Super Lame Apology
February 28, 2007 on 10:14 pm | In Business, Foobars, Insider View, Musings, Rants, Updates by Josh Jones | 157 Comments
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!
157 Responses to “Super Lame Apology”
Categories:
Archives:
- November 2009 (3)
- October 2009 (1)
- September 2009 (3)
- July 2009 (1)
- June 2009 (3)
- May 2009 (3)
- April 2009 (4)
- March 2009 (2)
- February 2009 (3)
- January 2009 (3)
- December 2008 (3)
- November 2008 (4)
- October 2008 (5)
- September 2008 (2)
- August 2008 (5)
- July 2008 (2)
- June 2008 (3)
- May 2008 (6)
- April 2008 (2)
- March 2008 (3)
- February 2008 (5)
- January 2008 (7)
- December 2007 (3)
- November 2007 (3)
- October 2007 (5)
- September 2007 (3)
- August 2007 (4)
- July 2007 (4)
- June 2007 (7)
- May 2007 (3)
- April 2007 (3)
- March 2007 (8)
- February 2007 (4)
- January 2007 (6)
- December 2006 (5)
- November 2006 (2)
- October 2006 (4)
- September 2006 (4)
- August 2006 (5)
- July 2006 (3)
- June 2006 (3)
- May 2006 (5)
- April 2006 (6)
- March 2006 (7)
- February 2006 (6)
- January 2006 (8)
- December 2005 (7)
- November 2005 (5)
- October 2005 (8)
- September 2005 (19)
- August 2005 (11)
- July 2005 (4)
Other Sites
- DreamHost Status - An off-network page for all DreamHost Announcements! (Not as silly as this blog.)
- DreamHost! - The host behind the blog.
- Forum - Discuss DreamHost and web hosting!
- Web Control Panel - Manage your account.
- Wiki - On DreamHost and web hosting.
Powered by WordPress. Pool theme by Borja Fernandez, modified by DreamHost.
Like WordPress? Consider attending WordCamp LA.
Entries and comments feeds.
^Top^
February 28th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Thanks for the great service!
February 28th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
just kidding, your service sucks!
February 28th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
see http://doted.info
February 28th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
We don’t need your apology.
We need to know that you have learnt some lessons and that you are about to change things according to what you have learnt.
And that you are looking under the carpet for things you have to change for preventing future SLAs.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
I recommend we have monthly total power outage tests so we can practice for the sort of unexpected technical difficulties that are caused by complete building power shutdowns.
Who’s with me?!
February 28th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Good point, with shared hosting outages happen, you just have to remember that its so cheap you are saving so much money and if your site needs to be up 24/7 you need to pay more per month for a vps or something in a non shared environment.
thanks, Ben
http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/
February 28th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
What about a free week disk/bandwidth upgrade?
February 28th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
How much are you pulling in per month again? 350,000 accounts at a minimum of $8 is 2.8 MILLION per month. Minimum. I left my old provider because they cost more and didn’t provide all the features Dreamhost does. I don’t expect 99.9% uptime out of Dreamhost, but this plus last summer’s meltdown are totally unacceptable. This would NEVER have happened at my previous provider.
You need to spend more of your income hiring more people who know how to keep a network stable (including core redundancy) at all times. Your non-solutions to problems (moving servers, offering lame workarounds or no solution at all to mail problems instead of FIXING them) are telling. It’s unprofessional. And no, a LOL SORRY HEHE message doesn’t cut it.
If I wasn’t so hooked on the combination of many databases + shell which other hosts don’t match, I’d be gone already.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Check google 4 “disaster recovery training”
my 2 cent
Der Klempner
March 1st, 2007 at 12:18 am
[...] According to the official Dreamhost Blog, things did not go according to plan. [...]
March 1st, 2007 at 12:24 am
What a bunch of whiny mofos.
YOU USE SHARED HOSTING! IF YOU WANT 100% UPTIME, PAY MORE!
I work for a hosting company and people like you can just rot for all I care. You don’t go down to the power company and raise hell when your power goes out. You just piss and moan in the privacy of darkness. You only complain here because you have an avenue.
Dreamhost’s announcements wouldn’t be so snarky if all its customers weren’t such assholes.
March 1st, 2007 at 12:39 am
How much would it cost to have an emergency power generator that would keep things running for 48 hours in case of problems like this again?
March 1st, 2007 at 1:12 am
All of my sites are down right now.
http://www.articlewheel.com
http://www.linkchannels.com
http://www.myspacetopia.net
http://www.earthweaver.info
March 1st, 2007 at 1:13 am
I’m new @DreamHost, but for me they are way better than all the other shared hosting companies that I researched before picking DH. At least DH is straight with us and tells us what the hell’s going on when there’s a problem. Compare that to the steaming loads of BS that you get from the call-center drones when you try to contact your phone company, electric company, airline, etc. So, I agree with Kenny. Shit happens, quit whining about it, and enjoy the humor!
March 1st, 2007 at 1:23 am
I’m sick of seeing people moaning about the down time. I didn’t even notice it (probably due to my down time)
As magical as the guys and girls at dreamhost are they cannot for see the future.
It also seems to be the people with sites which aren’t worth being on the internet which moan as well. so essentially dreamhost is doing the internet a favor by the small amount of down time.
The only reason people should have to be annoyed is if they loose a lot of business from the site down time. BUT if your a website in which a few hours of down time will effect your capital gain/turnover GET THE HELL OFF SHARED HOSTING! and invest in a redundant server on the other side of the world for the off chance that HARDWARE DOES BREAK and SOFTWARE DOES DECIDE TO RANDOMLY CHANGE ALL THE SETTINGS which effectively messes up the whole network.
Thanks for the great service currently you have a customer for life out of me and it will take a little more than a bit of down time to get me to move host.
Stop moaning about the hosting when you haven’t even bothered to learn basic design concepts and simple HTML/CSS standards
March 1st, 2007 at 1:27 am
For about three years, I’ve managed three DreamHost accounts concurrently. Maybe every six months, DreamHost services are unavailable to me for a few hours.
I have no problem with that.
The Crazy Domain Insane! plan DreamHost offers is such an outstanding value that it makes those few hours of downtime negligible.
But I’m not running one of those mission-critical blog apps that absolutely positively must have 112% uptime.
March 1st, 2007 at 2:03 am
Stop moaning you little whores… I know all about your 3 page websites and the billions of dollars you lost in those few hours of downtime when those 5 visitors (you, your mommy and daddy and your 2 mates) couldnt find your crappy little site on the internet.
$8 a month and you need an all inclusive holiday package with a 7 day cruise aswell dont you ?
get a life… even if you have a dedicated server at best of data centres, I can gurantee that you will not have 100% uptime…
March 1st, 2007 at 3:55 am
[...] post by Josh Jones and software by Elliott [...]
March 1st, 2007 at 4:13 am
One question remains: when will the Panel be back on-line? I need to do some DNS pruning…
March 1st, 2007 at 4:49 am
I run a multitude of small sites on my dh account, none deserve a dedicated server, and if I had them all in different small virtual accounts I’d be paying a large amount compared to the dh package and they’d all be going down at random. Dh has great uptime for a virtual host, except for force majeure like sunday’s thing and last summer’s outage.
Can’t complain.
March 1st, 2007 at 4:51 am
thanks for your SLA, I liked this post too much that i even feel ashamed to pay u so little for a month.
I make myself feel better, i have to quit using DH
March 1st, 2007 at 6:25 am
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.
WHY CAN’T I QUIT YOU?!
March 1st, 2007 at 7:50 am
Wow, I switched to dedicated on a different provider just 2 days before… guess I got lucky.
With dreamhost I had my ups and downs, mostly up though, just I could not afford the downs anymore. Still great bang for the buck if you happen on the right server. I’ll keep an account here for a while more.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:04 am
As really many people have already pointed out, if you can’t afford the downtime, pay more.
