Lessons learned from the Dreamhost outage
Monday morning Dreamhost lost one of their FTP servers. It just so happens that my sites (all of them) are hosted on that one server. I’ll spare you the details of the outrage that ensued from other Dreamhost customers. Suffice it to say, this could happen to anyone unless they’re paying for some redundancy which most hobbyists like myself can’t afford. I’m not here to dump on Dreamhost. Given the situation, I think they did a fairly good job. Communication about the status of the server could have been more up-to-date and forthcoming but otherwise they did the best they could given the situation.
There were some lessons learned that I thought I would pass on to you. Most of this has been repeated in many other blog posts across the Internet but by looking at the comments on Dreamhost’s website, nobody seems to heed the advice.
- You get what you pay for. Now, I’m not saying Dreamhost is an awful or sub-par hosting provider. What I’m saying is don’t assume you’re getting a particular service if you’re not paying for it. With a basic hosting package, DH doesn’t guarantee up-time, availability or that they will have a recent backup of your data.
- Backup your data frequently. If you blog once a week you should be backing up your database and files on your website at least once a week. If you post more often (daily or multiple times a day) you may want to look at backing up more often.
- Pay for upgraded services, if needed. I can’t stress this enough. If your livelihood depends on your website being up constantly then you should fork over the cash for redundancy, backups and a dedicated server. $10 a month goes a long way with most hosting providers but $50 will go much further.
- Have a plan B. If you want your website to remain online no matter what happens, it might not be a bad idea to pay for a cheaper hosting service with another company and keep a shadow copy of your site there that you can get up and running in a short amount of time. It’s easy to do and all you’d have to wait for is DNS to propagate.
- Chill out and be nice. Barraging your hosting provider with nasty email, comments and threats of a lawsuit will get you nowhere. In fact, you may be the last account restored once everything is up and running again.
- So what? Podcasting is a hobby for me. I make a little money off the advertisements but not enough to say that an outage is going to hurt my bottom line. There are more important things in life.
- I like turtles. I thought there needed to be a seventh point so I added this one for good measure.
To sum it all up: YOU are responsible for YOUR data.
I feel your pain buddy. I completely agree with all your points. Especially the keeping a backup and chillax.
I would add: If you have others that depend on your site. If you host others' blogs. Be sure you communicate to them what you are paying for and what to expect! Also when things go dow communication is the key. They are much more liable to be ok with things if you are communicating all you know.
I feel your pain buddy. I completely agree with all your points. Especially the keeping a backup and chillax.
I would add: If you have others that depend on your site. If you host others' blogs. Be sure you communicate to them what you are paying for and what to expect! Also when things go dow communication is the key. They are much more liable to be ok with things if you are communicating all you know.
I feel your pain buddy. I completely agree with all your points. Especially the keeping a backup and chillax.
I would add: If you have others that depend on your site. If you host others' blogs. Be sure you communicate to them what you are paying for and what to expect! Also when things go dow communication is the key. They are much more liable to be ok with things if you are communicating all you know.