A New Year’s Resolution

December 31, 2009 on 11:30 am | In Insider View by Dallas Kashuba | 17 Comments

New Year Clock

We have always worked hard to provide the best hosting service you can get for the money and we’ve been pioneers in offering many unique features such as Jabber IM, WebDAV, Subversion, Phusion Passenger, and our One-Click Installer for popular web applications.  We love to play with all the newest Internet toys and provide them for you to play with also.  Our attention to all the “shiny new things” can sometimes distract us from the more fundamental aspects of our service, though, and that’s why…

The DreamHost New Year’s Resolution for 2010 is a renewed focus on performance and reliability.  Over the last few years, we have grown in leaps and bounds and our customers’ expectations of our service have grown along with it.  We have not always kept up with those expectations, and we need to put some energy into improving that.

Yesterday, I spent some time looking back at the past few years.  We’ve had our share of ups and downs and many of our loyal customers have stuck with us through it all.  We couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work for than you.  So, looking forward, we’re going to update our methods and systems to provide a more consistently high level of service.

Here’s some of the areas we’ve already improved on, and things we will be doing over the next several months…

  • We are now using a more flexible storage system so we can easily keep up with your awesome demand for data storage.
  • Additionally, our open-source next generation file system called Ceph is coming along nicely and will provide a great platform for our network storage needs in the future.
  • A lot of work has been done over the past year on optimizing and better organizing our network infrastructure.  Everything being done is laying the groundwork for major future improvements in the works.
  • By purchasing a major interest in Alchemy, our data center provider, we can rest easy knowing the relationship will be mutually beneficial for a long time.  Our system administrators are very happy to know that we will not be moving data centers again for the forseeable future.  We have plenty of spare data center space available and will be able to grow capacity at a comfortable pace.
  • Our network connectivity has always been redundant but we’re going to kick that up another notch this year as we go multi-homed.  Once this is in place we’ll be able to withstand the loss an entire network point of presence without losing connectivity.
  • We developed an internal system to help us manage individual server stability by improving communication and reducing wasted effort.
  • We have deployed Ksplice Uptrack across our system, making mass server reboots for kernel security holes a thing of the past.  The Linux kernel has been hit with a couple of high profile security exploits in the past few months and we found ourselves scrambling to patch and reboot quickly.  Never again!
  • We have a new mantra, “test, test, test”.  Some amount of testing has always been part of our procedures, but we are now making testing a fundamental component.
  • Increased focus is being put on optimizing our procedures at all levels to reduce duplicated effort and errors, while also increasing accountability.  This is not something that happens overnight and it will be an ongoing process.

Having now solved our most distracting problems from the recent past, DreamHost is now positioned to tackle the future better than at any time in our history.  It won’t be easy but we have the best team in the business and a few new tricks up our sleeves on top of it.  And with that, we wish you all a very happy new year and a great 2010 (twenty-ten!).

17 Responses to “A New Year’s Resolution”

  1. Kevin Worthington @ kevinworthington.com Says:
    December 31st, 2009 at 11:34 am

    Great news, Dallas! Thanks for keeping your loyal customers informed! I’m looking forward to improved reliability and uptime, thanks to your efforts. Keep up the great work! Go Dreamhost!

  2. weston deboer Says:
    December 31st, 2009 at 12:17 pm

    can’t wait for next year!

  3. Brad Says:
    December 31st, 2009 at 2:29 pm

    Thanks for your efforts, and am looking forward to 2010!

    I wish more companies had customer service like DH.

  4. Chris Says:
    December 31st, 2009 at 7:55 pm

    I have been with Dreamhost for several years now and I have to say that their corporate transparency is refreshing and appreciated! Every host has downtime (I’ve been with many), the only difference is that DH will “man up” and tell us what happened and why. Cheers to another year Dreamhost!

  5. Sam Says:
    January 1st, 2010 at 12:03 am

    I look forward to PHP 5.3

  6. thanatox Says:
    January 1st, 2010 at 7:38 pm

    when DH offers its own managed dedicated server?
    i have wait n look for it for a long time,i wanna move my dedicated server to DH.