BUT, I took some security measures anyway:
1) Moved my email to Google Apps. Nice. :)
2) Moved my DNS to a different provider, so I can set up an “emergency” page if I want to next time this happens (and shit happens — live with it).
This way, my two greatest annoyances are gone. I can get to my email even if Dreamhost is down, and I can quickly switch my domains somewhere else (they have a TTL of 3 hours).
And if my sites go down, I’ll survive. It’s not as if they’re important or anything.
Cheers to the world!
March 1st, 2007 at 9:05 am
I agree with what some people above said – I think people moan way too much over a little downtime. If you’ve got a website/service that depends on high uptime, you really should be going for a premium service and not some shared hosting.
The age-old saying still rings true: “You get what you pay for”.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:11 am
Err…
I’m a well-known person for calling on DH to get their stuff straight; however, I think people are being fairly unreasonable as of late. Downtime is a fact of life–period. You want to have something more reliable, sure go and spend $50+/month for a VPS solution or about $100+/month for decent dedicated solutions…and these usually come with their own set of headaches (i.e. constant guarding of security, system performance, etc.). If you’re hosting a business-critical site on shared hosting environment it’s YOUR fault not DH’s if things go awry. But of course, we all know most people complaining do not actually have any mission-critical things running/hosted. It’s usually pseudo-geeks who get excited when their one-click WordPress install works(!) as if installing WordPress from source was any more difficult…go figure. And start complaining when their beloved web blog is not reachable by all three people who read it.
Face it, you’re paying dirt/month for a wealth of services and facilities…the least you can do is cut them some slack.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:31 am
You guys are like 5 year olds. How can any business take you guys serious enough to have you host there website. This apology was written like a 3rd grader, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:43 am
“How much are you pulling in per month again? 350,000 accounts at a minimum of $8 is 2.8 MILLION per month. Minimum.”
Are you stupid in all aspects of life, or would math and common sense be your only weak points?
March 1st, 2007 at 10:54 am
This has been brought up multiple times before — we host 350,000 domains, not accounts, and the domain:account ratio is not 1:1.
March 1st, 2007 at 11:18 am
@Chuck : There is a generator (actually 5 of them), but the nature of this repair did not allow them to be used. The bit of cabling that was replaced runs between the generators and our data center so running the generators would have just been a waste of fuel. Having to take down the power of an entire data center is unheard of and we’re not too happy with the building about this (we don’t run the building or the power).
@People : Healthy disagreement is good, but insulting each other is not so good!
March 1st, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Heyyyyyyyyyy how about everyone stops chatting here and fixes sh1t. i cant access my panel – mysql which means i cant do my work which is obnoxious, almost as obnoxious as your “super lame apology”
Calling it what it is, DOES NOT make you righteous DH.
(i know what rushing to the garage to get the generators is like i’ve worked at a hosting company but DH – get your act together)
March 1st, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Heyyyyyyyyyy how about everyone stops chatting here and fixes sh1t. i cant access my panel – mysql which means i cant do my work which is obnoxious, almost as obnoxious as your “super lame apology”
Calling it what it is, DOES NOT make you righteous DH.
(i know what rushing to the garage to get the generators is like i’ve worked at a hosting company but DH – get your act together)
March 1st, 2007 at 2:38 pm
[...] Update: DreamHost’s Super Lame Apology. [...]
March 1st, 2007 at 7:25 pm
I wonder why DreamHost even bothered to announce this beforehand in the first place: If they had simply done it unannounced, most customers would have slept right through it, and aside from a few complaints, it would most likely have been a blip on the radar screen. DH tried to be a good host and give advance warning for downtime, but, after all, no good deed goes unpunished.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Wow, who’d have thought that sometimes bits of the internet don’t work for short periods of time. I’ve never come across that before.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:04 pm
To all those who suggested dedicated servers as a 100% uptime alternative: You haven’t used dedicated servers have you.
Yes, they are probably a little more reliable. But nothing is 100%. In addition to my Dreamhost account, there was a period of time when I had two dedicated services with Rackspace. They had occassional outages. And even though I was paying more than $1000 per month, when a server crashed, it still took more than 24 hours to get everything operational. Not only were Rackspace’s admins working on the problem, but they had me and an admin on my staff helping. And it still took more than 24 hours.
I also have a VPS. It sucks more than anything I’ve ever used. Maybe because its a Windows server, but that’s another story.
The bottom line is I’ve been with DH since 1996. I’ve had dediacatded and VPS servers with other companies. For the amount I pay and the effort that I put into sys admin work, DH is the best I’ve had.
The only reason I use dedicated servers is for something that needs 100% of the CPU or something where I need root access for customize installations. I do not go dedicated for 100% uptime because that isn’t an option anywhere.
March 2nd, 2007 at 6:34 am
DH is the best service i had..
Good work guys!
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:01 am
Screw it all. I paid more at another provider for what pretty much amounted to 100% uptime, but whoa Jiminy, their support turnaround sucked. Their features sucked. Their admins were frosty and above talking to peons. Dreamhost may not offer 100% uptime, but they are far superior in every other way that matters to me.
If uptime is an issue, if you’re at risk of losing your very livelihood if your site is offline occasionally, consider that maybe you’re with the wrong host, and that you need to invest some money in a company that offers the services you’re currently expecting from budget hosting.
That is, don’t expect to buy diamonds with pocket change. That just doesn’t fly in that place we all like to call ‘reality.’
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:22 am
Thank you for the apology, DH….whether glib or not, it was nice of you to do so.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:23 am
guys, come onnnnnn!! ¬¬
Dreamhost is one of the best hosts on the web!
You have forgot one of the most important things!
The relation between client and company!
And I guess Dreamhost breaks all dimensions when talking about client support and price and benefit…
Other thing, we are in the EARTH PLANET so things can do wrong
Sure that lasts months was a crazy over dreamhost, but come on!
Lets take easy with the guys cause they do and amazing job, not like other company like ‘the pla…’ that only sell hosts.
Dreamhost sells great services with a lotta of humanity for less!
That’s FOR ME is the most important!!
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:31 am
This type of thing is the exact reason I left DH. DH customers, there are better options out there!
Oh, that and the panel times out all the time even on super-highspeed and reliable connections. Blank pages upon login. Weird downtime. Long ticket times.
I went from $9/month to 98¢/month at a host that makes you pay for ONLY what you use. Don’t use 140GB of traffic a month? You don’t pay for it. Don’t use e-mail? You don’t pay for it. I won’t name names, but go looking for it if you’re interested. There are a few out there now.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:39 am
I’ve been with Dreamhost for 7 years now. Prior to that I’ve dealt with other web hosting companies and still do from time to time on behalf of friends websites. Its good to know what else is “out there”. I live in Canada and barely have a telecommunications network. Bell Canada has no competition. I live 30 minutes from Toronto, a self-proclaimed “megalopolis of technology”. Major auto manufacturers are located nearby. But Bell Canada has no desire to service any of us with high speed internet and we’re destined to always have shitty, old cloth covered phone cables buried in the mud, run through forests and hooked (hitch-hiking) on power line poles. No competition. We’re screwed. Tech help is in a 3rd world country with people speaking languages I dont understand.
Then there’s Dreamhost. Just look at the apology… theres pictures of American (North American) muppets, notes that say sorry….. Man…. where can you go to even get an apology if some asshole opens his/her door into the side of your El Camino in a parking lot? Where can you go where a company actually KNOWS they have a problem, and doesn’t BLAME the customer by first giving you a song and dance about how you need to disable your firewall, antivirus software, reboot, etc… all the time knowing that there is an issue at THEIR end? I kept close tabs on the support blog during the outtage and yes, I was pissed… but stuff happens. Look at it this was, there WAS a place to check in, read the problems of others and generally get a grip on what was going on. Nobody hid behind a 500 page manual of excuses or blamed us, the Dreamhost customers, or ignored us.
