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I Am Your Shepherd

September 8, 2006 on 6:40 pm | In Insider View, Musings by Josh Jones |

The Swedish Trek: Borg Borg Borg.

So, a lot of people apparently liked making fun of my wife last week.

The post got on the first page of digg, over 1000 diggs, and pushed about 14 times the typical daily traffic our way.

Cool, people must have really found it interesting.

I must have really struck a chord.

Or maybe I cheated.

You see, the DreamHost newsletter went out that day, to nearly all our subscribers.. and I put a link to that post in it. That in itself drew way more people to the blog than on average.

Then, I posted it on digg. (Actually, I tried to, but some Happy DreamHost Customer beat me to the punch, so I just used his post!)

For those of you who don’t know, digg is basically a “meta-blog” where anybody can post an interesting link with a blurb and if enough people find it interesting it gets promoted up to the front page. It’s supposedly a highly-democratic way for the “hive mind” to filter out the cruft from the crop. Supposedly.

As you might have noticed, there are a lot of sites like this these days, these user-driven sites. Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, yada yada yada.. there’s even a community-driven t-shirt site, threadless.com!

I guess that’s what makes the web 2.0.

Then, I included the little “Digg” icon at the bottom of the post with some html they provide. Unfortunately, due to a problem with Wordpress and Javascript in posts, the digg icon doesn’t seem to show up in IE 6.

Unfortunately… for nobody!

It turns out enough newsletter readers saw the digg link, were registered digg users, and thought the post was diggable to get it up to 50 or so diggs pretttty fast. And apparently somewhere around 50 is when digg decides a new post is popular enough to automatically make the front page!

Once it was on the front page, that was it. The diggers started digging it, the newsletterers kept newslettering it, the traffic kept rising, the bloggers starting blogging it, and so on and so on. I was contacted by my aunt, my wife’s cousin, my old college suitemate, Yahoo’s anti-phishing department, and even the head of the IRS’s anti-online-fraud department.

Who knew my aunt read digg?

Happy DreamHost Customers

So, the post was clearly a hit.

But really, was it that great? I mean, yes, it was. Of course. I’m awesome. Thanks.

But what it also seems, is that I have a human “bot-net” of hundreds of thousands of willing drones, that I can send in any direction I choose! Mwah ha ha ha.

And it just so turns out that community “voting” sites are highly susceptible to the directed efforts of thousands of people!

If I wanted to, I could probably repost my old prediction about Apple making Video Airport Expresses (in anticipation of their announcement next tuesday), get it on the front page of digg, the rumor sites would take it as gospel, and before you know it, I’d be paid a little visit by three large men in black turtlenecks.

Of course, anybody who’s ever run an online poll knows how easy it is for community-driven features to get abused. My way is a just slightly less automated, but a lot more “authentic way” of generating attention and spreading my influence.

It’s really just the “web 2.0″ version of special-interest groups and letter-writing campaigns.

Letters?

Ask your parents about them.

And that is where I see an inherent weakness in this brave new world we’re entering into. Sometimes, moderators are needed. Sometimes, the wisdom of crowds doesn’t work. Sometimes, the crowd is gaming you.

It’s the tyranny of the well-organized minority.

It even happens to us.. subversion was one of the most-voted on features in our suggestions area for a while. It seemed a teeny bit esoteric to me, but eh, whatever, I guess we’ve got a lot of fancy coding mama-yamas hosting with us. We implemented it, and it does seem popular.. but not nearly as popular as we might have expected based on the votes.

Later I discovered why.

Some sneakster had published a link right to the “Vote for official DreamHost support of Subversion” in the Subversion area of our wiki!

There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it did mean that just about EVERYBODY who used DreamHost and was at all interested in Subversion voted for it.. whereas our other suggestions get a much more random and normal distribution of users.

I wish I weren't a lemming.

Anyway, it’s all very interesting.

What EVIL SCHEME shall I use you, my sheep, for next?

Shall we get mandatory school vouchers for hybrid vehicles? Maybe we should all boycott McDonald’s new DRM-restricted big macs? Or do some offshore drilling into SCO’s legal team?

No matter what we decide though, I promise it’ll be in our best interest! When you’re a minority (and believe it or not, DreamHost customers are still a minority), you’ve got to organize and use the power you have efficiently and effectively. It worked for the Sunnis in Iraq, and it will work for you.

First order of business, let’s get this T-Shirt design made:

(It was made by a DH employee’s GIRLfriend!)

