How to contact support when regular channels fail?

All my DH websites are down and I appear to be unable to open a support ticket.

I can complete the ticket procedure in the Panel, but I never get the "Thank you very much" canned response. Every other time this has happened in the past, I've had to wait a few days and resubmit. Usually, I would then get the canned response, followed up by a human response shortly thereafter.

Unfortunately, this is an urgent matter as all my websites are dead because it appears that they've been moved to a different server. To make matters worse I was never notified about the server migration and it looks like the server I am being migrated to is not configured for my sites. (If I go into the Panel and save a domain config, it gets assigned a new IP address. If I enter that address in my hosts file and go to the site, I get an empty directory instead of my site.)

How do you contact support if their ticket system fails?

(And if anyone from DH support is reading this please, please, please look into tickets 2886789 and 2886650).

Thanks,
- Tony

I replied to an unrelated support email that I received about a week ago and got a canned response, so hopefully someone will read it and check into my other tickets.

I am hoping to get notification from a person that the issue is being looked in to.

I threw a "heads up" over to a tech support staffer to grab those tickets and take a look at them for you.

--rlparker
--DreamHost Tech Support

All my sites are down, too- (nestea), this happened during the great RAID about a month ago, too.

Now.. what can I do to get on a different cluster? I'm getting sick of this.

I even volunteered to be migrated early.

Come on guys. Why don't you run the hosted sites on the same hardware that panel.dreamhost.com and dreamhoststatus.com runs on? Those seem to be up. .. maybe not updated, but .. up.

Excellent.

In the future, is it safe to assume that if I am not having email problems that I'll need to take an extra step to contact Tech Support if I don't receive the "Thank you" canned response?

Thanks!

This is not an official support channel. Though I do stop in from time to time, and may offer to help in some situations, you need to submit support requests for your individual site issues.

Submit a support request, and give them time to reply (at least 24 hours). Use the system the way it was intended to be used, and I'll try to help when I can if that fails you.

Please work within the established support channels, or I'll be forced to just ignore these kinds of issues on these forums in the future.

--rlparker
--DreamHost Tech Support

I have tickets in w/ support and one is over 24 hours old.

Last communication was that they had moved my site to another server, the script forgot to move my files, and that I was to be escalated to another group.

Just understanding what is going on would be tremendously helpful. If anything Dreamhost excels in their communication w/ their customers. It's why I stick around. Having support go dark like this isn't what I've come to expect.

Was the "last contact" where it was indicated that you were to be "escalated to another group" within the last 24 hours? The reason I ask is that often an escalation of that type results in an additional delay (you are moved to a new queue, which could be longer or shorter, but is necessary due to the nature of your problem).

I agree the massive influx of support requests has been a challenge since the first of the year, for existing customers, new customers, and the support staff. Given some of the aggressive pricing recently offered, there has been a huge influx of "shiny new just-out-of-the-box" customers clamoring for support.

We welcome all our new "baby DreamHosters", but many who have never had a hosting account before, and the hundreds of questions like "what is the FTP thing? What is it for, and how do I use it?" have made it harder to keep support responses as fast as we would like.

As you know, "going dark" is *not* the DreamHost way, but this is a really busy time right now, and some response times may be increased for a short period while we deal with all the newbies.

PM me with adequate information for me to locate your ticket (account number, domain name, webID, or support request tracking number) and I will look into the matter for you.

--rlparker
--DreamHost Tech Support

In reply to:

---

In the future, is it safe to assume that if I am not having email problems that I'll need to take an extra step to contact Tech Support if I don't receive the "Thank you" canned response?

---

No, not at all. In fact, in *most* instances you will *not* receive that. There once was a time when that was "automatic", but that automated "thank you" email is no longer sent in response to every ticket - it is sent in some instances depending upon the state of the queue when the request is received.

--rlparker
--DreamHost Tech Support

You can also see all of your Support correspondence in the panel.
https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=support.his&

-Scott

i'm a new dreamhost customer, and i do appreciate the support! though, i'd just like to know why i keep getting 500 internal server errors with the one click apps. i had a response the other day that said there was a mysql misconfiguration and that they fixed it. but it doesn't seem to have fixed it, since i still get the errors. anyway, i didn't want my response to get lost and was wondering if they had any idea what was happening. the site itself is fine and runs fine without these errors, so it's not a pressing issue. i was just curious.

Sounds like the same problem I'm having too (check thread I posted).. hopefully they rectify the problem soon, as (unlike your site which is running) mine wont run without it being fixed :-(

rlparker - Thanks for the response, and fortunately between the time you posted this and I read it, support got back to me...Even if it was to say, still working on it.