500 Internal Server Error
Currently, all my sites are hosted by Dreamhost. For the most part this has been a pleasant experience but I’ve noticed a number of issues in the last couple weeks and have finally decided to move all my sites back to my own server. I really don’t want to do this as it’s somewhat bothersome having to maintain my own server for a few sites that don’t really do much, but at the same time I’ll at least have a bit more control over what’s happening and if it breaks I’ll have nobody to blame but myself. :)
What made me decide to do this?
- Last week I tried to make some DNS changes and noticed that it took hours for my changes to completely replicate. While investigating I noticed some strange happenings in their DNS servers as well; they were shooting back different zone serials when queried. This in and of itself is not abnormal as Dreamhost uses three DNS servers, right? Well, the strange part is that the same DNS server returned different serials upon subsequent queries. An example would be if I queried ns1.dreamhost.com; first it would bring back serial 3, then serial 7, then serial 4 again. They probably have load balanced clusters or something fancy like that. No big deal, issues like this are inherent in highly scaled systems, but enough to encourage me to move DNS somewhere else. I’ve been using rollernet.us off and on for the last couple years and they are once again doing a fantastic job serving DNS for my domains.
- Earlier today I tweeted about some difficulties I was having, primarily that this site was encountering the dreaded “500 Internal Server Error”. Now, one thing I will give Dreamhost is that I’ve always had fantastic customer service from them. Evidently one of their managers noticed my tweet and decided to proactively address the issue. They discovered that my WordPress theme (Vigilance) was causing some issues so they turned the default theme back on. They also noted that my site was using a good amount of memory and recommended that I visit this very informative wiki page to figure out why. Very proactive.
One thing I will never deny about Dreamhost is that their support is better than any other shared hosting provider I’ve ever used. While writing this post I just got another e-mail from support stating that they noticed FastCGI was disabled, recommended I enable it and then turned my Vigilance theme back on. Impressive that they will go to those lengths to help me out, especially considering I never contacted support in the first place.
I know this post may seem like a slam against Dreamhost but it’s really not intended that way. For probably 99.9% of their customers they provide quality service at a very reasonable price. They just don’t do everything I desire so I shall happily move on.