Sort of Parting Ways

I just wanted to make a few things clear incase anyone goes crazy over what they read on my blog right now.

1. I have moved to a different primary hosting provider.

2. I am not angry with DreamHost at all. In fact, I've enjoyed my time here and will always recommend DreamHost to anyone asking.

3. I moved because I now require PHP to be run, fully-featured, as an Apache module. PHP as CGI just wasn't cutting it.

4. I will keep DreamHost as a secondary hosting provider for my smaller sites.

5. Again, I've enjoyed my time here and will always recommend DreamHost to anyone asking.

Hi -

> 5. Again, I've enjoyed my time here and will always
> recommend DreamHost to anyone asking.

I'm very sad to hear that you've decided to leave, though we really do appreciate your hosting with us. I've also personally appreciated your presence in the forums.

Best of luck with your new host!

- Jeff @ DreamHost
- DH Discussion Forum Admin

> I have moved to a different primary hosting provider ... I will keep DreamHost as a secondary hosting provider for my smaller sites.

Don't want to start my own clarification thread (as noone really cares and I am yet to keep an active blog), but I must admit that I am now using 3 other hosts ALONG WITH DREAMHOST. The difference is: I still consider DreamHost as my primary host in that my most important domains are hosted with them.

But to be frank, I am SERIOUSLY weighing the pros and cons of continuing to do so. One of the reasons is the somewhat growing downtime (for both web and e-mail) over the past few months. I have been using AND RECOMMENDING DreamHost for the past 5 (yes, FIVE) years mostly for their RELIABILITY (not particular pricing). Downtime had been (yes, had, not have) near zero, and I didn't have to worry about not getting e-mail (nor delays in getting them like for more than a minute or 2) or websites not showing up. This is paricularly important because I am hosting for my clients as well.

However, things have really deteriorated quite a bit (noticeably) in the past 6 months, when I have come across more and more short spans (less than an hour mostly but then those with more than a couple of hours are getting more frequent) of downtime. I can no more brag about DreamHost bullet-proof uptime which I enjoyed soooo much before. (I charge my client a bit higher than other competitors but used to beat them on quality.) The worst thing is: I canNOT verify the uptime. The system status page on the control panel always "claims" to be fine, e.g. "Up for 11 mons 6 days" when I'm damn sure that DreamHost (not my ISP) have been down for more than a dozen of times (each more than 15 minutes) in that same time frame.

I have started another thread regarding using 3rd party monitoring like WebSitePulse (which my other hosts use and I can show to my clients), but there seems to be little interest among DreamHost staff and even other users. The bottom line is: I don't really care about 3rd party monitoring IF there's little downtime. As a matter of fact, I rarely check even the status page before, when 100% uptime is what I could take for granted.

Apart from the generous bandwidth (which is of little use to me), I hope that DreamHost can stand out AGAIN on something more solid (like uptime), esp. when she has lost sadly in areas like support response (24 hrs vs. 15 mins) and the number of domains allowed (3 - 31 vs. unlimited), the latter being the reason why I also host with 3 other companies.

Lastly, I must say thanks to Jeff who have been very helpful in numerous situations and am really glad that Dallas is taking the time to address some of the problems that users raise here.

> as noone really cares ...

Told you: nobody cares. :(

In reply to:
One of the reasons is the somewhat growing downtime (for both web and e-mail) over the past few months.

I have several websites hosted with DreamHost, 3 of which are built around databases. Between my business site and personal site, I'm accessing the server and hitting the database for around 14 hours of every single day. I have clients who do likewise, and thousands of people read by personal blog.

Since joining DreamHost, I've experienced almost zero downtime. If I had to guess, I'd say that I've personally experienced the loss of maybe two hours of uptime in 11 months of usage. Customers can maybe add a couple of hours more. That is a pretty incredible performance, and it far eclipses the performance of all previous companies I have hosted with.

Email has been a little more patchy, with probably a day's worth of downtime in the same 11 month period.

I cannot understand why everyone seems to be complaining, to be honest. I appreciate that people are using different web, mail, and database servers, and some may have more problems than others, but it still seems strange that people are complaining of days of downtime when I have almost none.

I have sites on 16 different dreamhost servers, and am using 3 different mail servers. Mail has been the most prominent downtime for me. I really haven't seen much downtime on sack, but spork and murdock were troublesome, but seems to be okay now. I also only saw downtime on my servers when the ddos attack occurred, beyond that, I have seen no downtime.

I have seen no issue on any of my databases, but have received numerous emails from dreamhost that there were issues, just not anything I or my customers ever noticed.

But, to those that have had major issues (there have been some major problems on some servers) I can understand those customer's concerns. When running a business, and if your site is your major connection to your customers, then you have to admit, the downtime they are seeing could be costing them lots of money. Personal sites and downtime could also be a complete bummer. So, to that point, I do feel fortunate that I am not seeing (knocking on wood) those problems on the servers I am on. But do feel for those who have been having problems.

Edited by gonewthewind on 05/10/05 09:21 AM (server time).

Some (many?) of the E-mail problems seemed to be associated with the Junk filter. I have E-mail for 2 domains on Murdok and never had any of the problems other were expirencing, but I don't have any junk mail filtering set up.

-Matttail

Actually, I have no junk filter on any of my sites. The email issues on murdock were in August last year (i know, a long time ago) and again on early February this year. Neither were too terrible though. : )

On spork it has been quite a few more times...too many to go back in my outlook to see all of the tests my clients and I were bouncing around.

But, as of late, I have seen no email issues (other than my own errors.)

