Category: Dreamhost

Dreamhost

Moving To FlipHost

This site now sits on a server at FlipHost. I got a Storage250 server from them and added some RAM, and here we are. It’s really a pretty nice setup.

Pretty much everything I’ve setup I’ve done according to guides from Linode. Most of the guides in the Linode Library should apply at least somewhat to FlipHost.

This site was previously on Dreamhost, but there’s been a LOT of downtime there recently, a whole lot. Yah, I just linked to 6 posts from dreamhoststatus.com that were posted from May 12 through May 17. Crazy.

FlipHost wooed me on twitter and so far I’m really, really glad that they did.

I’ve already canceled the one VPS that I had at Dreamhost. May keep the shared account around for some other sites, but may end up moving absolutely everything to FlipHost. I haven’t really decided yet.

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DreamHost Outage

DreamHost experienced some pretty significant downtime yesterday. It started with network maintenance. When they brought a switch back online, it was missing configuration files. Seems kinda silly for a hosting company to not have backups of EVERYTHING.

Anyway, longren.org and various other sites I host at DreamHost were down for a good part of the day. Even the DreamHost Status blog was unavailable.

It had been a long time since a significant DreamHost outage prior to this event. Hopefully it will be a long time before we see an outage like this again.

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Moving Servers At Dreamhost

After making this post, I submitted a support ticket to Dreamhost. Justin at Dreamhost replied back with a pretty solid sounding solution:

I did notice a few busy sites on the apaches for 2 of your domains. I started a move to another IP/apache which should complete in a few hours, and we can see if that apache turns out to be more stable. Since the server-status page for the old 2 showed an uptime of about 1 hour, likely the sites were causing that apache instance to time out and need to be restarted, resulting in a bit of downtime. Give it a try for a day and if you still have problems, let me know!

Perfect. Switch my domains over to a new httpd process with less activity. Makes sense. Well, after that was done, not much of an improvement was seen, as you can probably tell.

Today, I received another email from Justin saying he noticed longren.org was still slow to respond. He offered to move me to another server, assuming I was willing to have some downtime. He even asked if there was a time I’d prefer the move to be made. I asked him if 10:00 PST would work, and it did. So, this site is going to be offline for a few hours tonight while it’s being moved to a new server. The actual switch won’t take very long, I’ll just have to wait a few hours for the DNS to start pointing to the new IP.

Hopefully everything will be up and running along nice and smoothly tomorrow morning. Also, Justin at Dreamhost is awesome. He’s been very attentive and always offers possible solutions. Thanks again Justin!

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Horrible Repsonse Time

longrenOrgEvenSlowerLongren.org has been really, really slow the last week or so. This site has never been this slow to load, even when I was hosting it out of my house on my cable connection. Granted, I didn’t get the traffic back then that I do now, it still shouldn’t be this slow.

Last time longren.org was being slow as shit, I posted an image of a graph from Site24x7, like I’ve done in this post. The response time in the earlier image is horrible, 4510 ms, but that’s a lot lower than I’m seeing now. As you can see from the image above in this post, the current average response time over the last 7 days is 6614 ms.

This has to be a result of something going on at Dreamhost. I say that because sometimes pages on longren.org will load up in a snap. Most of the time though they take between 15 and 30 seconds to load. Even sending queries to the database is slower than normal. Database queries are usually done being executed within 1 or 2 seconds. Lately, it’s been taking 5 to 9 seconds. Something is definitely up. Perhaps I will submit a support ticket to Dreamhost tomorrow. Yay.

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More Dreamhost Network Issues

Dreamhost is recovering from yet another network outage. Apparently a switch had issues and they had to take a few servers off that switch. Supposedly the servers were moved over to another temporary switch so they’d have network access, but I haven’t had access to longren.org for at least 2 hours now.

We have moved the servers in the affected rack to knew switches in other racks temporarily while we get a new switch in place. We are working on recovery efforts now on servers which may be down. The list of affected servers is:

Arrow, mel, caesar, herod, alondra, overland, rossmore, oxnards, cerritos, selma, nala, demeter, jarvis. This is a mix of 3 MySQL servers and the rest webservers.

Longren.org is hosted on oxnard unfortunately, that box seems to have a lot of issues, even when the Dreamhost network is functioning properly. They’ve now managed to replace the problematic switch and are working on bringing servers back online.

Sorry about no timestamp before, it’s 12:36 Pacific time (-0800? I never could keep track of daylight savings time.)

We have completely replaced the switch and are working on getting the servers back online. All networking cables are back in their regularly scheduled switch ports.


I always get a kick out of the angry comments that show up on the Dreamhost Status blog whenever a fairly widespread problem occurs. Of course, Dreamhost hasn’t had great reliability in the last few months. I feel bad for those trying to run a business with Dreamhost.

One quick note, WordPress 2.0.5 should be here soon.

UPDATE: Apparently there’s still trouble. Now Dreamhost is saying the servers affected are still behaving abnormally. This box, oxnard, doesn’t appear to be affected though, for once! They’re still updating that same post at the Dreamhost Status blog:

Wierdness is afoot. The servers are still exhibiting the same problems, we have even moved two of them into our new datacenter and it’s the same deal. It’s only specific servers in half of one of our racks.

UPDATE 2 @ 8:52 PM CST: Dreamhost now says all their problems are over. Which they do appear to be. I believe the K2 site is hosted at Dreamhost, I noticed it was down for a while but has since been revived. Here’s the update from the Dreamhost Status blog:

As of 1700 Pacific time (GMT-0800 or so, 5PM), we think the issues with this rack are behind us. We moved some machines to new hardware and this seems to have fixed the problems. We will be looking in to this more on monday, and doing some extensive testing on that hardware to make sure it was the root cause of the problem.


Hopefully this was just a minor fluke and we don’t see any more problems. Like I said before, Dreamhost has been less than stable these last couple months. Honestly though, I have noticed this site loads much quicker since Dreamhost fought with their network last time. Still, there’s a lot of recent posts categorized as “system outages” at the Dreamhost Status blog.

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