Been there, done that and switched to Dreamhost years ago because of that. The monthly Dreamhost “Lettery’s” only drive the point home that these folks actually have a pulse, give a damn and get the job done.
Kudos to Dreamhost. We all bitch and moan when things go bad, sure, I can ramp it up a notch too when my service hiccups… so here’s a big THANKS for all you do and all the downtime I’ve NOT had over the past many years!
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:39 am
I know someone thought they were being “hip” when they wrote the “cute” apology (muppet pictures and all), but please…I believe most of the DH customers are adults and would probably prefer an apology that was written for adults and a little more direct.
1. Identify the problem
2. Apologize
3. Outline plans for preventing future problems
4. Restate your commitment to customer service
The posted apology was very annoying. And to be honest, some of these comments about “stuff happens, deal with it…if you want 100% uptime, pay for dedicated hosting.” Well, those are just ignorant.
When I signed up for the “bargain” hosting service, no where did it say, “You get what you pay for.” Of course at no time did I assume my plan came with 100% up time, but I didn’t imagine the site availability would be a daily issue. Occasional disruption of service is expected for the plan I’ve purchased; however, daily problems (as I have been having since day one) and then childish aplogizes are completely ridiculous.
For what it’s worth, I am in the market for a new provider and am keeping a close on eye on a friend’s experience with hostmonster.com.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:48 am
Dreamhost is great, the prices are great, support is great. Uptime, is not great. If Dreamhost would just give away a bit less bandwidth, and harddrive space, I think the uptime would be much better.
But I applaud you guys for being able to maintain the company. It seems that managing all those servers would be a bitch. The support requests would be the death of me.
Just my opinion.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:58 am
Thats the best SLA I have read.. I work at a College and have fully dedicated on site servers with UPS and fuel generators… and I can tell you we are not 99.9% uptime… it’s a lot more complex… anyway I have my site on DH, and let them manage all that… for almost 8USD at month… I think is fair.
:D
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:09 am
Maybe it’s cognitive dissonance, or maybe I’m just to stuck on social psychology, but, no matter how much DH messes up, I still don’t want to leave.
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:37 am
Hey Dreamhost!
I’ve got your cheapest account and rarely ever have a problem, yet there’s people that claim “daily problems since day one.” You guys playing favorites or something?
I didn’t care much for the SLA. “Sorry doesn’t cut it” as my dear mum used to say.
I do like it when you tell us technical details about what’s going on behind the scenes. What exactly went wrong? Whose fault was it? Are you going to hold their feet to the fire to make sure they don’t screw up again? What are you going to change about your setup to prevent similar stuff in the future.
Seriously, even if it’s something I need to read a book to understand, every detail makes me more tolerant of downtime and any other issues. That up-front full disclosure, not encoded in impersonal corporate-speak, is an advantage you’ve got over all the other hosts and services I’ve ever dealt with. It’s worth a lot to me. Don’t trade that for apologies or BS, and you’ll keep this customer, and my advocacy.
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:42 am
I still love you guys.
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:43 am
I am in the process of switching all my sites over to Dreamhost. Why?
1) I am tired of my sites being down several times a week! I’m tired of constantly hearing that emails to me are bouncing.
2) I’m tired of horrible support, and nasty individuals who seem annoyed they have to support you even though it’s their job.
Dreamhost has excellent costs, excellent services, excellent communication, and the best up time I’ve had with four different hosts since 1998.
If and when one of my future sites begins to pull in a regular amount of money, and I need to offer my customers 100% uptime, then I will need to look into spending way, way more money each month. But until then, this is a fabulous option, and always will be for the majority of web sites out there.
If you want to spend the money Amazon and Google spend on their servers, go for it. Of course google was down for me the other day, but let’s not talk about that.
Brian
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:51 am
If one has been having problems since day 1 and is evidently in the vast minority, then perhaps the problem doesn’t rest solely with the service provider.
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:59 am
All I can say is… Keep up the good work, DH. And thanks for not keeping us in the dark when things DO go south.
The other whiners can go suck ducks.
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:11 am
This infantile apology was not just lame-ass, it was also very annoying. Please, try stop being “cute” and start being professionals. If I can’t take you seriously, how can I have any confidence in your sevice?
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:37 am
# Russell Says:
March 1st, 2007 at 1:27 am
For about three years, I’ve managed three DreamHost accounts concurrently. Maybe every six months, DreamHost services are unavailable to me for a few hours.
I have no problem with that.
The Crazy Domain Insane! plan DreamHost offers is such an outstanding value that it makes those few hours of downtime negligible.
But I’m not running one of those mission-critical blog apps that absolutely positively must have 112% uptime.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Totally agree!!
Whenever i’ve needed ANY help with ANYTHING Dreamhost staff have replied ASAP.
If my sites go offline for an hour or 5 hours etc every 6months yeh its annoying.. and i get a bit pissed off – but it happens.. running a different type of server i understand we’re only human.. im also on the crazy insane domain package and im so pleased with it..
so as far as im concerned Dreamhost are doing an awesome job..!
Keep it up
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:43 am
The one thing you could have done differently that I would think should be obvious is you should have sent out an email to all your customers ahead of time, so we could have known there was a “planned” downtime, and planned for it. I cannot believe you don’t even mention that in your lame ass apology.
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:52 am
DreamHost is the best. Don’t worry about it. Just keep up the awesome service.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:01 am
I didn’t even notice the outage, but the apology annoys me. There have been times when Dreamhost has been down and the complete lack of response has driven me up the wall. I’ve since taken the position that I’m not paying for professional service and Dreamhost staff aren’t interested in providing one.
For the cash-strapped, Dreamhost offers good value for money but extremely poor support (in my experience), particularly in times of crisis. To be fair, reliability has been moderate but in cases of outages I’ve always had the impression that staff don’t care in the slightest. This ‘SLA’ reinforces my opinion. Furthermore, the scant details provided is hardly full disclosure and only gives the impression that admins never really know what the source of the problem is.
Providing some redundancy in-house and moving essential services away has worked for me and the effort is better spent than lodging grievances at Dreamhost.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:01 am
I love dreamhost. period.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:08 am
I’m a new customer. I didn’t notice the downtime — thanks for getting the problem fixed so quickly. What I did notice was how entertaining and (more to the point) *human* your super-lame-apology was. I was laughing out loud. The entertainment I got from your apology was more valuable to me than any loss caused by the downtime.
It’s so rare to be in a business relationship where both sides can treat each other like human beings, rather than as conduits for commerce. Keep up the great work, and I now look forward to my monthly newsletter.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:23 am
I am a web developer and recently hosted my own one-pager (basically my CV) w/ DH, waiting to see how things are here before suggesting any client moves. Having just received the SLA (and it was Super Lame) and read all these comments, the bottom line is that we pay as little as we do and our hosts only care as much as they care (which seems to be a lot in some ways and not at all in others), for that $. But, I feel like I have to weigh in on a couple of things:
-my email was down not for 8 hours but for a REALLY LONG TIME, gradually started working again in fits and starts probably somewhere near the end of the stated 36 hours. This is not insignificant even for shared hosting leading me to my next point which is that…
-ever since the “dot com meltdown” I have pieced together a living developing mostly small to medium sized sites for non-profit and arts-oriented clients and individuals-some of them, BTW, receiving very heavy traffic indeed. What does this mean in the context of this discussion? ALL SHARED HOSTING, all the time. From long and varied experience I can attest to the fact that contrary to popular opinion here, but as a couple of others here have noted, it is not impossible to manage a shared hosting situation with a minimum of downtime.
-also the idea that those who complain about downtime all host pathetically tiny sites w/ no traffic and therefore deserve to die sounds kind of, um, pathetically self aggrandizing.
