What's the longest your website been down?

KaniGT5 said:
Im wondering if this happened to you about a year ago? maybe a little less? because now that you mention it, they didnt offer to move me to DreamhostPS, but they did say, "well, we can move you over to our new cluster which is unlimited everything, you shouldnt experience anymore downtime, etc etc, bla bla" which we did, and then went down AGAIN.

dreamhoststatus had like 500 comments from angry people all switching hosts. When it is up and it works, Dreamhost is fantastic. But it is exactly like you said - for spare/test/bullshit hosting, its good to have around, but not to throw anything mission critical on it, because when they DO go down, they really dont give a shit. This was right after I launched an ecommerce site as well :(
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Just checked my email history, and I noticed during the year of 2007, I had over 40 support emails to them about either webserver being down, or mysql being down.

It was about August of 08, that the a decent size downtime went followed by performance problems so they asked me to do a traceroute which was fine. Which they haven't responded to in 2 days, so emailed them again, then they responded blaming it on their bandwidth provider.

Hello,

Sorry about the downtime and slowness of all DreamHost services you experienced today. We had a problem with one of our bandwidth providers that caused a lot of network/routing problems. We removed them from our network initially as they addressed the problems. We have since added them back in again and things appear to be working correctly now. If you still notice problems please let us know by replying to this message. So far all reports are positive. I am leaving the issue as unresolved on dreamhoststatus.com for now but it does appear that this issue is indeed resolved now. Sorry about the problems this caused you today.

Thanks,
Ralph C
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which was the exact same automated response to my "server down" inquiry.

then month later turns out the server I was moved to was also having a failing harddrive.

Howdy,

It would appear that a network file server (which is mounted by your web server) had an issue with a bad disk.
This was causing the file server to fail drastically and cause issues for customers across your cluster. Please accept
my most humble aplogies for this problem. Keeping your sites up and running is rather important to us. Our admin
team is cleaning up a few straggling servers and all previously affected sites and services (including mail) should be
up again for the most part.

All the gruesome details of this issue can be found by reading the following DreamHost Status blog post:

DreamHost Status Blog Archive Filer causing issues for Janky customers.

I am also sorry that we had to use an impersonal canned message to respond to this matter, but the scale of what happened
and the amount of support it generated called for it. If you are still running into issues, please contact support by
replying to this message and one of our representatives will be happy to help you get things resolved as quickly as
possible.

Thanks!
Jason C.
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Then round early-mid Sept 2008, is when the "big one" hit. And after bout 5 days of emailing them they finally responded.

Hello Karl,

We don't have a problem with you writing in support tickets. Multiple
tickets about the same incident with no new info, sure...those clutter
things up. However, if you're having an issue, we want to hear about it.

It's true, your home machine has been powercycled quite a bit in the past
few days, which is a pretty good sign something is wrong. This doesn't
reflect on professionalism so much as it does economy. Unfortunately, on
shared hosting, there's always the possibility of unruly neighbors
causing headaches for others on the server. Dedicated hosting is much
more stable, but costs much, much more.

That, combined with some of the cluster-wide problems mentioned on
DreamHost Status has no doubt made for some hassle on your
end...for that, I do apologize. I've just requested an admin investigate
the server and find the source of the problems you've been seeing,
whether there's actually something physically wrong, or whether a user
needs to be slapped, disabled, or whatever.

In the mean time, you are back up and running at this time, and please
don't hesitate to let us know if you have any further problems.

Thanks!
Jeff H
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My sites are still down. They'll come back up for maybe an hour, but then
they go back down, they have been down several hours today and they are down
right now as we speak. It was down even after you sent the email below.

You say the issue is resolved but I don't see it that way.

-Karl
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Howdy,

Allow me to start out by apologizing for the fact that we have to use a form response to handle this matter. The
scale of this issue and the amount of support is has generated made using one a requirement. We have a pattern we
try to match when picking up tickets and yours matched that pattern. That means that some or all of your questions
or issues might not be answered. We really hope they are tho.

