live chat: 7 pm – midnight – 1.30 pm SGT

Hi,I read and update my 3 personal blogs several times a day. I rely on them. When they went down on 26 Apr, I scrambled to find alternatives to cope. I won’t describe my desperate attempts to find alternatives.

I expect the same reliability in my blog infrastructure as in my home broadband, or phone service. So the 26 Apr experience was more than an outage… it was a blackout. Based on personal recollection, my broadband ISP and my phone company had blackouts once a couple of year. Now I have to accept blackouts once a year from Dreamhost.

If I hit 5 hours of blackout a year, then uptime is 99.94%, right? That’s quite bad in my opinion.

Q1: what happened on 26 Apr?

Q2: what did you do (if any) in the prior hours or days, that lead to the blackout?

Q2b: has this kind of thing happened before?

Q4: what did you do to restore/recover?

Q6: what time did support team read my issue ticket? I assume Dreamhost has 24/7 support for this kind of blackout, right?

Q8: how many other users affected?

Q9: Could you share a brief process improvement plan to 1) address the underlying issue 2) speed up recovery and minimize the next down time?

In my engineering training we read about the “five whys” technique to uncover the root cause. I really wish to see the root cause uncovered, because my experience was … painful.