stupid and saying my business "isn't important" take note anyone who is considering DH this is the attitude even some customers have, wow.

On hosting it on a shared server we didn't have any idea how popular it would be now we know and we would have been willing to move it to a dedicated server to support it.

Sorry if there is some confusion I understand they don't offer phone support as a part of our package. I do have a problem with a situation where the ticket system has clearly failed i.e. we are now on day 6 and so it seems some way to talk to someone in emergency situations would be a big benefit. We did finally get a ticket yesterday where they spelled out here is what you need to do to resolve this. Why that couldn't have happened on Tues is beyond me.

I am paying for the service because I thought the quickest thing to do would be to move to a new service at DH. Clearly I was wrong.

TLG w as co-op I didn't work there it was only meant to point out I have some experience in this area which involved building and hosting sites on small and large ISPs. You claiming this is an attempt to make what I say sound brilliant is ridiculous.

Anyway I am sure you will get your wish those who want reasonable turn around on their tickets and helpful answers to their questions will go elsewhere.

BTW I just found this... Perhaps our site was impacted by this.


We have detected what appears to be the exploit of a number of accounts belonging to DreamHost customers, and it appears that your account was one of those affected.
We’re still working to determine how this occurred, but it appears that a 3rd party found a way to obtain the password information associated with approximately 3,500 separate FTP accounts and has used that information to append data to the index files of customer sites using automated scripts (primarily for search engine optimization purposes).
Our records indicate that only roughly 20% of the accounts accessed - less than 0.15% of the total accounts that we host—actually had any changes made to them. Most accounts were untouched.

Good call thanks for the info. It would also be nice if in a situation like this they would offer the upgrade.

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those who want reasonable turn around on their tickets and helpful answers to their questions will go elsewhere.

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There are all kinds of reasons why some may go elsewhere, not the least of which is that "elsewhere" may well be the appropriate place for them to host certain sites. Also, some need more "attention" than others, and want telephone support. That's cool, they should make those decisions and go "elsewhere".

I've hosted here for eight years, and I have *always* enjoyed:

1) Reasonable turnaround on my support tickets

2) Helpful answers to my questions.

--rlparker

Right. You just "found" that where exactly? In your email, or on the web "in the wild"? If it was in your email, and you just now found that, you have not been paying attention.

If you found it elsewhere, then you were almost certainly not impacted. It is trivially simple to tell if your were impacted by this - take a look at your files and logs.

At any rate, the effects of that intrusion only manifested themselves as spam links inserted in index* files - which has less than nothing to do with the problem(s) *you* describe encountering.

Bring that up in the context of this discussion is just ignorant.

--rlparker

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It is trivially simple to tell if your were impacted by this - take a look at your files and logs.

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Also, from the command line:

last <username>

Some accounts were logged into, but no changes were made.

Free unique IP and $67 off with promo code FLENSFREEIP67 or use FLENS97 for $97 off. Click here for more optionsEdited by lensman on 06/24/07 11:42 AM (server time).

On the web.


I wasn't saying this exact thing impacted us. When accounts are taken over there are lots of different things that can be done. Just because this was the first manifestation of the account takeovers doesn't mean it is the last.

It isn't ignorant can you prove that there aren't other things they did?

As a potential customer reading this I'm starting to second guess signing up. No phone support is fine, but poor responsiveness to support tickets is a big problem. There is no excuse for not responding if they actually received the ticket. The notion DH can suspend an account with 24 hour notice then not respond to the customer's follow-up for 5 days is very troubling. There is no excuse for not replying to a support ticket unless some sort of announcement is made to say they cannot reply for whatever reason.

To be completely clear:
-- Did DH respond at all to your support ticket? Asking for more details or telling you to do something specific is a response. Just saying they are working on it, or will get back to you later, or they are checking on it is only a valid a response if they both give and meet a reasonable time frame (not 5 days for something which should take a few minutes).
-- When DH gave you notice the site would be suspended, did you reply before it was suspended or after?

I just want to make sure their policy is consistent. Just sounding reasonable is meaningless if in practice its inconsistent or worse. This can be a quick case study to that effect.

Has anyone else had problems like this?


