As visitors may have noticed, disparate.info has suffered a number of outages over the last few days. My host, DreamHost, has experienced a number of problems with the servers powering this site (and many others) since it began moving its equipment to a new location. The recurring issues are disconcerting because, on more than one occasion, DreamHost has announced that it had resolved the problems only to discover that it hadn’t. I’ve been a customer for four years, but never before have I experienced problems of this magnitude, and the ongoing issues are testing my patience.
For one thing, I recently developed a plugin for WordPress, the Tag Dropdown Widget. On Tuesday, the plugin was added to the WordPress plugin directory, which led to a spike in traffic from interested users who wanted to see the plugin in action. When my site is periodically inaccessible, it does not instill a great deal of confidence in potential users of my plugin, who likely wonder why they should install something developed by an individual whose site doesn’t even work. I have also been unable to complete documentation for the plugin, nor can I answer questions from plugin users. Thankfully, the plugin is fairly straight forward, so I can only hope that users are finding success implementing it (not that I’d know if they weren’t).
More than anything else, the incessant downtime is wearing on me because running this site has become my sole diversion since being laid off in June. My hope was that this site could become a source of income to supplement my unemployment and that generating content would prevent me from wasting hours in front of the television. This week, neither has happened. I can only hope that those individuals who have begun following my postings will not lose interest after being unable to access my blog.
In a sign of how overwhelmed DreamHost must be by this problem, my support inquiries have gone unanswered for much longer than is normal. The company must be feeling the pressure at this point, considering it offers a 100% uptime guarantee. I can only hope that when the moves are complete and the issues resolved, that what little patience I have left is rewarded with faster, more reliable service. Otherwise, I’ll be moving to Media Temple.