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Have you heard of Dreamhost? It's a company offering inexpensive web hosting options. A lot of organizations use Dreamhost to host their websites and provide email services, among other things. This website, too, is hosted by them. Unfortunately, their service record is far from good, but they've usually kept everyone up to date whenever there were problems.

Guess what? They aren't doing that right now, and customers are angry. And they're talking.

I've been following the misadventures of Dreamhost on Twitter since Sunday evening, after returning home from a meeting to find that my email service was no longer working. While the coldacid.net website has remained up all this time, many other Dreamhost customers have found that their sites have fallen off of the internet, or suffering from periods of downtime for the entire past week.

Reactions of other users have ranged from the purely angry (Jenty: "Ok this is NOT funny anymore #Dreamhost!! My site is DOWN AGAIN!! #fail") to displays of humour (brianutley: "@dhstatus thanks Dreamhost for being so fast!") to plain old curiousness (mochadad: "@dhstatus What is going on with your servers, DreamHost?").

Apparently, despite this latest bout with downtime, Dreamhost has actually been improving its uptime stats. At least, according to a graph posted to TwitPic by blogger and entrepreneur Josh Paul. Cold comfort to people who rely on their Dreamhost hosted sites to earn income or entice customers to their businesses.

Every few minutes, a new batch of Dreamhost-related tweets show up through Twitter Search. Many have been complaints. Some have been requests for information. And others are dissatisfied customers swearing off the service for good. Meanwhile, both Dreamhost accounts, @dreamhost and @dhstatus, have been eerily silent.

In this day and age where customers demand 99%+ uptime, and realtime information about problems, Dreamhost is really digging itself a hole. While their establishment of the Dreamhost Status blog and the two Twitter accounts were a great move, the fact that they do such a poor job of keeping them updated might end up hurting them more than had they never created them in the first place. Of course, now that they're here, removing them would be even worse for them. Welcome to the social media tar pit, Dreamhost. Now get my email working again and everyone's sites back up.