March 30, 2004
All-Baseball Down
Mark McClusky asked me to post this:
"We were down almost all day yesterday due to problems with our host, so we
moved the site to a new hosting provider this morning. The switch of the
domain will take a little while, but we're hoping to be back and posting by
tomorrow. We're sorry for the inconvenience and the frustration -- believe
me, no on is more frustrated than we are."
Let's hope they are back in business soon. Lots of good blogs over there.
Posted by David Pinto at
04:49 PM
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AB is really a great site. I like the idea of collecting top bloggers of a related subject on one site and working with the integrated stuff; it can really lead to people discovering other bloggers they might not have otherwise found.
However, we also see the downside of this approach the last two days: when one is lost to the fickleness of the internet, they all are.
So, for those looking for something to do while it's gone, come read me blather about the Phillies (and, really, the rest of baseball at the moment).
I wonder if AB has the same hosting service. My site was down all day yesterday too. They had been real good up to that point.
We were hosted on Dreamhost -- we've moved to pair.com, where we're hopeful that things will be a little more stable.
yep. I'm on dreamhost. I hope you have better luck with pair.
I've had several sites (some that have come and gone) such as Mocksports.com with Dreamhost since 1998, and this was the first outage of any appreciable length in that time. We pay $23.95 (or whatever, they froze prices for life for us old-timers) a month to a virtual host instead of hosting websites on our own computers so we won't have to deal with problems like that, they will. It sounds like it's something that could have happened to anybody, including us if we hosted our sites on our home computers, and including pair.com. Best of luck, but I've never been anything but impressed with the Dreamhost folks. And the outage happened at just about the worst time for us, too, because fantasy baseball frozen rosters were due Tuesday on Mocksports!
Yeah, the other day was the first time I've had a long outage on Dreamhost. A couple of hours here and there, sure, but 100% uptime is a pipe dream.
I'd give consideration to moving to a new host if there were some real persistant problems, but for the time being I'm content to give Dreamhost continued support.
Of course, I'd be willing to bet that my sites draw a lot less traffic than AB.
http://www.dreamhost.com/shared/comparison.html
shell accounts, php, mysql, cron access, imap, and 500MB space for $9.95/month: sounds too good to be true.
I've never found all-baseball sluggish, not that I've ever done much there that's resource intensive (like use the MT search script, which I've read is pretty resource intensive).
For those at Dreamhost, did you ever find response sluggish?
To my sites, or to all-baseball in general? My pages are almost never sluggish, and when they are a traceroute usually identifies the problem as being somewhere between me and dreamhost (i.e., a bad router somewhere in st. louis or seattle or something equally random).
Here's the thing: most websites generate almost no traffic and almost no load on a server. If you're running anything that's super-popular you're going to be forced to a co-location solution, which means you've got your own computer running the site(s) but they'll plug it in at their data warehouse for you.
I've had better luck with Dreamhost than I have with Parcom (www.parcom.net)... Parcom had very rare downtimes but they lost my mysql databases and were unrepentant about it. That's what lead to me moving the site.
We switched from vBulletin to Invision Power Board in the last few months, and I and others have noticed that it's kind of slow. I frequent other sites that run IPB and it's not slow, so chances are it's Dreamhost.
But that said, DH recently stopped storing lifetime bandwidth stats for all its 1,000+ (or whatever) sites which it said was taking up millions upon millions of rows of table data, and it's seemed a bit more spritely since; and they say the new router they're getting now will handle a few times more traffic, so I'm hopeful it won't continue to be bothersome.
John's right, though, it really all depends on the traffic you get. We have about 200 users, and I know 80% of them by name, so when something like the other day happens, everyone gets irritated but recovers quickly. If you're extra popular, the damage from something like that is exponentially worse. I do have doubts that switching from Dreamhost will make it better, because like I said above, it sounds like something that could have heppened to anyone.
I really wanted to like Dreamhost. We just moved over there at the start of March.
But over that period of time, we had not only the big outage on Monday, but several other outages in the 2 hour range. Being offline that much isn't ok.
We're back up, by the way, at our new host.
I also use Dreamhost (and host John's Only Baseball Matters and Brian's TigerBlog), and have since December of '02. This is the first lengthy downtime I can recall, as well.
In their defense, they provided a very detailed and lengthy explanation of the downtime and what they plan to do to resolve it in the future, even going so far as to admit their nightstaff was unprepared for a DOS attack (which caused the router overload, and brought them down). As Matt points out, a DOS attack can happen to anyone - whether Pair will be better prepared than Dreamhost was is anyone's guess.
For me, hosting is a price/support decision - I stick with Dreamhost because I lucked into a ridiculous deal (their top-level plan for their bottom-level plan price - a three-day sale I'll bet they regret now) and their support has been top-notch. Very responsive and clear.
Anyway, this is just one of those "hey, that's MY webhost you're leaving, so I'm gonna jump to their defense" type of things; I mean nothing by it. Good luck with Pair.