Dreamhost Down?

Portal Home > Knowledgebase > Articles Database > Dreamhost Down?

Posted by Ceph, 03-23-2004, 01:25 PM
I use to swear by DreamHost -- Now I swear at them. A year or so ago, they were a great host. Support always answered within 30 minutes or so for most questions, the sites were fast, and all was good. Now, they have 310 open requests for support. We have 5 MySQL databases set up, 4 of them are up, 1 is not. Of course, the 1 is one that we really need. I submitting a request and gave it a "site outage" level of priority. I'll post back how long it takes them to respond. About a week ago they had almost 2 hours of solid downtime during the middle of a business day. Everything was down, apparently it was a "central database failure." I fail to see what sort of business model would have that large of a business rely on a single central database for the entire hosting complex. *shrug* *sigh*
Posted by Adam Clement, 03-23-2004, 06:15 PM
My brother was having some of the same problems with dreamhost. I used their services for a bit and I found that it worked well but recently my brother has been complaining so I think he is going to change hosts. I now have hosting at 1and1.com and they are really good, well for what I need atleast. Their site is quite slow though... Well I hope dreamhost works out their problems because they were a good host before. Good luck with them.
Posted by markjut, 03-23-2004, 06:20 PM
There website looks good. Perhaps the support staff went on holiday or don't have as much time to answer requests anymore.
Posted by Ceph, 03-23-2004, 06:24 PM
It took nearly 5 1/2 hours for them to respond to my notice. The database server was up sooner than that (2 hours). I set it as the highest priority available, yet it took 5 1/2 hours. Their # of requests hasn't dropped below 200 in months, even the simplest things take a full day. Critical things seem to be pushed off as a "server problem" no matter what the cause. We just purchased a SM server... *shrug*
Posted by gghosting, 03-23-2004, 07:03 PM
I heard bad stuff about DreamHost.
Posted by blue27, 03-23-2004, 07:13 PM
What bad stuff? Where did you hear it?
Posted by edeab220, 03-29-2004, 10:48 AM
heh...I'm having some problems right now. They seem to be down...and that's not good. Is dreamhost down for you too?
Posted by BitterSweet, 03-29-2004, 10:59 AM
the pages load extremely slow for me.. hope it will be solved soon
Posted by edeab220, 03-29-2004, 11:12 AM
At least they load for you :p. They don't even load for me.
Posted by finkployd, 03-29-2004, 11:27 AM
I've been very happy with Dreamhost (reletivly new with them, only about a year or so) in most regards. However I noticed yesterday that none of my sites are responding (nor is their homepage for that matter) and today is no better. It is certainly a problem on their end since a traceroute ends on gw-l3.dreamhost.com before timing out. Hopefully this is resolved soon, or I will have to move one of my sites at least (Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue Team, really cannot afford any significant downtime on that)
Posted by Sposs, 03-29-2004, 11:30 AM
can you not just ring their support department? there site is down at the moment so i dont know if thats offered?
Posted by finkployd, 03-29-2004, 11:35 AM
Probably, if I knew the number Also, I think they style themselves as one of the "ultra low cost" providers who do support over email. Which was fine for me because the few times I needed technical support they were very responsive. However that model of support kind of fails when the network drops.
Posted by jdenmark, 03-29-2004, 11:36 AM
I'm in the same boat, have been very happy with Dreamhost, but downtime is always very frustrating. None of my sites are available. I don't have access to their support line, but if anyone does I'd love to hear an explanation.
Posted by fix my com, 03-29-2004, 11:37 AM
Dreamhost only offers telephone support for their most expensive hosting plans. Realistically, even if you called, I think the best answer you would get would be "we're working on it." Have noticed that they haven't updated the system status or announcements tab of the web panel (which only became accessible about half an hour ago) They are a phenomenal service; love the interface, and all the goodies (php, mysql, etc.) that they offer. Up until about the end of 2003, they have been rock solid... ... but I've noticed that they've suffered from a number of outages since the new year started. Does anyone know what the backstory is?
