Dreamhost Nightmares
As we move towards a world of managed services, software-as-a-service, utility computing, on-demand, and other outsourced services that make our lives a little easier and cheaper, I thought I would take a minute, just a moment, to reflect on the horrible downside of putting complete control of your business “uptime” in someone else’s hands.
We finished building a very pretty marketing Web site for a customer that has a feature article appearing in the Harvard Business Review tomorrow. This means that a lot of people will be reading the article in the print publication AND the online version and clicking over to the Web site for additional resources.
Unfortunately, Dreamhost, the hosting company we recommended, has been up and down for 4 straight days. Not very comforting. In addition to the obvious reasons for pulling my hair out, what drives me crazy is their desire to steer customers away from talking on the phone.
How is it that when a hosting provider is down for an obnoxiously long amount of time they want to charge me for the privilege of a phone call explaining what the hell is going on. I included a helpful screen shot (above) for illustrative purposes. Oh, and they only call between 9am - 6pm pacific time. So I can tell our east coast customer we can pay dreamhost to call us in the 3 hour time slot that starts at noon Eastern Time.
Below is Dreamhost’s clever update to tell me they’ll have more to tell us next week. That’s helpful information to pass along to our customer.
Reply from DreamHost (Mar 22nd, 2008 - 14:27:32 / #17021886)
Subject: Re: Site was slow, now down
Hello,Sorry about the downtime. A lot of you have already been receiving blingy status messages. Blingy is your cluster of machines for web, mysql, and email. The main file server for this cluster is having serious problems.
We have been working on this file server for a while and unfortunately our efforts have not produced a permanent solution for the problems we have been dealing with. We currently have moves running that are removing users and data off of the file server onto a new different one. This unfortunately takes time to complete but we are working towards.
Unfortunately another issue came up last night and we had to unmount the file server from the machines and then clear off some data.
With the move behind us at this point, we will now be able to give this issue our full attention. Our goal is to make significant progress this coming week.
Please hang in there, we will get this resolved as soon as we can. If you would like an update on the status of this issue, since it is considered an ongoing issue, please send support messages to blingystatus@dreamhost.com. You will receive a message similar to this one with an update on steps we are taking. We are not expecting significant new information till next week. Please also keep in mind that you must write from a contact address listed on your account or the message will bounce.
If problems occur we will address them right away to get your sites back up, but we want to get this issue resolved rather than just fixing it as problems happen.Sorry for the downtime and overall poor service caused by this file server.
Thanks!
DreamHost
Peter Cervieri is co-founder of and Director of Business Development for ScribeMedia.Org. His fetish is collecting business cards.
and the folk aren’t happy at all. the firestorm begins.