My hosting company is Dreamhost; the last fora I used to help admin used them extensively and they seemed fast enough, plus I got a free domain via a promotional code. Upon sign up I was given the promising words of, “99.9% uptime!” and “reliable hosting!” so it seemed like a sure thing.

The past week or so however theres been a few spots of downtime and when I woke up this morning and noticed the site was down I decided to see if I could find any info on it. I googled “dreamhost down” (as the main dreamhost site was down as well) and found a status page for Dreamhost, hosted by Dreamhost presumably on a different server – http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/

Well, this lovely site details every issue they encounter and their resolution with the added bonus of timestamps and the ability to comment. Clicking on the comments were amazing though, for example:

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

How can you bill for December with a straight face after all this mess?

C’mon dreamhost, i know its cheap hosting with you guys but this is beyond a joke now! 

Oh wait, did I mention these comments appeared between 2 and 5 minutes after the service went down? The reason behind the issue was an issue with the core router and the service was down for a total of about 1/2 hour. Thats 1/2 hour to get an on-call cisco engineer into the office and resolve the issue at what was 11:30pm. I dont know about you, but thats a pretty rapid response time.

It does make me wonder about all the people complaining though. Yes, we’re paying for a service and yes we expect that service all the time if possible but problems do happen, especially incidents like this which arent directly Dreamhost’s fault. I was amazed at how many people were demanding a month’s free hosting because of some downtime, or announcing that they were going to move to a fresh hosting company as soon as they could, and part of me couldnt help but feel that if another issue happens next month I’ll see the same people complaining with the same style of comments.