Announcement Listory

The story of how a bad random number generator can result in 3 hour announcement list delays.

Some of you may use our Announcement List feature to send e-mailing to a happy group of subscribers (happy because they all opted-in)!

Some of you may have noticed that recently it was taking a long time to send out announcements.. they’d generally go two to three hours after the time you’d scheduled them for.

Some of you may have been getting angry about this..

Please be happy, it’s fixed now!

The first few times people reported this we thought it was just a temporary problem, like maybe there were just a lot of messages going out and the servers couldn’t keep up. We weren’t able to reproduce the problem and generally if you can’t reproduce the problem it’s going to be too hard to find and fix to make it worth the effort.

Finally yesterday, we were able to reproduce the problem.. right in front of our eyes the mailing lists were going out two hours behind schedule! Hooray! Well, actually BOO! that’s bad … but also, Hooray! now we can maybe fix it!

It turned out the root of the problem was not the sending of the mailing list itself, but actually another thing the same mailing list sender script did.. send out confirmation emails to addresses people have manually added to the list from our web panel.

But first let me give you a little “Announcement List History”…

It used to be whenever somebody wanted to subscribe a bunch of people to their list from our panel, our panel would immediately attempt to send out the confirmation emails. This was fine when people were subscribing less than say, 20 addresses.. but if you tried sending hundreds of email addresses right there in real time it would take so long that the panel would usually time out in the listmaster’s web browser!

This was no good because A. it looked bad, B. not all emails would always go out, and C. people would generally get scared and re-submit their confirmation list, thereby possibly “spamming” the very people we’re trying to make sure don’t get spammed!

Soon we implemented a better way. Instead of sending all the emails immediately, we’d just INSERT them into a database and then when our script ran to send announcements it’d also send the confrimation emails based on that table!

And everything was great for a few months!

Then, strangely we started getting reports the panel was timing out AGAIN! Why, God, why?! Well, it turned out even INSERTing thousands of emails into the database was too slow for the panel (which is a bit strange, but I guess not unreasonable).

So, to fix it this time, we created a temporary table that would just immediately store the whole list of addresses in just one INSERT. Then later (during the sending) we’d break that list into it’s thousands of individual components and INSERT them into the main table. (The reason we need that table at all is to track the unique “goop” … something like 005lcw1grDw5jA … for when subscribers verify their email by clicking the link in the email they get).

Back to the present.

As it turns out, the sending of actual announcements has been getting held up by the thousands of INSERTs the script was doing to send confirmations to people being added from the web panel!

Well, the first thing we did was separate these two scripts.. there’s no reason announcements need to wait on confirmation emails! That’s just dumb. So that fixed it.. but why were these INSERTs taking so long?

After some poking around, it turned out the problem was actually that “goop” stuff! You see, we need them all to be unique, and so this is the code we were using:

do {
## create the goop!
srand(time() ^ ($$ + ($$ << 15)) ); #gets a nice random seed.
my $p = rand();

my @chars = ('a'..'z', 'A'..'Z', '0'..'9');
my ($salt) = $chars[rand($#chars)] . $chars[rand($#chars)];
($goop) = crypt($p, $salt);
} until ($db->Insert(’mailinglist_approve’,
['goop','address','name','list','domain','sub_date'],
[$goop,$address,$name,$self->address,$self->domain,sref('now()')]));


Basically, we’d get some random goop, try and INSERT it into the table, and if that goop was already in there, it’d fail. Then we’d just create a new random goop and try again. Given the number of potential goops and the number of entries in the table at any given time, we should basically NEVER have to INSERT more than once. This is nice and good except for one part:

srand(time() ^ ($$ + ($$ << 15)) ); #gets a nice random seed.
my $p = rand();


It turns out that because the seed is based on the current time, we were not getting a “nice random seed” every time we ran it. The time only updated once a second, and so our goop would only change once a second! That meant we would do dozens of failing INSERTs over and over and over each second until the goop finally changed. And those dozens (hundreds?) of INSERTs were making the table slowww…

After a little bit of research on better random number generating techniques, we changed that code to be:

my $p = rand(`head -1 /dev/urandom');


Which actually gives you a good random seed ALL the time. Immediately the number of INSERTs we were doing dropped exponentially and everything is now fast and happy!

And that’s how a bad random number generator can result in 3 hour announcement list delays.

Google Talk’s Secret Mistresses

Just about anybody reading this blog has probably heard about Google Talk (beta) already.

Nonetheless, let me recap for you. Google Talk is Google’s new foray into Instant Messaging and Voice over IP, using Jabber for the IM side and SIP for the VoIP.

Currently, Google Talk users can only IM and call other Google Talk users. Ha, just what the world needed, yet another IM/voice chat service.

Actually, this could be just what the world needed.

You see, although Google Talk only connects to itself today, Google is using open standards… which means it’d be pretty darn easy for them to open it up to talk with say, I dunno, DreamHost customers.

And actually, not only would it be pretty darn easy, Google’s even said that’s exactly their plan! Before the thing gets out of beta bobstires12@gmail.com should be able to IM bob@bobstires.com, and vice-versa.