Posted by finkployd, 03-29-2004, 11:41 AM
I noticed three of us just posted our first posts in this thread. So I'm clearly not the only one who went searching for someplace on the web that might have some answers as to why my dreamhost sites stopped responding and found this forum
Posted by jdenmark, 03-29-2004, 11:41 AM
haha, yeah, same here fink. I'm glad I did though, these forums seems excellent
Posted by minsight, 03-29-2004, 11:51 AM
We can't get at our sites on dreamhost. Traceroutes have ended up showing traffic through Turkey(?!). Anyone else see this?
Posted by Chris C, 03-29-2004, 11:58 AM
Snap Been reading WHT for a while, but this is the first time I needed to post..so I registered. I have couple of sites with dreamhost all are down. Also the web panel and discussions boards. Traceroutes to dreamhost.com are showin very heavy packet loss. It's been approx 5 hours, this has been the first major outage of my site's with them but I have only been with them less than a month. They offer call back services on the plan I have with them but they are for US residents only. Not that I would be able to submit a ticket anyway if I was a US resident
Posted by a2ww, 03-29-2004, 12:03 PM
Same problem here. Can't get to dreamhost.com, my sites, or ssh to the machine they're on.... Peter
Posted by complexsplit, 03-29-2004, 12:23 PM
my dreamhost site is also down. traces to my site from my home cable modem on cablevision/optimum online: and a trace from my managed.com box:
Posted by morehost, 03-29-2004, 12:26 PM
if it has been three months with the problems than I guess it's time to find a new host...
Posted by finkployd, 03-29-2004, 12:27 PM
I don't know about anyone else, but this is my first problem I've noticed in the year or so I have been with them.
Posted by Sposs, 03-29-2004, 12:30 PM
If this is your first problem with them maybe you should give them the benefit of the doubt.
Posted by finkployd, 03-29-2004, 12:42 PM
Uhhh huh. I am actually. I never said I'm cancelling all of my accounts with them and committing ritual suicide over this, just that I came here hoping someone would have an answer as to what was going on. But if this is not resolved somewhat quickly and I feel it is likely to happen again, I will have to move one site off of them that I cannot afford to have downtime with. Don't take this as an attack on them, I've so far been very happy and would rate them a 9/10. Things happen and if they lost power or connectivity due to something out of their control I certainly wouldn't hold it against them.
Posted by Ceph, 03-29-2004, 12:49 PM
We have their "most expensive" hosting plan and phone support is not offered. However, due to some previous problems, DH gave us direct lines to their office. They are NOT answering their phone calls. This is not good. I have a feeling this is going to seriously hurt DH.
Posted by amandapage, 03-29-2004, 01:24 PM
Ceph; I'm experiencing the same problems today, and this isn't their first problem this month. Did you have problems with them a couple of weeks ago when they were down for a couple of days? I think one of my big problems is that they're not communicating when there's a problem. I have clients on my back, and I don't hear from them for a couple of days. They're very apologetic then, but that's not helping me right this second. I have a nasty feeling this is going to hurt Dreamhost too. I've been with them for nearly 6 years now, and I'm now starting to look around for other host options. I have to, they're starting to make my customers doubt me, and I can't be having that.
Posted by fix my com, 03-29-2004, 01:34 PM
I'm hoping that their next announcement will clearly explain what has been happening recently -- not just why this incident happened, but why there has been recent outages prior to this. I feel that the previous announcements have been a little on the thin side...
Posted by Ceph, 03-29-2004, 01:34 PM
Amanda -- Yeah, we were down for a good 4 hours earlier this month. Apparently it was a "central database failure." To compensate, they cleared usage records for disk space and MySQL usage. Apparently that was supposed to make us happy or something. They supposedly sent out an apology email, but no one received it (they now claim that their mail server didn't deliver it). I doubt we'll get an apology/explanation for this today, either. I did get into the Web Panel for a brief minute or so -- they had 341 open support tickets. They better hope they are down due to an earthquake or something serious.
