Thanks, But No Thanks

I love the transparency in business that blogging offers.

For example, it made Microsoft human.

It made great speakers online and accessible.

It gave companies that were once mocked and ridiculed a new lease on web presence.

But now this sort of transparency hit home: Dreamhost has major problems. And they’re blogging about them. Not whitewashed, not corporate-speak. Real people explaining what’s really going on.

And the blogger in me cheers uncontrollably!

And the system administrator says “It’s a good thing my company switched to Site5 last year!”

You want to know why we switched hosts? For the exact same reasons they’re explaining: the downtime at Dreamhost is simply unacceptable for corporate use. MySpace, apparently, uses the same datacenter and somehow they can stay up but their neighbors cannot.

There are many reasons for this. Reasons I don’t necessarily need to know but are explained in great detail.

All I know is, they discuss massive action, but they don’t take massive action. Let’s take a look at this section, which they explain how they were looking at create a network connection to another data center in the same building (hello! anybody home? power outages in your neighborhood much? why would you not just leave town?):

All this took a very, very, very long time. After months of searching and negotiating with Alchemy, we still had to get Switch and Data to allow us to put a cross-connect in from their data center over to their competitors down the hall. After even more months and teeth-pulling, we finally got that up and running. In fact, we finally got the first live server up in Alchemy a little less than a month ago.  

Let me tell you what I would’ve done: I would’ve found me a new datacenter that’s not in the most power-struggling cities/areas in the United States, and I would’ve gotten the hell out of there. Every waking moment would be spent looking for some other location that didn’t provide faulty Uninterruptable Power Supplies, locations that weren’t losing power on an almost weekly basis.

Now I’m hesitant to knock on any sys admins, particularly those that are upfront about what’s going on, what they’re doing and how they plan to improve. But if two power outages, UPS problems, and a simple network connection to a datacenter down the hall can’t be relied upon, then what the hell are you doing in that building?

I know the admins have jobs, homes, and lives around San Francisco. Obviously that’s the only place you’re going to look for a datacenter, so you don’t have to move all of those jobs/lives.

But, seriously, this is why you lost my company’s business, and no matter how transparent you are, until you leave that horrible location this will probably continue to happen.

The writing is on the wall. No more excuses. Let’s see some honest-to-God solutions.

May I mention again that Site5 is a fantastic hosting company who I had a problem with initially but who also replied in kind. I used Dreamhost for my company’s website I manage for about 8 months, saw outages on what became a weekly basis and subsequently looked like a doofus in front of my boss and the president of the company for giving Dreamhost such kudos at first.

Worse? Those sys admins who raved about Dreamhost looked the exact same when those problems (and these new ones) showed up.

Thanks for the honesty Dreamhost, and now let’s see the follow-through. It’s the only way you’re going to get any confidence back in your service.

Oh, only I can bring myself down. Why do I?
Why do I keep fucking up?