Dreamhost issues: Not all their fault

Yesterday was the end of a 24 hour period where my site was inaccessible. Everything connected fine (the panel, FTP, shell access, etc.), I just couldn’t access the site in the browser. And only rpheath.com was acting up. All other sites (including subdomains of rpheath.com) were working perfectly. And of course, there were no errors in the log files (with the exception of “Incomplete headers blah blah” in the crash logs). But get this: I modified my 500.html page just a bit, and when I put it on the server, it wiped it out completely (0kb). Then, you no longer got the 500.html page, but instead a blank white screen because there was no source in that file. About 2 hours later, my site turned into a directory listing, which was completely unacceptable. I tried adding index.html for the time being, just to at least get rid of the directory listing. But the transfer kept failing. Eventually, it uploaded, but again wiped out the source leaving me with a 0kb index file. I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on.

After trying several methods to FTP this index file, I finally got some direction when using FireFTP. It returned an error saying “550 index.html: disk quota exceeded.” After scratching my head (since I had 223 GB of space left), I decided to go through the panel a bit. Well, of the few users on my account, the main user had been limited to 50 MB (which said I was using 1918% of available space!), while all others didn’t have a limit set (meaning they got the full 223 GB). It turns out, if you modify email settings (which I had done), that can reflect upon your user settings as well, which I didn’t know. So I removed the limit and Dreamhost enforced the change and I was back up and running.

Dreamhost has been very helpful via their support, but that still doesn’t excuse the downtime. Things seem to be fine now, though. I guess as part of your Dreamhost troubleshooting checklist, make sure your users aren’t restricted in any way, because the errors aren’t obvious. At least they weren’t for me.