If you’ve visited this blog on any day this week, or you’re a subscriber to the RSS feed, or you otherwise tried to have any interaction with anything at this domain, you would likely have had a zero experience. Zero in the sense of the site just not being there.

The site has been down at various times every day this week, the longest outage being 9 hours yesterday until the early hours this morning.

You’d typically get a 500 or 503 error displayed in your browser if you came here during an outage, something like this:

My hosting service, DreamHost – who I’ve been with for nearly four years – has not replied to any of my support emails since Tuesday as the outages continue. That’s the reason I’m calling it a day on DreamHost.

No one can guarantee 100% uptime (I don’t think anyone actually claims to do that, do they?). Outages and issues – expected as well as unexpected – happen with every hosting service, and DreamHost is no exception.

The last email I received back from DreamHost support on Tuesday had a clear explanation on what was going on:

They told me that on Monday, too. Yet the outages continue.

Maybe this all suggests that my hosting needs are something other than shared hosting, more likely a dedicated server. I had been thinking about this already, considering whether to go for DreamHost’s Virtual Private Server service, a shared solution that looks as good as a dedicated server but without the cost of that.

However, what I have decided today is that DreamHost and I will part company as soon as I find an alternate service. I’m going to assess some things first including a better understanding of exactly what I need a host for, how I use it, what my sites do, etc. In reality, almost all my needs are for a reliable place that I can host WordPress sites and have confidence in the support system that they really do understand blogs and the infrastructure that supports them (DreamHost certainly do).

Trouble is, most other hosting services I’ve looked at seem geared to the old website models of hundreds of email addresses and databases, guest books, shopping carts and checkouts, all ready for e-commerce.

Totally not what I need.

Luckily, I’m asking some smart people for advice. So I hope to have a solution soon. Meanwhile my apologies if DreamHost’s service here continues to be, well, not here at all.