For me, Dropbox.com is up but scripting.com is down.

I believe this is one of those rare circumstances when I can use the word "irony" correctly.

Dropbox.com is up, sure. The service is down though.

Nobody has ever encouraged me to rely on scripting.com for my own business, though, so I could accept that situation more easily.

Same for me.

Interestingly, according to downforeveryoneorjustme, scripting.com is down as is dropbox.com. This is a bit odd, as it seems to load and work perfectly for me, albeit with https.

Hey...they at least posted something. I love when companies communicate that they are down rather than just stonewalling.

In this day and age when systems are ridiculously complex I expect stuff to go down every so often. It is how they handle it that counts.

Totally agree. And the community responds quickly too.

Use this link to keep an eye on things: http://status.dropbox.com/

Yikes. They are doing it wrong.

This is the classic case of "working hard to fix things when they should be spending a little more time updating clients and being descriptive about the problem."

I've been involved with so many down-time instances with web hosts and web service providers that I can tell you the #1 thing that pisses people off is the lack of communication - MORE THAN THE DOWNTIME ITSELF!

If they could tell us some technical, but not too revealing, details, that would be great. Then those of us with experience can guess what the time frame will ACTUALLY be to fix the problem, while others can at least get the feeling that they getting to the bottom of the problem.

I'll be the contrary voice. At this point, I don't really care what the cause of the downtime is and I'd prefer that their engineers are working full time on fixing it, rather than writing extended blog posts about it. If they have a solid ETA on a fix, that might be nice to know, but from my experience it's unusual to be able to give such a number with confidence. After the fact, maybe there is an interesting story to tell about what went wrong and how they hope to avoid it in the future, but that's for tomorrow not today.

I'll go in the middle.

First having a page like this where I can make sure I'm not the issue is helpful and I can be somewhat comforted there.

However, now that I've discovered the issue doesn't exist between my ass and my keyboard I'd also like some sort of idea on the depth of the issue and a timeframe for a fix.

I think your porridge is just right.

Don't make me read a wall of text to get a simple answer to "is it down?", but clue me in on what's going on and, if possible, when I can expect service to resume.

Dropbox isn't critical for us where I work, but it is something we use daily for passing documents around.

I respect your opinion, but what I mean is that seeing something along the lines of "replacing a router", or "re-establishing communications with AWS", or whatever it happens to be, is better than "it's down".

There also has to be a couple people there that aren't hands on with the problem, and their responsibility could easily be to constantly communicate with the public.

Well the persons that are sitting back not doing anything would still have to talk to someone who knows what is going on to ask them anyway.

Also, it seems you're never going to be able to give out enough info to please everyone in these circumstances so you give out just enough like they did.

I agree with you, personally.

But from what I have seen of my customers? they agree with the previous post.

Agreed, when I saw this status page I let out a slight sigh of relief seeing a straight forward "currently down" "working normally" site, instead of a series of blog entries ala twitter and tumblr.

It's nice that you want to write, but for the love of God get back to work.

Still down for me. You can get status updates here:

https://twitter.com/#!/dropboxops

They're Up Now: http://status.dropbox.com/ 11:55 pst

I would be interested to know how this is a 49 point worth submission

I'll guess that it's because many HN readers (including myself) heavily rely on Dropbox, pretty much every day of the calendar year.

It highlights the dangers of the cloud as people move more and more "mission-critical" applications to the Web.

Calling a service going down a "danger of the cloud" is sensationalist, like calling any pervert who has ever touched a keyboard an "Internet predator." The adjective 'Internet' in that case, or 'cloud' in this one, does not usefully divide the problem space.

Your service will have the same amount of unpredictable black-swan downtime whether it is local or remote. The difference is, when the only person you have to blame is yourself (or someone you empathize with), you mentally downplay the downtime—whereas, when you can point a finger and create a mental "us/them" division, you exaggerate it.

Also, DropBox is a YC-funded startup.

scripting.com is down

I very much consider Dropbox one of the very best when it comes to communicating and solving issues. Wouldn't worry to much.

1and1.com is down today http://twitter.com/#search?q=1and1

I've had constant issues with 1and1 over the years with their less than reliable uptime. At least one of my sites (which are relatively low-traffic sites) goes down once a week for an undetermined amount of time.

Has anybody had better experiences with other hosts? I've been thinking of trying out Linode lately..

I just came into a position where I inherited a site running on 1and1. Yesterday their DNS went down for a half an hour, that was a fun half hour.

I've never really had problems with HostGator or asmallorange. HostGator can be slow, but it's good value for the price, and pretty clean cpanel interface on the whole. ASO has good support and seems pretty snappy. (Of course I'm using an absurd amount of disk space on HostGator, mostly for backups.)

The biggest thing with 1and1 is what a huge mess their administrative interface is. Almost half of the space is ads trying to upsell you to their other services. You would think as a paying customer they could leave me alone.

It's both good and bad to see others are sharing my experiences. And yes, their admin interface is absolutely horrible.

Thanks for sharing!

Linode is excellent.

I did see recently that EC2 really has some competitive pricing, though - $225 a year for a 1.7GB server? That's a lot cheaper than most VPS hosting.

Check out the new micro EC2 instances that Amazon AWS offers. They make hosting a small site on AWS much more affordable than before.

I experienced the same issues with 1and1 last year.

It goes down often and they took sometime few days to reply to tickets (when they reply).

I'm now happy on Linode for my own stuff and on engine yard for work-related hosting.

Check out ElasticHosts...I started using them a few months back to run some servers, and I've got nothing but good things to say about them (so far).

Slicehost is good; I've used them for about a year now and had no problems. Very similar to Linode, but slightly more expensive.

I just recently got on with Linode for some personal projects and to learn a bit more about administrating a server. Can't recommend it enough. What an excellent service.

1and1 has always been pretty lousy. Good for domain registration, though.

Already working again for me.

Works for me, oddly enough.

Rolling blackouts, eh?