If you’ve been having trouble accessing my site or any of the sites that I host (you know who you are), it was due to yet another network-wide outtage from Dreamhost. I’m too annoyed right now to link to them or include my referral link.

At approximately 11:05 am eastern Dreamhost went completely offline. No email, no sites loading, control panel down. This time it wasn’t an act of nature such as a power failure…it was just a “switch error” according to their offsite status page. Seems back to normal now. Total downtime: about 2 hours. Being down 2 am to 4 am is not great but okay, being down 11 am to 1 pm on a weekday is not okay.

Even though I’m no longer working freelance, I am still hosting a number of domains pro bono. It doesn’t cost me anything and I don’t mind doing it. But I’m the type of person who takes that responsibility seriously and I feel that when the sites are not performing or the email is not working I owe those users an explanation.

Dreamhost has an offsite [network status page](http://status.dreamhost.com) but they did a shameful job of keeping it up to date while the problem was happening. No time stamp, no update while they were finding and fixing the problem.

So I went ahead and used my [ISP’s](http://www.comcast.net) free personal web hosting feature to create a bare-bones status update page. If I host your email or website and you haven’t received my email yet explaining the outtage and pointing you to my off-network status site, or even if you are also hosted by Dreamhost and you just want to know what I know when I know it, I present you: [Judi’s down-n-dirty emergency status page](http://home.comcast.net/~sohnfamily67/). i’ve also put the link in the sidebar. Bookmark it now so you don’t have to go hunting for it later.

When Dreamhost is reliable, they’re excellent. But when they’re not… *sigh*

Part of me wants to switch hosts. It’s not about the money. The issue is the time and effort that will go into moving everything over…MySQL databases, email accounts, discussion lists, etc. It can be done, and I’ll do it if I have to, but I’m hoping Dreamhost gets their act together and I don’t have to.