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You are here: Home / Personal / Reddit’ing My Site can CRASH Servers at Dreamhost

Reddit’ing My Site can CRASH Servers at Dreamhost

August 6, 2008 by Stefan Didak 5 Comments

While I’m on vacation and checking some server statistics in the morning I noticed that my site was very difficult to get through. I figured there was a lot of traffic hitting it and decided to look at the log which had, in the few hours in the morning, grown to over 300MB in size. A quick inspection showed the majority of referrer hits came from reddit.com. Shortly after I noticed this I got a message from the hosting company (dreamhost.com) with the following:

Hello,

I am sorry but I had to disable your stefandidak.com as it was again causing tremendous server load:
server: 08:09 AM# uptime
08:09:23 up 40 min,  9 users,  load average: 378.70, 317.88, 241.52

causing other customers to complain. Sure enough once I disabled it the load began to return to normal:
server: 08:19 AM# uptime
08:21:55 up 52 min,  9 users,  load average: 6.25, 39.37, 118.26

I did check for any abusive IPs or specific scripts I could disable but there was nothing that would allow me to avoid disabling the entire site. I apologize but we had to take action (at almost 400 load the server was going to crash and then nobody’s sites including your others would be accessible). If you have any questions or concerns let me know:

So, if you want to host a site that gets, or at some point might get, a bunch of visitors in a short period, you might think about where you’d like to host it. I’m contemplating whether to find myself a host that doesn’t buckle under the pressure (of what I don’t believe to be excessive traffic) and would be able to cap the requests-per-second instead of just DISABLING AN ENTIRE SITE!

Since this is just my personal site I’m not too concerned right this minute but I would have to conclude that hosting a website for your BUSINESS at Dreamhost is probably a VERY BAD idea. I’m open to suggestions for reliable hosting companies that do not have to resort to disabling entire sites when there are a mere 14.800 visitors in the span of 8 hours! 🙂

At the time of writing this (but not posting it because, guess what, I couldn’t of course reach my own site) it had been 6 hours that my site has been disabled by Dreamhost. I’ve inquired about how long, exactly, they think they need to do this and what, exactly, the limitations are for the numbers of hits and visitors their average shared server can handle (since this is not listed in the terms of service or plan details). I’ll let y’all know once the site is back up again and I can post this to the blog.

So, whatever you do, whatever site you’ve got, if you’ve got it at Dreamhost you’d better hope you don’t get linked on reddit.com or digg.com because chances are, you’re not going to get any visitors and your site will simply be made inaccessible. In the meantime, here are some other people, mostly former customers, of Dreamhost:

  • Experiences with Downtime, Dreamhost, Googlebot and SSH
  • Nightmare Host
  • Trash Dreamhost Here
  • Dreamhost is REALLY STARTING TO SUCK
  • Boo Dreamhost
  • Scoberlizer: Dreamhost getting sucky PR out on blogs
  • Dreamhost, kindly respond to Andy!
  • Dreamhost Hosting Sucks Big Time
  • UpstartBlogger: Why Dreamhost Sucks
  • Neville Hobson: Call me crazy about dreamhost

Prologue:

The site was back up again when Sallie and I got home around 11pm that day. There was some more communication with Dreamhost on this subject but it’s like talking to an inanimate object that doesn’t seem to have much understanding since they kept claiming my site was still generating quite a heavy load. Dreamhost insists they have had sites that did hold up to the ‘digg effect’ but I have strong suspicion those might have been simple HTML sites with just a few KB worth of data. I’m now hosting the pictures and graphics on my site on a different server (one that doesn’t have any problems with a lot of visitors) and will be contemplating something more suitable as a long term solution.

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Filed Under: Personal, Rant, The Web Tagged With: Bandwidth, Home Office, Hosting, Images, Pictures, Server, Traffic, Visitors, Website

Comments

  1. William says:
    October 4, 2008 at 15:51

    Have you thought of renting a dedicated server? I know a vendor that can get you a dedicated server with an unmetered 10 megs connection for a very reasonable price(my last referral got it for under 100/month).

    Reply
  2. ezra says:
    October 17, 2008 at 18:22

    if you don’t have it already turned on, you might want to look in to the wp-cache module.

    Reply
  3. Mr.angry says:
    April 7, 2009 at 16:26

    GoDaddy is a pretty good host. The only thing I’ve ever had to use support for was to ask if I could have the SVN module for Apache enabled on my server.

    Reply
  4. Eric says:
    May 12, 2009 at 09:36

    Why not host your own stuff in your home office? With all that equipment i actually assumed you did. Not trying to bash you, just curious.

    Reply
  5. Tim says:
    June 11, 2009 at 15:42

    Probably too late with this intel, but I’ve had issues with both Dreamhost and Godaddy. I recently switched to a couple 1an1 Dedicated servers and have been very pleased with the performance, control and reliability.

    Reply

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