DreamHost PS

The site that I have at Dreamhost gets a good amount of traffic and uses MovableType. I was contacted by one of the support people about upgrading to the PS service because my site uses a lot of server resources. We emailed back and forth and I decided it would be worth the extra money for some added stability.

The change was made late yesterday and my site has been down since 6:30pm last night. When I checked the status in my control panel it says things like
"Your website does not appear in the Apache configuration file."
and
"Your home directory does not exist on your web server."

I've emailed support three times now pleading for help and over 15 hours later I haven't heard from them and my site is still down. Unfortunately this isn't the first time I've had to wait this long for help from support.

If someone contacts you to switch to the PS service or to change your account in any way, beware! You may find yourself in my shoes.

Very, very frustrating.

As far as I'm aware, you have to wait for your DNS to update because of a change of IP. I'm not on DreamHost PS so I don't have any experience to share, but someone else may be able to confirm or deny this.


-- si-blog --

I thought I remember reading that it would take a few days for the transition to a new server when your DreamHost PS service is activated. I was lucky in that my site started working about four hours after they first started transitioning it over. At any rate since you're moving to a new server you'll have to wait for DNS to propagate so it's not like you could instantly switch over.

I don't think it's supposed to be a zero downtime operation and I do think it would be better if they provided more warning about this.

Have you checked whether the DNS for the domain you're concerned about has been changed to your new server? If it hasn't and you think all of your files have been copied over is to "edit" your hosting and just hit accept again. I think this redoes your DNS entries.

The issue was fixed around noon, over 16 hours later. It was a configuration error on their end. As soon as they fixed that, it worked fine.

The DNS listed in my domain's control panel is the same as before so I dont think that was part of the issue.

Whew, I'm glad they finally got it worked out. Did they say what was configured incorrectly?

Yes but I don't totally understand it.

"The problem came down to your server not being able to accept mounts to your user data. That's why not only your sites were down, since the web server couldn't find the web files, but you also couldn't connect to the server as your user."

I'm glad to have the site up and running again but some parts aren't working like AWStats.

The 16 hours down without hearing from support is also really an issue.

That just means that you didn't have a home directory. Without that, there's no place to log in to. A home directory is accessed during login, and if it's not present, the login bombs.

-Scott

(and fyi, the mounts referred to are NFS mounts)