dreamhost posts

I have finally, effectively, fully said goodbye to Dreamhost after around 14 years. Continue reading post "#4018"

I have finally shut down my DreamCompute server on Dreamhost after my recent four day downtime incident. I was waiting on a client to move her DNS to the new server, but the old one was having more problems in the interim. Continue reading post "DreamCompute account cancelled"

My server, and with it my blog, a client site, and other web properties, was down for four days. I put in a support ticket and didn't get a response until the fourth day. I've been with Dreamhost since 2009, and using DreamCompute since 2017, but I don't think the product gets nearly the focus that their shared / managed stuff does. I use Digital Ocean at work, and it has been a much more polished and solid product for unmanaged VPS. That is where my site is now hosted.

Dreamhost has added a nicer DNS management interface, along with some other updates to its panel. Continue reading post "#3322"

There was another DreamCompute incident leading to downtime of my site / server. Continue reading post "DreamCompute downtime incident 2020"

I transferred this site's domain (tobymackenzie.com) from Dreamhost to Porkbun. Continue reading post "Domain transferred"

This site was down tonight, possibly for a couple hours, seemingly due to another issue with DreamCompute. Continue reading post "#2486"

My server and site were down for about 16 hours from Tuesday evening (≈18:08) to Wednesday morning (≈10:36). This was due to a significant problem that occurred due to an upgrade to the Ceph system running Dreamcompute. Numerous people were affected, based on Twitter posts, and we still have little information about what happened.

So, this site was down for like 16 hours due to a botched update of DreamCompute…

Alright. After much effort, I have moved my site from Dreamhost shared hosting to their DreamCompute (unmanaged VPS). I now have my own (virtual) server to do with as I please. Continue reading post "Move: Shared to VPS server"

I decided to contact Dreamhost about my Apache logs showing 200 statuse codes for all mod_rewrite responses. It took seven back-and-forths to get across what was happening, discuss options, and conclude that "DreamHost systems are configured with a default environment meant to meet the most common webapp and customer requirements". Continue reading post "Dreamhost 200 status log conclusion"

I've done some more testing on the problem I mentioned before of all requests showing up as 200's in the Apache log on my Dreamhost shared server. I'm pretty sure it's specific to their mod_rewrite module. Continue reading post "Dreamhost, mod_rewrite, and logged status codes"

Dreamhost must've had an outage of some sort this (last) morning. I noticed a l…

Got moved to a new server in a new datacenter by Dreamhost this weekend. Seems …

Dreamhost now has PHP 7, so I've switched my main sites to it. Seem at least sl…

On my site, I'm using Apache's 'mod_deflate' and 'mod_filter' to compress my com…

Struggling to figure out why every response from my Symfony application is showi…

My sites are now HTTPS-enabled with LetsEncrypt. It was easy to set up with Dreamhost's panel. It was just a few clicks and some waiting. This is the first time my own sites have been available over HTTPS. I've been wanting to do it for a while, but it was kind of costly until the free LetsEncrypt became available. This brings my sites in line with the "HTTPS Everywhere" movement. I've also been wanting to play with the new installable apps forming standard for making web apps installable almost like native apps.

I had written a post before about how I'm setting my security-related headers. I've now added an HTTPS related header in a similar manner: Upgrade-Insecure-Requests and HSTS.

Dreamhost now supports LetsEncrypt even with shared hosting. LetsEncrypt provid…