DreamHost Data Center Move is a Nightmare

Web hosting provider DreamHost has given many customers nightmares during recent weeks after denial of service attacks, outages and network failure prompted by data center migration.

Following days of disruption, on December 8 and 9, the provider has had repeated denial off service attacks that have only been resolved by disabling the originating domain.

Cisco engineers have also been in to the new data center to deal with router problems.

DreamHost said on November 30 that ’just about’ all the problems were fixed and were back to normal – which turned out to be a hope rather than a promise.

In previous blog posts, DreamHost explained the company had “completed the mother of all DreamHost data center moves from the Net2EZ facility to Alchemy Communications’ data center, in which DreamHost has bought a large equity stake.

In response to a customer email, DreamHost put the outages down to a Shared Hosting hardware upgrade going wrong and customer support at a loss of how to put the problem right.

DreamHost has had to keep customers in touch with service status by email, Twitter and the DreamHost web site status page.

DreamHost is an employee-owned web service provider with 1500 servers hosting 800,000 sites serviced by 70 staff.

The DreamHost status blog has hundreds of comments about the outages – and the vast majority of them are not complimentary. Besides the blog postings, the company has not made any response to customers’ comments. “Never ones to be stared down, we got pretty good over the years at moving data centers,” DreamHost’s Josh Jones said before the move. “In fact, being unafraid to move data centers may actually have turned out to be one of our biggest competitive advantages. Of course, it may have been one of our biggest distractions too. Moving data centers has become such a huge deal that the planning for moving even just a third of our footprint now occupies our entire system admin team for the better part of a year.”