If you are seeing regular short outages of a few minutes at a time it is possible (and possibly likely) that there is an excessively busy website on your server that is occasionally using up all of the available Apache connections. That kind of thing usually only makes Apache 'down' every few seconds so our host monitor might see it down once and then check it again and see it up and decide it was up. It does have a way to notice if a service is continually going up and down ("flapping"), but it may miss it sometimes.

Anyway, the best thing to do is to contact us about it so we can check the server and look for weird things like that. If you've already done that without proper resolution, let me know!

Another possibility is network problems, but that is less likely. If you can get to other DreamHost sites (or our own site) at the same time yours appears down then it is probably not the network.

We did go through a couple of months of some internal network congestion a little while back, but we have since upgraded the majority of our network and have not seen the complaints any more.

Also, note that we don't always have a chance to check this message board. It is not a replacement for real support, though we'll try to do what we can. A lack of a quick response doesn't mean we don't care!

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

MacManX,

We will be sorry to see you leave.. The community that DH has created is unique which I believe is a product of it's family style hosting, and the frank way the employees reply to support request .

I rate DH as one of the best but like you I am considering leaving as I been burnt over Point 3 (PHP as CGI) and also the way that Debian patches really old version(s) of core utilities (ie imagemagick) rather than upgrading the core to more recent version(s) of this utilises. (Core 6.xx for imagemagick been out for 18 months and it is still listed as as "experimental" by Debian)

____________________

WP/Gallery2 Integration Community -> http://wpg2.ozgreg.com/

Thanks for the reply, Dallas. But to be frank, I don't feel like contacting support. If there really is another such user or even users on the server that I share with, DreamHost should have the necessary monitoring mechanism to spot and take care of them. Again, the down time is extended (not minutes, but tens of minutes) and irregular. I'm not sure if I am on a relatively older, more crowded server, but I notice more frequent unavailability of the Control Panel as well as DreamHost's own website during the same timeframe (last 6 months).

The discrepancy and uncertainty here also warrant the need for or at least a preference towards 3rd party monitoring. To be honest, clients (yours and mine) don't need to prove (either to themselves or to others) these downtimes before moving away for good.

I must admit that I might be like a well spoilt kid: DreamHost was SOOOOO good before.

In reply to:
I don't feel like contacting support. If there really is another such user or even users on the server that I share with, DreamHost should have the necessary monitoring mechanism to spot and take care of them.

With all due respect, that is equivalent to standing near the phone inside your burning house. And, rather than dial 911, you continue to stand there hoping that your neighbors are at home, awake, and notice the fire in enough time to contact the fire dept for you.

If you want to be sure that DreamHost notices your problem, please take one or two minutes in order to contact DH support. It's worth it.

I 100% agree with you that no one needs to prove to us they are experiencing problems. However, it is significantly easier for us to diagnose a particular problem and work to resolve it when we are given as much information as possible. It's obviously your prerogative to contact us or not and I will pass along this information to our engineers either way.

We are always working to improve our server monitoring tools and speed up our reaction times to any problems we detect. I would love to tell you we have everything tuned to a point where we always know about any particular problem within minutes of it occurring, but it's just not that simple. Often times we do know something is going on with a particular machine but sometimes the symptoms don't always point back to an obvious ailment. Sometimes a little bit of information provided by a customer is what we need to bring the whole picture into focus. Without the extra information we would still solve the problem eventually but it might take a few extra days.

If you are unable to access any parts of our network during the downtimes, it is almost definitely a network problem somewhere. In cases like that, we need specific information from you to diagnose it. The Internet is a complex system of interconnected private commercial networks and it's always changing. We do have multiple redundant connections and we can (and do!) make routing changes to help improve performance for our customers. That's not something we can do effectively without specific information from you, however.

We have changed the way we do things quite a lot in the last 5 years or so, and we have changed network providers several times. It is definitely possible that one of the changes along the way ended up with a less than ideal link to your own network location. We are currently looking into adding an additional network provider to help improve any weak spots in our current network coverage. If we were to identify your network link as one of those weak spots we could take it into account when considering our options.

Anyway, your comments are appreciated. I checked your support history and see the IP you last contacted us from so I'll see about getting a routing change set up to see if it improves things for you.

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

Thanks again Dallas for your elaborated explanation. And this is exactly the reason why I chose and still stay with DreamHost. Like I said, I'm more like a well spoilt kid. The DreamHost like 2 years ago was the PERFECT host; I actually spent some time researching quite extensively back then but decided to stay. And even I now have other hosting accounts elsewhere, I still keep my most critical domains here. AND the fact that they are critical makes even the slightest dose of downtime (which DreamHost used not to have) a bit annoying, and so the whining.

But I must say that these downtime spans have never reached the threshold level that I need to contact support; my guess is that they account for about 0.1 - 0.3% at the most, making DreamHost still a decent host with 99.7 - 99.9% uptime. That is also why I haven't called 911 yet, James. But sliding from e.g. 99.97% to 99.79% is not the best experience on earth. (These numbers are just my educated guess, as those presented on the status page are not reliable at all.)

I wouldn't dare to ask you guys to make any change if it is just me alone having problem (not worth it at your end). My business model has changed A LOT lately: the abilities to assign my own customized control panel and guarantee 99.9% uptime are essential; therefore, I have no choice but start some of my larger ventures elsewhere. (The latter is particularly important when I am partnering with others.) Anyway, I will be keeping my account at DreamHost no matter what, at least for some of my personal projects.

Ok, well let us know if the problem persists or gets worse and we can try some routing changes. Thanks for the comments.

It sounds like you're doing some pretty cool stuff!

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder