Dreamhost, you are a terrible host

I am the co-admin of a very small forum. Just a few dozen active members at any one time, and not a single day goes by that our performance isn't so bad, it is essentially unuseable.

Not just occasionally, not just every so often, but everyday. I read your blog crowing about all the things you did wrong in 2006 and what you were planning to do in 2007, but you have a lot of work to do. There are times when this goes on for hours, and sometimes, it lasts all day. You should not even be in the webhosting business. That is just how bad you are.

People warned us not to go with Dreamhost, but we didn't listen, and now we are paying the price. Your service is pathetic, every day. I could use a carrier pigeon to make posts faster than your insanely slow service allows us to.

Thanks for making a fool out of us because we went with you as our provider, and not someone else.

Maybe I'm dipping my toes in a bit too late, but you do remember about the 97 day money-back satisfaction thingumajig?

dh ftw? yarly

We don't want to have to change hosts and move. Moving the database of even a small forum is a real pain. What we want, is for Dreamhost to do what they are in business to do, serve websites. If they can't manage that, they need to get out of the business. It's been longer than 97 days anyway.

In the first couple of months we had them, they were perfect, then things went to hell and never returned.

As of the time I am making this post, we are completely offline. 404 Not Found. Typical of Dreamhost. This happens all the time.

We would like to be moved to a less crowded box. Obviously, Dreamhost has oversold ours. Like they always do.

Don't worry mate, I fully appreciate the... shall we say 'challenges' in moving an SQL database out of its current environ, repatriating it on another server... And then making it work in its new environment with your setup which previously worked fine, reestablishing all the dependencies, making sure everything works fine and trying to figure out the weird-ass error messages - it's a pain in the backside at the best of times.


I feel your pain dude :X I've had no problems with my account, but it's a new one, so I have no previous benchmark other than my stalking of the DH blog and boards for the best part of last year before signing up (and hell, it didn't cost a lot for the year's subscription, so I'm gonna take my time moving everything over, juuuust in case).

Sorry you're having these problems mate, wish you the best of luck in resolving them.

dh ftw? yarly

We've been with them more than 97 days already

As a mod on Evan's forum, I can't believe how slow the forum pages are to load. Slow loading, page errors, loading failures, page not found. Every day it's something. Not a day goes by someone doesn't post "Is the forum running slow for everyone or just for me." Then the flurry of "nope, not just you" posts come out. Slowly. Sigh.

Dreamhost404 - some dream!

What forum software / CMS you running? Just out of curiosity... And which box?

I've been a member of Evan's forum for over a year. I've seen ups and downs, but I have to say, I think the trendline seems to point mostly down. Although I wouldn't call the forum ultra high volume, its pretty hard to find a five minute interval with no new posts. In that kind of environment, downtime is VERY obvious. The forum is almost like a group email, and a lot of people are impacted by slow downs and outages.

Of special note, the mods have worked really hard to insure that the server load is as light as possible. We have limits like 30 seconds between searches, etc. We tolerate this because the forum is important to us.

But its not acceptable to have such terrible outages and slow downs as we've been experiencing lately.

Please do right by us.

Thanks for listening.

We run VBulletin. Not sure what box, Torrance I think. Maagic is the owner of the forum, he knows more about all that than I do.

I am also a member of the forum Maagic and Evan run, and I have to say, if it weren't for the tight knit group we have become over the past 4 years, there are a lot of us that would be long gone due to the frustrating slowness your server brings us.

We've already moved once and that, as you very well know tears up an online community. We do not want to have to do that again.

Thank you for listening.

Mackie

I'm also a mod on the forum. The issues have been getting progressively worse and worse. When the forum is not completely inaccessible, it is loading at a snail's pace.

There is no way that any new members are going to stick around with these constant problems. If we weren't such a close community, many more of our regular members would have simply given up and left by now.

Please do the right thing.

-Evil

The forums address is--- http://www.so-there.net --- just in case anyone wants to go see that we are not over exagerating any of this. :)

It looks like http://www.so-there.net/ is up and running.

Yeah, for now. :) Give it 30 minutes.

I'm not a mod on Maagic and Evan's forum, just a humble member. I am, though, an Admin for an online game's forum that boasts more members than ST. Unfortunately, in the time it takes for me to be able to enjoy my So-There experience (new posts click) I was able to make myself a bowl of cake and ice cream this morning. That included washing out the used dish and utensils to re-use it.

I'd expect or at least understand why this could happen at my work.. but not a small community like ours.

Le'sigh

We are down. Again. Thanks Dreamhost! You sure do make our days most pleasant!

Yes, because posts like this really make DH want to actually help you. Did one of you admins/moderators/whatever actually, you know, bother to submit a support request? Sure it isn't instant, but they reply to that faster than they will this thread. Especially if you do more describing the problem and less complaining.

Yes, I have an opinion.

Get a minimum 50% off with the "haveadreamyday" promo code, and... have a dreamy day. Original, no?

After a year of being with Dreamhost, this is the first time we have ever complained here, because we have simply had enough. And yes, we have filed support requests until they are coming out our eyeballs, and nothing. *crickets*

They couldn't reply to us any slower here than they do on their support requests.

I've been a member of Evan and Maagic's forum for a long time and I have to say it's been very slow. It's been so slow that there are times I get frustrated and walk away to come back to it still loading. I end up clicking the X. It happens at least a few times a day. It should not be that slow. I know that if I was a new user and this happened I wouldn't even bother.

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As of the time I am making this post, we are completely offline. 404 Not Found.

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A 404 means your site is up and it's telling you that the requested file wasn't found.

works fine now.

Clicking a site once and then seeing it load is improper troubleshooting. Slow issues are extremely hard to replicate, and in most cases are, in fact, on the user end. But when you get an entire community scattered throughout the world on different ISPs experiencing the same issue, the blame lies on the box.

I am also a member/mod on this forum and the slow loads can be fairly problematic. I have enough trouble finding time just to visit the forum to read much less having to wait for slow loads and timeouts. I would like to see action taken to move us to a server without as many outages.

One thing I'd suggest is to dump the large GIF files on the page. Barney's 268k, and the trooper is about 150k. Overall your main page is approaching 800k.

Granted, a slow server sure doesn't help, but your site screams "resource intensive" with vBulletin and large image files. Right now, it's loading pretty quickly for me after the 4-5 second lag of my initial visit. It drops down to less than 3 seconds after clicking a link or doing a reload.

-Scott

Yes I submitted a support request this morning as well as emailed support asking to be moved to a less populated server.

As of 8:15pm tonight I have recieved no response other than to see that the site is for the moment working.

Sure it's improper troubleshooting, but most of our users are computer novices. They want to enter the URL and have the page come up. When that doesn't happen, I get yelled at*. I don't like getting yelled at


* - no actual yelling takes place.

Hopefully they can accommodate your request, if that is what you feel will help. I have checked the referenced site several times throughout the day, and it functioned reasonably well for me.

I say reasonably well, as (like Scott pointed out) the site is *very* inefficiently built. The large images coupled with the heavy MySQL access requirements of the forum software only exacerbate the "slowness" issue.

On DH shared servers, all MySQL i/O has to make an additional "roundtrip", as MySQL is served from different servers than http requests - this leads to considerable traffic *within DH* between DH servers across NFS - all of this contributes to the "sluggishness" of a site.

Add to that the CPU demands that heavy interactivity of an active online community can create and you have a formula for a "slowish" site.

What have you done/checked in the way of optimizing MySQL usage? Have you created, and maintained, indexes on your heavily used tables? My "gut" reaction is that if no greater attention has been paid to optimization in the MySQL area than has been given to basic graphics optimization, the site's inefficiency is probably contributing significantly to the slow operation of the site.

It's great to have an active and supportive community - though rallying them to bombard your host's customer-to-customer forums lobbying for a "fix" for a site you have not subjected to the most basic optimization techniques seems a little bit ignorant and crude.

My experience has been that Dreamhost will help you as best thay can given the cost/benefit model of the inexpensive hosting you have purchased, but you should understand that some sites, because of a combination of traffic, inefficient coding, lack of image optimization, etc ad infinitum, may *not* perform well on an $8.00 a month shared server.

That said, while there may indeed be some improvement DH can help you with; there are *definitely* things that *you* can (and should) do for yourself to improve the performance of that site.

Of course, YMMV ; that is just my opinion and it is worth exactly what you have paid for it. Good luck in your endeavor to get it running faster.

--rlparker

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Clicking a site once and then seeing it load is improper troubleshooting.

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That is true to some degree, but is *does* duplicate a "typical" user experience and is at least as "proper" a trouble shooting technique as commiserating with other users, "Yeah! It's slow for me too!"

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Slow issues are extremely hard to replicate, and in most cases are, in fact, on the user end.

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Ne'er a truer word has been spoken, though I would add that in *many* cases "slow issues" are greatly influenced by the design/implemtation/coding of the site itself.

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But when you get an entire community scattered throughout the world on different ISPs experiencing the same issue, the blame lies on the box.

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Maybe, but not necessarily...a badly designed site, with overly heavy graphics, inefficient or non-existent caching, inefficient MySQL usage, and a whole host of other potential problems are *at least* as likely to be where the "blame" lies.

Real, useful, and effective troubleshooting is rarely that cut and dried - though it is easier to just "blame the box " and ignore the I/O, connectivity, and efficiency issues that are begging for attention.

--rlparker

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though rallying them to bombard your host's customer-to-customer forums lobbying for a "fix" for a site you have not subjected to the most basic optimization techniques seems a little bit ignorant and crude.

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I don't think the original poster should be too concerned about his forum, as it appears most of the user-base has migrated to a new forum, this one.

Mark

I am an Active Mod on the forum and it makes my job very hard to do when I can't get profiles or my Mod control panel to load up. We're not trying to be pains in your asses, we would just like our forum to run as it did when we first switched and Dreamhost became our new home. :) But please understand that it is very frustrating when you go through your normal morning/evening routine and log on to the forum and it takes forever or doesn't load up at all. Wouldn't you be annoyed with this kind of problem and then couldn't get a hold of anyone at Dreamhost to correct the problem? Think about it. ;)
Also Raz, We would not be at this forum if Dreamhost was doing their job. :)

I am also a member of the So There forum run by Evan and Lynn, and have also experienced a lot of the issues that the other users have.

What I do find surprising is the blase tone of many of the Dreamhost people regarding the support that Evan and Lynn have received. Its not so much that theres an issue - but more that its exasperated by the lack of support being received and the poor service. Ok, its a cheap site and for a forum of our size that is all it needs to be. Its not an ecommerce site to thousands or millions of users - just a small forum run by friends.

I do have to say that this forum leaves a lot to be desired too - so its little surprise that ours isnt running that well either.

All that is required here is for the hosting support people to help - point us in the right direction with the issues being experienced - Evan and Lynn are the customer after all - whatever happened to customer service? The fact that the members of the forum have posted here is more a reaction to the lack of support and the problems being experienced. We are all fed up as anyone would be. You dont buy anything to have it not work properly - you take it back for a refund, or you expect things to be put right or pointed in the right direction.

Thats all we want, nothing more. I think its time Dreamhost actually showed they care about customer care and support instead of just coming up with excuses for a rather poor product.

Enough said.

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Also Raz, We would not be at this forum if Dreamhost was doing their job. :)

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I am sorry if my comment offended anyone, it wasn't meant as a serious comment.

Having frequented a few forums with similar problems, I totally understand the frustration. However, as rlparker suggested, my first step in any such situation would be to try to optimize the forum itself, to reduce the server load as much as possible.

I'd suggest enabling CPU usage logging to see what kind of load the forum is placing on the server. Also, logging in via SSH and checking the server load during these 'slow' periods might shed some light on the matter too, it is possible that someone else on your shared box is running an errant script.

Mark

We will give those suggestions a shot and see what happens.

Dawn_Renee,

It's pretty easy to tell that you and your friends are frustrated, and I certainly understand how hard it must be for you to use your forum the way you would like. Nobody likes to wait for a slowly loading or badly performing site, least of all those responsible for maintaining it.

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Wouldn't you be annoyed with this kind of problem and then couldn't get a hold of anyone at Dreamhost to correct the problem? Think about it. ;)

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I would be *very* annoyed, and I would begin an intensive investigation as to why my site is having the problem. I'd lose the "weighty" animated gifs from the front page, I'd index my MySQL tables, I'd beat the vBulletin forums to death looking for ways to optimize the software's performance, I'd investigate caching as much as possible, etc. I'd enlist some knowledgeable help if I didn't have the skills to determine the source of the problem myself.

I'd regularly monitor my server's load from the shell, to determine if the server's loading *is* or *is not* likely to be part of the problem.

Only when I was completely convinced that I had done all I could do would I even contact my host's tech support people, and then I'd be asking for *help* (instead of "demanding" they put me on a different server because I was convinced all my problems were the result of the host's "overselling"). I would not "unleash the dogs of war" on my host's customer-to-customer forums (solicit on my forum for members to help me "against Dreamhost") complaining. If I had conducted my research thoroughly and completely, was convinced the host was at fault, and worked with the host to resolve the issue, but it became clear it would not be resolved to my satisfaction, I'd find a new host. A concerted "drive-by bashing" of an associated business whose service I was unhappy with is almost as childish as it is ineffective.

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We would not be at this forum if Dreamhost was doing their job. :)

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I also would not be so arrogant to assume that is "their job" to make my site run "fast" - I'd ask for their help in determining the source of the problem, rather than "invading" their forum with my whining.

Okay, whining might seem harsh, but how else is one to interpret someone complaining about the speed with which their site loads when the site's opening page has two large (not in dimensions, in filesize) aninmated gifs?

--rlparker

How does that explain why the site is still so slow when people are using the un-altered skin that doesn't display any animated images on the front page? It's just the straight, out of the box VB skin, and it makes no difference whatsoever. If the forum is running slow, it's running slow. The skin doesn't seem to matter.

We are going to try removing the images anyway, I was just curious why the skin mattered to those that didn't use it.

Looking at the comments in this forum I have to say that these are CLASSIC symptoms of a poorly indexed/maintained DB. (this just happens with time and why there are people with the job title of DBA - this is what they do.)

One problem with trying to diagnose these issues on a system where the DB runs on a machine other than the web server is that you have nearly no visibility into the db server to see what is going on.

One REALLY good piece of information though is that MySQL does have some good tools to see what's going on with the DB - and DH has a couple of guys that JUST work on DBs.

At this point, I'll be that no one has actually LOOKED at how the DB is running. It could be your tables getting full and not being indexed properly (this will cause queries to return slowly). It could also be that someone else is using all of the DB server.

I would either grab the MySQL tools and connect directly to the DB and see what you can see (you'll have your answers pretty quickly - once you know what you're looking at - there should be info on the wiki of how to do it) and/or report "Slow DB" to support to ask a DBA to take a look at it. A good DBA can look at the current status of the server and have a decent idea of what's going on pretty quickly and make some quick index changes or recommendations.

If the boards are really heavy it may be necessary to move older data out of the main tables.

But a good DBA can make recommendations for everyone's benefit.

Wholly

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What I do find surprising is the blase tone of many of the Dreamhost people regarding the support that Evan and Lynn have received.

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Joker,

First, I've yet to see any "Dreamhost people" participate at all in this thread. This is a customer-to-customer forum, and, while Dreamhost staff do occasionally stop in, and even more occasionally post here, most of us are just customers just like Evan or Lynn.

I suggest that what you are interpreting as "blase tone" is more accurately described as a difference of opinion about what is properly the purpose and responsibility of tech support in such instances.

It appears some here feel that the *basic* troubleshooting for speed/responsiveness problems is the responsibility of the site developer. There are many threads here where developers have posted high load values, DNS availability problems, or other issues that were *clearly* the responsibility of the host (bad_http config, etc) and have gotten empathetic support from the users here.

This situation is different in that none of that has been done. Instead, one day a group of "new users" show up an complain in concert, under a provocative thread title, that the host is responsible for their problem with no representation as to why that is true.

Most here are not particularly empathetic with such behavior, especially if we take the time to visit the site, find it working "reasonably well", and note that while the administrators of the site complain about loading speed, they put over 400KB of animated graphics on the front page of a totally dynamic site. We tend to think, "Yeah it could be faster , but it is obvious no attempt has been made to optimize it."

Additionally, the, "Hey guys, let's all go to the DH forums and bitch till they give us a new server" tone of the so-there forum makes me so-not-interested in how it all works out for them.

There have been several sincere suggestions regarding steps that could be taken to speed up the site and help identify to what degree the server is to blame. Until some of that has been taken seriously, all the rest of this is just "bitchin' in the wind".

--rlparker

We are on it.

I appreciate the help and info, but when it comes to looking at SQL data I may as well be looking at Chinese. Vbulletin has a maintenance section in their admin control panel and I have ran the "repair/optimize tables" function and removed the dreaded animated gifs that were plaguing my front page so we shall see if that helps.

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How does that explain why the site is still so slow when people are using the un-altered skin that doesn't display any animated images on the front page?

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It may very well not have anything to do with the speed problem for users that don't use the skin - I have no way to evaluate that as I only see what a "guest" sees.

