News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by colbyolson on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @03:55AM (#878620)
Now I know downtime is normal for a host. Yes, even Google.

But when you visit the homepage of their status-blog[1], don't you think that's a bit too many updates a little too frequently?

Or should we commend Dreamhost on being super-transparent in their network/uptime issues?

[1] http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/

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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by dflock on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @04:43AM (#878675)
DH are mostly just very transparent about downtime - more so than most hosts. They are also very cheap. If you would like more nine's, you will need to pay more. MT, rackspace, etc... are all considerably more expensive.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by bcl on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @10:35AM (#879146)
I always appreciate transparency in support issues. I'm much happier knowing that an issue is being worked on than sitting in the dark wondering if anyone has noticed.

I also see that they host their status blog outside their core network. Good idea :)

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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by aw3c2 on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @04:44AM (#878678)
They are just very bad. I am so glad I moved away from them a year ago.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by madaerodog on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @04:35AM (#878661)
what is funny about the status page is that it isn't a day that they don't run into an issue ..
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by timdorr on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @04:39AM (#878667)
Given the number of domains they host (nearly a million: http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/DR...), I'm shocked they don't have more outages to report. Perhaps they do. They've got enough hardware that system failures are bound to be a daily occurrence. And I'm sure software problems stack right on top of that.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by pbhjpbhj on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @07:21AM (#878823)
if you look at the issues too there's a lot of "this server had to have an fsck to resolve something" and "theses servers were slow so we fixed them".

99.9% uptime is still something like 8 hours downtime - this big outage was about 40 mins so they've some leeway yet.

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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by colbyolson on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @03:57AM (#878623)
If it's of any concern, Dreamhost is also the host for two of my websites.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by timtrueman on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @04:17AM (#878645)
Semi-unrelated but if you're curious about BGP, this 2004 talk—although absurdly long—talks about some of the issues with BGP (an many other issues with hosting content on the Internet). The speaker is Tom Leighton, one of the founders of Akamai.

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/199 (BGP at ~10 minutes in)

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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by noonespecial on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @02:21AM (#878502)
It looks like our core router lost its BGP session which took down our entire network (as far as we can tell). We have our network administrator heading to the data center now and should be there in 20 minutes or so. More updates to come.

Umm core router?! One? I'm thinking they'll revisit this strategy now.

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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by dangrossman on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @02:28AM (#878508)
Significant downtime throughout the entire history of the company doesn't seem to have caused them to revisit any of their strategies. Nothing will change, changing would cost money they clearly don't need to spend, or they wouldn't have retained their customers.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by madaerodog on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @03:23AM (#878586)
I liked this comment on their status page

"shabooty Says: I wonder if this site is hosted at media temple?"

epic

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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by andrewvc on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @02:18AM (#878495)
Good news, my DH hosted site just came back up sometime in the last 2 minutes.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by whatusername on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @02:27AM (#878507)
mines up as well
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by st3fan on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @07:29AM (#878831)
"""We have our network administrator heading to the data center now and should be there in 20 minutes or so."""

Huh. He could not dial in to login to the router? No emergency DSL line for maintenance?

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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by alexandros on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @03:16AM (#878573)
First Microsoft/Danger/Sidekick, then Apple, now this. We need a computing paradigm that does not suffer from single points of failiure, or at least fails more gracefully.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by mseebach on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @05:52AM (#878747)
You've got it. Call IBM and ask them about managed hosting. You can use the Dreamhost prices as a reference, just add 3-5 zeroes on the end.

If you buy a $500 car, never service it, and it breaks down unexpectedly, do you call for a new paradigm of personal transportation, or do you say "rats, well it was cheap and served me well while it lasted"?

Is avoiding 33 minutes of downtime worth tens of thousands of dollars to your business? Didn't think so.

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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by nuclear_eclipse on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @07:28AM (#878828)
I switched from DH, where I had constant outage problems, to Slicehost and Linode, both of which have never had outages (for me), for only $15 more a month...
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by mseebach on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @07:52AM (#878852)
That's nice, and $15/month probably buys you a lot over DH -- but it's not like Slicehost is immune:

http://status.slicehost.com/2009/9/22/stl-a-network-issues-2

http://status.slicehost.com/2009/3/27/stl-b-network-issues-0...

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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by atambo on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @01:18PM (#879531)
I recently switched from DH to linode as well. Best decision I've ever made.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by johnnybgoode on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @02:14AM (#878489)
I am not very familiar with Dreamhost, although I've heard of them many times, but if they're big enough, shouldn't they have failover for everything?
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by niyazpk on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @02:35AM (#878518)
But even after all those measures, shit happen sometimes. Then the only thing that matters is how you respond to it and how transparent and honest you are about it.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by johnnybgoode on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @02:57AM (#878541)
Are you saying they did have failover set up for everything? I'm just curious. I do agree with your point, though.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by gorm on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @05:50AM (#878744)
Quick fix for such a problem. Dreamhost support is pretty impressive, but sites can be a bit slow.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by whirlycott1 on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @07:30AM (#878835)
"We have our network administrator heading to the data center now and should be there in 20 minutes or so. More updates to come."

If they host a million domains, why isn't someone on site 24x7?

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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by sjs on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @08:17AM (#878882)
Anyone with serious uptime requirements avoids DreamHost. It sounds strange considering their size but it probably just isn't really in their budget. I used to have a DH account and it's pretty good for what it is. Now I have a VPS though.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by Retric on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @08:13AM (#878874)
My guess is they only have low to mid level support 24/7.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by aw3c2 on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @10:53AM (#879186)
My site was slow and support told me that this was due to the long travel the packets have to go cross-atlantic. Yeah.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by Mystalic on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @02:21AM (#878501)
My site's loading...and websites loading is a good thing.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by vaksel on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @02:25AM (#878505)
works fine for me
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by schammy on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @03:48AM (#878612)
Shit happens. Even Google has outages (Gmail, anyone?). Life goes on.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by uriel on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @04:57AM (#878697)
Other than search and google.com, the reliability of Google's services is truly awful.
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Re:Dreamhost is down. All of it. by jonursenbach on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @02:29AM (#878509)
Funny that this happens the day I start looking into a hosted Wordpress service.
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