Whammo!

April 29, 2007 on 8:25 am | In Funnyish, Insider View by Josh Jones | 44 Comments

Bim Bammo!

Somebody outside our office window was waving at fellow co-workers, showing off his new ride… and BAM!!! BING!!! BANG!!! POW!!!

44 Responses to “Whammo!”

  1. BUGabundo Says:

    It look just like my car….

  2. chris Says:

    hey guys, thanks for being such freaking awesome hosts.

    good hosts = sweet
    good hosts + awesome blog = WIN

    http://www.tuftsmania.com

  3. dave Says:

    how about instead of buying new cars you all buy some more reliable hardware, servers, …

  4. the1337g33k Says:

    where did it in the post that they said they bought that car? If you want reliability, buy your own server and try to host a website on it. Something will happen sooner or later. I think they are doing an awesome job. If the server I have in my house fails, its a few days before I get around to getting the parts, fixing it, sometimes reloading linux, samba, etc…

  5. pixiepurls Says:

    omg was that really a new car and the person was just waving? So bad!

  6. Emz Says:

    As gobsmacking(ish) as the photo might be… it has me wondering how the rest of your day was for this to be the most ‘bloggable’.

    I’m joking – I love you guys (and girlies)!

    What are the chances of that happening right outside your window?! Dear oh dear… buffoooons! (Not you; the driver and similar people).

  7. Waaaaaaambulance Says:

    @Dave

    That guy’s driving ability seems brilliant when compared to your off-topic whining.

  8. Gene Steinberg Says:

    I wanted to laugh.

    Then I recalled the fact that my son’s brand new 2007 white VW Jetta Wolsburg Edition had a serious wreck when it was less than a month old.

    So I’m not laughing.

    Peace,
    Gene

  9. Nathan Friedly Says:

    I don’t find it terribly funny that the dude recked.. but the fact that Josh got to post it on the blog is hillarious

  10. Tony Says:

    Damn janpanese ride?

  11. Waaaaaaambulance Says:

    The wreck is funny because it’s the result of not paying attention AND because he only hit concrete.

    If the damage to his car had been from hitting a human, then it wouldn’t have been funny. Maybe, today was his lucky day and this lesson will keep him from running over a little kid next time he gets the urge to wave.

  12. Sheldon Says:

    I’m assuming he wasn’t a DH employee but just in case he was, please keep him away from root.

  13. Dan Says:

    Whats that post doing there anyway??

  14. Zaigham Says:

    Oh man, I feel sorry for that guy… hope car is insured…

    regards.

  15. Meg Says:

    Hehehee, I’m glad he’s ok!

    Oh man I remember when I bought my first car at 24 and had it for less than 3 months when I totaled it. I was crushed, not only did the insurance only give me a little for the car but I didn’t buy gap insurance…..ouch!

    I paid that car off only one year ago. :) THANK GOODNESS

  16. Pete Says:

    hahah.. you guys got trolled. I’m pretty sure Dave’s post was an act of parody.

  17. Tom Says:

    What kind of car is that?

  18. chris Says:

    Looks like an Infiniti. Cant tell ya the model, but it looks bigger than the G’s

  19. Henrik Says:

    It’s interesting how a post about a carcrash outside the DH-office ends up in a “you should buy better servers”-storm of complaints :)

  20. Eric Says:

    I for one think that DH is doing such a good job they should go buy some more new cars

  21. emlak Says:

    thank you very nice topic thanks:)

  22. Waaaaaaambulance Says:

    Did a bot post that comment spam for you, or did you do it all by yourself?

  23. Daniel M. Clark Says:

    I’m still trying to figure out what I’m looking at… it can’t be a road, right? What’s that block of concrete doing there?

  24. marcello Says:

    the guy surely isn’t exactly the brightest person ever but, really, what’s a concrete block doing in the middle of a road?

    M

  25. Jeff @ DreamHost Says:

    > the guy surely isn’t exactly the brightest person ever but,
    > really, what’s a concrete block doing in the middle of a
    > road?