I understand the issues of bang-for-buck, little control over third party data center (outside of DH taking their biz elsewhere), and the ongoing price wars that make profits in the web hosting biz elusive and necessitate feature-rich hosting w/ tiny and inexpensive staff. Maybe I am just being a nostalgic old fart but I for one would be willing to pay a little more (I am really hosting here due to the fact DH hosting is set up in an extremely logical and developer-friendly way-for example DNS and directory structure features that allow me to have TESTING SITES-that I have pined for for years-kudos DH), for more stability.
Anyway I’m gonna stick around a bit. Besides the setup I am starting to find the smart-ass honesty and the dumb-ass Newsletter kind of refreshing.
Cheers.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:26 am
my site http://www.urushares.com goes down lots of time, but other of my sites hosted in the same accuont worcks fine, like http://www.tusitioporno.com what is the problem when happen it? bouth of sites are in the same server so why one worck and the other not?
stop the “thanks” and design performance and start to use a bit just a bit more of money in the server quality.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:28 am
Why all the complaining? Dreamhost is the best webhost out there. Period. Well, maybe not period, maybe 2 parenthesis, with the words “for the money” in between.
Not only does it offer WAY more features (for the money), but to date, I’ve MADE more money via referrals than I’ve spent on hosting in the last three years! $97 bucks for referring people to the best webhost out there (for the money)? Thank you dreamhost… for PAYING ME to use your AWESOME service!
Look, everyone, we all know that a companies always issue statements like this after problems are experienced. And we all know that those statements are really SLAs. So give credit to Dreamhost for being HONEST and admitting that, yes they are obligated to apologize, but the apology is really NEVER going to change anything, so they might as well call it what it is. They could have even called it an Obligatory Super Lame Apology. OSLA.
Shame on you who are placated by those “tell you exactly what you want to hear” types of statements. Here on Earth, no one is perfect, we’re all human, and mistakes can and will happen. All your whining is only part of the problem. Why not be part of the solution?
FURTHERMORE, I’ve never seen a company INCREASE their service’s value without charging extra for it. For instance, by multiplying the disk space and bandwidth each month, and making unlimited domains and subdomains with each plan, Dreamhost just keeps getting better and better, and even better.
And the newsletters? They are HILARIOUS. Who else has newsletters that are actually funny worth the time it takes to read them? Thanks Dreamhost.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:48 am
For all the know-it-alls who keep saying “if you want more reliability get a dedicated server,” well I DO have a dedicated server with Dreamhost, and I WAS down for a day, and I DO pay good money for my server.
I realize that most power outages cannot be avoided. I won’t fault DH for that. But what I fault DH for is that it seems like everytime their routers/dns servers/etc get powercycled something fails to come back up. I was hoping beyond hope that after last summer’s meltdown DH was going to make sure that when the juice comes back on, our service would be restored very quickly and we wouldn’t have things breaking when they got powered back on.
Unfortunately DH has let all of us down…
Let’s see some power cycle tests in the next few months. I’m willing to put up with some headaches now so that next time there’s a power outage, and there will be, DH will handle it more smoothly.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:49 am
This stuff is getting really, really old. Your candor gets you a pass on the first incident, but it doesn’t work on the second, and then the third, and then … Now it’s just annoying.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:59 am
I am totally with the sh*t happens. If I needed my sites to function 24/7, I would pay for a dedicated server, or get off my phat ass and learn to run one myself – so the downtime is no biggie for me.
My issue is (and this might be up in the comments somewhere already, but I don’t want to read through the 900 comments from various asshats to find it) my issue is that you guys knew there was a power outage a-comin, and there was no email to warn us. Perhaps there was a post somewhere on a blog or something – but when the service is going to be out and you know in advance, it would make good business sense to pause the porn on the Tivo and send out an email to us all.
Thanks dudes – you guys really do good work.
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:04 am
Well, I accept your apologies.
I hope that won’t repeat.
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:18 am
Just read this in Josh’s profile:
What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen while working at DreamHost?
All our servers off in the data center, dark and quiet…. HA, just kidding, like that’s ever happened!
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:20 am
Seriously guys – this is f&cking lame. First off, we don’t pay $8.95 – we pay THOUSANDS each year for dedicated servers with the expectation of having reliable service. We are planning on moving our business elsewhere as soon as possible.
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:35 am
Yo solo puedo felicitaros por el gran servicio que dais a mucha gente de todo el mundo.
En español hay una frase que dice “El mejor escribano hace un borron”. Es decir, cualquiera puede tener un error en cualquier momento.
Felicidades, animo y a seguir trabajando.
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:55 am
I have only really recently started using Dreamhost but I feel in a way we get what we pay for. I am paying less than £8/month. Or at least I think I am, about $4/monthish and I have found that the service apart from this little glitch absolutely amazing and all the people have helped me so much considering I’m fairly technically inept. Couldn’t recommend them more.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:09 pm
My rundown:
1. All my sites went offline (5 personal and 4 with partners).
2. Big deal. Middle of the night.
3. Oh wait! One of my websites brings in money. What will my clients think? I know what they “should” do… go back to bed and check the site in the morning. To those who gripe about “losing business”, well, get a dedicated server as noted above by quite a few people and even then your uptime will not be 100%. And yes I do make good money with my clients, but (a) not one of them wrote in and (b) one person did write in… it was my brother who said “hey i couldn’t see your site last night” and I told him check now. His response was “cool!”.
4. Oh yes, back to my screaming in the night at the loss of my sites. More like, yawning. Email will be delivered in the morning, check. Websites up the next day, check. A warm blooded women in my bed waiting for me that night, check-a-rama!
This thread with a bunchload of you whining and going on and on about your sites. Funny thing is some of your sites should be yanked as they look as if they were created on tripod free pages circa 1997. And like others said, and I’ll say it again, if you lost so much money, and you make so much money, why don’t you have your own server or dedicated hosting. I’m not trolling here or trying to cause trouble, I’m just saying that yes, it sucks to have your sites offline, I know that. But this is SHARED hosting people. Shared. If you need to again, buy dedicated or set your own up in your home or office.
Maybe it’s because I worked help desk years ago, but really people, come on. You are paying under $10 a month.
Please, find a host that will give you 100% uptime and I will fly to a swedish doctor and tell him I need the sex operation to have YOUR baby.
Next time this happens:
1. Pretend it is 1986
2. No dot.whatever websites to worry about
3. Read a book, watch a movie, go to bed (and maybe even cuddle with someone if you are lucky!)
*unless of course newsgroups are your life!
Again, not trying to spark arguments here. Just putting some of you in “CHECK” because of your whining.
My two cents. Leave Dreamhost. More solid customers who enjoy hosting with an “EMPLOYEE OWNED HOSTING COMPANY”.
And yea, I’ve been a customer for over 4 years now. Sure there have been downtimes but I have had much worse with other hosts.
I love you all though. Really I do. And now I’m going to go read a book.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:29 pm
I host a bunch of stuff, but nothing that needs uptime. Thank you for your explanation.
The only thing I ask is to learn from this and maybe upgrade components for more reliability.
Really, for $8/month, and 8 sites, I can’t complain.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Blah Blah Blah, whine whine whine. I run 31 sites on Dreamhost and I never complained once, for the 15.95 a month I pay, this is a great service, and don’t think for a minute I don’t make my hosting fees back. So even with some downtime, I’m still making some extra cash on the side.
I couldn’t even begin to fathom moving my sites to another provider, not that I wouldn’t, but hey i’m lazy and I dont have time to move over 200 Gb of data and set it all back up.
To all those idiots posting other service providers, just give it a rest. It’s no wonder why those providers don’t have forums and blogs on their sites that arn’t heavily moderated for fear of bleeding customers over to Dreamhost.
Even with some downtime, the service is excellent and the responses I get some Customer Service have been great!
