Site outage on 2021-11-26

[Phil Harvey]

Dreamhost sucks!  They disabled exiftool.org for the 3rd time due to high demands on the server.  Of course, this time it was on the first day of my vacation, so it was down for a week before I could fix it.

When a web site is being hammered by some IP, instead of blocking the IP dreamhost disables the whole web site.  This is really bad customer service.

I recommend avoiding dreamhost for web hosting.

- Phil

[Joanna Carter]

Wow! That is so bad, especially when it deprives people of an absolutely essential resource.

What can I say but "welcome back" 

[Neal Krawetz]

@Phil:  If you want a different hosting provider, I'm willing to volunteer.

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Neal,

Thanks for the offer.  I may consider taking you up on this if dreamhost continues to screw us around.

I had a cron job in place that would block the offending user and re-enable the web site, but it was looking for "DISABLED" in the name of the dreamhost-disabled directory.  Unfortunately they changed the name slightly this time so my script didn't kick in.  I've updated the script to look for any name now, so it should work no matter what they call it (as long as they don't move it to some other directory or change permissions or something), so hopefully this will be fixed automatically next time if it happens again.

- Phil

[Hayo Baan]

I had a cron job in place that would block the offending user and re-enable the web site, but it was looking for "DISABLED" in the name of the dreamhost-disabled directory.  Unfortunately they changed the name slightly this time so my script didn't kick in.  I've updated the script to look for any name now, so it should work no matter what they call it (as long as they don't move it to some other directory or change permissions or something), so hopefully this will be fixed automatically next time if it happens again.

I'm surprised you even have to do that. I would expect it to be standard practice for a webhoster to keep your site running. No matter what attacks happen... Hey, it's not your fault the attacks happen...

But yeah, welcome back! 

[jfarkas]

Hi Phil,

We (CLink Media) would be also glad to provide you a dedicated VM on our bare metals (not our core business, it is simply part of our infrastructure)

Janos

[Mac2]

Of course, this time it was on the first day of my vacation, so it was down for a week before I could fix it.

Isn't it always 

I must say that I was quite a bit worried  since ExifTool is so important for so many people out there.

I have found a mirror of the exiftool.org site on SourceForge (http://exiftool.sourceforge.net/) (not even HTTPS) and I wonder if this is something official or some sort of quickly-pulled a scam?
I'm aware of the official Github.

[Phil Harvey]

I have found a mirror of the exiftool.org site on SourceForge (http://exiftool.sourceforge.net/) (not even HTTPS) and I wonder if this is something official or some sort of quickly-pulled a scam?
I'm aware of the official Github.

The SourceForge mirror is official.  So is github, but it doesn't mirror web pages and download files like SourceForge.

A list of official ExifTool web pages is here (and here).

- Phil

[Hubert]

Very glad to see you're back. 

[Phil Harvey]

Update after contacting DreamHost technical support:

Once again, DreamHost offers no support at all other than recommending I upgrade to a more expensive package, even though the current plan was supposed to include "unlimited traffic".

Thanks for contacting DreamHost technical support. I'm Manager. I checked
the notes on your account and found that your site is causing a high load
to occur on the shared hosting server. To avoid getting disabled in the
future I suggest that you upgrade to our VPS service where you will be
able to get a higher RAM allocation to help with the loads your site is
generating.

And in the DreamHost advertisements, you will see lies like this:

Fast & Reliable
If your website is slow or down,
then you are losing customers,
conversion and search engine
rankings.

Ironic that they understand the importance of keeping a web site up, yet shut it down when the traffic gets too high.

                                                            

- Phil

[greybeard]

Welcome back - was wondering what had gone wrong.

My web site runs from a server in the front room - but I don't recommend that for reliability either.

Occasionally I get hit with some sort of attack where someone tries to run hundreds or thousands of different commands - but when that happens the ip address keeps switching (so it seems like multiple users).

[Phil Harvey]

It's been a year since this problem, and since then I have enabled load-limiting features in the forum to temporarily take the forum down if the dreamhost server is too busy.  While this has resulted in a number of short outages, dreamhost hasn't disabled our web site since then, and I came back after my vacation in December to find the forum still working.

- Phil