Go vote!

Please?

77 Comments

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1

You know, normally I’m all for these long musings and views into the souls of the folks who make Dreamhost run - but it’s a little bit rude to post one of these things when Dreamhost *isn’t actually running*, and half your customers are sitting on their hands waiting for the panel to even be working so they can submit a ticket to complain about it.

Comment by Daniel Drucker — September 8, 2006 #
2

Josh is attempting to control our minds off of the downtime with this blog post. Mmmmm… sheep.

Comment by Jacob — September 8, 2006 #
3

I was thinkig the exact same thing. Shouldn’t your customer’s websites be our first priority? Not adding to your own corporate blog.

Comment by Redune — September 8, 2006 #
4

Can you make a post about the serious downtime instead of how you trick people online? Oh, wait.

Comment by Kyle — September 8, 2006 #
5

Josh,

Why don’t you STOP posting and START fixing!

I’m sick and tired of my site going down EVERY COUPLE OF DAYS.

…here’s one “unhappy” dreamhost customer wishing he didn’t pay for a year of service in advance…

Comment by jacob — September 8, 2006 #
6

I can sympathize with people who are upset when they see a blog post during problems. For what it’s worth, Josh is not our network admin, and I promise you the people who ARE our network admins are presently working on our network and not posting to blogs. Hope that helps.

Comment by Pete — September 8, 2006 #
7

I can’t believe we pay you for this. This nonchalant attitude is an insult to all the people who have paid you to host their blogs, their online stores, their art galleries, or whatever they’ve chosen to upload. As you know, some of your customers depend on their web site’s constant operation for their income. Two or three days of downtime is a serious issue to these people.

I think that instead of posting this ridiculous garbage, you could at least mention the fact that you know that DreamHost is down, and that yes, you are working hard to fix the problem.

In other words, you could make an effort to demonstrate something resembling tact.

Comment by Paul — September 8, 2006 #
8

Regardless of whether Josh is the network admin, the optics of posting a frivolous post to the official blog when ours (you know, the ones we pay you to host) are down — well, it looks bad. Nero fiddling while Rome burns and all that. Tone deaf.

Comment by JC — September 8, 2006 #
9

Or, let me put it this way: my server’s load averages are pushing 250, none of my web sites have been publicly accessible for more than 10 minutes this evening before going down again, and the control panel — you know, the only way we can report problems — hasn’t loaded properly in my browser in more than two hours. So, you know, a post about Digg on the Official DreamHost Blog doesn’t go over real well right now.

Comment by JC — September 8, 2006 #
10

wheres my website at?

Comment by ninj0r — September 8, 2006 #
11

I have to say to all the dreamhost customers that you need to calm down. Outages happen. I’ve been with Dreamhost for a year now and I’ve experienced very few outages compared to my previous host. Perhaps you have never been with another hots but at my previous host every time there was an outage it was not even noticed until I submitted a ticket. Dreamhost has always had my site up an running quickly without my intervention.

And regarding the Josh bashing… at your company if there is a problem down on the floor does the rest of your company shut down. I don’t think so. You put your best people on it and the CEO continues with his golf game. Besides do you really want the head guy coming down and pressuring you when you’re trying to work something out? They just get in the way. Let Josh post while the network guys fix the issue.

Comment by JH — September 8, 2006 #
12

Nice post, josh…but…uh…your timing *sucks*. Many DH customers’ sites can’t handle a half-dozen visitors right now (or even one if they are MySQL driven) because of *serious* network issues at DH. This is probably *not* the time to be “flip” about the wonders of driving traffic to sites via social networking. I still love ya, but you simply *must* show a little more sensitivity for you customers’ feelings, or you are gonna come off a “less” than the sensitive, compassionate soul you are [wink]

Comment by rlparker — September 8, 2006 #
13

Sorry folks. Every time there is a problem everyone starts to whine and blame and in general downtalk the host. I for one am happy with Dreamhost. I came here from 1and1 as a host. my websites have been down ONCE in the almost year that I have been here. Even now my sites are all up and running, although I cannot access the control panel. This will be solved. Keep wporking on it guys, and thanks for the best hosting experience I have had since I hosted my own site on this box :)

-HAPPY Dreamhost customer.

P.S. Putting the support page somewhere else would lead to TONS and floods of reports and so forth over a problem they already know about, costing them more time in fixing the actual glitch. dreamhoststatus.com is up, try looking at it.

