how reliable?

I'm new here and my website has been down twice in the last four days. Nothing on the status page except that my sites have been "Up forever!".

Is this a spot of bad luck? Or, is this a common problem?

what is your experience? I'm not looking for a "whine fest", just objective information.

thanks

Bad luck, maybe? I haven't really had any problems. Perhaps the server you're on is having issues.

Technically the server has been up near forever, but your site may be an another matter altogether. I'd recommend that you sign up for a (free) third-party monitoring service, such as host-tracker.com. That way you can have more practical information to work with.

As far as DH reliability has been concerned... when we first signed up here at the very end of 2004, we got assigned to a server that was extremely flaky. We complained enough about it to support, and they eventually moved us to a new server. The new server has been behaving like a champ months on end, our sites clocking near-100% uptime save for scheduled maintenance periods. Only the database server gets s-l-o-w occasionally.

I'd suggest that you submit a support ticket, and describe exactly what kind of a site you have (database-driven? PHP? static?), how it goes poof on you, and most importantly, that your site has gone down repeatedly. You might also mention what the web- and database servers you're using, so they can save time if it's a known problem.

Thanks, y'all. It is now up. Perhaps the server crashed again? Good news, it was not down for a long time.

I submitted my support question first thing. We'll see what I get.

As suggested, I signed up with www.host-tracker.com. That should give me some hard data.

again, thanks.

Thanks for the tip about host-tracker.com. I'm not currently having problems (I've been in the rarely-to-never range for problems with DH) but very nice to know that if the site goes down without my knowing about it I'll find out.

> Nothing on the status page except that my sites have been "Up forever!".

I think it is genrally accepted that nothing on the System Status page should be believed.

Here it claims domains have been up for way longer than they've even existed.

> they eventually moved us to a new server.

Out of interest, did that include your users? Or did you lose the user accounts and have to recreate them?

Everything was moved intact, including users and files. All in all it was a very painless operation.

Thanks. I guess the destination server must have had no users of the same names already.

According to this knowledge base article, usernames are unique over more than one server:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/kbase/index.cgi?area=3015

Indeed, but not all.