Thanksgiving Travel

November 24, 2009 on 10:38 am | In Business, Insider View by Josh Jones | 30 Comments
Get the Flash Player to see this video.



We got our holiday traveling done early this year!

While everybody else is stuck spending the night at the airport, trying to figure out how to best spend their $15 meal voucher, catching H1N1 from the crazy pig farmer snoring next to them, all the DreamHost servers are going to be snug as a bug in a lug in their NEW CAR!

I mean NEW DATA CENTER!

That’s right, we (more or less) completed the mother of all DreamHost data center moves this last week, and if you’ve been with us more than a couple of months, you know the mother of all DreamHost moves must have been a DOOZY.

In the last decade or so, we’ve probably moved data centers an average of once a year… let’s see, there’s been:

CyberG8T => caput (we called them “CyberGate-tuh”)
Commotion => caput
SoftAware => acquired by Digital Island
Digital Island => acquired by Cable and Wireless
WebVision => caput
Exodus => acquired by Cable and Wireless
Cable and Wireless => IPOed and got lame
Switch and Data => IPOed and got lame
Alchemy => still there!
NaviSite => dumped their LA data center on Net2EZ
Net2EZ => we just moved out!

We’ve moved data centers for a multitude of reasons, but we always knew in our heart of hearts “this is the LAST time”.

Recently it’s become hard, harder, and even MORE harder to do these moves. Not just because we’re getting old and flabby, but because servers in general are getting smellier as well as more sharp and covered in razor blades.

Get the Flash Player to see this video.


Not really. Really because the number of servers has become more, more-er and even MORE more-er-er! In fact, we’re a little bit of an oddity among colocation customers. We’re a big customer, but we’re very price conscious (because unlike say a law firm, colo for us is a variable cost) … and usually in business when that’s the case you vertically integrate.

We’ve been considering getting our own data center for several years actually! It just never quite made sense. We just weren’t quite big enough to justify the humungo capital outlays, and we just didn’t quite have any expertise in the electricity and cooling side of things. And besides, the market for colo had gotten so soft that the prices we were getting from all the competing providers made it REALLY not worth getting our own.

Of course, those prices are always “introductory”… and once that initial contract is up, they know they’ve got you hooked and it’s time to jack up the rates!

Which is why we went into the Garland Building in the first place… I figured with four competing colo providers all on the same floor, we could always play them off of each other; threatening to move down the hall if one didn’t match a competitor’s offer.

Get the Flash Player to see this video.


That worked, more or less. Of course, sometimes they called your bluff, and it was time to put up or shut up, and actually go ahead and move those half-ton racks of servers down the hall!

Never ones to be stared down, we got pretty good over the years at moving data centers. In fact, being unafraid to move data centers may actually have turned out to be one of our biggest competitive advantages.

Of course, it may have been one of our biggest distractions too. Moving data centers has become such a huge deal that the planning for moving even just a third of our footprint now occupies our entire system admin team for the better part of a year.

Get the Flash Player to see this video.


Which is why 2009 marked the year in which DreamHost, web master of so many’s domains, finally became masters of their OWN domain… by taking a large equity stake in our primary data center facility, Alchemy Communications!

We consummated the deal back in May, and since then have been planning (and carrying out) the move out of Net2EZ and into what is, finally, our “own” data center. The climax of which occurred this Saturday when we finally physically moved out the remaining now-defunct “spunky” servers out to the data center we have at LAX.

Get the Flash Player to see this video.


Just in time for them to catch all their flights home for the holidays. And the flu.

P.S. I’d like to acknowledge all the great work Micah, Patrick, Jeremy K., Mike H., Jordan, Mike P., Terri, Jeremy H., Kyle, RK, Leon, Douglas, Brett, Sandon, Robert, Anthony, and Ken did in making this quite possibly our best and quite possibly our last move ever!

30 Responses to “Thanksgiving Travel”

  1. Hanan Cohen Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 10:49 am

    FIRST! (or not?)

  2. Hanan Cohen Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 10:50 am

    And now to more serious stuff, is today’s Network Failure related to the move?

    http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2009/11/24/network-failure/

  3. Josh Jones Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 11:11 am

    That’s a good question.

    I actually wrote this post yesterday and scheduled it for posting this morning, auspicious timing as always.

    We’re still trying to figure out exactly what happened, our second core freaked out for an unexplained reason. We did add some more gbics to it yesterday, which was to add network capacity (which was needed due to the move), but there were no messages in the log related to that.

    Just reloading the router seems to have fixed the problem, it’s been humming along okay for 7 hours now at least. It is a little disconcerting for sure, but at least now that this move is over we can (and will) re-focus our efforts on even more network redundancy and various other stability efforts!

