Dreamhost Hosting Power Outage : 5 Hours Downtime Planned

Dreamhost, a popular web hosting service (which also hosts this blog) has announced a downtime of approximately 5 hours due to power outage to the building where the web hosting servers are housed. The building management has scheduled an emergency maintenance for Sunday morning, February 25th, at 12:01AM PST.

“Since only one of our three data centers is losing power, not all servers will be shut down. Unfortunately, our core routers and our upstream providers are in that data center, so there will be no network to any servers during the window. Gaah.

Since we have advanced (albeit limited) warning of this event, we will be onhand to physically power off all of our equipment at 11:15PM PST. Barring any unforeseen issues (on our end or the building engineer’s) we plan on having everything back up by 4AM PST, hopefully much sooner.

This outage will affect everyone’s sites and email. Email sent to our customers during this outage will be deferred on the sending server and will be delivered after service is restored.”

Although the 5 hours hosting downtime is disappointing, especially after they promised better service, still I like Dreamhost because of the clarifications and prior notifications they provide, at least you know what is happening. Thankfully it is a Sunday and site traffic is universally low, moreover, they are fixing the issue at night too (when probably your readers are sleeping). At least this advance notice will keep you from submitting that story to Digg during that period…