To me, the graphics themselves were not so much a "problem" (I have a "fastish adsl connection") in and of themselves, as they were an indication that no attempt at, or consideration of, optimization had been made.

Now, I realize that may not be true, but that is how it appears. I suspect that things like optimized MySQL queries, indexed tables, and caching are most likely to be the the best approach to avoiding "bottlenecks", but I recognize it *could* be the server - the problem is that no server load numbers, or any other types of empirical evidence, were provided - only the anecdotal reports of "It's unusably slow".

My experience has been this is *usually* more a problem with the site than the server; if it *is* the server, there should be other indications.

That, the provocative post title, and the "let's go invade the DH customer forum with complaints" tone of the so-there forum itself pretty much turned me off and made me less sympathetic than I might normally have been.

--rlparker

Making sense of that "Chinese" is just what the DH DBA's can probably do for you. Repair/Optimize shouldn't hurt at all but a real DBA (or a lucky developer) can sometimes find a "golden hammer" and and take a turd and turn it back into a diamond.

And sometimes not. I do wish you luck on this. Slow forums do suck and you have taken a heaping of abuse from rlparker. He always gets grumpy on days ending in "day". Hopefully it'll be worth it in the end.

WhollyEdited by wholly on 01/08/07 10:05 PM (server time).

Evan,

That's great to hear! It's also pretty neat that you have such a passionate and loyal community; they obviously care about the site, and that is a "Good Thing(tm)".

Good luck with your fact-finding, and don't hesitate to post back (preferably in a new thread) if there is anything *we* (customers like yourself) can do to help you sort it out or help with any optimization you might decide to attempt. Good Luck!

--rlparker

Can you link me to the exact "tools" you were referring to? I looked in my control panel and I didn't see anything besides PhpMyAdmin.

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I have ran the "repair/optimize tables" function

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That is likely to have a positive effect! Good luck, and let us know the results!

--rlparker

We just heard from Dreamhost, and they did admit our server was running slow because of excessive CGI scripts running on it, so they are willing to move us to a new box. :) I guess it wasn't on our end afterall.

Either way, we got rid of the animated graphics just for safe measure.

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you have taken a heaping of abuse from rlparker. He always gets grumpy on days ending in "day"

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Ha! You think my posts in this thread qualify as a "heaping of abuse" ? And I even thought I was being careful to "be nice"! It's a good thing I wasn't *trying* to be abusive. BTW, how does pointing out an alternative (possibly more productive?) method of troubleshooting qualify as "grumpy"?

I'm actually in a great mood today, so much so that I tried to make helpful suggestions in a thread my better instincts told me to ignore (I've gotta learn to trust my instincts more).

--rlparker

"I would not "unleash the dogs of war" on my host's customer-to-customer forums (solicit on my forum for members to help me "against Dreamhost") complaining. If I had conducted my research thoroughly and completely, was convinced the host was at fault, and worked with the host to resolve the issue, but it became clear it would not be resolved to my satisfaction, I'd find a new host. A concerted "drive-by bashing" of an associated business whose service I was unhappy with is almost as childish as it is ineffective."

^-- To address that, since it was replied to my post. I can only speak for myself here, but I was merely stating my opinions on how the forum is working for me. I don't believe I said anything that was seen as "drive by bashing" or "childish". Was just stating my opinions is all. And if I offended you, I apologize. :)

"I also would not be so arrogant to assume that is "their job" to make my site run "fast" - I'd ask for their help in determining the source of the problem, rather than "invading" their forum with my whining."

^-- To address this, I mainly said that "Dreamhost wasn't doing their job" because Evan was sending email after email and wasn't getting any responses back and it seem like his concerns about our forum were being ignored. I thought that was very unprofessional. Had he had gotten at least an automated "Hey we received your email and will be getting back to you, blah blah blah." everything would have been copasetic, Yanno? And again, I can only speak for myself here, but I think it's safe to say that *WE* were only showing our support and appreciation to Evan and Lynn by coming here and helping them get some answers on how we can fix our problem. :) I know that I didn't come here to appear childish or to whine, just wanted to voice my opinion that's all.

The MySQL tools that I was referring to are from www.mysql.com. They're most useful to DBAs and developers. If support found an issue it must have been noticably bad.

That's one of the dangers of shared servers. Everyone has to play nice.

Wholly

Those are all good points, Dawn_Renee, and I appreciate you taking the time to respond with them. I understand your reasons for posting completely, and I was not offended; no apology is necessary (though your willingness to show concern for that is admirable).

