I (heart) Dreamhost

You were expecting a blogging recap, right? Well, I wrote almost NO posts this past week — seriously, you could probably count them on one hand. But still, this is a different kind of blogging recap.

Thursday night, I tried to login to Small Business Search Marketing, but after about 20 seconds of trying, the browser spit back this error message:

Redirect Loop

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

The browser has stopped trying to retrieve the requested item. The site is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete.

* Have you disabled or blocked cookies required by this site?
* NOTE: If accepting the site’s cookies does not resolve the problem, it is likely a server configuration issue and not your computer.

The blog itself was fine – visitors didn’t know anything was wrong. It was just an admin login issue. I cleared cookies, reset my browser, did everything possible — even reset the domain/hosting at Dreamhost. Still couldn’t login.

I have about 6-8 blogs hosted in this one account at Dreamhost, and discovered that I had the same problem on the @U2 blog — but all the others were fine; no login troubles at all. Crazy!

Did some research online, but didn’t find any answers — just some others having the same problem.

So I finally gave in and contacted Dreamhost tech support. Someone named JJ helped me a bit last night, but we couldn’t solve it and I was super tired and called it a night. This morning, Robert in tech support picked up the support ticket and emailed me out of the blue. The problem was still there, but he couldn’t reproduce it until I gave him my login details. Sure enough, he couldn’t login, either.

He turned off all my blog plugins and was able to login. After logging in, he turned the plugins back on — one at a time — and made sure they were all updated to the latest version. After that, he was unable to replicate the login error. And sure enough, after I cleared my cookies one more time in Firefox, I was able to login, too.

w00t!

Robert did the same thing on the 2nd blog, and all was good with the world. He thinks it may have been related to not using the latest version of Akismet. In any case, after about 18 hours of back and forth, Dreamhost solved the problem for me. I used their customer service survey form to give this feedback:

Both Robert and JJG have been EXTREMELY HELPFUL with sorting out these strange WordPress “Redirect Loop” issues I was having on two of my blogs.

I can’t underestimate how happy I am with the support team you guys have. Please give them big payraises, or some extra vacation time, or whatever. They deserve it.

Thanks so much, and PLEASE keep up the great work.

Dreamhost has had at least one major server disaster in the 2+ years I’ve been with them, and they took a lot of flack for it. But they handled that situation very well with complete transparency on their blog. And every time I’ve needed help, they’ve been quick to respond, quick to fix things, and good at explaining what was wrong and how they fixed it.

And that’s why I (heart) Dreamhost. If you’re looking for a hosting service like this, here are a couple links: my affiliate link or just go to Dreamhost.com.

So there’s your blogging recap for this week.