Seriously Enough

I use a service that monitors my site uptime and have had 11 outages since I started with Dreamhost.

What can I do to ensure I get moved to a more stable server? I open a ticket each time I see the site is down and always get the same canned response that another user on the server had scripts running out of control and that it's been taken care of. However this continues to happen!

I don't expect 100% uptime, I know that's not possible, but seriously it shouldn't be happening this often.

Below is a list of the outages and times they occurred. I'm getting frustrated to the point that I'm debating going back to my old host.

Year Month Outages
2009 January 1
2008 December 2
2008 November 1
2008 October 3
2008 September 2
2008 August 2

Edited by plumwd on 01/06/09 01:09 PM (server time).

You can request to be moved to another server using a ticket.




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The number of outages doesn't determine your uptime, so your numbers don't tell me anything about your uptime.

The bummer about getting an account here is they put you on the same server as all the other new users. New users often experiment and learn from a lot of mistakes what kills a server. I've found that my server gets more reliable as time goes on. I'm *always* above 95%, and usually 98% or above.

-Scott

Uptime monitors are, for the most part, completely useless. I just thought I'd throw that in there.

-- si-blog --

I have asked several times to be moved, and instead I just get replies that my server is being "worked on".

Frustrating to say the least!

I realize that uptime monitors are not the end-all be-all of uptime, that it only captures what was available at the time of the check, however I think when done on a regular basis it can get a fair estimate of what's going on.

My average uptime is still around 99% but of the times that it's gone down sometimes it's an hour or more.

Like I said I'm not expecting perfection, but this server has issues regularly and that's more what I am concerned with.

In reply to:

---

I realize that uptime monitors are not the end-all be-all of uptime, that it only captures what was available at the time of the check, however I think when done on a regular basis it can get a fair estimate of what's going on.

---

They aren't even that good. The problem lies with the fact that there are many nodes and lots of network equipment between the server and the uptime monitoring service. A problem at any of these points can give the illusion of downtime. Even monitoring from multiple sites does not get around this problem (although it would improve accuracy, of course). Naturally, each time a monitoring service "checks" your site(s), some of your bandwidth allocation is eaten too.

-- si-blog --

Agreed. They do, however, give me a feel for what my users experience. If I were *that* concerned about server uptime, I'd write a quick script and run it locally on my webserver.

Oh, and the bandwidth I lose? Hmmm...unlimited minus...one meg per day leaves me with...drat.

-Scott

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So I got a reply to my latest support ticket and was told that I cannot move to a new server....so much for that!

The kicker is they took a full day to get back to me (admittedly a first normally they're on top of that) AND my site was detected as offline again this morning....not starting the year off right. It's the 8th and the server has gone down twice in a week...