Only because I had a temporary notice up yesterday about it, I'll mention that my site outage has finally been resolved. Dreamhost had performed a long overdue but inevitably problematic major upgrade to their server software for their shared hosting plans. I, and as far as I can tell a handful of others, subsequently could not run any CGI scripts. Static pages and PHP scripts continued to work. The cause: stricter suEXEC policies, and broken Apache configuration for some users involving which Unix groups are permitted to run scripts. An understandable problem with a straightforward fix, and expected in the light of the nature of the upgrade.

It's a problem that it took over six days, and repeated support contacts, to fix a very serious site outage for a customer. I don't think I've ever had a customer service response faster than 48 hours, which is a little disconcerting, and for this one, the first two responses neglected to take the problem to a complete resolution. But for the fewer-than-a-dozen outages I've noticed in over 8 years (!) of being a Dreamhost customer, this is the first outage I've seen that wasn't caused by something that would set off their pagers (hardware outages, massive power failure). DH has room for improvement in their processes and their software, but they're such nice folks, and they're so cheap, that they continuously win out over my abortive attempts to self-host on a box in my basement.

No points this round, but I rescind the Punishment By Blog temporarily enacted during the outage. It's just good to be back.