Back up Part II – Goodbye Dreamhost
By glblguy
No more than a few hours after Gather Little by Little came up it went down again. Dreamhost resolved the initial application server problem, but then a problem occurred with the database server that caused the site to be down all day yesterday. After waiting most of the day for a reply I finally just gave up on them and moved Gather Little by Little to another server. They did finally reply stating that the problem was that I had an old version of software. What’s interesting about this is that it was software I pay them to maintain that was out of date.
I fully understand people make mistakes and sometimes technology seems to have a mind of it’s own, but this was the straw on the camel’s back for me. I’ve been a huge Dreamhost supporter for more than a year now and always spoke highly of them and even defended them in conversations. After almost an outage a week now for well over a month, and then two full days of being down it was time to move on. Not to mention I learned that when you open a problem ticket with them, their agreement is to reply within 24 hours. Meaning they may not even respond for 24 hours. Here is a snippet from the reply the sent me where I complained about not receiving a reply after more than 8 hours:
We understand that having your site down is frustrating, but we aim to answer all support within 24 hours and this reply is well within that time frame.
24 hours is a lifetime on the internet and I require better service levels than that.
Gather Little by Little is now hosted by Media Temple. From what I’ve heard it should now be both faster and more reliable for you. I think I’ve resolved any glitches that occurred as a result of moving over, but if you see anything, please let me know. Also, if you’ve emailed or contacted me in the last 24-48 hours, I might not have received it, so please resend it to me.
Thank you for your patience and for all of the “We miss you”, “Hope you are up soon” emails. They really made me feel missed! One of the worst feelings as a blogger is knowing that more than 2000 readers are looking for your content daily and you can’t deliver it to them. Thanks again!
October 30th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Dreamhost was good to me for almost a year and I don’t regret staying with them in that time. Like you, I defended them and because I believe that every inexpensive hosting service will have problems now and then (the $200/month ones should spend a lot more time protecting you against these problems).
But when those problems become consistent, or aren’t handled well, then it’s time to move on. Your decision makes sense…24 hours for the first outage, maybe. But after that they have a responsibility to fix your problem. And 24 hours is no longer acceptable. In my case, they waited 52+ hours to even respond about a HUGE error. Which followed on weeks of slow loading times…just too much.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Good to see you back – both from website errors and from moving! Hope the move went smoothly and you’re finding your way around all the boxes okay.
October 31st, 2008 at 12:20 pm
We understand that having your site down is frustrating, but we aim to answer all support within 24 hours and this reply is well within that time frame.
This is called tactics of customer support sector… They reply you within time frame and still it means they don’t care in what frustration you are…
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I think you were right to move hosting company, 24 hours a significant downtime period and can cost you visitor traffic and advertising revenue as well as causing disruption for your usual blog readers
August 28th, 2013 at 2:04 am
I have come across so many good reviews online about Dreamhost when I was trying to find a hosting service for my site. I wonder if their service is this bad.