nobody asked…

My loyal readers (both of them) may have noticed that my volume and frequency of output has decreased recently. That happens as men age… What? Oh… yeah… right… I’m supposed to be talking about blogging. Anyway, while I owe no explanation, it might do me good to shoot off about this.

When I decided to start blogging in early 2005, I did some serious research and analysis of hosting providers. Of the many available, DreamHost kept bubbling to the top of the heap. Their pricing is excellent and they deliver a lot of bang for the buck in terms of bandwidth, storage, WordPress savvy folks and services, and number of domains supported in their various plans. That last one is important since collectively, Roomie and I have 6, or is it 8, and still growing. The other kicker, and perhaps the deciding factor, was their uptime, or lack of downtime. The stats I found and the people I listened to, all pointed to DreamHost being one of the most stable, highestest availability, hosting companies on the planet. And, indeed, my first year of experience with them proved that to be so true that I never even thought about it.

Then everything changed. Over the past couple of months, DreamHost has delivered many outages, high levels of instability and unavailablity, many excuses matched only by the number of apologies. They have had power grid problems, server failures, hard drive crashes, router insanity, and switch deaths. That last one is truly amazing, since switches never hardly ever fail. But all this stuff interacts, cascades, takes its neighbor out as it goes down. I know. I understand. I’m in the business. I’ve seen it happen. Except for the switches…

Ya gotta feel sorry for their techies. They have worked ’round the clock for days and nights on end, only to get it all patched up and 2 days later start all over again. Living on stale coffee, Jolt Cola, Mountain Dew, M&Ms, chips, and cold pizza … while getting only short, fitful, catnaps on the well worn office sofa (if lucky) or the floor (if not) … Over time, all of this conspires to morph the techies into unkempt, ill-tempered, trouble-shooting robots with a couple of fried circuits themselves. Robots experiencing excessive and frequent evacuation from all the junk food, caffeine and sugar.

So, if you’ve wondered if Winston had packed up and left town when you have seen the “Server Not Found” message, now you know. It’ll take more than DreamHost’s nightmares to get rid of moi. In addition to the original deciding factors enumerated above, I also preferred a host with facilities on US soil, and DreamHost is. A bonus I did not know about at the time, and which few if any other hosting companies offer, is an offsite status page. This is their network status, open for the world to see, and updated frequently during major burps as we have seen lately. And as already mentioned, this page is located offsite, on a server at a remote location not likely to be affected by network or external issues of concern at their main server farm. Reading a few sequential or random entries is like reliving your worst nightmares.

By now, it seems that DreamHost has replaced almost every major component, and many of the minor ones. With so much of their infrastructure replaced, does that mean their customers can expect to experience improved stability and uptime? One can hope so, and for those inclined to pray for divine intervention by the Big Techie Dude upstairs, now would be an appropriate time to do so. I know nothing of DreamHost’s financial situation, but cannot help but wonder how badly all this sudden expense might have wounded the company.

The title also mentions pain in my integrated aft cushioning device, but my rattling on about DreamHost’s nightmares has taken longer than anticipated, so the arse agony will have to wait for the next session … as soon as I get over sitting this long for this part…