I own a whole boat load of domains (as I have stated in my GoDaddy Addiction article) and the hosting service I go through is Dreamhost and I must say they are by far the best hosting service I have come across…I’ve jumped around a lot over the years trying to find a host that was fairly reliable, had a good administration user interface, and had fairly prompt customer support. Dreamhost is it.
Well, my opinion of them soured every so slightly yesterday when I was unable to reach any of my sites or any of my friend’s sites that are hosted at Dreamhost…for about 5 hours. Heck, even the front Dreamhost site was down at the same time. Obviously something went horribly wrong as Dreamhost had not sent out a ‘planned down time’ e-mail as they usually do. Ok, sure, I’m fairly forgiving when things go wrong, but when Dreamhost did not send out a reason as to why their services were down (as they usually do), I became somewhat irritated. Perhaps I’m too touchy when it comes to that sort of thing, but when a hosting service holds all of my data and source for hundreds and hundreds of hours of time and effort…a little feed back would be a good thing.
A couple of minutes ago, my irritation was put to rest. It wasn’t Dreamhost’s fault. It seems that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had a slip up that caused large portions of LA to lose power for upwards of five hours. Here’s the article at LA Times which I found over at LAVoice.org.
So thats a big hooray for skill of Toluca Lake’s workers and a big apology to Dreamhost. I suppose if I watched the news a little more diligently, I would have known…granted, some communication after the fact would have been nice to see.
A hosting company like DreamHost should be able to do a bit better than this.
The easy (cheap) part: they should have sent a message out after the point regarding their outage.
The expensive soution: I gather dreamhost is fairly large. They should be running some backup power generators. At least enough for five hours.
Granted, DreamHost isn’t a high-end co-located ASP, nor are they priced like one. Overall I’m still happy with them and would recommend them, but this was a bit disappointing.
Yeah, they should have e-mailed…
Expensive solution…a generator wouldn’t ahve done a whole lot of good, would it? If their T1 or T3 provider is stationed in LA, that would have been out too.
There’s more to this story. Dreamhost DOES have a backup power supply. But that went down as well. In fact the backup power supply for the whole building went down and brought other web host companies along with it (Inlcuding Media Temple).
I’ve had terrible experiences with DreamHost. I moved to a host with redundant data centers located far apart. Read about my experiences at Why DreamHost Sucks.
Read my “Dreamhost Review – Day 1″ (click on my name above)
Hard to find a better hosting value than dreamhost. I got a year of hosting and a free domain for less than 30 bucks
So far so good, been with them for nine monthsw without any outage. Definately would recommend them to anyone on a small budget.