Logical Eccentricity

So, I finally got my NY State tax refund this morning. For some reason it took New York state almost two months to give me my money back. The federal government gave me my money much faster; it only took them a week or so.

I know you’ve all heard of some horror stories about Dreamhost earlier this year, the whole billing fiasco, but I wanted to give you another side of the company.

Monday night, at 11:24pm I noticed that my websites weren’t responding, and I couldn’t connect to them in any way (SSH, Putty, ftp, plain web). So, I fired off a support ticket, thinking that I would hear back from them sometime tomorrow, and my site would be down for the night. About six minutes later I got the following response:

Reply from DreamHost (Apr 7th, 2008 - 20:34:52 / #17321215)
Subject: Message from support. On Mon, 07 Apr 2008, you wrote:
> I am trying to go to my website, and Firefox says that the connection has
> timed out because the server is not responding. Furthermore, I can not log in
> via ssh to my shell account.

I took a look at your site, and it looks like the server your site’s on
is having issues. It could be an abusive user, or a high load on the
server. I let one our admins know, and he’s working on it. I’ll let you
know as soon as it gets fixed. If you have any more question, please let
me know, and I’ll see what I can do to help. If you need anything else in
the mean time, you can e-mail me directly at [redacted]@dreamhost.com

The first level support staff volunteered his email address to me, without me asking for it! I was away from my computer, so I didn’t see this email until I got the next one at 11:37:

Reply from DreamHost (Apr 7th, 2008 - 20:37:06 / #17321223)
Subject: Re: Site not responding On Mon, 07 Apr 2008, you wrote:
> I am trying to go to my website, and Firefox says that the connection has
> timed out because the server is not responding. Furthermore, I can not log in
> via ssh to my shell account.

It looks like the server ended up needing a complete reboot, but when the
server came back up, so did your site! If there’s anything else I can
help you with, please let me know!

So, in less than 15 minutes, they had my website back up and running again. This is the fastest response time I’ve heard from any hosting service and another reason why Dreamhost is awesome.

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