-Burn

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It isn't ignorant

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Ok, I'm sorry if you took the "ignorant" description personally - but it *is* ignorant to even suggest that issue might be related to your problems. I say this because:

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can you prove that there aren't other things they did?

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Of course I can (on an account I have access to), as can you! From my earlier post: "It is trivially simple to tell if you were impacted by this - take a look at your files and logs." Looking at your files and logs will show your *whatever* was done (yes, even if something other than the present manifestation took place! doh!)

--rlparker

I can not speak to the OPs experiences with support, but as a customer of three years now I have always received quick and helpful support replies.

Also as a member of this discussion board for three years as well I can say that this is not the norm for support. As long as you can play well on a shred server you'll be fine. Playing well means that you monitor your site usage - traffic as well as CPU usage.

You also need to understand that this is shared hosting and it will go done from time to time. Down time may be a few min to a couple of hours - it doesn't happen very often at all, but it will happen. If that's not acceptable you need to look at dedicated hosting.

DH tries to move customers who are using too much CPU time and slowing down a server to "limbo" servers where they have a month to either tone down the scripts or move to other hosting (dedicated or an other company). If the script is simply crashing the server, generally the only choice is to disabled the offending server and then notify the customer. It seems that the OP got something half way between these two options - a day notice to fix things on his own and then the offending service was disabled.

Hope this helps. If you have more general questions (not relating to this incident) you'll probably be best off creating a new thread.



--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

Hi,

We responded as soon as we got the notification and asked that they please not turn the service off and that we were happy to move/upgrade to resolve the issue.

The result was they turned off not only the service but took us out of DNS i.e. the DNS recorded was obliterated. They have since turned DNS back on 3 days after turning off the service.

They have an auto responder to all tickets so yes we got an auto response to every ticket.

The problem is in the follow up and qualiy of the response. Up until yesterday we were basically told tough luck until it was finally moved from a junior tech person to someone who could help, that took 4 days! Yesterday they suggested we open a new account which we did that afternoon and then provided all the info the tech requested. It is now 12pm and we are still waiting for a response.

There are periodic threads of this nature on these forums and other discussions all over the web - obviously, YMMV is relevant here. Reading through some of those may give you some useful perspective.(I can only speak for *my* experience).

My experience with DH over 8 years of hosting has been excellent in both the timeliness and quality of response.

I have noticed a "trend" evident in many of these situations where the complaining about quality of email response is accompanied by frustration with no telephone contact:

1) Often poor communication skills on the part of the poster seems to exacerbate the situation and prolong the time it takes to resolve the problem

2) Most *do not*, or *will not* post their support history - we are left to guess at what their experience has really been and can only rely on how they *perceived* it to have been.

3) They are *often* related to account suspension or disablement (TOS, resource utilization, DMCA, etc.) and quite often, when researched, seem to involve sites that probably have no business being run on low-budget shared servers in the first place (way too much traffic or resource usage for such hosting).

4) They are, actually, extremely rare - even considering that most "happy campers" don't post regaling us with stories of their satisfaction, the *huge* number of sites hosted by DH actually result in very few of these types of complaints. They nature of the Net is that the "loud minority" get attention way out of proportion to the vast majority!

None of that may have anything at all to do with this OP's situation (though it may!), and we may never really *know* the actual circumstances. Why don't you ask the OP to post his support history to the thread so you can evaluate for yourself whether or not you feel the support attention he received was reasonable or acceptable in your estimation?

I think that would give you a far better picture of what to expect than reading through his posts here; he is obviously very frustrated at the situation he finds himself in (and that is understandable) and it is really difficult to guess how that frustration may be effecting his objectivity when describing his support experience.

--rlparker

Good points and worthy of a response.

I didn't know posting our support log was an option I will ask those involved if its okay to post them. There are lots of things people don't want to see in a public forum like personal details so I doubt this will happen. If it does enough will be taken out that it is unlikely to serve the purpose of providing additional context.

This is likely a high traffic issue, but as I said we offered to upgrade/move the service as soon as we heard the CPU usage was an issue.

Yeah there are situations where someone's frustration makes them less than objective. There are also situations where the person complaining doesn't know or understand how hosting works etc. This isn't one of those situations.

