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DreamHost Works to Restore Email Services After Prolonged Outage

Los Angeles-based web hosting provider DreamHost is continuing to resolve an issue with its email services that started on Monday when it noticed “extremely high loads on [its] homiemail-sub5 and homiemail-sub3 email clusters.” As of this morning, there was still no estimate into when all services would be fully restored.

On its status page on Tuesday, DreamHost informed customers that it had to perform “additional emergency maintenance on two of [its] mail filer systems on the homiemail-sub5 mail cluster of servers.” At the time, it was anticipated to only impact some customers for a “few hours” but the issue lasted days for many customers.

DreamHost has provided a statement to The WHIR by email on Friday:

On July 25th we discovered one of our email clusters was not performing properly, and we tracked it down to a pair of problematic file servers. When dealing with critical data like email we have to be abundantly cautious, so we removed access to those file servers to troubleshoot. This caused some customers to be unable to receive email, but we were still accepting it and no data was lost. All inbound emails have continued to be received by our system. The impact at the peak was about 4.5% of all mailboxes, and at this time over 85% of those affected have already had service fully restored.

We are continuing to work toward the complete resolution of this issue while being especially cautious about individual data and email needs. Looking forward, development of a next gen email cluster that eliminates this sort of issue altogether has already been underway for over a year, and we expect to see that go into production in the next couple of months.

As always with a web hosting outage, customers took their frustrations to Twitter.

The WHIR will update this post once services are fully restored.

Source: TheWHIR