Comment by y0himba — September 8, 2006 #
14

I wish my load was at 250. Try:
19:28:33 up 2:37, 2 users, load average: 854.79, 922.14, 762.35

Uptimes are usually less than 5 minutes, with load climbing regularly over 400. This machine (starburst) is seriously stressed. This is nothing new. I complained about 400 load averages a week ago.

Comment by roberte — September 8, 2006 #
15

I’ve been with dreamhost for about 2 months, my website has been fine, but i’ve always had issues accessing the control panel, now my website is down D:

Comment by ninj0r — September 8, 2006 #
16

JH, I’ve been with DreamHost five years to your one. They’ve done a good job overall, but the last two months have sorely tried my patience.

And even if the CEO should continue with his golf game, it still LOOKS bad. Josh can’t get servers running on his own, but this post’s timing came across as callous.

Comment by JC — September 8, 2006 #
17

“Putting the support page somewhere else …”

Someone is seriously advocating an intentional policy of having the trouble-ticket system be broken whenever it’s needed most?

Comment by Daniel Drucker — September 8, 2006 #
18

The situation here is a little different than the factory-floor scenario you presented, JH. Because this blog is the official DreamHost blog, anyone who posts here is a de facto representative of the DreamHost gestalt. It follows that regardless of whether Josh is DreamHost’s CEO or its janitor, when he posts here he acts as a public relations agent whether he likes it or not. As rlparker pointed out, Josh’s timing could not have been much worse.

Comment by Kayel — September 8, 2006 #
19

I have already paid for a new host, and would jump ship if I could log into my CPanel to change my damn DNS info. Still your sheep in the meantime, all four legs in boots.

I’m going to kick your ass legally!

Comment by Blarrrrghhhh — September 8, 2006 #
20

Maybe you should stop patting yourself on the back for your stupid story that got on Digg and start figuring out how to run a hosting company that ACTUALLY WORKS!

I’m jumping ship because of the downtime.

Dreamhost is the worst hosting company I have ever been with in the 11 years I’ve been online. I’ve had more downtime in the last 3 months than I’ve had in years with other hosting companies.

Fix your stuff!! I’m outta here!

Comment by Dreamhost Sucks — September 8, 2006 #
21

This is ridiculous. Instead of this babble, at least inform us, the people who are stuck without websites, what the heck is going on.

I could care less about your blog getting on Digg when my sites don’t even load.

Please have some decency and at least let us know what is going on.

The most pressing issue right now is, “Will we have to wait until monday to get our sites back?”

Comment by Brandon — September 8, 2006 #
22

Hi. My site’s on the Rygar server, and everything’s been working fine for me. I guess if I were on one of the troublesome servers, I’d be peeved, but from where I stand, Dreamhost is still a terrific value.

Just wanted to balance out all this negativity with a few positive comments of my own, but I might be fighting an uphill battle in that regard.

Comment by Albright — September 8, 2006 #
23

Alternative hosting companies:

http://dreamhostsucks.blogspot.com

Comment by Dreamhost Sucks — September 8, 2006 #
24

My sites seem to be working just fine… although I did end up here because the panel was down and I was hoping for another informative post (like that one about a month ago with all the hindenburg pics and such) to explain things to me in appologetic terms that make me feel important. While I can’t complain personally, I do sorta feel the same as the fellah above who called you nero… at the very least write a few words to tell us you are aware there’s a problem, my dear freind, and at least pretend you’re personally running on 6 days of no sleep to calm us down.
Other than that, yea, I voted for your coworker’s girlfriend’s design. It’s a good design.

Comment by ken — September 8, 2006 #
25

I like how your status page says “We are working on the network and all servers having problems, but the real solution will be the Monday Night maintenance.”

How about tonight?

Comment by Ken — September 8, 2006 #
26

By the way, I wrote #24, not #23. That’s a different Ken.

Comment by Ken — September 8, 2006 #
27

OK, why does this Dreamhost-hosted website work, and mine doesn’t? Is it possible that I might enjoy the same privileges as Josh Jones, that I can actually ACCESS my website? Or is reliable webhosting only available to Dreamhost employees?

Comment by Charles — September 8, 2006 #
28

I will vote when you can make the panel work again and our websites don’t load like snails.

Comment by dhuser — September 8, 2006 #
29

Agreed.. this bites.

