Christian Yorke

Lord Byron was on to something when he wrote, “Adversity is the first path to truth…” (Don Juan (canto X11, st. 50)). I recently put this statement to the test when the all powerful Dreamhost unilaterally disabled my charming blog. As I wrestled with this unexpected crisis I soon realised that the second path to truth is determination, and that ultimately all paths can only be navigated with a good knowledge of inspirational nouns and adjectives. I also realised that Dreamhost’s path is strewn with twisted jargon. 

Many of you will be familiar with Dreamhost. It is a mainstream web hosting outfit that sells itself as follows:

“…we do things a little differently around here…”

“…We’re a tight knit family…”

“…we love it here and we’re all focused on hosting…we’re not faceless robots…we’re looking forward to welcoming you to our family.”

So you get their drift. They are a self-styled loving entity with dazzling skills, a non-corporate structure and powerful arms to scoop you up when things get tough. They sounded genuinely friendly, and made the process of starting a blog seem easy and cool. Before I signed up with them somebody explained that Dreamhost had a dark side, and that maybe the Dreamhost nerds were trying to do irony with their soothing promises. But I knew better, and reminded my advisor (many times) that Dreamhost is a FAMILY, and families are sincere.

How wrong I was.

I am, in web-speak, a newbie. I have been running this website for a few months, using a Dreamhost shared server and Wordpress. And when I say ”running” the site I actually mean stumbling along like a simpleton. Getting to grips with the cyber-world has been one hell of a trip. That famous picture of a troubled parrot had never before summed me up so completely. Adversity was never far away as I gradually learnt my widgets from my Googlebots, added some exciting plugins and started generating some content. After much frustration I had the site linked to Twitter, Flickr, Digg and Facebook and was attracting some hits. I felt at one with the hip Dreamhost gang.

And then, one dark day last week (after a brutal day at work, with all the usual introspection and mental pain) my blog was no more. It had been removed from the cyber matrix by an unseen force. I immediately nose dived into a depressed state. I had no idea what was happening; had my site been vapourised? After much confusion I discovered an e-mail, sent earlier that day from one of Dreamhost’s non-robots. It read thus:

“I am working on the load on your hosting machine and found your user eating up a lot of CPU…so I checked the access.log and found the problem…”

As I read this I wondered what a” hosting machine” was and whether it was the same as my “user” (or whether my “user” was a different, more specific piece of jargon). I also wondered what a “CPU” was and how much of it had been “eaten” by my “user”. I was encouraged, however, by the promise of a solution, and read the following:

“4 195.210.57.83
    15 115.88.240.91
    36 66.249.68.102
  3552 67.205.56.9″

So there it was. Four lines of meaningless numbers. The e-mail continued by explaining something about an apache server, an access.log (again), code loops and something called .htaccess. The upshot was that my blog had been re-named (to something that Dreamhost was keeping secret), I had to fix my “user”, get the load down and finally enable the blog once more. No doubt this should have been a doddle, but I still didn’t understand my blog’s crime and felt that the “we love you, we love your blogs, it’s what we do” team at Dreamhost was tormenting me with the mirage of a solution amid a haze of impenetrable jargon; that hybrid, pretentious, ultra-technical nonsense that renders the English language incomprehensible. 

I wrote a slightly unpleasant reply to Dreamhost (that I’d rather not share at this point) demanding a clear explanation of the problem, and (to be fair) soon received the following clarification:

“I am sorry that you’re not happy with my message but I tried to explain
as best I could – if you would like it in the simplest terms here was the
server load with your site enabled:

 10:34:44 up 26 days, 17:23, 12 users,  load average: 131.47, 149.02,
122.45

Here is the server load with your site disabled:

 12:08:52 up 26 days, 18:57, 10 users,  load average: 7.60, 10.57, 11.02

…I simply re-named the folder you store the site
data in (that results in the site being down until you can  name it back
and fix it). I also directed you to investigate your plugins which are
actually not at all standard:

akismet                           fidgetr
slidepress           wp-greet-box
all-in-one-seo-pack               flickr-slideshow-wrapper
stats                wp-hashcash
bookx                             google-sitemap-generator
streampad            wp-shortstat2
comenta-wp                        hello.php
tweetable            wp-stats-dashboard
commentcontrol.php                index.php
wp-addpub            wp-super-cache
disable-wordpress-core-update     page-flip-image-gallery
wp-db-backup         wp-twitterbadge
disable-wordpress-plugin-updates  podpress
wp-flashtime-widget
dm-albums                         post-rich-videos-and-photos-galleries
wp-flv.php

That all-in-one-seo-pack for esample is actually a terrible resource hog
and can take down a server all on its own…If you can’t or won’t find and remove whatever is
causing the loop I identified you’re welcome to run your site on a
Private Server where it will not effect other customers…but I am afraid that it is beyond the scope of support to troubleshoot
your custom installation for you…”

So, the Dreamhost non-robot, who I had (until then) thought of as a brother had set it out in the simplest of terms; which worried me because I still had no idea where I would find the renamed folder that now held my blog hostage, or what I should do if I found it. There was to be no help “troubleshooting” this calamity. I was on my own. It was Byron’s whole adversity and truth thing.

It was a few days before I got back to fixing this problem because sometimes I have to sleep, and when not sleeping I have a demanding day job. But when I finally found the time I went after adversity with a vengeance, trawling the net to learn about CPUs and disabled Dreamhost sites. I discovered that I was not alone. The forums were full of bitter complaints about how Dreamhost shut sites down without warning. It appears that although Dreamhost offers unlimited bandwidth and storage, there is a CPU limit hidden in the small print. That might be reasonable, but if a CPU limit is so critical then Dreamhost should TELL its customers.

Nevertheless, I was determined to find a solution and I started down a twisted cyber path to truth. By now I knew that all the disruption had been caused when Dreamhost disabled my website by renaming it. The solution was to delete certain plugins and then return the site to its original name. I know that sounds easy, which it is if you know what you are doing. I would now like to share with you, in PLAIN ENGLISH, how I fixed the “problem” and got this lovely blog up and running again. Here goes.

1) Access your Dreamhost web panel. That means going to www.dreamhost.com and clicking on “web panel” and then typing in your user name and password. (I told you this was in plain English!)

2) In the sidebar (the list of things on the left of the screen), click on “manage domains”

3) The screen will then list your domain name, or names if you have more than one. Select the domain that has been renamed/disabled and click on “WebFTP”.

4) Enter your username and password again and then click “wp-content” in the column headed “name”

5) In the next screen click on “plugins” in the column headed “name”

6) In the next screen click the box (in the left hand column headed “add”) next to the plugins that you are willing to delete. Try to select the plugins that seemed like a good idea at the time, but that you don’t really use or need. Then click “delete”, which is towards the top right of the screen.

7) Click Directory Tree “root” which will take you to a screen that includes your renamed site. It is likely to be called something like “yourblog.com.renamedbydreamhost”. Select your renamed site by clicking the “add” column, amend it to the original name of your blog, and then click “rename”, which is towards the top right of your screen. And then you are done! Your old blog will work and you will be a hero.

Discovering that your cherished blog has disappeared is a nasty business. In my opinion Dreamhost’s support-bots are too wrapped up in jargon to really help us newbies. In fact the help they gave me was shit. However, adversity (and some determination) set me on a Byronic path to truth and I feel better for the experience. I have learnt a lot about the machinery behind the (seemingly) user friendly blogs and next time (and I’m sure that there will be a next time) I will be better able to get my site up and running.

I certainly hope that some of you find this helpful. Happy blogging!

Tags: adversity, blog, cpu, domain manager, Dreamhost, family, internet, irony, jargon, lord byron, nerds, newbie, parrot, plain english, plugins, rename site, solution, troubleshoot, twisted, web panel, widget

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 10:48 pm and is filed under THE CY CHRONICLE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.