Posted by jaysheth, 03-29-2004, 01:58 PM
I have been with them for quite some time and have been quite happy with the features and services which they provide. Their recent central database failure was unusual for them. I think they have about 20 or 30 employees and about 10,000 or 15,000 customers. So they have been very successful so far. As a policy, they only provide support by email, which in the normal course of events works; in this case, however, their own website and control panel is down too. Usually they are very upfront about problems and admit any mistakes they have made immediately. They also provide good email support, not just form letters. Still, it is annoying that all my sites (and email) are down. I have had horrible experiences with other hosting providers though. [ *See Eye* Host (spelled with those first two words as letters) is notably bad, and they are still around.] I tried the free offer by 1and1.com which was good, but I found their control panel was not as good as Dreamhost. And they have some unduly restrictive rules, such as not being allowed to use MySQL databases to log information about visitors (website statistics). Previously Dreamhost had been hit by a series of denial of service attacks. This could be something similar ... So, I just hope that my sites come back soon.
Posted by dpmoyd, 03-29-2004, 01:59 PM
Another first poster here. I'm unable to even get to Dreamhost's site at all - and in the previous outage earlier this month, I could still access my email via POP - now, I cannot even do that. I mostly have my site for fun and depend on the email accounts (currently looking for a new job, so REALLY need access to my email). I've been with Dreamhost for several years now, but have also been considering a change primarily because there is NO way to find out what is going on when there is a problem. I also do not care for their "golly gee whiz, it was no big deal" type emails they send out after the problem's been resolved - it doesn't make me feel like they really are concerned about preventing issues in the future.
Posted by finkployd, 03-29-2004, 02:02 PM
My sites are back up and responding nicely. panel.dreamhost.com still seems to be down though.
Posted by Ceph, 03-29-2004, 02:05 PM
Ours are back up, too, and the panel is slow (but it is ALWAYS slow so it is nothing different). Waiting on a response to our support ticket and hopefully a non-parody announcement.
Posted by complexsplit, 03-29-2004, 02:07 PM
i'm back up now.
Posted by amandapage, 03-29-2004, 02:07 PM
I understand they're a small company with a large recent customer growth. However.. I think I'd be happy with something like I've experienced with other industries; a recorded time/date stamped telephone message that gives me some idea of WTF. Even if they're not sure WTF, a recent message saying "We're working on it, we feel your pain, we're thinking it's a DOS or Qwest". Something. They have a pretty casual style of email communications, which I don't mind. This is like being on hold on one of those machines that has no hold info whatsoever, so you're not even sure if you're still connected. curse swear swear.
Posted by Chris C, 03-29-2004, 02:08 PM
Mine are back as well 7 hours down Fingers crossed it was a one off.....
Posted by Chris C, 03-29-2004, 02:10 PM
For people who can not access the control panel
Posted by dpmoyd, 03-29-2004, 02:15 PM
My email is up now - BUT - I have no mail since about 2am. I participate in several very active mailing lists, so I know that mail has come my way - I hope that it will be pushed out eventually and it isn't lost into ether. Site is still down.
Posted by Ceph, 03-29-2004, 02:16 PM
I would advise any large DH customers to reconsider their host choice. This is about 12 hours of business hours downtime in the past month alone. We had a database crash for 3 hours earlier this month as well, and our mail server stopped delivering mail for over a day. Our site is somewhat up, but all of our employees/clients are not using it yet for fear of a crash again. I just pulled the latest database backup and site backup in case they go down for a day or something.
Posted by amandapage, 03-29-2004, 02:25 PM
Chris, thanks for posting tht. I still can't get to the panel. My sites are back up now, but no email. I'm not concerned about that yet, I sent a test email from my mac.com email address, and the email didn't bounce, so that's a small bright spot in my day. I'm trying to remember, does Dreamhost offer a x% uptime guarantee?
Posted by Chris C, 03-29-2004, 02:29 PM
No they don't offer any uptime guarantee in fact they 'parody' a lot of the 99.9% uptime guarantees that some hosts offer. They actually give an example hardware failure etc as a single event that is 'out of their control' that would mean less than 99.9% uptime.
Posted by dpmoyd, 03-29-2004, 02:30 PM
Latest: Hello DreamHost Customers, This morning we experienced a router failure that took down our network from approximately 2am - 10am PST. The cause of the failure is unknown at this time, but it appears to be hardware related. The backup router failed to take over the responsibilities of the failed primary router, resulting in a network brownout. We are further investigating both of these issues at the moment. We are terribly sorry about this network outage and any inconvenience this may have caused you or your business. We have already taken several steps to ensure that such an outage does not happen again. Our apologies once again, Happy DreamHost Network Team!
