I was reading the Dreamhost status blog and noticed they are having some serious problems with their spacey filer problems. Now I do know there are a large amount of mad DH customers, but many of those are extremely high income companies. I am guessing many people do not know about DH dedicated servers, which are pretty expensive but offer dedicated resources, integration with the web panel, and the same things you get with a shared or dreamhostps account.

Now I have seen a couple of times that DH sees storage as cheap, so I am wondering if storage is cheap so must buying other hardware to try and increase their overall uptime. They are one of the largest webhosts in the world from what I can tell, but with so many customers I am hoping they will do some work on improving their actual uptime, maybe less clients per physical server or evolve to a GRID type service so users do not have to worry about unscheduled downtime so much and only have to worry about scheduled downtime.

I must give dreamhost credit though their panel is unlike any other, which means they have some pretty advanced staff on their team. Who knows we might see DH move to a GRID/Cloud based webhost in the future.

We are currently experiencing some networking issues with one of the file servers in our ’spacey’ cluster. If you’re on one of the servers below and are having problems with your website, this should be resolved soon. One of our admins is on his way to the datacenter to work on the problems with this file server and fully restore service.
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Update - 12/14/08, 5:19 PM PST: So it turns out the file server is in a bit of a reboot spiral due to a few bad drives. Our admins are in the process of preparing and swapping the bad drives and hopefully things should level out soon. More updates will be posted as soon as things are all clear.
Update - 12/14/08, 11:13 PM PST: As it stands, the file server is going through disk checks to make sure that nothing has been lost and that a bigger problem isn’t going to bite everyone affected by this unfortunate outage later on. This is going to take a few hours to do — but once the file server is happy, we’ll update this entry.
Update - 12/15/08, 3:31 AM PST: I’d like to say that the checks were a complete success — but they weren’t. The operations center technician who is left in charge of this is getting a hold of one of our senior admins and they will be working to resolve this. More as things progress.
Update - 12/15/08, 3:31 AM PST: Unfortunately it was determined that if we could save the filer at this point, it may take longer to do that than to replace the hardware. One of our admins is currently handling that. There isn’t an estimate for restoration of service at the moment, but another update should be coming soon.
Update - 12/15/08, 11:31 AM PST: We are unfortunately still having problems accessing the data on the file server. We are going to try upgrading the Operating System in the hopes that this will allow us to access your data so that we can move forward. We will know if the upgrade is helping in roughly 3 hours, if everything goes well. At that point we will do our best to send another status post detailing the plan at that time.
Update - 12/15/08, 2:15 PM PST: We have isolated affected customers, and users not on the peeler file server are back up and running. Unfortunately, customers on peeler are still experiencing an outage. For those of you on the problem file server we are going to be moving you to a new machine. Unfortunately we are not able to access and move your data, but the move will allow you to upload your locally backed up content and get your email working. We are still attempting to recover data, but are not optimistic at this point. We are in a “wait and see” scenario with the rebuilding of peeler’s array. This process will finish late this evening at the earliest.
If you are on the problem file server we will be contacting you by email as soon as your account is moved with more details and instructions on getting back up as soon as possible.