Housekeeping
Posted by Sunday on May 4, 2008 at 1:11 pm in Daily SpaceFor anyone following the Mutant 59 saga, you may have noticed that Part 3 is still not yet available. For this I apologize, and have a super-weak excuse: I haven’t been reading anything this week. I’ve have a cold/allergy/infection triple roundhouse to the face the last week and as I previously mentioned, the Sudafed has made reading and writing a near impossibility. Comic books and Netflix are the height of my cognitive ability.
In a non GalacticMu-themed note, does anyone who reads this site use Dreamhost? BattleGate, our intrepid engineer, has been struggling almost daily with these people, writing them a constant stream of “Why the fuck is our service so slow?” emails and then forehead-against-keyboard slamming when the reply is always “Check with your local service! Thank you for using Dreamhost! This is an automated response! We’re not sure how to use periods, but since an exclamation point has a dot at the bottom, we just use that!” I let BattleGate handle this because she’s smarter than me, but I thought I’d ask the readers if they have the same problem with every provider or if it’s just Dreamhost that does this. And for clarity’s sake: we live in different states, so our local service is most certainly not our problem, nor is the problem with BattleGate’s elegant, ladylike coding skillz - just now I timed loading the WordPress dashboard and it took 27 seconds. This is about 25 seconds longer than any other website pages I load. That’s 25 seconds of my life I had to spend reflecting on how I’ve wasted my life so far. Also enough time to doodle a duck shooting laser beams out of its face at Dreamhost:
i use dreamhost. i haven’t had any performance issues that were consistent, though there is the occasional period where response seems to be intermittently poor. more to the point, i’ve never known them to be anything less than brutally honest about what’s going on, as their blog is constantly pointing out problems that don’t even affect most users. and as someone who deals in the soothing of clients who blame their service provider for performance issues, i can tell you that “check with your local service provider” has an advice success rate of about 95%. which is to say, if there’s a real problem they probably really don’t know about it and/or can’t see it happening. performance problems, especially if they’re intermittent, can be horribly difficult to track down so if you have specifics about what is common between the things you’re doing that are slow just make sure you’re sending those along (for example, if everything you are having problems with resides on a specific server, or if it all involves mysql transactions, and so on).
I agree and understand that the great majority of problems lies with the user, and this was expected from them in the beginning. It’s hard for me to talk about it because I’m not Leesa (BattleGate), but if I’m not mistaken she’s run a wide array of diagnostic crap only to find it has nothing to do with anything we have power over. We’ve even occasionally gotten an email back from a real person going “Oh yeah, it looks like there’s a faulty script here…” and then we never hear from them again and our service either only temporarily is better or doesn’t get better at all.
I’m afraid they’ve been less than “brutally honest” with us in the past, mostly in the form of tech people who are either actually not reading our emails or being intentionally evasive. We have a whole cache of emails where Leesa says,
“This is our problem, and I’ve tried A and I’ve tried B so far. Any suggestions?”
And Leesa literally gets an email back that says,
“Hi! Have you tried A yet? This is how you try A. If that doesn’t work, try B. Thanks for using Dreamhost!”
And then Leesa writes back,
“You just sent me an email advising me to do what I already told you I’d tried. Please get back to me with further suggestions.”
And… nothing.
No exaggeration, we have a collection of these email. We’re saving them.
Interesting.
I’ve been silent out of respect for all parties involved in the aforementioned issue and feeling it wasn’t really my business.
I do a heck of a lot of surfing the Nets. I have a very consistent ISP and tons of fast bandwidth. Peak usage times usually don’t even phase loading the most graphic-heavy sites.
GallaticMu is by far the slowest loading site I visit. Often I have to open it in a tab and move on to something else while it loads. There have been numerous times when it will just time-out and not load at all.
I have no issue with Dreamhost, but did a quick google of only the word Dreamhost, nothing else, in the hopes of an unbiased google search. Out of the first page of hits, an inordinate amount were disgruntled Dreamhost users who had these same issues.
An interesting thing I noticed is a tendency for recent users to have very negative complaints, whereas 2 or 3 years ago they were more positive. Go here for some honest, unbiased reviews of Dreamhost. By far, the majority of complaints appear to be in three categories: over-billing issues, poor and/or non-existent tech support, slow service with frequent down-time. Many complained of strong-arm sales tactics demanding a more expensive tier of bandwidth for ‘excessive’ visitor traffic on hosted sites.
My personal WTF opinion: They have taken on more hosting than their infrastructure has the capacity to handle and, in an effort to remedy this, have resorted to playing hardball with peoples fees (see reviews and comments by hosted sites at the above URL).
Just my humble opinion … and expert powers of observation and deduction.
Note to BattleGate: I believe now is the time for one of those ‘polls’ we were talking about. Lets ask visitors about loading time. Would be nice to ask, in an anonymous way, their general location (state or region, ie northwest, etc.) and their type of service (cable, DSL, dialup … yep, I said dialup … hee) so we can get a better idea of the extent of localized individual ISP performance -vs- primary hosting server (Dreamhost). I am in the northwest, you are in the south and Subspace is in the … where the hell is she anyway … in the ‘middle’ somewhere! Anyway, we three have totally different ISPs and live in opposite points of the compass … and we all experience very slow loading rates. This site is not a huge hog either, just that nice chromey bot-nerd on the left there!
So whadaya say, poll time? I vote yes!
I used Dreamhost until just recently. My websites went down for 3+ days and I had no access to files. After that, I couldn’t take it anymore and switched to Linode. I have more control there anyway, and it’s perfect for linux geeks who want to mess around with stuff.
If you just need simple hosting/email, that sort of thing, LiquidWeb has been pretty good in my experience. I have a client who is hosting their $6b company’s website on one of their dedicated servers. Their support is top notch and the uptime has been impressive.
Great, this is good information, Dan. I mean, not just the confirmation that Dreamhost might be lacking, but we’ll look into LiquidWeb. Unfortch, Linode sounds scary to me because I for one do not want to mess around with servers. I just want them to be there. Over there. Where someone else messes with them.
@quagmire: all the info you mentioned is already available to Subspace and I through stats.
Everyone else:
Anyone who wants to give us feedback on the loadtimes of Gmu or problems they’re having please send us a note here:
Feedback Form
so we can pass your experiences along to Dreamhost when we contact them next. Select “problem with site” from the dropdown menu.
Your Engineer, Battlegate