    It’s not really a road – it’s kinda-sorta a drive-way in front of our Los Angeles office (”DreamHost West”), near where people pull in and out of the parking structure. You definitely shouldn’t be going fast there, as there is a fair amount of foot traffic.

    I work at DreamHost East (and don’t travel to West all that often, so I’m not 100% familiar with where the picture was taken), but I’m pretty sure the block is to prevent you from driving up on the pedestrian walking area on the left side of the picture – the place with a slightly lighter color.

    - Jeff @ DreamHost

  26. Waaaaaaambulance Says:

    “but I’m pretty sure the block is to prevent you from driving up on the pedestrian walking area”

    Looks like it works!

    I was way off, though… I thought it was a bad-driver magnet. ;)

    Concrete: 1
    Car: 0

    I definitely think the car should start training for a rematch.

  27. Daniel M. Clark Says:

    >> I’m pretty sure the block is to prevent you from driving up on the pedestrian walking area on the left side of the picture

    Oh, well mission accomplished then! :D

  28. Phiya @ Dreamhost Says:

    That block is right near the parking structure exit.the guy mustve made a quick sharp turn. Guess he we too excited about being off work

  29. phoenix Says:

    Looks like a Nissan…what kind of car was it? Poor thing…glad everyone was okay though!

    And honestly, it wouldn’t be the DH blog if someone didn’t post one comment completely off topic like “isntead of moving servers/doing maintenance/buying carbon credits/breathing/eating/sleeping why don’t you buy servers/be more reliable/fix whatever/make my everything faster/pay attention to me.” I think we’re all used to it by now. ;)

  30. Mari Says:

    Heh, that’s not good. Well, at least everyone’s okay.

    I think it would be nice if the Dreamhost blog took time to explain this post:

    http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2007/05/03/dreamhost-sucks-at-hosting/

    I’m entirely serious. Write a post explaining that post. (The current Digg count for that story is 223 Diggs and it’s the second story down on the front page.)

    Please don’t delete this comment. As a paying customer, I need to know whether this is indeed true in order to weigh my options before I decide to renew my hosting with Dreamhost (as I will need to do within the next few weeks).

  31. Maya Says:

    Wow, nice ride! But awful driving

  32. Dallas Says:

    I think it would be nice if the Dreamhost blog took time to explain this post:

    http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2007/05/03/dreamhost-sucks-at-hosting/

    It basically went like this:

    1. The guy’s single site was overloading the server. Without his one site running, the server is fine.

    2. We notified him of the problem and took some proactive steps to protect the other customers on the server while also working with him to get to a setup that works for all of us.

    3. He ignored our requests to not re-enable his website and did it anyway.

    4. His account was disabled.

    It’s not our usual policy to disable accounts in situations like this but it was deemed necessary at the time. We’re reviewing it now to decide if it should have been handled in another way.

    The blog post’s assessment of the technical situation of our server is just plain wrong. Our servers are configured well for the way we use them. His particular website is simply not suited for a shared hosting environment. Many of our customers do use their allotted bandwidth while also staying within our other server limits.

  33. Mike Says:

    I think some people just don’t get why it’s called SHARED hosting.

    And it looks like he has problems with wordpress as well: elliott.wordpress.com – be sure to read the comments.

    And if he ever springs for a dedicated server, he’ll probably complain about having to share the data center with other servers.

  34. Mari Says:

    Dallas:
    Ah, so Elliot was like the crazy neighbor (read: Tesla) who continuously sucked all the juice out of the power grid and kept taking the power out for everybody.

    Mike:
    It’s amazing you noticed that.

  35. Jeff @ DreamHost Says:

    > Many of our customers do use their allotted bandwidth
    > while also staying within our other server limits.

    An addendum to what Dallas is saying above: I believe the problem in this particular case was primarily due to there being a rather significant number of concurrent hits for relatively small files.

    This can be a problem even if the customer does not come close to their bandwidth allocation as it’s possible for a single site to hit their Apache instance especially hard, using up all available connections and/or overloading the server they are on.

    Another customer, sharing fewer but larger static files may exceed their bandwidth allocation but have an otherwise negligible impact on the server.

