Super Lame Apology

We are all really bearry sorry about the extended downtime this Sunday from the planned power outage!

The power was only out for about an hour, but as it came back on, there was trouble, trouble, trouble. Our router started acting funny, some file servers were mis-configured, some web servers didn’t want to come back on, and so on, and so on, and so on…

Although most things were back up and running within the five hours, the network in general was still flakey for about 8 hours, and everything wasn’t TOTALLY fixed for about 36 hours.

We really thought things would go a lot smoother, given that for once we had some advance warning, but good old Murphy was in full effect, y’all, again.. urgh.

Anyway, to try and make up for it a little bit, we thought we’d offer something we’ve never offered before at DreamHost, something we thought we’d never need, something we always thought a little silly… an SLA!

That’s right, I’m offering you a… Super Lame Apology!

HA ha ha! Oh, did you think I meant a “Service Level Agreement”?

But really, isn’t that all a typical SLA is?

“We’re sorry we broke our promise, here’s credit for the 46 minutes you were down. Sorry.”

Lame!

In web hosting, it’s usually a credit for the exact amount of time you were down, sometimes a full day’s worth, or I guess if you are really paying a lot, a month’s worth.. though an SLA like that even in the high-end business world would be a rare animal indeed.

In the case of the outage this past weekend, if you were paying $8.95 a month you were down for anywhere from 6 to 44 cents worth of service. What would you think to yourself if we automatically credited you 44 cents on your next monthly bill?

You’d probably think either:

A. Is this 44 cent credit because February only had 28 days?

or

B. My site is down for hours and all I get is 44 cents?! That barely pays for the stamp I’m going to need to mail my foot all the way up your butt, DreamA$$Host!!

In fact, even if we gave you a full month’s credit, $8.95, you’d probably think the same thing. Either A. you didn’t really care, and the money doesn’t matter, or B. you really did care, and the money doesn’t matter.

The truth is though, we do offer an “SLA”… the same “service level agreement” you’ll find at McDonalds, Nordstrom’s, Staples, or just about any other successful business. If any customer ever comes to us with even an eigth-way legitimate gripe, we’ll do our best to fix it, even if it means giving them an account credit or their money back (even after our 97-day money-back guarantee period). Better to lose a customer on good terms than on bad, eh?

So, if we’ll happily give refunds anyway, why not go ahead and lay it all out in a “real” SLA?

I guess mostly because we feel they’re B.S. Case in point, we actually have SLAs from our data centers! Which is why I sleep sowell at night, knowing our servers are safe and sound. HA!

Not only do they fail to meet the SLA, I believe we’ve never gotten a single service credit out of them for outages… and I’ve asked!

The only useful thing you can get out of an SLA is the ability to break a long-term contract without penalty. All you really want is for everything to just work. If you’re constantly having to exercise your SLA, you’d trade all the service credits in the world for a new provider!

If that’s not the case, you don’t really care about the downtime and are just complaining to get the money! Shame on you! Go back to fatwallet.com where you come from! Hissssss!

All I’m saying is, since we’re in an industry with such a low barrier to entry, and since there’s nothing stopping you from switching hosts at any time, we really already have a lot of incentive to make our service as good as we can.

I know we fubar it sometimes, and I know we fubar it a lot, and when we do, you guys are doing the right thing by bitching and moaning and even quitting us. But a service level agreement wouldn’t change a thing.

So, so-o-o-o-o-o-o-orry!

And that’s the Super-est, Lame-est, Apology-est SLA you’re going to get!

Read This Now!

Quick, before it’s gone!

If you enjoy all the hilarious hijinks, illuminating illustrations, and jovial jokes of the DreamHost Blog, you better suck down a local copy TODAY…

We’re having a planned power outage tomorrow night!

(Click that link for some more details.. it’ll be from 11:15pm PST (GMT -0800) tomorrow night (Saturday) to hopefully much less than 5 hours from then.)

Not planned by us though, planned by our building. It would have been very nice if they could have given us a little earlier heads up, or avoided the outage at all, but no, they just can’t. And trust me, we want this to happen even a tiny bit less than you do!

So, this site will be down then, as well as all other DreamHost services, with the exception of ns2.dreamhost.com and dreamhoststatus.com, which are kept off-site for exactly this sort of situation.

Well, I just thought I better post something about it here too.. thanks for your understanding, and we’re really really really really sorry.

P.S. Here’s the pic the building emailed us of the problem:

So, um, yeah. I think what that shows is a piece of metal is vibrating next to that wire and cutting into the rubber insulation… and if it gets much further in, KABOOM!

ICANN is Smoking!

…something.

Last Thursday I got an email from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers asking for our approval of their 2006-2007 budget. The link they included, as well as all the text of the message, actually referenced their 2005-2006 budget.

Last Friday I got another email apologizing for that silly email, with updated info to the 2006-2007 budget. This was the first evidence of possible illicit behavior.

The (corrected) email mentioned that their registrar fees were changing this year, from 25c per domain plus $3.8MM shared among all registrars (based on their size), DOWN to just 22c per domain and $.8MM shared!