Posted by dpmoyd, 03-29-2004, 02:36 PM
Email is coming through now, but ONLY messages since about 10:30 PST, and only sporadically. No earlier email is coming through yet.
Posted by minsight, 03-29-2004, 02:51 PM
my web isn't. my mail is.
Posted by dpmoyd, 03-29-2004, 03:13 PM
Latest announcement: All network service has now been restored. We will be taking steps to ensure any problems like this in the future are handled more quickly. I'm starting to get a trickle of emails from the downtime, but it's a crawl. Also, my site is STILL down, regardless of what Dreamhost claims.
Posted by fix my com, 03-29-2004, 04:18 PM
We are the opposite; http is up, pop3 is down... It's definitely not all there yet.
Posted by cliffman, 03-29-2004, 05:49 PM
We finally got all of our sites restored around 1 PM EST. Of course I received numerous calls from my clients asking what was going on and I had no way of knowing what was happening outside of DreamHost being down as well. After services were restored I had to contact all of my clients and give them the update, explain that I have never experienced any type of downtime like this before, it shouldn't happen again, etc. Now here it is 4:35 EST and DreamHost and my clients' sites are down again. Fantastic!
Posted by Ceph, 03-29-2004, 05:52 PM
Yeah, this does not bode well for their "superb" service that they had years ago. For the price they charge, I would expect more. We are down as well, as are all of the DH IP blocks.
Posted by BitterSweet, 03-29-2004, 06:20 PM
I could access the sites and mail fine before, but now it's slow again.. either everybody is trying to receive their mails or the problem is back
Posted by dpmoyd, 03-29-2004, 06:26 PM
Everything's down for me again, also. Gah.
Posted by amandapage, 03-29-2004, 06:46 PM
Yep, all my sites, the panel, and email are down again. Now I *really* want to know whatthehell is going on. anyone else able to get into their panel yet?
Posted by rknobbe, 03-29-2004, 06:55 PM
I've got my dreamhost content mirrored elsewhere. How do I go about redirecting my web site to my backup server when dreamhosts's panel is down (and I can't change the DNS entry)? Thanks from a novice web admin. rog.
Posted by Ceph, 03-29-2004, 06:58 PM
Advice: never register your domains with the company you host through. You would have to transfer the domain to a new registrar before you could change the DNS. We took the "free" domain, registered it, & transferred it immediately.
Posted by danad, 03-29-2004, 07:13 PM
And it's down again! I can't even get to dreamhost's site now. Anyone else?
Posted by edeab220, 03-29-2004, 08:22 PM
Yup, mine came back this afternoon too, but when I checked it just now...it was down again...
Posted by minsight, 03-29-2004, 08:27 PM
same here.
Posted by kellegous, 03-29-2004, 08:39 PM
My site is dead too. I think this wraps things up between me and dreamhost. I have noticed an almost constant degradation in service over the past few months (unreasonable shared server loads, spotty mail delivery, and of course two huge system wide down times). I have no reason to believe this is going to get any better. I have a server at home running fetchmail that keeps picking up mail sporadically, so maybe they are under some kind of DDOS attack. I typically see the same traceroute that others have reported. Occasionally, I will see a router loop back into Level3.net.
Posted by totems, 03-29-2004, 08:39 PM
Hello all, Just thought I'd throw my hat into the Dreamhost problems ring. You name it, and it's down. Even the dreamhost.com home page is toast. This is at 4:39 PST. This seems to be an all day issue. Anymore word from the kids at DH? Chad
Posted by danad, 03-29-2004, 08:53 PM
Agreed. I've been with them for three years, and it's going to be a total pain in the rear to move all my domains (40 - 50), but these outages are completely out of control. If someone does start to see their sites come up, can they post here? I'm keeping an eye on this thread until I can actually get at my email again.
Posted by edeab220, 03-29-2004, 08:59 PM
Earlier it was an issue with the router. Now I dunno what's wrong .
Posted by random user, 03-29-2004, 09:03 PM
Website and control panel back up for me. Web server, ssh etc still down for me. It's about 5pm pacific
Posted by pod_cj, 03-29-2004, 09:05 PM
The site I work for is hosted with Dreamhost, and seems to be back up...
