Wed, August 2, 2006
Downtime to Kill—12:57 PM
Brandon, you've been curious about the state of DreamHost during the recent outages, so I refer you to this excellent summary/mea culpa over on their blog. I think it sums things up nicely and gives reason to be optimistic.
The rest of you can just enjoy me getting snippy. I do so enjoy it. (As Kevin James says, "I'll punch your asshole!")
As a loyal DreamHoster through a few turbulent times, I appreciate the familiar folksy honesty and transparency. Not because it's cute and it's respectful (though of course that helps), but because it actually convinces me that issues like this are less likely to occur in the future. DH knows where the problems are (in the building's infrastructure, and in their own processes), so this is an actual learning experience.
I agree with those who suggest that irate customers who are losing significant profits due to downtime should seek a new solution. There are definitely options if you're looking for backups on top of backups and redundancy on top of redundancy. They may cost a little more, but compared to the "thousands" you'll lose in just three weeks of intermittent outages, it sounds like a steal. Pick your new hosting company with a quick Google search for "guaranteed 100% uptime" – it's not possible, but at least you'll get a couple dollars in pro-rated refunds if you stay up late and submit trouble tickets for every momentary network glitch you find at 4am. Apparently that sort of thing makes you feel better.
If you're like me, you selected DreamHost based on its stellar feature offerings, excellent prices, and very-good support. I've experienced some disappointing outages from DreamHost, and the occasional slow support reply, but they've also gone out of their way to assist with silly glitches in my own code or setup, and the level of access and configurability are unmatched in my experience. But I host a dopey blog; if you host a mission-critical e-commerce hotspot, you have to live with your decision to save money on your hosting bill.
If your personal zero-tolerance policy for downtime mandates that you leave DreamHost (and you'll leave your new host in a week after that), I'm glad to see you go. For those of us who stick around for the improved service as DH learns from its mistakes, the support turnaround will be even quicker now that there are fewer people clogging the tubes with 20 goddamn support requests in six months, just because once or twice a week it takes more than three minutes to check e-mail.
Thanks, as always, Josh, for an enjoyable and informative read. (!)
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