In that same vein, please accept my apology for "personalizing" some of my comments by responding to *your* post - it's always hard to know what to include in a given post that addresses the entirety of a thread. My comments regarding the "campaign" and the effectiveness of "whining" were not directed personally at you, but rather the whole "process" the so-there community support of Evan and Lynn took in this thread, and the characterization of that campaign on the so-there forum as an "us against Dreamhost" thing.

You certainly did not engage in any "drive-by bashing" or "whining" (though I do think that was the general tone of this thread), and I apologize for making those comments in a post responding *to you*!

The recent posts in the thread indicate some effort is being expended toward being able to authoritatively identify the source(s) of the responsiveness problem(s), and I'm hopeful that will be productive for the benefit of you and your community.

--rlparker

That's good to hear, and hopefully your problem will be resolved.

Even with that fix, if the site has started to degrade in performance with usage, wholly's suggestions re. the DB tuning are still well worth following up on. Good Luck!

--rlparker

Thank you, rlparker. I understand what you mean about the replying part. There should be a separate "reply" post at the bottom so that you don't have to necessarily "reply" to someone's post, Yanno? ;)

And Sorry about being alil over sensitive to your post. Perhaps I shouldn't have taken it so personally but I felt alil attacked. Blame my meds. LOL :D

And Yay we got a response and are being moved!! Thank you to all that gave us Lots of possible solutions and paths to help us fix our problem. We greatly appreciate it!! (whether it seemed like it or not) :)

I was an admin on a board with well over 150,000 members, and over 6 million posts...so managing a forum correctly is key. The signatures are way oversized, avatars are too large, and it appears there is no specified limits for graphic sizes. The site would appear slow due to the loads of kb of the aforementioned items. Put some better limits in place, and you would be amazed at the response time.

As mentioned, the site is heavy with excess. I've actually been a member for over a year, and really haven't noticed any problems. Course, I have an incredibly fast connection, so it breezes by for me...albeit slower than other boards I frequent.

For such a tiny forum (yes, it is tiny) you shouldn't, have any problems. Graphic heavy sigs and huge avatars (150x150!!! Should be 20x20!) are slowing it down for most, I would imagine.

Always good to have a pro stop by. Not all of us have had the luxury (frustration) of a large user base.

Wholly

We've tried disabling sigs and avatars but they didn't seem to have any noticeable effect. Personally I despise huge signatures and would prefer leaving them to one line of text, but I'd be chased outta town by a rabid mob if I tried to do that.

Actually, we like being a small forum. It's a very tight knit group of people, so in some cases, size really doesn't matter. :) Bigger isn't always better.

But when you have performance problems it's ALWAYS better to not be the big dog!

Wholly

It's not about disabling sigs...there are lots of animated sigs and such...it's limiting size of sigs to a rule of x pixels by x pixels and no greater than 50kb.

[quote]it's limiting size of sigs to a rule of x pixels by x pixels and no greater than 50kb.[quote]Frankly, I think even 50kb is too much; viewing a "flat" thread with 10 posts that have 50kb sigs generates a page containing nearly half a megabyte of "sig cruft" *in addition* to any other "content" of posts.

--rlparker

I'm a bit late to the party, waiting on a password to arrive for this place. I am also just a regular user of Maagic and Evan's forum, and have a bit of tech savvy to use for testing the "slow times" of the forum.

I have used the Lynx browser on a 3Mb/1Mb connection and still had the forum load slow. (for those who don't recognise the name Lynx, it is a TEXT ONLY *nix web browser.) Which means even cutting the graphics out didn't help it run any faster for me during the "slow times."

I've you've got any MySQL skillz, offer to look into the DB and see if you can identify anything. Agreed, Lynx will bypass all images and if it's slow then, it's just plain slow.

Previously in this thread DH support acknowleged some heavy CGI issues on thier server which could be making it rough but it never hurts to check on the DB.

Wholly

We're having similar issues on our forum. I know it's not just the forum, though, because I couldn't load anything in PhpMyAdmin either.

This is the error message we get when the server borks on us:

I have to step up and eat a little crow. DH did for us exactly what they said they would do, and they did it very quickly. I regret the title of this thread and wish I could take it back. :)

We are all responsible for what we say though, and I'm no exception.

Thank you Dreamhost. The next time we have an issue, if we ever do, I will sit on my hands.