It looks like I’m not the only one that had Dreamhost problems - when I first moved to Dreamhost, I saw astronomical uptime numbers similar to what Daviey saw. While these numbers are actually normalized to the number of CPUs (as opposed to 1.00 as he mentions), 430+ is not exactly acceptable. Here is the screenshot from his blog showing the stats:

That effectively means that every CPU on his box (which came up as a 4-way box) has (on average) over 100 processes waiting on it in the last minute. More terrifying, however, is for the server he is on, there has been an average for the last 15 minutes 210 processes waiting on the CPU.

Obviously these numbers are just ridiculous. When this happened to me, Dreamhost said that it was related to some ‘perfect storm’ failure with their filers. This notice made it on their blog, on the status page, and into the control panel. While I admire how well they tried to publicize what had happened, how it got as bad as it did and was still in a state where they couldn’t fix it for two weeks I will never understand.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt, however. At the time I was just happy to have my happily humming hardware back. That enjoyment was short lived, however. Before long, I was back to running uptime again, and lamenting over numbers well above the CPU limits. Even an uptime of 7 on a box with 4 CPUs should be considered unacceptable by any reasonable host; but that was the norm for me at Dreamhost.

For me, it’s not about the fact that they have technical issues (all hosts do), it’s not even about the fact that you can’t use their service like they advertise - for me, it’s that they are letting things get so out of hand, and then when they do, they come up with crap like this Super Lame Apology post to explain why they don’t have an SLA, and how you need to put your money where your mouth is.

That ‘SLA: Super Lame Apology’ post in my opinion is missing one key point. Does a $20 rebate really make a shit’s bit of difference to me as a customer? No, not if I’ve lost business any way. But, as Don MacAskill said over at SmugBlog - SLAs aren’t meant to help your monetary losses:

The whole point isn’t to compensate SmugMug for our loss, it’s to make it unprofitable for the service provider to keep making the same mistakes.

Do you honestly think Dreamhost would keep this shit up if they never got any money for their hosting because it was always down?