  7. Greg Says:
    January 1st, 2010 at 9:36 pm

    @Dallas

    Always great when you post. I don’t think I’m alone when saying, hearing more about the tech side of Dreamhost is always fun and interesting ready.

    Keep up the great work.

  8. Fred Says:
    January 2nd, 2010 at 5:46 am

    When DH to service a cheap cloud computing?

  9. sdayman Says:
    January 3rd, 2010 at 8:51 am

    Sounds like the Snow Leopard approach. Less bells and whistles – better performance.

    Chris noted DH transparency. It would be nice if this extended to your Ticket system. Once a ticket is submitted, we rarely hear a peep until it’s been resolved. It would be nice if there was a Status assigned to the ticket, such as In Queue, Assigned, In Progress, On Hold, Resolved, Unresolved, Closed. This would quiet down many of the complaints when there’s a problem.

  10. coreyg Says:
    January 3rd, 2010 at 11:08 pm

    I’ve been with DH for a couple of years now and have always been impressed with their outstanding customer support and overall service. Looking forward to the improvements in 2010.

  11. Dallas Kashuba Says:
    January 4th, 2010 at 11:23 am

    @sdayman That’s good insight about our support ticket system. We currently rely on our support techs to communicate information back to the customer but that sort of system can result in a pretty unpredictable experience. I’ll see what we can do about this.

  12. James Says:
    January 5th, 2010 at 1:30 am

    Hi DH,

    I’ve been with you since ummm… (checking blog)… May ‘09. I heartily concur with the sentiments in this post. You guys have a massively flexible setup (upside) and the uptime & reliability issues (downside) have made reading the dreamhost status page a risk unless you have fire resistant retina’s.

    I look forward to nothing exciting happening :) I mean to say the resultant benefits of your more rigorous test regime and network management improvements.

    PS. I personally love the DH status page telling me about inodes…

  13. for3v3rforgott3n Says:
    January 10th, 2010 at 1:18 am

    Reliability and performance no doubt deserves a lot more effort. The lack of help customer service has been providing is truly depressing.

    Lately, our team presented a problem for the Dreamhost support staff to fix as a “benchmark” to how efficiently and quickly it could be resolved. The results shocked us completely. Requesting admin access to a Wordpress website is not too surprising, but after 8 support tickets (and mind you these were detailed and extensive tickets), all the support staff could reply with was somewhere along the lines of “There’s a problem in this general area of your scripts (which was already pointed out in the ticket, but the request was help on how to fix it.), fix it.” Yes this was frustrating but having done this type of “benchmarking” a few times before, we were not completely blown away.

    What caught us off guard was that during the 9th ticket, the support staff went into the admin login we provided, once again confirmed what we already pointed out, and deleted around 70% of a very lengthy tutorial (well over 3000 words) that our team had written. This was the last straw, not only did he not provide a fix for the problem, he deleted something (although possibly for testing purposes, he HAD NOT backed it up in any way).

    Now we are just waiting for our plan with Dreamhost to end, and once again, a customer having their dreams shattered packing up and leaving.

  14. itransition Says:
    January 12th, 2010 at 1:53 am

    I look forward to PHP 5.3 (2)

  15. The Digital Productivity Blog Says:
    January 13th, 2010 at 1:12 pm

    I don’t get it.

    You moved away from NFS because network file storage was causing you problems.

    Then you go with the homegrown ceph distributed filesystem?

    Six of one, half a dozen of the other?

  16. Rainbow Skill Says:
    January 16th, 2010 at 11:43 pm

    Great! Thanks for the post.

  17. usbflashdrive Says:
    January 29th, 2010 at 12:10 am

    I just join Dreamhost now and I have to say that their corporate transparency is refreshing and appreciated! Every host has downtime (I’ve been with many), the only difference is that DH will “man up” and tell us what happened and why. Cheers to another year Dreamhost!

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