Disaster happens — even to web hosting companies. You get operating system/software issues, server hardware issues, network glitches and data centre issues and even interrupted electricity that plague your hosting business. Worse, when they all come one after another within a short time span. It is what happened to DreamHost last month, and they are still in the process of picking up the pieces. Many web sites were affected, and outrages were everywhere around the blogosphere.

While the engineers were working on the technical side of the issue, Josh Jones used the DreamHost blog to fix up their publicity and relationship with their customers. Great communication. Good honesty. And sometimes in the very competitive low-margin industry like web hosting, it is what matters.

Quoted from Scobleizer,

How do you treat your customers when you let them down? DreamHost did about as good a job as I can imagine after they were down during a power outage that they couldn’t control. Read the comments where customers are coming back — corporate blogging done right.

It is interesting to see how more and more web hosting companies are doing up their blogs. Not just as a PR tool, it is also a great media to communicate with their customers, if “comments” are used properly. It is something I don’t see in Site5’s blog as the commenting is always disabled. Then you might as well calling it “Company News”.

Their status blog is also making it very transparent on what’s going on in their facilities (which server is down, what is the cause, etc). There are people scared because of so many servers going up and down in those status pages, but I consider them very helpful. Remember, DreamHost is a large web hosting company with many servers, and as long as there is hardware involved, they will fail.

Personally I don’t feel much of down time. I am hosting FuCoder.com and FOCUS UNSW there, and probably they are not on the affected file servers. They are pretty low volume websites anyway. I do noticed that my server has changed from a dual Opteron to a dual Xeon with HT.

I will probably not host critical sites on DreamHost, regardless of last month’s outage. Not because of their historical record of downtime. “Mission criticial” and “shared hosting” just don’t mix in my book. But I’ll continue to use it to host hobby sites and media files, as its value is hard to beat.