DH are mostly just very transparent about downtime - more so than most hosts. They are also very cheap. If you would like more nine's, you will need to pay more. MT, rackspace, etc... are all considerably more expensive.
I always appreciate transparency in support issues. I'm much happier knowing that an issue is being worked on than sitting in the dark wondering if anyone has noticed.
I also see that they host their status blog outside their core network. Good idea :)
Given the number of domains they host (nearly a million: http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/DR...), I'm shocked they don't have more outages to report. Perhaps they do. They've got enough hardware that system failures are bound to be a daily occurrence. And I'm sure software problems stack right on top of that.
Semi-unrelated but if you're curious about BGP, this 2004 talk—although absurdly long—talks about some of the issues with BGP (an many other issues with hosting content on the Internet). The speaker is Tom Leighton, one of the founders of Akamai.
It looks like our core router lost its BGP session which took down our entire network (as far as we can tell). We have our network administrator heading to the data center now and should be there in 20 minutes or so. More updates to come.
Significant downtime throughout the entire history of the company doesn't seem to have caused them to revisit any of their strategies. Nothing will change, changing would cost money they clearly don't need to spend, or they wouldn't have retained their customers.
First Microsoft/Danger/Sidekick, then Apple, now this. We need a computing paradigm that does not suffer from single points of failiure, or at least fails more gracefully.
You've got it. Call IBM and ask them about managed hosting. You can use the Dreamhost prices as a reference, just add 3-5 zeroes on the end.
If you buy a $500 car, never service it, and it breaks down unexpectedly, do you call for a new paradigm of personal transportation, or do you say "rats, well it was cheap and served me well while it lasted"?
Is avoiding 33 minutes of downtime worth tens of thousands of dollars to your business? Didn't think so.
I switched from DH, where I had constant outage problems, to Slicehost and Linode, both of which have never had outages (for me), for only $15 more a month...
But even after all those measures, shit happen sometimes. Then the only thing that matters is how you respond to it and how transparent and honest you are about it.
Anyone with serious uptime requirements avoids DreamHost. It sounds strange considering their size but it probably just isn't really in their budget. I used to have a DH account and it's pretty good for what it is. Now I have a VPS though.
But when you visit the homepage of their status-blog[1], don't you think that's a bit too many updates a little too frequently?
Or should we commend Dreamhost on being super-transparent in their network/uptime issues?
[1] http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/