Bloody Dreamhost site down and no customer support

Does no one work at Dreamhost? Absolutely ridiculous service, am paying good money for a private server and it's always down. Not only that, they'll not communicate with me. Dear knows how much money we've lost by not being online for over 24hrs.

http://skitch.com/leemunroe/hhse/picture-5

Lots of people work at DreamHost. All the time. They're usually really good about getting back to people on support issues. I'm having difficulty understanding if it's "always" down, or if it's just been 24 hours. Sounds like whining to me.

You'd lose less money if your business-critical operation had a failover plan. Then you'd have a strategy if you decide to leave DreamHost.

-Scott

Hi Scott,
You're right, I am whining so apologies.
I am just frustrated and desperate for some sort of helpful response from Dreamhosts.

As far as I know it's holiday today. I've heard it might be possible that that's why there is a slower response.

I dunno, I reckon I'd be whining too if I was paying for PS.

More money should equate to improved support or at least faster response times.




How To Install PHP.INI / ionCube on DreamHost

A dead machine gets a pretty quick response. One that's all gummed up will take a bit longer. Usually, when people say that a server is down, it's hard to tell what they really mean. Often it's pingable, and it's just a service that's died or is *really* slow. Either way, as customers, there's nothing we can do here on the boards. Only Support can tell what's really going on.

-Scott

Yeah, I remember I really gummed up my PS when I first got switched over. I remember the support guy telling me to stop rebooting it in the middle of him setting it up! 8-O

I think the biggest problem with Dreamhost support is that you don't get a manual confirmation email when someone has started working on your problem. You get the automated acknowledgment when you submit a ticket and you get a human response when they've figured out what's wrong and think they've fixed it, but nothing in between.

Another support problem is that when there are general outages, they broadcast on the status blog that they've fixed the problem and then mark all the tickets they think are related as fixed. I don't think the individual ticket submitters get responses saying that their ticket is considered fixed due to the relief from the general outage. Thus, people don't know that they're supposed to send a *separate* ticket detailing their problem (repeating the symptom analysis and everything) and having run the automated tests.

Fixing these two process-oriented problems would go a big way to relieving the frustration I see on this board and on the status board from people who are just caught up in the confusion around the current support process.

Just my opinion.

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I think you're likely right. I'm not on PS myself so am definitely speaking out of turn on this, but I do think those paying for PS should receive a better support process than us cheapskates on shared servers.




How To Install PHP.INI / ionCube on DreamHost

In reply to:

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More money should equate to improved support or at least faster response times.

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I'm not really sure how that would work, since it's all the same people at the same company--just different products. In order for support to seem better for PS, they'd have to intentionally make it worse for shared customers... which they have about 11 more years of experience in dealing with.

I guess I'd compare it to not expecting different service at the grocery store when I buy a cart full of groceries, compared to when I just stop by to pick up a few things.

Back when they had the $79 Strictly Business plans, people would complain that they got the same support as the smaller plans... when the only things they were paying extra for were the additional resources/features, with all else being equal.

I'd guess it's the same for PS. If your site won't run on shared, but runs on PS, that's probably where the extra money goes.

If they were to add additional strictly PS-staff for more support, I'd imagine it would affect the price.

Anyway, I don't use PS and it hasn't been offered for too long, so I'd probably expect a few bumps along the way if I tried it.

or, we should ALL receive adequate support REGARDLESS, would be my way of thankin.

I think the level of Support is adequate for what I'm paying on shared.




How To Install PHP.INI / ionCube on DreamHost

I'm on PS (www and MySQL) now, but I want to downgrade. I have to reboot at least once a week and it costs >= $45 per month extra. Shared hosting was much more reliable.

just a side note: This is a "virtual" private server meaning that the private server is just a partition on a shared hard drive or dedicated instances of Apache, ProFTPD, and other various server software running on a shared hard drive.

Visit me, please...
www.theraven7.com

I think Support can downgrade upon request. As far as what "PS" is, I think it's more like a virtual machine where you get a select chunk of memory, a capped amount of CPU time, and a disk quota.

-Scott

Virtual Machine was what I meant by a new instance of the server software.

Edit: I have confirmed that a request can be made via Contact Support to remove your PS's.

Visit me, please...
www.theraven7.comEdited by theraven on 12/03/08 01:25 AM (server time).

Virtual Machine was what I meant by a new instance of the server software.

Visit me, please...
www.theraven7.com