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curetinnitus.org seems to have been down now for a couple hours. While
you seem to be recommending an upgrade, how can I trust your service,
if, with just 20 or so members, my site keeps going down? Also, how
can I build a business when my site can go down for hours and minutes
at a time? How can I keep my top google ranking?

Please let me know what kind of uptime you can provide me, and why my
sites have been down so very often and for so long.

I understand that there are no “perfect” solutions, but I frequently
experience downtime of 30 minutes to 2 hours, and we are at about 3
hours now. How can I attract and keep members?

Looking forward to your response and seeking more stable hosting.

Thank you,
Dainis
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Dreamhost’s response:
First, I am very sorry for the delay in answering this request. We try
very hard to answer all requests withing 24 hours (and we are usually a
lot quicker), but sometimes when the queue for support is particularly
long, we are not able to respond as quickly as we would like.

I am sorry to hear of these problems, and I too very much want you to
enjoy more stable hosting with DreamHost. It appears to me, from your
error logs, that the problems you were having were here were related to a
hardware issue that has since been resolved. Software problems that are
of a transient nature are one thing to deal with, but a hardware problem
can be tricky as it can be intermittent and can *appear* to be software
related.

It seems that now having replaced the NIC in your server jove, these
downtime problems have been curtailed, as jove has now been up almost
three full days, and is running well at low load (this is a
multiprocessor machine):

jove:/home/dainis/curetinnitus.org/community/wp-content/plugins# w
14:03:05 up 2 days, 22:59, 2 users, load average: 0.98, 1.76, 1.57

We want you to have the best service possible, and we will continue to
work toward that end. Machines do break on occasion, and when they do we
will do our best to find, and fix, the problem as soon as possible. It
appears at present that all is in good order for a steady server
experience here, but please let me know if you have further issues.
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I’d like to say that I am comfortable with Dreamhost’s reply, though I find it necessary that we as a community stay vigilant about uptime for our community. Should the site be down, just reply to one of your newsletters with the subject “CureTinnitus.org Site Down from X:XX to X:XX [TimeZone]” or just “CureTinnitus.org Site Down at X:XX EST” if you don’t want to hang around until it is up again (of course, just put in your own time zone, and the date I assume will be the date of the email).

That ought to do it. Since the site is pretty stable, and the support seems to be professional and courteous, you might want to check out their service for your sites.

Click here to check out Dreamhost’s Hosting Service