Posted by kellegous, 03-29-2004, 09:05 PM
here's my hat too. i have a machine running fetchmail that last popped some messages at 4:25 PM EST. My troubles started at started at 4:36 AM, when I had a window of solid downtime until 7:48 AM. Then the next batch started at 9:34 AM and lasted until 1:12 PM, during which access was sporadic and/or slow. This is getting very frustrating, especially since the last significant downtime was also due to "their primary router"
Posted by edeab220, 03-29-2004, 09:05 PM
webmail login screen and control panel working for me. FTP, website, actual checking of mail not working again.
Posted by kellegous, 03-29-2004, 09:33 PM
everything is up for me ... finally ... fingers crossed hoping that is over.
Posted by edeab220, 03-29-2004, 09:38 PM
Not yet for me .
Posted by finkployd, 03-29-2004, 09:40 PM
New Announcement: Dear Everyone, Our apologies for the repeated outages today. It turned out our router problems _were_ caused by a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack aimed at a site we hosted (note past tense). It was a pretty massive attack, more than doubling the amount of inbound traffic we normally receive. As a result, our routers were overwhelmed. Due to the nature of the attack and the circumstances surrounding it, we were not able to immediately trace down the cause of the problems. We have now blocked the target's IP address and are keeping a close eye on our inbound traffic so that we can act quickly to prevent this from impacting customers any further. We are also in the process of adding new routers and upgrading our existing routers to provide more capacity so that in the future such attacks will be easier to withstand - so that we are better able to react to similar attacks and take action before wide-scale problems develop. Due to the unprecedented scale of this particular attack, we were caught unprepared and for that we apologize. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at support@dreamhost.com or via the web panel. Due to the large amount of correspondence we have received from customers we are experiencing heavy support loads, but we will try to get back to you as soon as we possibly can. Sincerely, The DreamHost Distributed-Denial-of-Sleep-Team
Posted by Ceph, 03-29-2004, 10:09 PM
Our sites are back down again. *sigh*
Posted by edeab220, 03-29-2004, 10:48 PM
heh...mine never came back since this afternoon. Can anyone login via webmail?=
Posted by Ceph, 03-29-2004, 11:47 PM
Our sites are back up, webmail is not, nor is pop3. smtp is delayed -- if any of you have mission critical emails that go out, try to route them through another provider. You can do this in PHP with the Pear::Mail package (can connect to remote smtp servers). I am just now getting emails that were sent announcing the downtimes today that were sent around 1pm PST.
Posted by zhoujianfu, 03-30-2004, 10:11 AM
Hi Everybody, I guess finkployd already posted the announcement, so at least people know what happened. I just thought I should still post an apology for what happened as well as some things we're going to do in the future to make it better. For one, we'll be setting up status.dreamhost.com today at a separate physical location on a completely separate network that doesn't use our central database at all. It'll just be a plain HTML page that we can post to should our regular web panel be unaccessible. We'll just try and get our customers to all know about it if in the future there are any more incidents that take our regular web panel down. Besides that, we're looking into more anti-DOS tools and techniques we can buy and implement, as well as just getting some more routers so that even if we don't stop a future DOS attack before it starts, we'll at least be able to handle it with our excess capability until we get it shut down. March 2004 is a month we can't wait to see end. Three unrelated events conspired to multiple days of downtime. Yesterday's DDOS really couldn't have come at a worse time, at least from a costomer confidence standpoint. We really appreciate you guys sticking with us through these rough spots.. we've had some spotty service periods in the past but we've always worked through them eventually and corrected the problems for good. We're doing our best to do it again now.
Posted by amandapage, 03-30-2004, 11:52 AM
Looking forward to that separate status.dreamhost.com page, that's an excellent idea. 9/10ths of the frustration is not knowing.
Posted by Thanatoz, 04-02-2004, 03:47 PM
I moved away from Dreamhost because of the poor performance (on my server). Their support is great but the server speed is just poor. That happened after they go on sale and lowered their price... also my box was always down for a while everyday, and they had no idea how to fix that issue. Now I am on a super fast machine with the same price.
Posted by hidetoshi, 04-10-2004, 11:33 AM
@Thanatoz...which webhost is your new/current one?

Add to Favourites Print this Article