In what appears to be an ongoing issue for the past week, web hosting provider DreamHost has been experiencing numerous outages. The issues began shortly after the company migrated its data center and a resulting network failure occurred. From the looks of it, the web hosting company did not spend a little time beforehand planning out all the details and possible outcomes of this data center move.
On November 24, 2009 DreamHost proudly announced it had completed its move from the Net2EZ facility to the new location at Alchemy Communications’ data center. After the fact, it appears as though the migration really was not as well planned out at all. The company’s own technical team is attributing the current problems to several factors – shared hosting hardware being upgraded, the upgrade not going as planned, and the customer support team not knowing exactly how to solve the mounting issues.
DreamHost’s status page is long on the reported errors and issues since the company’s big announcement. Among those listed are intermittent web-mail errors, network errors, network failures, and most recently the death of a raid controller. Here is where I have more than just a slight problem. The entire page is written for those who are in the know when it comes to network issues, network packets, raid controllers and more. The average web hosting client is not going to care about the major technical language involved in explaining why a thing is not working. The average web hosting client wants to know in plain language when his or her web site will be operational once again.
The grumblings of DreamHost’s web hosting clients can be seen all over the Internet – specifically on Twitter. A quick search on the micro-blogging web site shows a number of clients tweeting about moving their hosting services and questioning why the down-times are not being handled in a much quicker fashion. In what can almost come across as humorous, DreamHost lists a Twitter update account right on their status page. However, it shows nothing more than what the page already covers. According to the main DreamHost Twitter account update from nearly a day ago, the company is reporting that 95% of its servers and services are back in operation. Yet, it still appears as though many customers are still without working web sites.
Perhaps the most telling thing of all is DreamHost’s Thanksgiving promotional page. Depicted is a turkey reading a newspaper and appearing to defecate out a bunch of stuffing. Probably not the best picture in hindsight.
