www down for +24 hours and NO SUPPORT from DH!

We have currently our www site down (for more than 26 hours now) and support hasnīt give us a clear answer. Since they have no phone support and the "live chat" has always been a "no chat available" banner in the support panel, we can only expect a miracle, or pray strong enough to make it real.

We wonder if any other of DH customers have had this problem before, and we want to know how did you managed your own temper... We want to SCREAM !!!

Is there any clause in the contract about the time support has to satisfactorily response or resolve an important problem like a www down? Our company image depends on our www, and we have been transfering an average of 9 GB per month in the last 4 months...

Oscar Andrade
webmaster
http://jaguar.edu.co

> Since they have no phone support


> We wonder if any other of DH customers have had this problem before

Yes. Murphy's Law has not yet been (and never will be) repealed.

> and we want to know how did you managed your own temper... We want to SCREAM !!!

With tolerance and patience? Screaming won't help anybody.

> Is there any clause in the contract about the time support has to satisfactorily response or resolve an important problem like a www down?


In my experience, if you DON'T scream, and you are reasonable, then they'll treat you fairly, especially if they've made a mistake or things have gone fubar on their end.

Good luck,

BobS

> We wonder if any other of DH customers have had this problem before

Sort of - one of my sites has gone down each time I changed its HTTP "type of web service" (e.g. mirror, redirect due Support say to a known problem in their server config update code which affects all sites to some extent, but it did come back up 2.5 - 3 hrs later after I emailed Support.

Did you change this setting?

Are you seeing the Dreamhost "Service temporarily unavailable" page?

Thanks for your answers. Iīm gonna check about Phone Support. It will help a lot to be listened to. Didnīt know about its existence.

No we havenīt change anything. Not in the web panel, not in the registrar's DNS data (where they say it may be the problem).

And magically, yesterday (sunday August 1st), without DH notice, the site magically started again. They donīt know the reason.

And today (monday), the service simply stopped again where the connection to our website is again down... we donīt see any page from dreamhost, but a looong wait and then a "site not found" browser error.

The strange thing is: No FTP error, no PING error to the domain name, no webmail error. Other domains are working without problems.

if you want to check by yourselves:

http://jaguar.edu.co

Thanks again,

Oscar Andrade

Edited by oscarandrade on 08/02/04 05:17 AM (server time).

In reply to:

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And magically, yesterday (sunday August 1st), without DH notice, the site magically started again

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I fixed it (yesterday). We're looking into why our monitoring systems didn't notice it. I will also look into why the tech you spoke to didn't look into the issue more throughly.

will:

Thanks for answering. What was the fix that you did? Support history shows nothing, and we are afraid it will happen again in the worst moment later... It was really a "registrar problem"? Support didnīt ever contacted our registrar, so we suppose it wasnīt their problem. We were down today (august 2nd) for 8 hours again.

Oscar Andrade

The instance of Apache that your site is on seems to have crashed, and our normal monitoring systems didn't pick it up for some reason. We're still looking into why this happened.

There is / was no registrar problem in this case (though support wouldn't contact your registrar if it was a problem of that sort, e.g., an expired domain).

In the last week, our www has been down at least for 46 hours, 4 to 5 hours per day. Dispite that Will has identified the problem since Sunday, all that support has done in this days is to repeat the apache shut down procedure, without knowing why is it happening.

We have been repeteadly contacting support, and everytime the www falls down, it takes at least 4 hours for them to solve the problem, even if the procedure has been discovered before.

We havenīt got any problem with the server before, but now we depend on it heavily because our anual event is coming and our www is our main promoting weapon.

I hope that support will be able to find a real solution for the problem, without having to restart the apache server continually. This hasnīt happen to the other 2 www servers we have.

Unfortunately we are out of US and we canīt use the Callback service Dreamhost offers.

Does anybody has this problem before?

Oscar Andrade

I can't tell from your posts, but are these dedicated machines or shared hosting? It sounds like some of your sites are on different (physical) servers? Have you asked to have your site moved to another machine?