I almost choked! ICANN was actually lowering their fees?! For the first time in recorded history? Amazing!

After regaining consciousness, I started to contemplate it a little more. Why shouldn’t they lower their fees, man?

If ever there was a business with huge economies of scale, ICANN’s is it. Their basic job is hang out, maybe eat some brownies, and talk about domain names and IP addresses. The cost of those meetings should change very little depending on whether there are 50 million domains registered, as there were two years ago, or over 80 million domains, as there are now.

I dunno, it definitely feels like the the Internet works already. All the kinks with IP addresses and domain names have already been baked out. It almost seems like ICANN’s new mission is to keep thinking of things for themselves to do to justify an ever-increasing budget!

After approving the creation of the .info, .museum, .biz, .coop, .aero, .name, and .pro “generic” Top-Level Domains a few years ago (and we all know how important they turned out to be) in 2006 ICANN approved the creation of five more gTLDs: .travel, .jobs, .mobi, .tel, and my personal favorite, .cat!

.dogs everywhere were incensed.

I don’t mean to be blunt, but the only purpose to ANY new gTLD these days is the transfer of wealth from trademark holders to domain squatters, registry operators, and ICANN. After all, the ONLY people who get domains in all these TLDs are large companies who just absolutely need to own every TLD for every brand they oversee!

Nobody, and I mean nobody is going to prefer a domain like “losangeles.travel” over even something super-retarded like “josh-joneses-la-travel-site.com”. Why?

People already barely grasp .NET! Good luck getting them to blaze a path to your “.aero!”

But I digress..

As I said, I was pleasantly surprised that our ICANN fees would be going down this year! I was just about to vote to approve their budget and go get some munchies, when I decided to take a second to actually read the pdf. Bong… I came to a sudden realization!

I couldn’t find the part in the actual budget that mentions any decrease in their fees… can you? (In fact, I also noticed that the fiscal year we’re being asked to approve runs from July 2006 through June 2007.. it already began seven and a half months ago! Has somebody been just laying about on the grass instead of getting their budget approved?)

Here’s the exact text of the email:

For this fiscal year (July 2006 through June 2007), ICANN agrees to maintain
the same two-part variable registrar-level fee structure used last year, but
will reduce the transaction fee to US./upd.22 per transaction. The second part
includes the per-registrar variable fee totaling US.8 million divided
among all registrars.

Okay, so maybe the .8 million is a typo and was meant to say “3.8 million” like before? Or maybe they’ve raised it to $8 million? I sure hope not, we wouldn’t be able to toke that! But the rest of that passage seems to pretty clearly indicate a price drop to 22 cents a domain, n’est pas? Alas, everything in the pdf still says $.25!

Looking through that budget, I found some other beautiful reefers of government-granted monopoly largess..

1. Even though the number of domains has only risen about 30% in the last year, ICANN’s total budget is rising from $23MM to $34MM, almost 50%!
2. Their payroll for 2000-2001 was $1.2MM for 15 people, an average of $80,000 a person. In 2005-2006 it was $7.3MM for 59 people, an average of $124,000 a person! And for 2006-2007 it is $12.4MM for 89 people, an average of over $140,000 a year each! Which is why I’m quitting my day job and going to become an intern at ICANN!
3. Their budget for board meetings and travel went from $3.8MM in 2005-2006 up to $5.9MM for 2006-2007! That’s $500,000 a month! Now, it does look like they have a lot of meetings… but maybe they could combine just a few of those and just have say, one a quarter? Also, instead of having all their meetings in crazy international locales (San Juan, Lisbon, São Paulo, Marrakech, Amsterdam, in the car, their parent’s basement, frat houses), they could save money by just getting tickets for the same flight on Space Ship One. That’d also save them money on getting high!

So, in reality, it sort of seems like they’re not lowering our fees at all. In fact, somehow, they’re increasing their budget another $11 million this year!

Looking at the pdf, it seems like all of that is coming out of VeriSign’s pocket. Which is nice, because they are the ones making the REAL killing, charging $6 per .com and .net domain per year. The good thing is, under their current agreement with ICANN they can’t increase that price by more than 7% a year, even if ICANN keeps rolling them for more paper.

The bad thing is, VeriSign has other ways to charge for things. Whether it’s flat per-registrar fees, domain redemption fees, or even unrelated businesses like secure certificates, I have no doubt VeriSign will pass this $11 million on to hosts like us. Whether we pass it on to shmoes like you is anybody’s guess..

But don’t worry!

I’m not voting for this budget!

(You can’t actually vote against the budget.. you can only abstain!)

If only ICANN would abstain a little…

Google Maps Gets Buildings and Subways

Okay, this isn’t your typical DreamHost blog fodder, but it IS your typical typical blog fodder, so what the heck..

Did anybody notice that Google Maps now has little mini-buildings even on the map view (in some areas)?

And, more importantly, subway stops? I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in New York recently and Google Maps is close to useless there without Subway info!

Now it’s use-full!

(Ah, I guess they did this a few days ago.. well, just today they added more to Los Angeles, so I noticed!)