I'm going to be up front with you here. Ever since the operating system upgrade at the beginning of the month, things
have been less than stellar on your server cluster (janky). That's not to say that the upgrades and the performance
of your server are completely related - but the uptick in issues after the upgrade is setting off a few alarm bells.

A group of servers on your cluster had some poor performance this morning and afternoon due to both NFS related
issues and some problems with the limit of files they could have open at once. Both of these issues should be
remedied and your sitse should be happy for now.

Of course, this doesn't mean we're out of the woods. We'd like to think that we are, but Murphy and his blasted
law can rear their ugly heads at any time. If you happen to see any furthter issues - or I didn't manage to address
your problem with this mail - I can be contacted directly at "jasonc@dreamhost.com". Feel free to use that in
response to this message and I'll do whatever I can to make sure you get taken care of.

Thanks!
Jason C.
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few days later when a few servers went down (sept 30th).

We are having major problems fixing this server. We know when machines
have repeated issues and this machine has gotten plenty of attention
recently. Unfortunately the problems continue with the machine so I am
going to offer you a move to a new machine. Just give me the green light
and I'll get it going. You can reach me at ralph@dreamhost.com.


Thanks!
Ralph
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It wasn't until 10/3 that they moved me.

Lasted until bout mid-december, with small outages here and there (mainly had complaints from clients/friends as they noticed more than I) Mail went down for an entire day on December 20th.

Then the sites went down for good while around 1/4/2009 this is when they suggested DreamhostPS

Hello,

Your sites are experiencing down-time because your sites are using to
many resources. Basically, because you are on a shared-
hosting server, you don't have any resources allocated to you! Therefore,
whenever your sites use to many resources our process
watcher will kill it. Using a ton of resources can happen for a lot of
different reasons. Usually, this happens when you have to many people on
your sites doing to much stuff or when your scripts are constantly on or
very resource intensive.

Here is a except from our process watcher:
2009-01-03 03:53:43 procwatch2 INFO: Process(pid=1583, name='php.cgi',
uid=kblessing(2281054), tty=None, cpu=2.2, rss=27328.0, vsize=77136.0):
kill for total RAM (27328.00 self, 161224.00 total exceeds limit)

The easiest remedy to this is to get a private server. If you are driving
this much traffic then I think that this may be necessary. A private
server will allow you to have dedicated resources for your account.
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course being quite fustrated I replied.

I'm not driving nearly that much traffic (bout 100 to 300 unique visits in a day).

Also if that's your excuse, then why is the dreamhost website even down? Please don't try that lame excuse with me. The company haven't done so in the past, and I don't expect to start being treated as an idiot now.

Could you point out which domain utilizes that process?

-Karl
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Course when no response occured:
Ok, Let's try this again,

I was not the only one down over the last few days, so its somewhat insulting to immediately tell me its because I'm consuming resources.

My busiest site doesn't get more than 100 to 300 unique visitors a day, it's a blog, it does not upload and convert videos or do any other processor intensive tasks.

And then to get a sales pitch about dreamhost PS as being a solution, when even dreamhost.com itself was down at times yesterday doesn't seem to reassuring either.

To be honest, if I had my disk quota knocked down to 10GB from 600GB, and bandwidth knocked down to 1tb from 6tb, I'd be more than fine with that, if it meant a more stable hosting experience.

Also I would recommend hiring people who can speak/write fluent english if you're going to deal with english speaking customers. It's "too" not "to" (probably outsourcing to India or something if someone misuses 'to' over 5 times).

-Karl Blessing
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I eventually got a DreamhostPS to see if that would fix the problem. Course keep in mind I haven't actually FTP'd over anything yet. And it was showing resources maxed out for least 2 days straight, full memory and all that. So I canceled that.

