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Unreasonable downtime and vague promises for move to new server
Until 8 weeks ago I would have been dropping praise for Dreamhost, whom I have used for 2 years; their support has been responsive and the array of tools are efficient and easy to use.
That was until I noticed more and more downtime. I use ServerMojo to monitor my site, which is now below 90% on on November 7 was less than 60%
http://www.servermojo.com/zoom/5106
When I first contacted them they informed me that the server I was on, on Sept 21, I was told:
On another contact, Nov 6, the reasons had changed:
So there is a known problem with their servers that are not communicated to paying customers, nor never appear in the cheery monthly messages from Josh Jones.
I did as instructed and volunteered to have my server moved, and got no response or confirmation. The link for the "UPGRADE TO UNLIMITED DISK AND BANDWIDTH FREE" is gone.
After another outage yesterday, I submitted another support request, provided the link to my ServerMojo stats, and was told again to click on the upgrade link. So in my counter response, I replied:
To which I heard:
Let's see, I am supposed to just wait around for a fix to a problem they never told me about? And I am paying them for sub-par service? I am not just sitting around waiting, I am shopping for a reliable hosting service who does not tell me to "just wait"
And maybe, while I am waiting, I will register a new domain dreamhostsucksinabigway.com on their site.
I am less inclined to move because of (1) the hassle and (1) most hosting companies suck as well, so it is going from one burnt pan to another. I'd be more happy is:
(a) Dreamhost would communicate technical problems, and more than a vague "network filer" issue. This does not appear in their status listings at all.
(b) Dreamhost would offer more than vague timelines of fixes to problems than "soon"
C'mon Dreamhost, right now you are DreamChokes or NightmareHost
That was until I noticed more and more downtime. I use ServerMojo to monitor my site, which is now below 90% on on November 7 was less than 60%
http://www.servermojo.com/zoom/5106
When I first contacted them they informed me that the server I was on, on Sept 21, I was told:
It looks like the server your site's on was having issues earlier that ended up needing a complete reboot. It could have been an abusive user, or a high load on the server.
On another contact, Nov 6, the reasons had changed:
It does look like sobe has undergone quite a bit of troubleshooting due to network filer-related issues.
You may want to consider volunteering to upgrade to our newer servers (that won't have the same problems as the server you're currently on as the file servers aren't networked at all). Eventually, all users will be on these servers, but as that is a massive undertaking that could cause a few errors for some users based on how their site is configured, we are starting with volunteers first.
You can find out more about this by going to Billing / Manage Account in
your panel, or by clicking here:
https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi...
Then, click the "UPGRADE TO UNLIMITED DISK AND BANDWIDTH FREE" link.
So there is a known problem with their servers that are not communicated to paying customers, nor never appear in the cheery monthly messages from Josh Jones.
I did as instructed and volunteered to have my server moved, and got no response or confirmation. The link for the "UPGRADE TO UNLIMITED DISK AND BANDWIDTH FREE" is gone.
After another outage yesterday, I submitted another support request, provided the link to my ServerMojo stats, and was told again to click on the upgrade link. So in my counter response, I replied:
I have already submitted that request for the server move when I filed a ticket last week.
To which I heard:
Yarg! Im sorry then, I guess its just a matter of waiting. :(
Let's see, I am supposed to just wait around for a fix to a problem they never told me about? And I am paying them for sub-par service? I am not just sitting around waiting, I am shopping for a reliable hosting service who does not tell me to "just wait"
And maybe, while I am waiting, I will register a new domain dreamhostsucksinabigway.com on their site.
I am less inclined to move because of (1) the hassle and (1) most hosting companies suck as well, so it is going from one burnt pan to another. I'd be more happy is:
(a) Dreamhost would communicate technical problems, and more than a vague "network filer" issue. This does not appear in their status listings at all.
(b) Dreamhost would offer more than vague timelines of fixes to problems than "soon"
C'mon Dreamhost, right now you are DreamChokes or NightmareHost
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Inappropriate?Dreamhost still has not taken action nor provided a timeline.
I’m resigned to being stung
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Inappropriate?I'm very sorry for the trouble you've had. I'll admit that we've been having some issues with a couple of our server clusters in particular, and that is part of the reason why you have not been moved to the new servers.
We've been experiencing issues on the homie cluster (the new on you're looking to get moved to) and have decided to stop moving customers to this cluster until the bugs are totally worked out. This was always advertised as sort of a "beta test" cluster and we'd hate to get you moved from a server with problems right now to another server with problems, which would serve nothing. We're making great progress and hope to start up the server moves again soon.
While I can't comment specifically on uptime monitoring services (they're notoriously unreliable and don't show the "bigger picture") I can say that the uptime of some of our customer's website has definitely been less than desirable lately. We're working hard to get things corrected, and I apologize for the issues that you've experienced lately.1 Comment
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This solves the problem
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Thanks for the followup, although it has been like 2 months since I even complained. My site has been moved and is running okay, and DH help staff were helpful with some WordPress suggestions to speed up my site.
However, my complaint was that I was offered this in November 2008, and my site was moved in March 2009, after about 5 offers that it would be done, and DH's initial quirky messages that "it could be tomorrow or next year" -- THAT is totally inappropriate.
As far as uptime pings, yes, they can give false positives if my site has too many widgets hanging on it; yet at least 3 times it alerted me to a problem I reported to DH that they did not know about, nor are they every in the status page/RSS feeds. -
Inappropriate?I'm sorry that the time frame that you were given was something that you felt was inappropriate, but it was the best information that we had to give you. This rollout of the new servers (and free extra features that came long with it) was a very beta service and this was mentioned when you request to be switched over.
As was mentioned in our blog, we plan to have all of our customers moved over to this new hardware and architecture within the next 2 years, with no solid time frame for any one customer, server, server cluster, etc... so it literally was impossible for us to provide you with a more specific or appropriate estimate.
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