Comments on: The fight for stable Private Servers

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:30:23 +0000

Wow! It is great to see an actual explanation – for me it is too late though. The worst thing about Dreamhost is the lack of communication when things go wrong. After failures got more and more frequent, and I kept asking “what happened” , I got NO EXPLANATION – just, “your site is back up now”. This led me to migrate most of my sites away from dreamhost over the past few months, hopefully they can start communicating better and not lose the rest of their customers.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:33:44 +0000

While I do appreciate you guys being open I have to say my $0.02

I’m a bit surprised it took you a week to do a malloc(), so you can repro the issue. I’m also surprised that after more than 45 days from this blog post, it’s not yet solved. And last but not least, I’m surprised it actually started in November, and it’s still not over.

From my point of view, Dreamhost PS has been very bad. Constant crashing, sites down daily, etc. Overall a very bad experience. I don’t feel I should be happy and thankful, like some of the other guys here, that it’s not crashing as often, when we’re paying extra for it.

Or perhaps I was wrong in expecting it to work more than it does (which isn’t very often).

Anywho, time for yet another change.

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By: Pete Carapetyan

Pete Carapetyan — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 23:15:38 +0000

Can’t believe I read the whole thing, didn’t intend to. But that’s the power of a good mystery and honest disclosure. Go dreamhost.

By: Chad

Chad — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:15:14 +0000

Just wanted to thank you guys! I’ve seen a huge improvement in VPS reliability since you have worked on those 4 fixes.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:30:35 +0000

Nice! That was a really good reading!
This kind of explanation should be more frequently!
It is really impressive how some few bugs can do such a mess!
More interesting is to follow the daily fight of DH developers in order do keep things up and running.
Thank you guys.
DH is the better choice for hosting! :)

By: yonkeltron

yonkeltron — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:44:00 +0000

@andrew but what if I want a proper vsp? I would rather buy from you!

By: Charlie Schluting

Charlie Schluting — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:37:44 +0000

Epic story. Thanks for sharing it! Do more like this (but don’t introduce bugs just to have something interesting to write about, kay?) :)

By: Dallas Kashuba

Dallas Kashuba — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:50:29 +0000

Yes, and Andrew F mentioned, we have been spending some time with both Xen and KVM. We actually use Xen for our internal package building system which automatically builds our custom debian packages across two releases and two architectures (etch and lenny, 32bit and 64bit)… it’s kinda neat and may deserve it’s own blog post.

Anyway, though, we have been investigating using either KVM or Xen to supplement our use of Linux-VServer. We love how lightweight Linux-VServer is, but it’s not the best fit for every situation.

By: Andrew F

Andrew F — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:37:12 +0000

@yonkeltron, @vicm3, @Fred: Xen and KVM are both definitely nice, but they have some significantly different properties from Linux VServer that make them not quite as great for what we’re doing. For instance, there’s a significantly higher memory overhead for each running guest under Xen and KVM (you really can’t get by with any less than 64 MB wired down for each guest), whereas the memory used by an idle Vserver is often under 16 MB. Similarly, it’s difficult to adjust the memory allocated to a Xen/KVM guest while it’s running, which is an important feature for many of our customers!’

So yeah, there’s reasons we aren’t using Xen or KVM for our Private Server product right now! We’ve continued to follow the development of both projects with interest, though… while they aren’t perfect for DreamHost PS, they definitely still have their own benefits.