In the end if customer is willing to take the time to complain outside of the normal support cycle the company should listen. There may be noise but there is also likely to be some signal which may help the company improve.

My recommendation would be to make sure you google whatever provider you are thinking about using. I wasn't the one responsible for choosing DH, but I sure wish they had done some investigation beforehand.

Hi,

I sure wish they had offered the ability to move it to a new server. We would have done it in a second. As of now they told us to pay for (which we did) a new service and try it there. Of course this was 5 days later :(

rlparker has a good point. By posting on the company forum this is the "worst hosting company you have ever worked with" you are invariably trying to deprive them of business. If thats your intent then you'll have more success by posting logs, tickets, emails, and other bits of information. This will either, make your claim concrete which would drive away business (and stop the heckling by other customers) -or- clear things up as not really being as bad as it sounds (and more heckling).

To me, this sounds like a freak scenario or serious miscommunication, but would be business as usual with my current web host... Try asking why your account was not moved to a "limbo server", then copy & paste the reply in here.


-Burn

You still haven't answered my question. What does your script do?

There's no such thing as a "limbo server" on Dreamhost, but they will work with a customer to move them to a server that is substantially less active as the one they were on before (essentially a shared server with very few users on it), but in this case it doesn't sound like it was an option.
Anyways, most other shared hosts will also often just disable the service under your account that is being hit the most, in his case - apache (the web server). In this way, you can still access your account and change whatever you want (working with DH support being the best method for this) until you resolve the issue, whatever it is, and then contact support to let them know you'd like to try it out again.

I will absolutely agree with you though, it seems to be a miscommunication issue as the OP has already pretty well indicated.

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In the end if customer is willing to take the time to complain outside of the normal support cycle the company should listen. There may be noise but there is also likely to be some signal which may help the company improve.

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While I'm not in complete agreement with your first sentence above (given the large number of "rants" that often find their way outside the "normal support cycle"), I agree whole-heartedly with your second sentence; any signal that can be identified within the noise is of value, and I'm all for finding that signal where it exists!

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My recommendation would be to make sure you google whatever provider you are thinking about using. I wasn't the one responsible for choosing DH, but I sure wish they had done some investigation beforehand.

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That is *always* good advice. I don't think anyone ever regretted (though they might have been frustrated by) the amount of research put into selecting a web host.

--rlparker

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In the end if customer is willing to take the time to complain outside of the normal support cycle the company should listen. There may be noise but there is also likely to be some signal which may help the company improve.

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That's true. Are you trying to:
1. Get better peer-to-peer support? You might do better in the General Troubleshooting forum.
2. Give feedback to DreamHost? Hmm. Actually, there doesn't really seem to be an obvious way of doing this, but http://dreamhost.com/contact.cgi seems a good start.
3. Deprive DreamHost of business (as MegaBurn suggests)? You seem like the kind of guy who has more valuable stuff to do with his time, so this can't be it.
4. Get noticed? This is my best bet - that you've posted here because you have some support issue that wasn't getting worked out and decided that the best course of action was to try to get more attention for your problem by "yelling and screaming in the lobby of the hotel". This tactic may get results but don't be surprised if your perfectly happy sleeping neighbors don't take kindly to the use of this tactic.

Again, I am happy that things seem to be working out better for you and your company.

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My recommendation would be to make sure you google whatever provider you are thinking about using. I wasn't the one responsible for choosing DH, but I sure wish they had done some investigation beforehand.

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A decent suggestion. Actually, one thing I have noticed is that DreamHost does not censor anything posted here - they do shut down threads that devolve into personal attacks, though. Anyway, as a result, this is an easy place to dump on DreamHost and you'll find a good number of such posts here by angry customers and former customers.

As with all such anecdotal evidence, I suggest that you weigh it with the knowledge that every individual or company will have its detractors, no matter how good your service and intentions are generally.

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...I don't think anyone ever regretted (though they might have been frustrated by) the amount of research put into selecting a web host.

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Yep, thats why I'm here. Another two to three days and I'll know one way or the other if DH will work for my community sites. Overall the only downside is I have to live with my current host longer...