    We have no problem with customers using their disk space or bandwidth allocations, but we do have one blanket rule we have to live by and customers need to understand: If a site has a disproportionate impact on the server it is hosted on and is causing stability or performance issues for other customers, we reserve the right to take it offline. We will endeavor to give some prior warning if possible (it appears that we did so in this case), but that’s not always guaranteed.

    Anyhow, sites like this really do benefit from a dedicated hosting environment. That way, they can monopolize the resources of their server without any chance of impacting someone else.

    - Jeff @ DreamHost Web Hosting

  36. smurf Says:

    haha that sucks

  37. Dallas Says:

    I think the real problem here was the relatively poor communication from us as to the reason his account was disabled. The terseness of the ‘Your account is disabled’ message didn’t make it clear what the real reason for the disablement was and led the guy to think we might keep his domains and files hostage. I do think the situation was a bit misrepresented in the blog post but I also have to admit that the flow of the thread as quoted in the post does not paint a pretty picture!

    It may have been justified to disable his account (we’re still figuring that out for sure right now), but our communication could have been better.

  38. Dave Says:

    My site had a stats package that was hammering the CPU in the server about a year ago. Dreamhost simply disabled the script and fired off am email telling what they had done and why they did it.

    Can’t really fault them for that. Storage and bandwidth are one thing but if an errant script is bogging down a server and affecting other users then the two choices are disable or fix the script or pay for a dedicated server.

  39. Elliott C. Back Says:

    Replying to Dallas, who says:

    3) He ignored our requests to not re-enable his website and did it anyway.

    This is not true. As soon as your tech explained that the site was overloading the server, I disabled both the site itself, and the flow of traffic to that site (you have to love mod_rewrite and dns) instantly. I then left up the index page and turned on the subdomain, which was receiving no traffic and not hosting that website.

    Your tech somehow managed to misread my email and assumed I’d done what I wasn’t supposed to. The reality is it’s my right not to have a http_bad_conf error on my domain, and it’s your right not to have to host something that’s killing your server. I satisfied both of those conditions, but got disabled anyway.

  40. Paul Says:

    I see Waaaaaaambulance is calling everyone with server problems a whiner still.

    If the servers were running properly no one would need to whine.

    When you’re the last one to leave, Waaaaaaambulance, can you turn off the lights please?

    The people driving cars like the one in the photo are laughing at people like you who continually call people with server problems whiners.

    They say:

    “We need more customers like Waaaaaaambulance”

    While they’re rubbing their hands together.

  41. Mike Says:

    @Sam: Way to turn a blog into a link farm with a single post.

    @Paul: You’re whining right now, about someone calling people whiners. Is there a point to it?

    It’s a post about someone crashing their car. What’s so hard about sticking to that topic?

  42. sam Says:

    I’m joking – I love you guys (and girlies):>

  43. Mike Says:

    So, after getting your first post deleted for spamming, you thought it was a good idea to come back one more time to link to your non-Dreamhost site?

  44. Robert Says:

    I laughed so hard at that. It was seriously funny. But on a not-so-funny note I have totaled 3 cars in 3 months. Literally. 2 were mine and the other one was owned by someone else. I paid off that debt to the other individual’s insurance company about a year ago. Took 3 or 4 years to do it.

    The first car of mine that I totaled I owed nothing on it but I didn’t get anything from the insurance company for it either. It was seriously messed up after knocking down one tree and hitting another. Both head on. If you need a visual… I had a ‘94 Toyota Pickup Truck. The right side of the car was up to the cab and the front axle was practically under me. Trees on either side and luckily my windows were down or I would of had to exit via the back window.

    The second one was practically twisted by the other individuals car who skidded off into the trees. I got some money from the second one but had to pull $1000 out of my own pocket to pay off the remainder of the loan.

    My last car lasted through 2 accidents luckily without totaling it. I managed to trade it in for my 2007 Rav4 so hopefully nothing will happen to my “baby”. Only $22,000+ in payments to go.

    Oh and I know that was a long comment…

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