  4. micoh Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 10:24 am

    it seems that you label today’s network failure as a minor issue: you don’t even mention it. Well done…

  5. kestasjk Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 10:33 am

    That’s good news

  6. Awbrey Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 10:58 am

    Glad everything is back up and working; hope no more problems like this occur!

  7. Simon Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 11:43 am

    It is good to see DreamHost taking a large equity stake in your primary data center facility, Alchemy Communications!

  8. nikc Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 2:16 pm

    Yay for future stability!

  9. Doug Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 4:15 pm

    @Josh

    With your investment in Alchemy … does that imply that Alchemy dedicated server offering is actually just a Dreamhost server?

    https://servers.alchemy.net/order/products.php

    Because if so, I’m a current Private Server customer and would love to get 4GB of RAM for just $49/mo (which would cost $400/mo as a Private Server)

  10. Pushka Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 6:20 pm

    O________________O

    good work guys!! I have a friend who works at a tiny IT company and he was saying how hard it is to move even 10 servers because of downtime etc. But DreamHost is HUGE!!!!~~~~~
    keep being awesome~

  11. jerie green Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 6:29 pm

    I certainly hope everything works out. People are freaking out over at the Dreamhost status page. It seems much calmer over here. We have several clients who can’t retrieve their old emails, old meaning as of pre-weekend, but so far they are being understanding. It doesn’t make us look good.

  12. Mike Cronin Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 8:14 pm

    Oh boy, this does seem like good news. I was absolutely hating on the downtime we saw last week, and looking at the status page I only just now saw the downtime from earlier today (none of our clients seemed to notice). I’ve actually signed up at MediaTemple to contemplate a move, but I don’t think I’ll like anyone as much as Dreamhost. You guys are great, but please bring the awesome back! I want to stay!

  13. Josh Jones Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 9:23 pm

    Hey Doug!

    I wouldn’t exactly call it a “DreamHost server” .. as in, you won’t get the DreamHost control panel or support team with it. But, you will be in the same data center at us, and the Alchemy support team do sort of indirectly work for us now! And actually, the servers being used for Alchemy’s dedicated right now are some of our (newer) ex-shared-hosting machines! Synergies!

    If you do want to sign up for that, this link will give you $5 off (whahooooooo!)

    https://servers.alchemy.net/order/products_nd.php

  14. Steve Says:
    November 24th, 2009 at 10:51 pm

    You guys are totally KNOWINGLY screwing me out of my referral. For anyone “in charge” over there check out case #30693566 for account stefeu. This is the 17th referral [as I am a web developer] I’ve brought to your company and NOW you’re going to tell me that “oops, our mistake…but we’ll give you a free month of hosting.”

    I don’t want your pity $8.95. Obviously, you guys need it more than me. But watch to see if I stay once my renewal comes up. Watch to see if I refer anyone else to your site. Yeah, sure…my potential 10-15 customers per year isn’t much compared to the 600,000 you currently have…but remember all of the little people that helped you guys and stuck it out through all of the BS over the last few years with MANY down server issues, email missing for DAYS/WEEKS, and absolutely ZERO help with this issue.

    “You might win some, but you just lost one…”

  15. Jay Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 2:02 am

    You guys are the coolest hosting providers

  16. Andrew Mitnik Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 7:48 am

    You WHERE the coolest. Maybe you’re still fun, but this week sucks.

    I was very happy at the beginning. Actually, a double beginning. I used to host with you my sites, regardless the size or the critical they where. I could trust you, since you where (once again, the past) the best.

    A friend of mine used to host a 10k+ dialy visits website, and got no problems.

    But now, my central website (become the central in the recent months, without previous prompt), went outline once, twice, three times… and for looong times. This week, I recieved 2 messages: “It’s all solved, we will still keeping an eye over” “Oh, we’re sorry”. And never, never the website went running OK while it was hosted on the DH servers. I had to move it to my VPS, where my critical Apps are running, with some load, giving me another reason to contract even more expensive services. But at least, I will pay once, not twice, for my services.

    I mean… there were no reasons to pay twice. At first, I kept my contract with DH as a backup, if my VPS went offline for more than 1 hour (and happened, BTW, but we never needed to take DH’s services as a backup). And now, taking this as an experience, I’d like more to contract a Dedicated then virtualize and then host some apps per virtualization enviroment, than contract multiple VPS’s. And obviously, I will never renew with DH.