-Burn

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There's no such thing as a "limbo server" on Dreamhost

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It's possible DH no longer has specific limbo servers, but I'm guessing they do. First, there's been plenty of talk about them here in the past, and 2nd see this Wiki entry. The limbo servers were particularly *popular* while DH had a hard CPU time limit in place.



--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

Sorry takes the results for a web service does some work and then makes them available as a web service.

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Sorry takes the results for a web service does some work and then makes them available as a web service.

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Isn't that what any script on the internet does? Takes some data, processes it, and spits it back out?

I think the point of the question was to get an idea of how intensive that script might be, and how often it was running.



--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

Ah that isn't the issue it was working fine for 6 months so unless we were being attacked or traffic rose sharply it should have been fine. We couldn't get access to look at the logs as I mentioned before so don't really know, but I bet it was traffic. It isn't doing much work at all it takes some inputs and uses those to query another webservice and then spits back the results.

Anyway it is 5:30pm and we still haven't heard back from DH support. We are giving up and moving on. For those who offered suggestions and tried to help thanks.

You don't seem to get it.

I garbage script might not bring a site down with one visitor per day.

The same garbage script might do it with 1,000 visitors per day.

In that case, the script is the problem--not the traffic.

To someone that thinks that's a traffic problem, it would make more sense to build a data center to run a single script, rather than just clean up the code to where it can play nicely on a shared server.

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saying my business "isn't important"

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It isn't. If it was important, its very existence wouldn't depend 100% on a single shared hosting account. That's common sense.

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take note anyone who is considering DH this is the attitude even some customers have, wow.

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Yeah, take note. Take note that if you choose a thread title like this genius, then follow it up with a bunch of crap, people might reply and tell you that you're stupid. That has A LOT to do with choosing a host!

Also take note that if the most important thing in your life is phone support, and you sign up with a host that doesn't offer it... you might be retarded.

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Anyway I am sure you will get your wish those who want reasonable turn around on their tickets and helpful answers to their questions will go elsewhere.

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Maybe if people wanted quick responses, they'd learn to communicate better. Crying that nobody wants to chat with you on the phone isn't the way to get results.

Seriously, there are thousands of us. Do you really think that you're the one doing things right, and the reason the rest of us get better support is just pure luck?

Well, from the looks of the OP's last post, and his responses to mattail, scjessey, and MegaBurn, it's becoming pretty obvious to me that this was most likely another "drive-by bashing" (ie. for any of us seriously attempting to discuss this poster's issue: we've been trolled)

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Anyway it is 5:30pm and we still haven't heard back from DH support. We are giving up and moving on. For those who offered suggestions and tried to help thanks.

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Which brings to mind a couple of items I forgot to include in my comments in this post about things that are common in many of these types of posts:

A) Often these post are the first appearance on these forums by a user who claims to have been a DH customer for a certain period of time, but has only felt the need to post on the forums because of how badly he has been treated - then open a thread and pound it for a day or so, then go away (this OP 16 posts to a single thread over two days - but it is not important enough to "follow-up" on - "We're moving on".)

B) When pressed for verifiable details of their support experience, or the particulars of what they/their script/their dog was doing when their account got suspended/taken down/pwned or otherwise "dealt with" by DH, they are not only reticent to share the details of their support experience (already listed in the first list) but are evasive about the script that purportedly caused their demise. Probably 'cause it is "a secret", though possibly because they *know* their script will not withstand the inspection of others.

Lensman also correctly pointed out that the choice of the "Curious About Dreamhost" for the forum seems to be a lot about "shouting in a hotel lobby" - which is possibly designed to get attention. However, given the OP's ultimate statement on the matter ("We're moving on"), is more likely to be more about discouraging others from using the company or it's services than it is about effecting a positive resolution to their problem.

End result - after causing a big stink on the board for a day or two, and getting lots of attention, they just "move on". And we all "played along" and kept that thread title active for two days. In instances like this, I think we are *too* respectful of the title and, if we are going to interact with such posters, we should only do so by changing the title as appropriate when the subject develops. At various times in this thread, good alternate titles might have included:

"The script that killed the site"

"Who did what to whom, in whose back yard, and for how many cookies?"