As the majority of your paying client sites are down - again - hopefully ‘only’ until Monday the 11th (yikes!), it would seem like a perfect opportunity for D.H. to walk a mile in our shoes meanwhile and have this cheeky “I’m Digg Cool” crap load 404 like the rest of us.. +__+

Lead by example if you want any respect from the troops.

Comment by Lars — September 8, 2006 #
30

god people - if you are so sad about the service then leave! I’m 100% happy. There has two periods of downtime, i’m paying US$10 a month, there’s nothing wrong!

Comment by Anonymous — September 9, 2006 #
31

As someone who’s been hosted at dreamhost for 6 years, I’ve got to say this lack of service combined with the brainless self-agrandizing post during the middle of a serious outage, is the last straw. And mr pathetically anonymous, I AM leaving dreamhost, and a strongly urge everyone else to do so. Maybe then they’ll think about someone else before they spend a half hour jacking off about how wonderful they are, instead of trying to fix their crappy systems.

Comment by don — September 9, 2006 #
32

Add to the chorus of “Don’t want to hear it while none of my account works properly”. Hell, I can’t even check my f**king email at the moment.

I’d been nothing but happy with DH, and recommended them to everyone I could, now in the last couple of months you guys have been screwing the pooch. I can deal with occasional downtime for my site, but the IMAP trouble that’s been a regular feature of my account lately is an insult. A friend who signed up a couple months back is jumping off again because of it, it made ME look bad for saying you guys were competent.

Really, at least a little lip service to your suffering customers was in order, if you HAD to make a blog post.

Comment by bdu — September 9, 2006 #
33

Josh appears to have gone all messianic now. I wonder if he has put his chair on a plinth yet. His co-workers should be afraid… very afraid.

I have these little yellow pills prescribed to me if his co-workers want to slip some into his coffee. They make you sleep all day … so no change there then.

I am not going to wear a tee-shirt with a purple long-nosed chicken on the front!

Comment by Norm — September 9, 2006 #
34

I think you should tell us what you think about dreamhost-sucks.com

Actually, I’m considering leaving dreamhost. Within 20 days of my experience, I’ve met 2 uncounted down times, one mysql server problem, one network problem.

$22.4 is not quite a big number, both for you and for me, but maybe I should get it back.

Comment by gorewayne.com(if working) — September 9, 2006 #
35

This selfrightious pat on the back post is quite unverving, i thought this blog was used to talk to clients and prospective clients, about … dreamhost … it does say blog.dreamhost, if … Josh want’s his own blog … he should pay the 10 bucks a month and make an account on dreamhost ( he gets a free domain so he can get a craaaazzzzyyy name ) and wait until monday so he can talk to us about the wonders of digg

Comment by Soundcult — September 9, 2006 #
36

status.dreamhost.com doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for over 12 hours here.

Comment by Jon — September 9, 2006 #
37

it’s http://www.dreamhoststatus.com

Comment by Anonymous — September 9, 2006 #
38

Keep writing your posts. For the price we pay we’re going to get occasionally flakey hosting. I’d rather have occasionally flakey hosting and a funny corporate blog than occasionally flakey hosting and no blog.

Dreamhost is (still) the best.

Comment by greggles — September 9, 2006 #
39

Bah, you folks are lucky.. at least they’re working on your problem. Try having a problem NOT related to the network issues, and see how long it takes for anyone to even listen.

I’m closing in on 24 hours now, and as far as I know, no one has looked into my problem at all.

Comment by Baxter — September 9, 2006 #
40

Oops :) Goof

Comment by Jon — September 9, 2006 #
41

Oi, hi there everybody…

I want to apologize for the timing of this post! I didn’t mean to rub in or highlight that this site was up while plenty of our customers were down or anything like that! In general, this blog is meant to be separate from dreamhoststatus.com, which is the one specifically meant for system status, downtime, etc. The post about the power outages is sort of an exception over here, and generally any downtown-related posts you see here will be more like post-mortems than “breaking news” updates.

I wanted to also mention that this site is just hosted on a regular DreamHost customer account, on a regular web server, on our regular network, with a regular MySQL database server. So, sometimes this site may be up while yours is down, and sometimes this site may be down while your site is up, and sometimes both may be down, and (hopefully) most of the time they’ll both be up!

Also, I apologize how a lot of times our panel is down while your site is up and you’re trying to write in to support! I promise it’s not on purpose.. I also hope that is a little evidence that we’re generally in the same boat as all our customers and we’re trying our best to get everything working as soon as possible.

