Website unavailability over the past week
Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 1:50 pm
Apologies for the hiccup over the past week, and thanks to everyone who emailed/PM me to alert me of the problem!
Anyway, as promised, here's a rundown of the entire episode for those of you who are interested.
TPFC has been hosted with Dreamhost even since it started. I chose their shared hosting plan since it's the cheapest (about $10/month). Despite some outages over the years, I have largely stuck with them because they do a pretty good job for a shared hoster, and they are pretty transparent about problems with their machines/network. I have direct/indirect experiences with a few other shared hosters, and so far they represented the best bang for the buck, until now..
Starting from one or two months back, they started offering their "private server" plan. The plan is akin to what's know as VPS (virtual private server) in the industry, and cost $15/month for minimal config. A little investigation tells me that $30-$50/month will be a more realistic figure for a typical website. Since this was way out of my budget, I decided to ignore it. Anyway, the advertisement started with their newsletters, and ended in private emails to try out the offer. Then the offers got aggressive:
With high hopes, I tried accessing the forum again. I got the same "Service Temporarily Unavailable" message. WTF! So I went ahead and switched the database to their "private server" plan as well. That took two days too, and on 30 Apr, the switch was made and suddenly, TPFC works as before again.
What really pissed me off about this whole thing is their apparently strong-armed tactic of holding a user to ransom and forcing him to migrate to a more expensive plan. The shared hosting was running fine before, and I only get the occasional email from support to fine-tune certain database operations, so what has changed? If you create a more expensive product, surely it is unethical to suddenly cripple an existing, lower-end product to force user to upgrade?
Anyway, I am still monitoring the situation and figure out how much it is actually going to cost me on the new PS/PSSQL plans. The first week is free so that I can get a feel of the maximum resource usage, but from initial observations, it will be at least $40/month. With this kind of money, it will probably be cheaper to migrate to a real VPS, some of which only cost $19.95/month. I will definitely be spending the next couple of weeks researching VPS solutions, so a migration to another host is definitely on the table.
Anyway, as promised, here's a rundown of the entire episode for those of you who are interested.
TPFC has been hosted with Dreamhost even since it started. I chose their shared hosting plan since it's the cheapest (about $10/month). Despite some outages over the years, I have largely stuck with them because they do a pretty good job for a shared hoster, and they are pretty transparent about problems with their machines/network. I have direct/indirect experiences with a few other shared hosters, and so far they represented the best bang for the buck, until now..
Starting from one or two months back, they started offering their "private server" plan. The plan is akin to what's know as VPS (virtual private server) in the industry, and cost $15/month for minimal config. A little investigation tells me that $30-$50/month will be a more realistic figure for a typical website. Since this was way out of my budget, I decided to ignore it. Anyway, the advertisement started with their newsletters, and ended in private emails to try out the offer. Then the offers got aggressive:
followed by:Last week we sent you an email inviting you to try our still-new
DreamHost PS (Private Servers) and/or our DreamHost PS MySQL service!
It looks like you never checked it out at:
http://www.dreamhostps.com/
Nor did you choose to sign up by visiting:
https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=vserver.provision
We can understand if you're perhaps not interested at this time.. it's
true the minimum extra monthly charge is $15 (for 150MB of resources).
But... what if we gave you $5 a month off... forever? What THEN?
Well, what if is what NOW... if you sign up in the next week (by 2009-04-18),
you'll automatically get a 150MB DreamHost PS server for just $10/month...
forever! That's 33% off (give or take .3333333333333333333333333...%)!
The main advantages of DreamHost PS are:
* You get your own PROTECTED system resources for improved stability.
* You get more flexibility than regular hosting to run any process.
* You can scale your resources on the fly, and reboot your own PS.
* It's currently only +$10/month for every 100MB of memory. ($5 off!)
* It's a completely seamless transition from our regular shared hosting.
You can also sign up for DreamHost PS MySQL, which is just like PS but
for your databases. If you get both PS and PS MySQL, you get another 20%
off both, forever!
Sign up now and we'll be able to provision you ASAP!
Thanks once more,
The Happy DreamHost Evite Team!
When that didn't work, they sent me this email dated 23 Apr:Last week we again sent you an email inviting you to try our still-new
DreamHost PS (Private Servers) and/or our DreamHost PS MySQL service!
But again it looks like you never checked it out at:
http://www.dreamhostps.com/
Nor did you choose to sign up by visiting:
https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=vserver.provision
Well, it's hard for us to understand how you couldn't give it a shot for
just $10/month (33% off). But not impossible for us to believe. What's
IMPOSSIBLE for us to believe is if you don't take advantage of this, our
final and greatest offer!
$10/month off.. forever. That's 100MB free.. meaning you can get your
very own Private Server with 150MB of ram for just FIVE dollars a month!
Awooooooga!
The main advantages of DreamHost PS are:
* You get your own PROTECTED system resources for improved stability.
* You get more flexibility than regular hosting to run any process.
* You can scale your resources on the fly, and reboot your own PS.
* It's currently only +$10/month for every 100MB of memory. ($10 off!)
* It's a completely seamless transition from our regular shared hosting.
You can also sign up for DreamHost PS MySQL, which is just like PS but
for your databases. If you get both PS and PS MySQL, you get another 20%
off both, forever!
Now, this is really our final final offer. And, it expires one week from
today (by 2009-04-27) .. sign up and we'll be able to provision you
ASAP!
Thanks one final time,
The Happy DreamHost Evite Team!
Then suddenly all the non-availability messages start to appear. It got so bad that I was unable to access the forum to post a news item about it! At first, I thought it was some problems with their servers. But after a few days, I decided the fastest way to bring TPFC back up again was to switch to their "private server" plan temporarily. It took two days to provision the switch, then on 28 Apr, I was told the switch has been made.We are contacting you to inform you that we have had to throttle the connections to your site (portablefreeware.com) as it was causing the apache server you are on to run out of available connection slots. While we attempt to avoid disruption of customer services in this case it was causing problems for other users so we were forced to take action. If you can redesign your site to be less process-intensive (we only throttle sites when they are causing load in the server in addition to having many connections - if you just have static content for example that's easy for the machine to serve up and we can just give you more connections) we'll be happy to review the case for you. It is also possible that you have outgrown shared hosting and are ready for your own private server:
http://dreamhostps.com
If you are interested in that option please contact support with any questions you have any we'll be happy to assist you.
With high hopes, I tried accessing the forum again. I got the same "Service Temporarily Unavailable" message. WTF! So I went ahead and switched the database to their "private server" plan as well. That took two days too, and on 30 Apr, the switch was made and suddenly, TPFC works as before again.
What really pissed me off about this whole thing is their apparently strong-armed tactic of holding a user to ransom and forcing him to migrate to a more expensive plan. The shared hosting was running fine before, and I only get the occasional email from support to fine-tune certain database operations, so what has changed? If you create a more expensive product, surely it is unethical to suddenly cripple an existing, lower-end product to force user to upgrade?
Anyway, I am still monitoring the situation and figure out how much it is actually going to cost me on the new PS/PSSQL plans. The first week is free so that I can get a feel of the maximum resource usage, but from initial observations, it will be at least $40/month. With this kind of money, it will probably be cheaper to migrate to a real VPS, some of which only cost $19.95/month. I will definitely be spending the next couple of weeks researching VPS solutions, so a migration to another host is definitely on the table.