Bout Jan 12th I requested a refund after already being charged for the new year. Wasn't until the 16th that the only option they left me was to put a credit on my account since they wouldn't refund the paypal payment (I should have just did a paypal dispute, didn't think to do so), despite all the BS I've gone thru with them. In my support history section, if I were to limit it to just human messages, there are over 20 pages of problems since I opened the account, and since I opened one with them, I had been on over 3 different shared servers, and 1 DreamhostPS server, all of which had significant downtime or performance issues.

My account is still open, just no hosting on it at all, it'll remain open until I can transfer the rest of the domain registrations I have on there (some of which are for sale in BST section here).
 
At least you got responses. I was stuck in dead water until our sites were back up.

All resources maxed out on a VPS is def. a sign of poor virtualization. they obviously have sys admins in there who don't know wtf they are doing.

Yeah, and after I get wacked for another 2 static IPs (monthly), I was told they couldn't refund paypal, thats some bullshit.

My moral of the story was 1. stick to dedicated in ALL situations, especially when it involves money or apps/sites critical to run your business. and 2. ALWAYS use a host who has PHONE support, at least a number if its not 24x7.
 
its bullshit, hard drive failures? doing as much clustering as they do, they should at least have some sort of redundancy with their customers DATA. I'm sure they can afford to throw some decent fibre channel SANs in there, and have them mirrored. I would love to see a pic of that datacenter.
 
KaniGT5 said:
My moral of the story was 1. stick to dedicated in ALL situations, especially when it involves money or apps/sites critical to run your business. and 2. ALWAYS use a host who has PHONE support, at least a number if its not 24x7.
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I'm actually quite happy with Knownhost VPS over the last year, I am of course switching my personal VPS to ZenSix (already purchased it), so I can get the price break of unmanaged, Knowhost doesn't give you a price break if you decide to not use a control panel at all and use 'unsupported' software. So I'll be using ZenSix personally and anyone I host will be using Knowhost with a WHM/CPanel configuration. PS: yes that's an affiliate link above... and thats one of the first domains I moved to ZenSix VPS.

PS#2: Dedicated servers are the shit though :D (just be weary of ultra cheap ones like ServerPronto, if you're going cheap).
 
2 days I had a site down for. I had already paid a load of money for social networking and video advertsing. I wanted to flip, but I simply chnaged hosting firms. Never again.
 
about 5 months. I had a proxy and my host suspended me and told me i had to get a dedicated server at $15/month but i wasnt bringing in enough in ad revenue so i just left it..
 
IcanWrite said:
about 5 months. I had a proxy and my host suspended me and told me i had to get a dedicated server at $15/month but i wasnt bringing in enough in ad revenue so i just left it..
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A dedicated at 15/month? You sure about that? I haven't seen em less than 35/month and thats for the absolute bottom line not including any cpanel license cost and such.

Also doubt it was "down" for 5 months, more like suspended for a few weeks before being terminated. I think when op says 'down' they mean down at the neglect of the host.
 
about 12 hours.......coz they have some electric trouble, but I have bonus contract for 1 month after that..
 
Longest mine has ever been was about 9 hours I believe, I was asleep though and never even realized it. :/
 
About 12 hours on a shared Host Gator account. I had some sites that had just grown too big for shared, so they just turned it off because I was sucking bandwidth. No email, no nothing. Just an "account suspended" page for all of my sites on the shared server. Probably had about 25 sites that were down for half a day. Figured I probably lost around $500. Luckily I didn't see any SERP issues and I got dialed in on a dedicated server rather easily. No issues like that since.
 
My site was down about two months, because I stopped to pay for hosting - the site was not important for me then, but it was about a year ago.
And about three days - a ddos on a hoster
 
Lpdesigner said:
Thank god I found WiredTree from one of the threads on here and got a VPS and a dedicated shortly after. I've been with them for over a year now and don't think I've ever experienced any downtime :)
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Lpdesigner said:
Lol fuck, jinxed myself. Server down for about an hour now.... -___-"
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My VPS at WiredTree has been down for 8+ hours now. I think this is my longest ever downtime.
 
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