More on Dreamhost downtime

The last 4-5 days have been very frustrating, since my site was down 9 out of 10 times I would check it. Things have been acting a little better for me the latter half of yesterday, but I thought I would go back and look at the impact downtime can cause. Here’s a plot from Google Analytics showing some of the activity around my site from January 8th, 2007 to January 15th, 2007. Friday was the last day my site was normal.

So, for last week, I went from 45 visits to 8 visits (160 pageviews down to 19 pageviews) over 4 days. That’s somewhere around an 82% drop in visits and an 88% drop in pageviews, all because of downtime. It doesn’t particularly matter for my site, but what if, instead of 45-50 visits per day, I was getting 45,000-50,000 visits per day? And what if I made a living by selling ads or some sort of service? When downtime causes an 82% drop in overall visits, which then causes an 88% drop in pageviews, it becomes somewhat of a problem. Of course it would be worse if I were losing money over this downtime, but still, I’m a paying customer who expects to be able to post to my site whenever I want. Those kinds of numbers simply aren’t fair to anyone.

At any rate, I hope they get things straightened out. I’ve contacted support again about this issue. I’d rather know there’s a problem than get yet another response such as “Well, your site seems to be working fine now…” I guess we’ll see.