25 Responses to “DreamHost Goes North (San Francisco)”

1. Simon Jessey Says:
   September 13th, 2006 at 11:39 am

   Is this the beginning of DreamHost’s expansion into a vast global empire? Will Josh be soon the Emperor Darth Cisco, or something like that? Will a small band of rebels be sufficient to take out the firewall, fly into the superstructure, and ultimately destroy the network?

2. Rob Says:
   September 13th, 2006 at 3:22 pm

   Sigh.

   Dreamhost is headed south, not north. Is email down again? I see no mention of it on dreamhoststatus.com.

   “We have decided to decommission the system status page until we are able to make it more accurately reflect actual system uptimes! Our apologies.
   In the meantime, if you can’t access your site, there’s always dreamhoststatus.com and even blog.dreamhost.com.”

3. Sigh Says:
   September 13th, 2006 at 5:40 pm

   > Dreamhost is headed south, not north. Is email down again? I
   > see no mention of it on dreamhoststatus.com.

   And this has what, exactly to do with this post? I’m hoping with the addition of comments to dreamhoststatus.com that this whininess will leave the main weblog and go there.

   BTW, dreamhoststatus.com isn’t going to report on every single bit of downtime. “Hey Fred, your site is down, just thought you and ten thousand other people whose sites are working fine would want to know.”

4. rlparker Says:
   September 13th, 2006 at 10:42 pm

   The comments would be nice to have, except for the huge number of people who have no concept at all of the “right place” or the “right time” to vent their personal frustrations. Actually, I think DH is on to something here: Intelligent people reading the bulk of these comments can’t *help* but empathize with DH, and be thankful that they don’t have to spend a huge part of their work-life dealing with these kinds of dull-witted, self-absorbed people.

   One problem with the “blogshere” is that is both susceptible, and appealing to, the kinds of people who delight in “drive-by” vitrolic and/or the classic troll, who loves nothing more than to pollute every communication forum with themselves.

5. Adam Says:
   September 14th, 2006 at 6:04 am

   Hey,

   Good old San Francisco! That place is awsome. Who ever is working up their, send me some canned fog! No, really they sell them up there. If you check out the golden gate bridge gift shop they have some. LOL

   Anyways Rock on DreamHost,
   – Adam

6. Jon Says:
   September 14th, 2006 at 8:13 am

   What’s good about San Fransico?

7. gone Says:
   September 14th, 2006 at 8:20 am

   All sites and email are down again for the past 2 days. That is all. I am gone. No more cute ‘poor us’ excuses. You are a giant company that makes tons of money everyday. You continue to sell new accounts to unsuspecting people who are thinking that they are getting a great deal, when in fact, they are getting a bogus service that does not offer what it promises because everything is always down. This has been going on for months and months. I have lost clients and business. I would have been happy to have less disk space and bandwidth for the price I was paying. I would have given up a lot to have reliable service. There is no excuse for this kind of service. It is disrespectful to every dreamhost customer.

8. Huh? Says:
   September 14th, 2006 at 8:23 am

   Right place, right time? The guy above quoted the control panel where dreamhost says to come here.

   “if you can’t access your site, there’s always dreamhoststatus.com and even blog.dreamhost.com.”

   Just like the control panel says to do, when something is wrong, I go to dreamhoststatus to see if it’s been posted. If it hasn’t, I come here because the control panel says to.

9. Huh? Says:
   September 14th, 2006 at 8:25 am

   By the way, San Francisco is awesome, but isn’t it dangerous to expand into an area prone to natural disasters?

10. Barbara Says:
    September 14th, 2006 at 10:52 am

    This is a blog about a job posting for Dreamhost in San Francisco. Definitely not the place to complain about “my email” is down.

    Although the comments about San Francisco somewhat apply. I would love to go to San Francisco, but fear earthquakes. Isn’t The Ghirardelli Chocolate Company close?

    Why have another office in California?

11. Jeff @ DreamHost Says:
    September 14th, 2006 at 11:05 am

    Why another office in California? Because that’s where we’re already at. Having done telecommuting from another state for two years in DreamHost’s early days, I can say that it’s not quite the panacea it’s made out to be.

    In any case, there is no more or less ‘risk’ involved in this, natural disaster wise – we’re not going to be hosting any servers in San Francisco. This is a development position, meaning that it’s just going to be someone sitting at a desk with a text editor and a couple cases of some heavily caffeinated beverage nearby.

