DreamHost had a bad day today. Please note this is the best place to check status if your website is down, and you can’t login to your control panel:

http://status.dreamhost.com/

If things are really bad, even that URL might be down, and it’s best to check Twitter.com and search for @dhstatus, you can do this here: http://search.twitter.com/

I should note that I’ve been with DreamHost since 2006, and outages like these are not a typical experience. If you have a business that can’t tolerate its website being down for several hours, you should probably not have your website hosted with a shared hosting company (and be paying way, way more than the $10/month that DreamHost charges).

For my own business and the small businesses I work with, we can tolerate some downtime occasionally, and so for us DreamHost is a great choice for inexpensive hosting. I advise my clients to first try to notify DreamHost if they have an issue, if they can’t login, check the status.dreamhost.com website to see if there is a systemic issue.

But please don’t panic. After watching the very scary news from Japan, it really puts issues like having a website being down for a few hours into perspective.

If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill