amphichon

DreamHost is really irritating sometimes. Once in a very great while, I’ll go through a flurry of activity where I am actually working on my site, uploading files and editing entries and generally depending on it to be working reliably. And for some unknown reason, it seems like every time I hit one of those flurries of activity, DreamHost hits one of those flurries of flakiness. To wit:

It makes me wonder – if on those few occasions I actually use the site, it’s flaky, how often is it flaky and I don’t even realize it?

Have you tried to reach this site in the last year or so and found that it was unresponsive or laggy? Please let me know – I need to be able to pass this stuff on, because lately when I bring these problems to their attention, DreamHost writes it off as unreproducible or a passing glitch. Especially over the next few days or weeks – if you see any problems, please make a note of the time and date, and (if commenting is responsive enough) let me know here, or email me directly at yoursitesucks atsign amphichon dot com.

Thanks.

UPDATE – 11pm 9 January
I am getting more and more frustrated with Dreamhost. Here’s the latest – more than 24 hours after I noticed the problem, it still hasn’t been fixed. DreamHost support did contact me earlier today, to say (predictably) that they didn’t see any problem and would I provide some more information. I provided pings and traceroute that (I thought, at least) demonstrated pretty clearly that the server on which my site was hosted was responding erratically. The support guy basically shrugged and said “Well, I don’t see any problem, but I’ll move you to a new server.” So he does this, and presto, the site stops working completely.

Well done DreamHost! Take the fucking site down and no one will complain about how long it takes to load! No latency problems now, are there? Brilliant!

So I reply back to the guy asking him to fucking fix whatever he did, no word on that yet. In the meantime I Google the specific error (error id: “bad_httpd_conf”) and learn two things – one, that (as one might guess) it’s an Apache config issue, and two, surprise surprise, four out of the top five search results are confused and frustrated Dreamhost customers.

Per the Dreamhost Wiki, one can sometimes resolve this issue by editing the domain settings through the control panel; I’ve done that and managed to make the site available at http://amphichon.com again for the moment. http://www.amphichon.com, however, is still b0rked, even though the settings I’ve saved and resaved on my end are that both domains should work properly. So apparently there’s still a glitch that is going to have to be manually fixed on the server side.

The one bright spot is that, despite the httpd_conf errors, the new server does not appear to be lagging or dropping any packets. Cross your fingers that, in fixing the domain mapping issue, they don’t manage to screw something else up.

UPDATE – 11:30pm 9 January

There’s been no word from Dreamhost, so I can’t tell whether they made an adjustment on their end, or if my latest attempt to fix this error through the domain settings on the control panel resolved it, but one way or another it now appears that the domain is fully responsive on both www.amphichon.com and amphichon.com. Here’s hoping this is the end of the technical issues for now. I’m going to bed.

UPDATE – 12am 10 January

Almost immediately after the last update, I realized that latency problems were as bad as ever, and a traceroute revealed that they just moved me back to the bad server, the one of the 2000ms response times and every third packet dropped. I can’t believe that Dreamhost’s support is really this bad, but apparently it is. I just finished submitting yet another ticket, documenting this whole issue, and their response to this will determine whether or not I move to a new webhost in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you may continue to see erratic response on amphichon – I apologize. Please bear with us as we try to work it out.

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