I’m really sorry about the recent problems, and the post on dreamhoststatus that was poorly phrased and seemed to imply we weren’t going to do anything until Monday! What that actually meant is we are _completely_ replacing our core1 router on Monday (we wanted to do it Friday, but Cisco couldn’t get us a replacement fast enough, despite out support contract). We were still all up until past three last night working on the problems though with the resources we have, I promise!

Things do seem okay still now, and hopefully they’ll stay under control through the big replacement on Monday.

Er, I guess have a good rest of the weekend?

Thanks!

Comment by Josh Jones — September 9, 2006 #
42

Did anybody ever stop to think that maybe, there’s a reason this upgrade is happening Monday night that doesn’t involve just sitting on some hardware until some predetermined time to willingly piss off customers?

My sample size may only be two, but DreamHost is far better a host than I could have ever hoped for.

Comment by Wyatt — September 9, 2006 #
43

Josh: you have to realize that when a company has major technical problems, the worst possible thing you can do is fail to communicate fully with your customers. I know this because I learned it the hard way myself, working in tech support for many years. The customers want more information, desperately seeking a way to plan their work around your technical problems, but Dreamhost merely issued a couple of terse sentences on dreamhoststatus.com that said “we’re working on it.”

Please try to imagine yourself in your customers’ place. Our websites are down, no information is available, other than the same old “we’re working on it” that we’ve been hearing for weeks. Even the control panel and dreamhoststatus.com were unavailable, but your website IS available. For a time, you were the only voice of Dreamhost. Hundreds, maybe thousands of customers are hopping mad, and all we can get from Dreamhost is a flippant story about Digg and somebody’s girlfriend’s t-shirt design.

Please understand that for many of us, our websites are our professional appearance on the web, and when our sites are unreachable because of hosting problems, Dreamhost makes us look bad. I spent all day at a conference, referring people to articles on my website, unaware that my site was down. Everyone went home for the evening, tried to load the articles I told them about, and found nothing. The Dreamhost outage made me look unprofessional, or worse.

The only solution to this problem is communication with your customers. It won’t solve the technical problem, but it will give customers the feeling that someone is in control of the situation, and give them the means to plan their work around the problems. Unfortunately, this won’t solve all the problems, I have no way to contact all the people at the conference I told about my website. But it would give me the opportunity to deal with the problem in a forward-looking manner, for example, now that I know Dreamhost will have continuing outages at least through Tuesday, rather than handing out my URL, I could take people’s email addresses and email them the URL once the outages are over. A little communication might have enabled your customers to find ways to move forward, despite the technical problems.

Comment by Charles — September 9, 2006 #
44

Anyone with a hammer and a few screwdrivers can build & maintain a reliable network… but no one can blog or write newsletters like Josh! :D

Comment by Mike — September 9, 2006 #
45

That is a cute t-shirt design! I’ve voted!

Comment by Sara — September 9, 2006 #
46

Just fix your damn network. We don’t care about this crap.

Comment by dh customer — September 9, 2006 #
47

Quit your whining. They’re working on it. Yes, it sucks it’s down. Yes it sucks it’s been a couple times recently. But, they fixed it once, and they’ll fix it again. Your whining isn’t helping them get it fixed any sooner. If you can materialize the parts, equipment and help they need to complete the work then use your magic wand and make it happen. Anyone slightly involved in working with electronics and technology knows that crap just happens….it’s the nature of the beast.

Comment by Tired of the Whiners — September 9, 2006 #
48

this post couldn’t of come at a worse time. i want to know what kind of service i can expect after this. i can’t have a simple select statement on a 2 column 40 record table take 10 seconds. i cant have these high loadavgs. i want to know what are acceptable levels to you so i can decide right now if i’m staying or leaving.

Comment by steve — September 9, 2006 #
49

Steve(#46)-

The first sentence was fine - on topic, relevant, and worthwhile. Everything else in your comment is wrong place, wrong time, wasted space.”I can’t have…,” then *don’t* - find another host. “I want to know..,” then ask via a support ticket. Oh! What’s that you say? You just wanted to vent? I see. Feel better now? Sheesh!

Comment by rlparker — September 9, 2006 #
50

I know fanboys follow certain video game systems and that sort of thing. But the unquestionable loyalty to a silly web hosting company that apparently has no full-time network engineer is surprising. Why bother to defend dreamhost? Yeah **** happens… unless you are prepared. Which dreamhost quite obviously was not.

Comment by Tired of the fanboys — September 9, 2006 #

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