Posted on December 11th, 2009There are a several things one should expect from a web hosting provider. A decent amount of allowable web space, bandwidth limits that aren’t too restricting, and a consistent up-time ratio (preferably higher than 99.9%). In what is still reverberating throughout the Internet, the web hosting provider DreamHost seems to have severely dropped the ball on the consistent up-time ratio. What should have been a smooth data migration turned out to be a very poorly planned venture costing the web hosting provider some of its customers.
The Move
A move from Net2EZ to Alchemy Communications was announced as completed by DreamHost on November 24, 2009. The company proclaimed its success, not knowing the ensuing issues that were about to plague them and their customers. Starting out with a network failure, the problems quickly began to mount. According to the technical team at DreamHost, the problems were being attributed to several factors. The shared hosting hardware had been upgraded, the upgrade did not go as planned, and the support team frankly was at a loss as to how to solve it quickly.
Status, Technically Speaking
Starting out almost immediately and appearing to still be an ongoing slew of problems, the DreamHost status page is rife with network failures, dieing raid controllers, and continuous webmail errors. For those with more than just a bit of technical knowledge, the offered status page may reveal more into what is going on with DreamHost and its latest move. The average web hosting customer, however, may find the information a bit overly technical. DreamHost would go a long way in offering information on a slightly less technical level and truly give its customers information they can use and understand.
Not too Happy
Tech-speak aside, it has been clear that DreamHost customers are less than pleased by the whole fiasco. Twitter has been inundated with tweets from customers regarding their dissatisfaction with all the errors and resulting down-times. Some have been content with complaining while others have decided to drop the web hosting provider and move onto a more reliable service. The DreamHost Twitter account reported on November 30, 2009 that at least 95% of their services and servers were back online. However, no further reporting has been made since that date (other than 2 personal responses and 1 holiday shopping URL). As of December 4, 2009 some customers are still reporting web sites that are unavailable.
Final Thoughts
In retrospect, DreamHost could have and should have planned their data migration a bit more. The support team should have been instructed on what might occur so they could be on the ball and ready to fix issues and errors as they arose. Most importantly, it may have been in the company’s best interest to not crow about a successful data move until they were completely certain the network was up and running smoothly.
DreamHost may need to do a bit of good public relations to combat the fallout of this data fiasco. It is uncertain how many customers they may have lost over the past week and how many more they stand to lose over the next couple of weeks. The web hosting provider clearly needs to wake up and do a bit of damage control.