Keep up the great work DH! Time to renew another year this month, and I’m not moving :)
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:33 pm
I’m just more worried about the six people who view my site each year, may have been affected by this…
… is all i’m sayin’…
:)
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Jake Says:
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:08 am
[...]
It’s so rare to be in a business relationship where both sides can treat each other like human beings, rather than as conduits for commerce. Keep up the great work, and I now look forward to my monthly newsletter.
—–
Amen, brother.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Look you opiniated bunch. Stop it with all this ‘get a dedicated server’ crap. If you really cared about your revenues you would a) buy your own hardward in duplicate b) investigate the data center in which you placed it c) set up monitoring software d) come up with a disaster recovery plan (ie a site in a different city) e) pay thousands per month!
I know it is hard to accept the fact that you might not know what you don’t know. The fact is that there is a trade off between uptime and cost, and if you want the uptime you have to pay the cost – that is, al pay a stupid amount for complete redundancy (per day if you actually work out the full costs: ie hardware, fiber connections, electricity, building maintenance, staff salaries, etc).
The comparisons between this or that web hosting company being better misses the point. It’s is your own business acumen that you should be questioning.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:55 pm
I’m in for the long haul. I’m not quitting, and I don’t need a lengthy apology.
I would like to hear that you have fixed not only the configuration on the fileserver, but the process that make that incorrect configuration possible. I want to know that you know exactly what happened with the router and are working to prevent that ever happening again.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:09 pm
thanks for the apology. i know lots of companies that wouldn’t even do that.
i don’t know if you know, but the squirrelmail is still wonky. being dropped by the IMAP server. thanks.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:17 pm
I came over from 1and1.com a few months ago. I used to get quite a bit of downtime (less than an hour each, but at least once a month). When I called their customer support, they’d tell me the last time my site was down was 9 months ago! Therefore, I definitely appreciate DH willing to give us constant updates on this issue.
I too could do away with the jokey blog entry if it was followed with actual “lessons learned”. That is, what’s going to happen next time, differently, other than “hope”. “Hope is not a plan”, to quote a possible future president.
Finally, for those who are complaining with a shared service, they can be offered a different plan, one that costs double or triple (or whatever it is), by mirroring their site, and having a true distaster recovery solution, one that guarantees 5 9s or 7 9s or whatnot.
For me, 99.9% uptime (9 hours downtime per year) is definitely a great deal for the crazy insane plan. Even 99% uptime (almost 4 full days of downtime) is acceptable.
The question is: how much are you willing to pay to go from 99% uptime to 99.999% uptime? Whatever it is, tell DH that’s what you want and that’s what you want to pay.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Why are all the pro-Dreamhosters in this thread soooooooo angry at everyone that isn’t happy with the service?
Look through this thread and every other time someone says they’re happy with Dreamhost they feel it necessary to lose their shit and call anyone who complains a moaner, whiner, a little whore, an idiot. How pathetic. Ironically the people who are actually unhappy with Dreamhost service haven’t said anything nasty like that.
If I was checking out Dreamhost for the first time and read this thread I would run away from this company – not because of the number of unhappy customers but because of how unhappy the happy customers are.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:25 pm
I suggest that some of you $8.95 Internet Magnates do a little investigation(Google will be your friend here…) about what the phrase “Ground Fault”, especially on a 440 volt service leg, can mean to a big bunch of servers, routers and other really, really expensive electronimical stuff, should that fault start pumping a lot of 440 volt amperage down the ground. Or the neutral.
Then go out and experience what really shitty hosting, with call centers in Tierra del Fuego or some such is like.
Sheesh…more Whine than the Gallo Brothers hereabouts…
One question: I have seen some rather…ahem…”expansive” figures regarding lost revenues experienced between 0200-1000 PST. Are some of you running “Escort Services” sites or sumthin’? How’s the money with that sort of thing. I’m always interested in entrepreneurship opportunities.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Hi,
I read two things here…
a) the… “downtime it sucks, dh suck”
b) the… “Good hosting DH, small downtime over long term”
and from DH, were sorry, albeit a long we’re sorry ;-)
Sorry in my opinion is irrelevent, meaningless and only looks to the past.
Lets move forward, and to do that we need these questions answered
1) What caused the power outage?
2) What has been done to prevent it from happening again?
Definitive answers to those two questions are more important than sorry, or the type a) & b) replies.
Steven
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Well my email has been either completely down or so slow that IMAP consistently times out since the power outage. It’s friday now and that means I havnt been able to reliably use email for 5 DAYS. I dont care if it’s a cheap service, and I’m only paying $8 a month. That’s not acceptible for any price. If all you high-and-mighty people who accuse everyone of ‘whining’ had equivalent problems, you’d certainly be whining right along with the rest of us.
All these ‘cleverly’ written dreamhost blog posts and newsletters which claim the problem is solved only serve to annoy me more because clearly the problem is NOT solved. Maybe spend less time in creative writing classes and more time learning how to operate a data center.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Apology accepted, especially if you put it in this funny lame way.
Anyways, it would be great if you can blog about what you guys have learnt from this experience and, more importantly, what you are doing to prevent it from happening again.
We are interested in knowing preventative remedies. The AJAXy panel is real nice and smooth, but I’d trade it for uptime anyday!
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Geez… what a bunch of whining douche bags. I’ve been with DH for a year now (just renewed my hosting) and I run a few sites there as well as host some for friends and family. I don’t get pissed off if my site goes down for a day. Sure, it’s annoying, but that’s life.
My last provider went down for a week and tehy never responded to any e-mails or phone calls I sent to them. That’s saying a lot. I almost took them to court to get my money back.
DH’s been good to me so far. As with any host, there’s bound to be problems at one point or another.
I have a few small gripes though;
1. An advisory e-mail would have been nice.
2. Was this post *really* necessary?
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Look, I love my dreamhost account. I recommend it to all my tech savy friends. Bur I don’t recommend it to business clients. Sorry to say. I LOVE the bandwidth, the diskspace, the shel freedom, the databases, there is so much to love. But speed and reliability aren’t. So great for techies… but… Oh, P.S. I love the SLA. My geekside does anyway, as a business owner I’m not so sure.
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:35 pm
@Julia: DH shouldn’t have e-mailed everyone to tell us about the planned downtime, because they told us about it in advance at http://dreamhoststatus.com. If you don’t check that daily/weekly/ever, then it’s really convenient for you that it’s available as a newsfeed that you can subscribe to! That way, DH won’t have to send us e-mails every time they update dreamhoststatus, because that would be unnecessary. Sure, you could say that this outage was a larger issue than most of the things they post there, but they didn’t expect it to be.
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:36 pm
My major complaint was with the emergency page. I had to search Google blogs to find out any kind of updates and cached results I could. For a few hours I thought DH magically disappeared. :(
That + sarcastic “sorry” == Complaints out the ass.
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:38 pm
My major complaint was with the emergency page. I had to search Google blogs to find out any kind of updates and cached results I could. For a few hours I thought DH magically disappeared. :(
That + sarcastic “sorry” == Complaints out the face.
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:05 pm
there we go again …… another happy Dreamhost customer calling anyone who complains about downtime ‘a whining douche bag’.
Dreamhost’s happy customers are truly frightening.
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Apologies (even if I ignore the unprofessionalism of this one) don’t mean squat. PERFORMANCE means everything. Delivering this sort of unprofessional “apology” makes it appear that you take a similarly unprofessional approach to performance.
I suppose I could tolerate the jokey lame apologies if your technical performance wasn’t so horrible. But in comparison to the recent technical problems at Dreamhost, I am prepared to believe that this intolerably offensive “apology” is as professional as you are capable of being. Is this the message you want to send to customers?
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:58 pm
[...] piden disculpas a los clientes por el corte del otro día que duró varias horas. Fue debido a un apagón en el [...]
