Comments on: Something Good Came Out of the Dreamhost Outage (for me)

By: Sally

Sally — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:34:26 +0000

Good news. Dreamhost is done moving their data centers.

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/11/24/thanksgiving-travel/

By: Sally

Sally — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:06:08 +0000

Russell – Thanks for sharing. Good info. Also, thanks for the link. Interesting article.

By: Russell Heimlich

Russell Heimlich — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:41:23 +0000

Anyone that gets mad at Dreamhost downtime has some serious perspective issues. Their all about affordable, easy to use web hosting not tier 1 enterprise hosting. Sites go down, nothing is perfect.

If you’re really concerned and must have your site up 99.999% of the time then seek out a company that offers an uptime service level agreement. They’re not cheap.

Here’s a cheat sheet with the amount of time allowed per year to be down in parenthesis for different levels of a guarantee:

90% – 876 hours (36.5 days)
95% – 438 hours (18.25 days)
99% – 87.6 hours (3.65 days)
99.9% – 8.76 hours
99.99% -52.56 minutes

(“five nines”)
99.999% – 5.256 minutes

Finally,
99.9999% – 31.536 seconds

Today’s downtime was about 30 minutes which puts them at about 99.9% for the year. Big woop!

I stand by Dreamhost for their great tools and easy to use features in the control panel + no need to worry about bandwidth or diskspace, you can’t be that for $120 a year.

Here is some more food for thought:
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_scale_99999_uptime_is_for_walmart.php
I’d recommend printing that out and putting it in a drawer so you’ll have something to do the next time your site goes down.

By: octopusgrabbus

octopusgrabbus — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:37:25 +0000

Your outlook is good, because sometimes you just cannot win with customer service. You have to go with what you get.

By: Sally

Sally — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:22:53 +0000

The Dreamhoststatus page has now been updated: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2009/12/07/network-outage-2/

By: Sally

Sally — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:18:18 +0000

Bilal and Dan, I know. I too have been very frustrated with Dreamhost over the last year. I never used to have problems with it but lately there seems to be more. I just wanted to say thank you to @kingkool68 about how his tweet changed my whole perspective on the situation.

Thanks for commenting!

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:12:13 +0000

The problem isn’t that Dreamhost went down today the problem is that for many of their customers, Dreamhost goes down every few days, often for much longer than 30 minutes. When they decide to put http://www.dreamhoststatus.com back up, have a look through the comment history of some of the many recent interruptions.

By: Bilal Jaffery

Bilal Jaffery — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:11:56 +0000

Gave me time to re-think my plan to stay with Dreamhost. Not for $11/month, not these days.

- Bilal