    Sure, there’s some risk of them being squished should the building come down when The Big One hits, but if that happens we’ll post another job opening ASAP. :)

    - Jeff

12. Barbara Says:
    September 14th, 2006 at 11:10 am

    lol

13. Brett Says:
    September 14th, 2006 at 1:29 pm

    To make Dreamhost more fault tolerant, you should open up a satellite office in Chicago. I happen to know a sysadmin…

14. rlparker Says:
    September 14th, 2006 at 7:39 pm

    Re. “Huh” (#8) – Of *course* this is *one* of the places to come to check *for additional information* when other resources are down – no problem with that! That *does not* make this blog’s comments the “right place, right time” to vent that one’s site is down, or other complaints that are not related to the post being commented on. I have *no* issue with “in topic” commenting; I just feel the general complaining, posturing, threatening, whining, add-your-choice-of-socially-inept-behavior here belongs elsewhere (since some people feel the need to vent *somehwere*).

    It’s the tendency of these people to vent *everywhere* that makes all blogs that allow unrestricted contents unpleasant to read. One above poster has the right idea thoug, just don’t read the comments ;-).

15. Olaf Says:
    September 15th, 2006 at 4:42 am

    After all the trouble in the last month it’s postive to start business also on other locations. I like to see a office (and servers) somewhere in Europe ;)

16. James Weston Says:
    September 15th, 2006 at 6:40 am

    Hey, DH
    I live in the uk and i would love some servers in the uk.
    Even may be an office.

    Peace out DH
    James Weston /.

17. SK Says:
    September 15th, 2006 at 9:08 am

    Second that. Put some servers in the UK then my .com sites for uk companies will appear in google.co.uk.

    And we have double the voltage too so your servers will last twice as long ;-)

18. ImageProduction Says:
    September 16th, 2006 at 5:48 am

    Is this the right place to request a hindsight overview of what happened the past month ? What went wrong and how you could have avoided it ? Also it’d be nice to post some pics of the folks that lost their sleep trying to fix things in your NOC. They r true heroes IMHO. (Not to mention your support stuff, I am sure they were abused savagely the past few days).

    You at least owe us(and the tech stuff) that much so come on, start posting….

    A happy-to-be-your-customer customer.

19. cricket Says:
    September 16th, 2006 at 8:35 am

    I second the call for a hindsight overview. What happened, what you/the vendor originally thought, what actually happened, and what you’re going to do differently in the future (one can only hope) to avoid a problem of this length and severity in the future.

    I don’t expect you to offer 100% uptime, that’s impossible. I do expect you, as a business, to invest in preventative measures (server/network re-architecture, more senior techs/retaining consultants, redundancy) that shorten the length and “reach” of any given downtime.

20. Jon Says:
    September 18th, 2006 at 2:22 am

    “Why another office in California? Because that’s where we’re already at. Having done telecommuting from another state for two years in DreamHost’s early days, I can say that it’s not quite the panacea it’s made out to be.”

    Is the panacea you are talking about California or telecommuting?

21. Chris Says:
    September 18th, 2006 at 9:51 am

    Heh.. good luck on this one. Last job posting I saw was for somebody to work with them down in southern cali. Salary was starting at like $32,000. I think I make about that much each year and no way I would be able to make that work down south. I’m in Southern oregon and I barely get by. No way $32k/year is gonna work in San Fran. You should put your office outside of San Fran like Sac or Hayward.

22. Dallas Says:
    September 18th, 2006 at 10:53 am

    The San Francisco position doesn\’t list a salary on our jobs page but it\’s been advertised elsewhere as \’starting at $50,000\’. We will definitely consider offering more if an applicant is very qualified or experienced. Our tech support positions typically start between $30,000 to $35,000 so that may be what the commenter in #21 was referring to.

    Also, another blog post discussing our recent problems and what we are working on to strengthen oursevles for the future is coming very soon.

23. dhtest Says:
    September 19th, 2006 at 7:37 am

    dhtest

24. Please Upgrade Says:
    September 19th, 2006 at 10:35 am

    Python has now been upgraded to version 2.5. Dreamhost, please uppdate.

    http://python.org/

    And since I know you guys use debian, here’s the link for the package

    http://packages.debian.org/testing/python/python2.5

25. siva Says:
    September 22nd, 2006 at 7:17 am

    Even My hosting server often giving this kind of errors. Are the so called Load balanced servers will solve this issue?

    Sometimes my emails are very slow just because of this Network outage.