March 2nd, 2007 at 4:42 pm
I was one of many, who were not expecting anything in free hand out. The Super Lame Apology is just what should be said. They could have said nothing. I except it and will continue hosting here and promoting Dreamhost.
Just to let you all know yes I have lot of site here and yes I may have lost a sale or two. But I could have had the down time any where on the earth. Sales are a funny thing, always a “what if “,“could have” so on.
Hey nice to have a day off from answering emails.
You offer more goodies and support then any place I have parked my sites in 11 years, keep up the good work.
March 2nd, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Here’s my question.
You had a “planned power outage.”
Then suddenly your SERVERS WERE MISCONFIGURED?
You must have some REALLY SMART UPS SYSTEMS!
Your WEB SERVERS suddenly didn’t work? Because the power was out for an hour?
I don’t know any servers that change their config files because the power went out.
Die, yes. They will do that.
Memory blows, and the OS overwrites itself?
Sure.
Rewrite the config files.
Uh-uh.
Sorry.
Try again.
Do try to keep in mind that there actually ARE some TECHNICAL PEOPLE here using your hosting service.
Don’t bullshit us, please.
With jokes or otherwise.
March 2nd, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Nodoby wants a refund—although one might be appropriate. What we want is better reliablility. Nobody at Dreamhost seems to understand that.
Poor reliability: that’s lame, and frustrating, and bad for business. Rather than giving us a long excuse about SLAs (when few people would expect one anyway), tell us that you take these (recurring) downtime problems seriously.
March 2nd, 2007 at 5:48 pm
I’m tired of the cutesy newsletters full of weak humor and few useful bits of info buried in the crap.
I’m even more tired of the attmpts to turn outages into a joke. It makes it seem that you don’t care and see nothing wrong with outages.
Another poster said that shared host customers were by definition assholes. I’d suggest that that person who said he worked for a different provider is exactly the sort of person who should not be in business. Certainly if his company offers shared host service, no customer would want to be there.
You, Dreamhost, are offering a service. You set the terms and the rates. Deliver the service and take responsibility.
March 2nd, 2007 at 5:53 pm
I wish the people who cry in these blogs would take a moment to appreciate the fact they have an unmoderated outlet to vent their frustration.
Most hosting companies do not, and keep any whinging under wraps. The fact DH allows people to whinge up a storm on their own publicly viewable blog shows they are not trying to hide anything from potential (and existing) customers.
I’ve got a few domains with DH, nothing critical, and I never even noticed the downtime. If this blog wasnt in the newsletter, I would never even have known it went down.
My work domain is hosted with an Australian provider, simply because of the speed. However I am paying about the same price for 1/20th of the allowance, and 1/50th of the data transfer. Despite this, it still has downtime – enough that its noticable during business hours on occasion, mainly disrupting email.
Long story short? DH is no worse than any other provider in their uptime, but is far better in their communication and open-ness. I’ll be hanging around for a while yet, if only to see if I can crack a terrabyte of transfer in a month :P
March 2nd, 2007 at 6:20 pm
What’s clear is that the unhappy people here are not just upset about the outage. There’s a bigger reliability issue that is the real problem. Many Dreamhost users have been suffering for months from frequent unbearable slow downs that are unacceptable – even for cheap shared hosting. If you’re lucky enough not to be one of those affected that doesn’t give you a right to shout “whiner” at anyone who complains. Add to that the fact that support tickets frequently take 20 to 30 hrs to get answered and an event like this is bound to bring out a lot of negativity.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Your apology is acceptable. :) Hopefully, Dream Host will be giving a LOT of attention/concern/care about “reliability” starting from now on.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Heheheh… your posts are great.
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:32 pm
可以发一份中文版的email给我吗？谢谢！
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:35 pm
Perhaps your apology should be a little more sincere? And you should state how you will avoid the down-time in the future?
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:34 pm
This outage, for some of us, did NOT occur in the wee hours of Sunday night. Oddly enough, most of the world isn’t on Pacific time, and the World Wide Web actually *is* used World Wide. Even more shockingly, not even everyone who’s hosted on DH lives in the same time zone.
Just thought I’d mention that, since no one else did.
As for the outage itself, it was an annoyance, but I didn’t particularly mind it. These things happen. I had to deal with some people (in Australia) whose sites I host, but it was no big deal.
Having said that, the fact that I wasn’t personally too put out by this doesn’t mean that I think the people who *did* feel that they were negatively affected, beyond a mere annoyance, don’t have a perfectly legitimate grievance, or that it’s at all reasonable or acceptable for them to be bashed for expressing their dissatisfaction.
I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to want or expect to see some sort of plan for minimizing such failures in the future. I, for one, would like to know what, if anything, is being done to prepare for future events such as these.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:07 pm
I have to say that I also wasn’t inconvenienced by the outage and I don’t expect any compensation.
But the “SLA”… I don’t need ‘Aw, bro-han, the servers were DOWN, baby! You see that shit? LOL’. I don’t want a concern-free ‘my bad’. As someone else remarked, I’m going to have a hard to feeling that I’m being looked after in a professional manner if I’m getting a frat house update on a major facility downtime. Tell me what happened, what steps are/were taken to mitigate future incidents and if you want to do so in a friendly one-on-one manner, go right ahead. But… this was just… sophomoric and a little insulting.
I host with two different providers. One which offers me a high uptime guarantee (and delivers) and DH for some other things that aren’t in need of this. And I’m pretty happy with DH so far. But had I seen this post before I signed up, I can guarantee you I would have had second thoughts.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Your not ok.
I’m not ok.
..but that’s OK!
love the post DH. (and the digg greggles :-))
-lgm
March 3rd, 2007 at 12:06 am
One of the photos in your post shows the word “sorry” written in signwriting. This photo is from a protest, here in Australia, against our Prime Minister’s refusal to say “sorry” for the treatment of indigenous Australians in the past.
We’ve been trying to get our PM to use the ‘S’ word for more than a decade now – he can’t manage to say the word but you guys did. And that’s fine by me.
As for the 44c, may be if this situation arises again you could make a donation to charity on behalf of your clients – I’m sure all those 44 centses, added together, would mean a lot more towards AIDS in Africa or environmental efforts in South America than just on 44c does to me.
PS I never even noticed there was an outage, and I’m in a timezone where your early morning is my prime time.
March 3rd, 2007 at 2:10 am
Please, behave like adults. If you were trying to be funny you failed utterly and miserably.
March 3rd, 2007 at 4:25 am
You know, I could handle the irritating downtime. I even posted on the DHstatus to say so. But I don’t appreciate sarcasm. I am looking for a new webhost.
March 3rd, 2007 at 6:12 am
This is bullshit. I have a didicated server. I can’t reach the web panel at all. I can’t access webmail. I can’t do a god damn thing right now, and I have to tell my customers that they have to wait before I can setup your e-mail account becuase my host cannot seem to get their shit together. This “apology” is very insulting, and we should recive a “real” apology for this apology. I’m just tired of all the problems, and AWFUL and slow customer service. I think I will start looking for other hosts.
March 3rd, 2007 at 7:15 am
Damn! i was so ready to leave Dreamhost after only being here for a few months. I checked other hosting out there and there aren’t any that give you these features, this level of control, at these prices. I’m gonna stick around a bit and HOPE DH IS BETTER PREPARED IN THE FUTURE FOR THESE TYPES OF OUTAGES.
Good luck DH. i think there are a lot of people here who want to stay so GET YOUR SH!T TOGETHER PLEASE.
March 3rd, 2007 at 9:08 am
Ha ha ha ha ha!
I used the planned something not working to not do anything ;)
March 3rd, 2007 at 9:39 am
[...] Internet Service Provider that hosts this Web site (and 350,000 others), said sorry about a significant outage they had last weekend due to a power failure. Theirs is a bit tongue in check but I think it gets the point across that they have compassion for [...]
March 3rd, 2007 at 12:16 pm
I’ve been with Dreamhost for some years and have referred some friends and coworkers to it. I’ve been VERY happy with the uptime and the level of communication they provide to me and the rest of their user base about issues.
I’ve been with other providers that would do everything to blame my equipment for downtime (even when I’d mention that a friend of mine across the country isn’t able to load the site either and they’re on a totally different PC and service provider) That is normal shared webhost support. Dreamhost doesn’t do that. Constant communication is what I see from them.
That’s customer service.
That’s why I stay.
March 3rd, 2007 at 3:44 pm
[...] me resulta inconcebible que un negocio pueda despachar a sus clientes con un entrada como la que hace unos días publicó DreamHost en su [...]
March 3rd, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Fuck you dreamhost. I’m done.
March 3rd, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Once again, Dreamhost manages to screw its customers.
Moving to one of their competitors in a better building was the smartest thing I ever did.
March 3rd, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Man I had to actually go to bed and update my web site in the morning. WTF??? I don’t sleep! Now I’m quite pissed off that you forced me to do such a thing.
March 3rd, 2007 at 11:18 pm
SLAs are Bullshit…
The fine people at DreamHost had a tough week. Their data center had a planned power outage last Sunday, and as tends to happen with these things, some things broke and there were residual effects for some days. Shit happens and I can totally feel the…
March 3rd, 2007 at 11:45 pm
ever heard about ups? (Uninterruptedly power supply)
March 4th, 2007 at 4:18 am
I can live with that, I have never paid less and I have never have had better service…
Yes, hosting in Poland is very expensive, or very shitty…
DH is quite nice in comparision to the others.
I’m hosting 20 domains on DH.
March 4th, 2007 at 5:52 am
Doing test is almost useless. If you ever ran anything on a computer you know “if a test succeeds, we have forget something”.
March 4th, 2007 at 7:10 am
Dreamhost’s shared hosting has been unreliable and slow for months and months. Almost every day my site has significant down time. A simple blog that loads in 5 or 6 seconds on other cheap hosting plans normally takes 15 to 30 seconds to load on Dreamhost. Support requests take more than 24 hours for a response. For $8.95 I can live with the occasional outage. But I can’t live with consistently unreliable service.
March 4th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
I am still with DreamHost.
.
I have not left the building.
.
I want to ride to work with Josh on the Big Blue Bus now that I’m in The County and know what the Big Blue Bus is.
.
.
.
This part of The Apology had me rolling, yer lucky or I’d be pissed off (even though I did not even notice the downtime mess this time.):
[
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!!
]
.
.
.
I’d like to write a story about all of the DH electro-punks hanging around the office there …
March 4th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
For my hobby/personal sites: Dreamhost, $8.95/month, downtime like this is fine.
For my business: $1,000-2,000/month in a Tier 1 colo, 1 hour of unplanned downtime in the last 3 years.
I suppose some of you complain that they didn’t use filet mignon on your Big Mac?
March 4th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
My two cents:
1. I did not even notice the outage.
2. I find the Dreamhost newsletter tone and apology tone mildly irritating, since I’m pretty busy and it takes time to extract proper information from them. On the other hand, I despise bland corporatespeak and admire anyone willing to inject levity into an irritable world, so I’m willing to put up with it.
3. I go to an arts festival in the desert every year and survive for a week without email or Internet access. It’s not so bad. Refreshing, actually. Not worthy of frothing at the mouth, anyway. (I would feel differently if Dreamhost were powering my Mom’s life-support machine, of course. But he’s not! It’s only a website.)
4. I have no intention of switching providers.
March 5th, 2007 at 3:37 am
I think the people at DreamHost are doing their job, at least they aren’t like other providers and giving you the run around saying that the servers will be back up in a few hours… and HECK, they pretty much got on their knees and kissed your feet (BECAUSE MOST OF YOU LAME PRE-WEB DESIGNERS ARE SITTING ON YOUR A–ES COMPLAINNING HOW YOU LOST MONEY TO ON YOUR WEBSITES THAT DON’T GENERATE A PROFIT AT ALL!) and all most of the users can do is complain.
Well, I for one take DreamHost’s apology to heart and say thank you for being human and taking time out to say sorry about the downtime.
Keep up the great work!
March 5th, 2007 at 4:03 am
Thanks for being straight with us. All providers have downtime and usually paying $1000/mo for the promise of no downtime doesn’t really amount to anything when it actually happens.
The only thing important to me is that you learned something from this experience and have implemented corrective action. It’s no big deal that bad stuff happens; it only becomes a big deal if the same bad stuff happens twice.
Building and power issues are difficult. Hopefully, you’ll have better logistics next time and build a minimal fail-over data center when resources allow. It would be nice if you could provide fail-over support that automatically transfers our pages to either “This site is down for scheduled maintenance” or “This site is having technical difficulties and will be up as soon as possible. Estimated up time at: X”
The more disturbing thing was that routers and software configurations had problems booting. What I have seen at a few hosting providers is monthly tests (I think someone else suggested this as well) where you take all servers down on a rotating schedule and start them up.
In this fashion, you become aware of any configuration issues 1 server at a time during a relative calm instead of during the mad rush that is whole service failure. I certainly would not mind 30-60 minutes scheduled downtime for a monthly reboot. If you get fancy, it’s even possible to migrate the server to a temporary machine so that I don’t even know when my machine goes down because I don’t see it ;)
@Pete: if you’re going to engage a ranting customer by stating that the ratio is not 1:1, perhaps you should give the ratio? Even if it is a 1:5 or 1:10 average ratio, I think his point that DH has enough revenue to take action is valid. My suggestions above should be doable and not as costly as the negative PR that a well handled outage creates. I’m new here but you guys seem to do a good job.
March 5th, 2007 at 4:12 am
[...] a huge downtime, Dreamhost certainly knows how to repay their customers. The released a new [...]
March 5th, 2007 at 5:56 am
Please keep my “rebate” and invest it in a generator or a battery backup system. I appreciate your view on “SLA’s” but would appreciate if you would have simply communicated the downtime in advance. Advance notice would have been the best thing you could have done. I didn’t see that in your SLA.
Alternate idea — how about redundant datacenters.
March 5th, 2007 at 6:54 am
I had an account with dreamhost. By coincidence, it was expiring Monday, just after this problem. The renewal was 119.4 US and in the end I didn’t do it, because even though people say dreamhost is cheap and all, that’s a lot of money to pay upfront. I sent a ticket to the billing department saying that I was not satisfied with the service and said I would not renew because of that. I was expecting some kind of reply that they were working to improve the services and avoid this kind of stuff in the future. What I got was “this was not our fault, and renewing the service is up to you”. With that, I just gave up on DH.
March 5th, 2007 at 9:07 am
haha i love this comment:
# jahjah Says:
March 1st, 2007 at 9:31 am
You guys are like 5 year olds. How can any business take you guys serious enough to have you host there website. This apology was written like a 3rd grader, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
—
there was a recent snow storm in the midwest that you heard about. the power was out and we had backup systems and everything. nothing we could do about it.
i am a 3rd grader too. i would love working for this company or hanging out with these guys.
March 5th, 2007 at 10:43 am
I briefly moved a domain to DH a few months ago, even after reading about the email meltdown last year. I finally decided I didn’t trust them to provide the kind of service I needed and stuck with my previous *shared* host, who does have near-perfect uptime and great service, and doesn’t need to publish circular “apologies” that seem to be masquerading self-justifications for not actually parting with ill-gotten cash.
I got the email newsletter from DH this morning and just chuckled.
March 5th, 2007 at 11:14 am
Gee, I’m glad I don’t host my main site here. This is the lamest thing I’ve ever heard.