    I had about 24 hrs THIS MONTH in outages. Outages means loses, as much in money as in visits. I can’t lose more because fails that I can’t solve by myself, or by my team. Maybe you can. I simply don’t. I need a support that is active and proactive, not just reactive. Those fails (network fails) could be suppresed before they were too problematic. Let me say you one of the possible reasons of the Nt failures: old cable.

    Well, those are my experiences, my two cents, and thank you once again. For the great times, and for the worst too.

  17. kyle Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 8:50 pm

    Y’all need to get a clue on how to run a freaking business. You have professional clients and you treat them like chickenshit on a normal basis. I can proudly say I will not be choosing dreamhost for my future needs. thanks for the downtime.

  18. Jim Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 9:10 pm

    Okay, I understand that servers crash and need replacing, or that companies move to new locations, but… I have seen downtime I have NEVER seen with any other host. In the past I helped move a web based company with ZERO downtime… I’d expect a pro company like DH to be able to do that as well. Downtime for my sites has been occurring on and off for the last 6 to 9 months. I host several sites for clients, and constantly hear about it when their sites are down… and will most likely lose their business. My own sites include business sites which bring me revenue. When they are down I lose income and credibility. And DH has an incredible knack for going down right after I worked on marketing my business. Nothing like spending time and money to advertise a product, and then the site is down! Christ, even GoDaddy had 100% uptime for me when I tried them ages ago! As did Media Temple.

    Also, I NEVER receive emails to let me know of upcoming downtimes. If I did, I’d at least be prepared for them and could let my clients know about them.

    Dreamhost started out great for me, but losing income in an already shitty economy because of web downtime is not making me happy. And I dread having to move all my websites and databases to new hosting since that will blow even more money.

  19. Sean Berry Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 10:55 pm

    My site’s still down and we’re approaching the 11pm deadline – I have a big sale and e-newsletter going out at midnight – I wish I had been notified via e-mail that my site would be down! I could have easily set this sale up to start Friday…oh well, fingers crossed at this point….

  20. jochem van der spek Says:
    November 26th, 2009 at 3:26 am

    like mike said: I’ve actually signed up at MediaTemple to contemplate a move, but I don’t think I’ll like anyone as much as Dreamhost. You guys are great, but please bring the awesome back! I want to stay!

    I wholeheartedly subscribe to that. I’m a very small customer, but even so, I start getting problems with not being able to respond to clients through email, etc. Please, PLEASE you guys, make me want to stay again !

    J

  21. Mike M Says:
    November 26th, 2009 at 10:36 am

    @ #9 Doug

    Actually, yes those are.

    Keep in mind those machines are much more hands-on and require a greater level of personal maintenance than a PS would. If you are totally comfortable getting a little bit more dirty in your upkeep process, its totally worth the investment.

  22. Ted Says:
    November 26th, 2009 at 8:50 pm

    @Mike M & Josh

    Anyway to get a Private Server with 4 GB of RAM for just $79/mo ? :) :) :)

    (Love you guys)

  23. Anonymous Bastrd Says:
    November 30th, 2009 at 7:49 pm

    Any idea when we’ll get PHP v5.3.1?

    Pretty please

    (You guys are awesome btw)

  24. Christina Tisi-Kramer Says:
    December 8th, 2009 at 2:49 pm

    How do you get some good old fashion customer service when a client needs some assistance getting their website up an running. I parked my website and my web designer can’t unpark it so I tried and now it shows Google… Is there a human in your service that can help???

  25. BUGabundo Says:
    December 8th, 2009 at 2:56 pm

    a eee701 to work as a console for the blades?
    lol

  26. Dmitri Saviski Says:
    December 8th, 2009 at 9:19 pm

    Dreamhost, you are the best. My company has several account with you, we host around 60 domains and websites. We are really happy with you. Congratulations with your move, God bless on the place!

  27. Dmitri Saviski Says:
    December 8th, 2009 at 9:21 pm

    Dreamhost, when do you lunch affiliate programm? I would be happy to be your partner and recommend your service to our site visitors. Good luck!

  28. Yani Says:
    December 8th, 2009 at 10:32 pm

    How’s ya backs after that one. I recommend oxycontin, I’m sure there will be a supplier in the spam list. ;)

    Hope Christmas is drama free and you all get a bit of a break. Obviously Xmess is over. ;)

  29. bizlil Says:
    December 9th, 2009 at 4:53 am

    I used dreamhost for last year.

  30. Yuan.Yu Says:
    December 9th, 2009 at 6:31 pm

    My blog have used dreamhost more than 3 years.

Powered by WordPress. Pool theme by Borja Fernandez, modified by DreamHost.
Like WordPress? Consider attending WordCamp LA.
Entries and comments feeds. ^Top^