"He said..she said...wtf really happened?"

--rlparker

Completely agreed, rlparker. I think we've been had in this thread, but I'm not surprised, as the OP provided absolutely no factual information at all. They simply "claimed" to have been "screwed" over by DH. To me it originally appeared the OP had communication issues - but this indeed takes the cake, and proves they're just here to "blow a lot steam" about nothing

This whole post started out with a statement of what happened and I provided numerous follow up posts to answer people's questions as best I could. There were plenty of facts.

Please don't misinterpret my giving up. I have just realized that regardless of how hard we tried to resolve this with DH i.e it is now 9pm and still no response it just isn't going to happen.

This only proves one thing it got so bad it was easier to move the service elsewhere than deal with DH. I previously thought it would save time to keep the service with DH I was wrong.

You haven't been trolled but I can see how it would be a convenient out rather than the reality of the situation.

The issue here is the level of support from DH. I was hoping to find somone who could help navigate DH support or offer suggestions on how they resolved similar issues. One poster did by talking about the "limbo" servers and the ability to have a place to try to figure out what is going on before the site is taken down.

The site has been down for 6 days. We struggled with trying to get a response and/or someone who would actually try to help us rather than ignoring us or not being helpful.

I have no idea what you want me to follow up on. Whether the script or traffic was to blame we would have fixed it if we had been given the chance. We would have even moved it to a dedicated host, again if we had been given the the chance.

At this point its been over 24hrs since the last email from DH even after several follow ups where we point out that we have done everything they asked including paying to spin up a new service.

I am not following up because this forum can't help solve the problem. They can't make DH respond any faster or help DH provide reasonable solutions to customers before they turn their service off.

As several as of you have pointed out this may not be the place for people who expect that kind of service. I agree.

You do realize it's Sunday, right?

Speaking of which, has anyone noticed any difference between weekday and weekend service at DreamHost? I'd guess that they have more people M-F during business hours in California.

Apologies for my weekday attitude, but at the company I work at, you don't get weekend support for less than a $1MM annual contract. (basic services notwithstanding)

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You haven't been trolled but I can see how it would be a convenient out rather than the reality of the situation.

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Maybe not (re. being trolled), but I still think that is a distinct possibility, and *I* don't need any "convenient out" to mitigate any of the "realities" of the situation. I'm just a customer here, and am only interested to the degree that there is a way to help you. Apparently you are convinced that there is no such way (and you may be right!).

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I have no idea what you want me to follow up on. Whether the script or traffic was to blame we would have fixed it if we had been given the chance. We would have even moved it to a dedicated host, again if we had been given the the chance.

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I don't care *what* you do to "follow up on" this discussion, but *I'm* done being concerned about how you may have been treated until you take seriously, and respond candidly, to questions that have been posed regarding the details of your tech support communications and the details of the operation of "the script that killed your site".

Actually, you have indicated that you *were* "given a chance" to react to the situation, even if it was only "a day's notice". I don't think it is reasonable to expect more than that if your site/script is negatively impacting the experience of others sharing your server. This is shared hosting and no single site should be allowed to operated to the detriment of others.

There is also an argument to be made that had you been monitoring your site's performance in a professional manner, reviewing your logs, and tracking your resource usage (all things that are not only reasonable, but are actually *required* when managing a growing site), *you* would, or should, have seen this coming and acted pro-actively to provide for the site's continued operation instead of just letting it run until DH said, "enough". It is *your* responsibility to provide adequate resources for your site's operation, not DreamHost's - to just stick a site up on a shared hosting account and assume all is well, and then expect the hosting company to wait for you to sort it all after the site negatively impacts others is just unreasonable.

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I am not following up because this forum can't help solve the problem. They can't make DH respond any faster or help DH provide reasonable solutions to customers before they turn their service off.

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As you are "new" to these forums, I can understand that attitude. The fact, however, is that *many times* users here *have* been helpful in helping to show how to optimize a script to improve it's performance as well as being able to offer productive suggestions regarding communicating, and resolving problems, with Dreamhost. Starting the thread with the title you chose *after* the site was taken down (instead of upon receiving the email giving you the "day's notice"), and then declining to provide any details regarding the script itself *does* make it unlikely much productive help will be forthcoming from these forums. It's also unlikely anyone can give you any useful pointer re. the support communications process, as you don't share the communication that has preceded.

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As several as of you have pointed out this may not be the place for people who expect that kind of service. I agree.

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It's a shame that you didn't recognize it until after the prolonged downtime; if you *had* you might have been able to avoid being down so long. Hopefully, you will be able to take something with you from all of this that will be useful to you in managing your relationship with your new host, and your site will continue to thrive and grow.

--rlparker

What "facts"? I saw absolutely no facts provided at all, other than your complaining about there being no phone support and that DreamHost wasn't answering your support request as quickly as you'd have liked. I see no facts within any of your messages, so stop lying to us and to yourself. This only proves my point further, that you're extremely poor at communicating, and therein lies the issues between yourself and DreamHost I believe.

Good luck at your new provider at all the same though - I hope you actually did some research on them this time

I wonder if hosting companies look at these kinds of forums when people say that they're "sick of their old host" to determine if they should support them.

Now that would be priceless.

Wholly - Use promo code WhollyMindless for full 97$ credit. Let me know if you want something else!

Definitely a troll at play. As someone eluded to earlier in this thread, I had outage problems for over a week. My sites were down for several hours a day. I got testy with Dreamhost, but they always maintained their professionalism and kept trying to help. I finally figured out the problem and guess what--it wasn't their fault! It wasn't really my fault either--what was happening was that spambots were infesting my PHPbb forum. I had some mods that prevented most from registering, and none could post until verified but I was still getting over 100 phony spam registrations a day plus who knows how many unsuccessful registrations. This was overloading the SQL database, which impacted my other sites. I've since removed the forum until I can improve the security and my site(s) work like a charm.

It was very frustrating when my sites were down every day and I--nor Dreamhost support--could figure out why. In retrospect, however, they bent over backwards trying to help and figure things out.

In the troll's case, the solution was simple--if your poorly written script was causing problems you should have just disabled it until you could have corrected it. This is not DH's problem or fault, and most hosts wouldn't have given you a 1 day notice--they would have just zapped the script themselves. If your script--for whatever reason--was compromising the performance of other customers DH did the right thing in removing it. And instead of trying to figure out what the problem was you "demanded" they restore it? As I noted above, I had a similar scenario--my websites were working fine for months and then the problems started. My initial reaction was to blame DH, but as I noted above the problem wasn't their fault at all.

Then maybe taking a better attitude toward DH support and to this forum would have helped immensely. That's how I finally figured out my problem--I posted here, provided links to my site and some data and within a few hours and several "leads". I actually fixed the problem initially by simply deactivating the forum, and DH has been helpful in making sure that my site runs efficiently.

DH support does a great job IMO, but if a website is central to your business its foolish to not be proactive about your problems. I can understand being frustrated due to downtime, but the last thing that DH wants is for your sites to be down either. They explained to you what the problem was, gave you some leadtime to correct it--and if your website is that "mission critical" you had plenty of time to find a workaround for your bad script. And its hard to have sympathy for someone who's "files are deleted" when a simple backup would have presumably nipped this problem in the bud.

Even after the ordeal of the past week or so I'm still a satisfied DH customer. Their support remained calm and professional when I was at my most upset, and they did everything they could to help. This forum was also instrumental in helping, and--assuming you're *not* a troll--if you'd post a bit of actual information about your site and the problems you're having you'd be amazed how quickly you'd get some very helpful replies.

I've been with at least a dozen different webhosts in the decade plus that I've had a website(s) and Dreamhost offers the best price to value ratio I've ever seen. I've spent a lot more for hosts in the past, and those outfits didn't offer half of the features that Dreamhost does. Furthermore, even though I was paying more their support simply didn't give a sh*t about my problems when I had them. Even at my most frustrated, I never got the feeling that my problems weren't a concern for the DH support.

No one here that I'm aware of *works* for Dreamhost. By asking for "facts" they're trying to help you diagnose and correct your problem. You'd be well advised to let them help you, as you'd probably get some good information.