SLA’s mean something, and if you’re not offering one because you think they’re BS, then you must think making your customers happy is BS too. You’re not even trying, but you think you are– now *that’s* BS.
You guys make me laugh. At you.
March 5th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Gee, I’m glad I don’t host my main site here. This is the lamest thing I’ve ever heard.
SLA’s mean something, and if you’re not offering one because you think they’re BS, then you must think making your customers happy is BS too. You’re not even trying, but you think you are– now *that’s* BS.
You guys make me laugh. At you. Ha ha.
March 5th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Oh man, if it wasn’t so lame to call people lame when they call other people lame I’d have to call myself lame and head it all off with a lame loop!
I-heart-Dreamhost!
In a world that starts to think “professional” means anything more than “pay for it” we’ve got a gem in DH, and very unique personalities in our tech corner.
Peace!
March 6th, 2007 at 6:34 am
[...] So they offered an apology. [...]
March 6th, 2007 at 8:44 am
My biggest problem with the company is tone. The tone of the newsletters is grating and unprofessional – not human. Maybe if I was a 20 year old hipster living in an illegal loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I would fine the tone of the communications from the company to be “human”. I find it grating and I actually don’t understand the point of what’s being said half the time.
I know that 99.999 uptime is a myth. Hell, even Gmail went down last week for over 24 hours for some accounts, and their response to it was abysmal – and I was about to use Google Apps for my business site. I decided not to do it not because of the downtime, but because of how they handled the downtime.
I’m not threatening to move, but I am making the noise that your communication is just unacceptable.
There was a period of time where DH was providing clear, unambiguous communication to their customers. I may not have liked the answers, but I thought the answers were truthful and clear.
March 6th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
I’ve been a happy shared hosting customer for almost a year now, and I’m not at all upset about the minor downtown I’ve experienced.
However, I would like to echo others in requesting a bit more of a serious attitude, or at least *less* of a super-goofy approach, to issues like this. Like many others, I’m also pretty happy about how up-front you are with system status, but this is still a business – not a creative writing contest. Blog what you need to, let us know what happened in cases of emergency, apologize if the situation calls for it, use some wit and crack a couple jokes, but please cut down on the über-goofy stuff.
Thanks for some of the best damn hosting this side of the intertubes.
March 6th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
I noticed the outage, and in a big way. One of my domains hosts a mortgage company (used for e-mail only), and we’re in the process of moving to a dedicated server elsewhere. This move was planned about six weeks ago (i.e. unrelated to the outage, which still continues regularly, btw) and is supposed to happen next week. But the duration of the outage was REALLY bad and caused a customer’s loan to not close on time (long story), which ultimately contributed to us losing the loan completely. This cost us thousands, not just a monthly DH fee.
I contacted Dreamhost and asked them for an ETA on their “low severity” problem. Given that my support includes 3 callbacks per month, I requested a callback. A long while later, someone wrote back, apologized, said it wouldn’t happen again, and said they’re not doing call-backs on this issue. Gee thanks.
As far as those who say, “if you want good uptime, get a dedicated server!” Well, a dedicated server (which Dreamhost offers) doesn’t do anyone any good if the power goes out and the infrastructure isn’t reliable to come back up. It’s probably not a cost issue, but a set-up/configuration issue.
I also don’t buy the “you get what you pay for” attitude. Dreamhost may be less expensive, but that doesn’t explain the service problems many of us have had lately. I suspect that if our monthly fees were double what they are now, what happened a few days ago still would have happened.
I pay more for Dreamhost than I do for my home phone due to a good deal I get. Yet if that phone company went down for even a few hours, people would be outraged.
What I don’t like is when I hear back from tech support (and their response time is usually good), and they give me a blow-off answer and a promise that it won’t happen again. When I had recurring problems connecting to the mail server a week or two ago, I was told the reason for that was one of my users (a disabled account) was close to her mail quota. What on earth does the mail quota of a disabled account have to do with my ability to connect to the mail server?
Anyways… been here a couple years… pre-paid a year in advance. Will probably keep my personal site here but, as I said earlier, the mortgage company is moving elsewhere.
March 7th, 2007 at 6:21 am
Deary me,
Get a grip everyone, this happens every so often to everyone! My car broke down last week after a service – I didn’t complain, the problem was fixed and I was on my way again, lessons learnt. If it happens again we shall rise up against ye!
Apologies accepted.
March 7th, 2007 at 6:54 am
[...] outage apologies An apology for the downtime last [...]
March 7th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Let me see if I’m reading this right…
I think this “super-lame” blog entry can be read this way:
“We believe that SLAs are a joke, and we here at DreamHost are opting to have service that is worse than a joke.”
March 7th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Thanks DH, carry on and don’t “sweat” the whinners. Even reading all the blog entries I couldn’r come up with representation from ALL 350,000 domains………
So, the majority accept that things happen to the best of us. For the price (not the MOST important issue) but definitely the VALUE of the services you provide, you can’t beat the My Crazy Domain Insane.
Thanks again for the apology but keep up the good work!
March 8th, 2007 at 8:18 am
I don’t care about your apology, I lost another day of revenue – again. You lot don’t care – again. I’ve given you guys so many chances, but this blog post really takes the cake. Sure guys, make us feel like you’re not sorry at all, but that you’re just really fed up about your annoying complaining customers! I mean, we just pay you good money to keep our sites up and running, who gives a damn if we lose out on even more money?
Btw, keep up the awesome support desk service you’re giving my friends, I’ve long ago stopped recommending you to anyone.
March 8th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Thank you for the apology.
I love the features included with your hosted plans. I love the panel. It is implemented so well. I love the way you have Spam Assassin configured. I love the fact that each user can customize his/her SPAM settings in Webmail. There is so much that I love about Dreamhost.
But I am tired of all the downtime that I have experienced since I signed up nearly 3 months ago. I tried to be patient, thinking that it would go away. But there was so much downtime and the pages often loaded so slowly that I am forced to take my business elsewhere.
I am sad that it didn’t work out. I wish all the best to you. I hope someday you will have and maintain a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
March 11th, 2007 at 10:48 am
dreamhost is ‘ok’. they are too big for their britches. for example i had 1 script running in crontab and it was ALL i had in my entire $250 hosting package with them. and they renamed it. never contacted me or anything. dreamhost can be real DHs
March 11th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
here is DH fixing the power :D
http://www.orsm.net/shite/update20070308/rs021.jpg
March 12th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
It’s been a pretty bad run for you guys. I don’t care if it’s occasional but it’s been pretty damn regular lately. Try telling a client that you don’t know when their site will be back online. They don’t think it’s very funny especially when their email is down too.
March 17th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
[...] outage apologies An apology for the downtime last [...]
April 5th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
[...] DreamHost Blog Super Lame ApologyI have a didicated server. I can t reach the web panel at all. I can t access webmail. I can t do a god damn thing right now, and I have to tell my customers that they have to wait before I [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
[...] I am still a satisfied customer. Compare to Dreamhost, who admit on their blog that they had 95.0838% uptime in February and keep a running list of [...]
April 23rd, 2007 at 9:53 pm
[...] sabía quienes somos y donde estamos. Ahorita de echo estamos preocupados de que los dueños del oso arrepentido que trabaja en DreamHost nos vayan a tirar esta vez y no por una falla en sus [...]
June 7th, 2007 at 10:24 am
I am happy doing business with dreamhost even theres a few down times.. but their service works great for me..
Kojak
June 26th, 2007 at 7:46 am
After the problem, everybody forget about it…
June 29th, 2007 at 1:34 am
doesn’t change that much if you change hoster…that’s the sad truth!
October 15th, 2008 at 2:49 am
Thank You.
December 1st, 2008 at 6:45 am
this is wonderful topic …. i will put acopy of this topic on
my site here
http://www.as7ap4you.com
January 6th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Animal sex videos….
Sex with animal. Animal sex pics. Animal sex….