Background
I have 3 sites currently hosted with DreamHost. I actually had a fourth site that I was in the process of testing on DreamHost, but I pulled it back.
I have a handful of sites that are also hosted with Yahoo, Network Solutions, and 0catch.
There are things that I like about the control panels for Yahoo and DreamHost. I generally do not like the control panel for Network Solutions. It is not quite as bad, but very close, to GoDaddy’s control panel that I fortunately no longer have to deal with.
There is another host company that I used a long time ago. They tried to rip me off, and I don’t remember anything about their control panel. I can tell you, however, that ci host is the devil.
So I have some experience with a few different host companies.
In the near decade that I have been doing websites I have never had the week that I just finished….##Houston, We Have A Problem##
I get a call and an email last week (3/25 - Tuesday) from one of my all-time favorite clients. Her sites are AnnounceInviteDelight.com and KnottyKnote.com. Her AnnounceInviteDelight email is down and she has not been able to send email for 2 days.
I log in to see what’s going on, and sure enough, DreamHost is having some catastrophic issues in the heart of some fileserver. It’s affecting sites, databases, and email. Awesome. They think they will have it resolved by the end of the week. Super.
I am able to send and receive mail from my domain in spurts using Mail.app on my iMac, and can sometimes log into the webmail. Usually not, though, because their servers are totally honked.
Days pass. It looks better. Maybe. No. It’s still down. Crappers!
Time for a new plan
I’ll pull the email hosting from DH and put it back on Yahoo’s servers. I make that call on Friday (3/28). I cancelled the Yahoo plan for this domain 10 days prior (3/18) because the migration to Dreamhost went great, and we didn’t need to pay $20/month/domain for Yahoo’s service. Double Damn!
I call Yahoo tech support to go through my plan. Good to go, and I can do it from the website. Psyche! Their website doesn’t have the option I need to redelegate the domain. I spend about 2 hours on the phone with Yahoo tech support, and they have to escalate it and open a ticket. They will let me know when it’s resolved and I can go back through the fixed page.
I submit a ticket myself online later that night. I am very familiar with Yahoo and their tech help. It’s not because I am a dumbass, either, although that’s sometimes debatable. Yahoo will be the subject of another blog on another day.
It’s Go Time
I get an email Sunday morning that their site is fixed, so I submit the request to redelegate AnnounceInviteDelight.com. DreamHost got their servers back in order over the weekend, too.
I also submit a request with DreamHost to get a static IP. That will allow me to change the nameservers on DreamHost to point the web and email hosting back to Yahoo. I then have a custom DNS entry (A Record for those scoring at home) to point the web hosting back to DreamHost at the new static IP.
The A record thing is what I had in place for the site that I pulled back from DH, so I knew the drill. It just takes 2-3 days for the static IP address to get setup, and then more time for the DNS changes to propagate once all the fancy footwork is done. It’s a really easy process, but it takes days for the hamsters to run through the tubes.
So the email is working through Yahoo now. She still can’t send email from Outlook, though. She calls HP support to get help setting Outlook up. She’s money with Outlook, but it is a new computer. With Vista. Which is Windows.
Turns out port 25 (the default) was maybe being blocked on the outbound mail, so she had to change the config to port 587. Schwing! Mail sent. Barrett makes a mental note: remember the port 587 thing in the future.
Phew. What a week. Now I need to find a new host. A rails-friendly host at that.