They also mention they’re already working on VoIP interoperability with Earthlink’s upcoming free offeringas well as SIPphone.com. But more on that later…

Remember when AOL users could only email other AOL users?
And Prodigy users could only email other Prodigy users?
And Compuserve users could only email other Compuserve users?
All the online services of the day were like “walled gardens” for their users to play with each other in complete security and comfort under the watchful eye of a responsible organization.

That sucked.

Email never became mainstream until the real Internet took off and provided a clear open standard for all these disparate systems to hook up. It took a while for all of the big providers to come on board though, because if everybody could talk to each other there’s less of an incentive to sign up for a big provider!

But as the Internet grew, not allowing Internet email (not to mention access), became so much of a liability that even mighty AOL was finally forced to open up. So now bobstires1234567@aol.com can email bob@bobstires.com without a second thought. And the world is a better place.

The IM and VoIP landscape as of August 22nd, 2005 looked a lot like the email landscape did on August 22nd, 1993. There’s AIM, MSN, and Yahoo!, for IM and none of them talk with each other. There’s Skype, Vonage, BroadVoice, and a number of other VoIP providers, and none of them talk to each other.

But wait.. haven’t you ever heard of Trillian?

Okay yes, there are some hacks out there right now that let you be on all three IM providers at once, by signing up for an account with each one. This is feasible because, unlike the email providers of old, all the IM services are free!

But there are problems with the way things are now. For one, good luck starting a competing IM system. For anybody to use it, you’ve got to be able to interface with the big three… and since they all have their own secret way of doing things, you’ll be constantly reverse engineering and hacking things together just to get basic communication going. Whooeee, and good luck supporting file transfers, chat rooms, video conferencing, smiley plug-ins, and whatever else is all the rage with the kiddies today!

Google’s Secret Mistress

The annoying (though excusable) thing is that there IS an open standard for IM that all the services COULD be using… she’s called Ms. Jabber, and you get to use her free with all our hosting accounts.

Ms. Jabber’s address looks exactly like an email address, which means you can run her on your own server and have complete control of your IM-ing destiny. Unfortunately, Ms. Jabber doesn’t speak the same language as the 99.999% of the world who uses AIM/MSN/YIM. Fortunately, people write little plug-ins for Ms. Jabber called “transports” which let her speak French, Spanish, and German all at once, and thereby communicate with the big three IM services.

But Ms. Jabber keeps losing touch with them!

Why? Because, like Navajo code-talkers, AIM/MSN/YIM are always creating new languages to use, and when they do they feel no obligation to keep Ms. Jabber in the loop! I don’t blame them though… Ms. Jabber is the new girl on the block. When ICQ first showed up he had no choice but to come up with his own language, and then later MSN and Yahoo had to do the same because there was no way ICQ/AIM wanted to hear anything those bozos had to say!

And what do you mean VoIP providers don’t talk to each other? Haven’t you ever heard of telephone numbers?

It’s true, VoIP providers are forced into interoperability because they’re trying to break into an industry that’s already standardized. Vonage would have exactly no customers if you couldn’t call non-Vonage telephones with their service! Skype gets away with only allowing you to call other Skype customers because it’s free (and you can call real phone numbers too if you pay).

However, these providers are still creating artificial barriers to VoIP’s broader adoption because they don’t interoperate on the IP-level. Yeah, they can all talk to each other over POTS (plain old telephone system), but that’s not really the point. That’d be like if the old Compuserve allowed emailing AOL users… by just printing out your emails and snail mailing them over to AOL’s headquarters. Then charged you $30 a month extra for the convenience.

VoIP’s Secret Mistress

Her name is SIP, and the mainstream VoIP providers don’t want you to know about her.

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is basically the Jabber of VoIP. Big surprise, a SIP address looks just like an email address, and in theory you can connect to any other SIP address and do any sort of voice/video/text chatting (IM can use SIP too) for free (well, just the cost of bandwidth) over the Internet.

And, all the big VoIP providers (except for Skype) already use her. So, does that mean if you set up a SIP server and get a free SIP client (like maybe from Xten or SJphone) you could call Vonage phones for absolutely nothing?

Yes!

Er, actually… NO!

It turns out, if your Vonage phone number is 1-323-555-1212, you have a SIP address of 13235551212@sip.vonage.net! Or rather, you did. Apparently sometime last year they started hiding SIP from the outside world. So, even though she’s all set up and they in fact use her when making Vonage-to-Vonage calls, they just choose to block the rest of the Internet from her.

How intriguing!

What are they so ashamed of?

Beats me, but I think it’s a little bit of the old AOL mentality. As far as they can see, there’s really no money to be made in direct Internet-to-Internet calling… nobody pays for email or IM, and nobody pays for Skype-to-Skype, so ain’t nobody going to pay for SIP either.

And unlike the AOL of lore, they’ve got nothing else they can charge for besides telephone calls. The sooner the world starts using SIP instead of telephone numbers, the sooner Vonage has got to find a new business model.

So right now their thinking is probably along the lines of “SIP who?”

But… SIP has another lover, one who isn’t ashamed of her. They parade her around for the whole world to see, even shout her name from the top of their web site! They’re SIPphone.com, and they’re the opposite of Vonage.

I think they also plan to make their money on the SIP-to-POTS transition, but at least they’ve resigned themselves to the inevitability of a SIP phone world. When you sign up with SIPphone, you get a phone number in the 747 area code that is also a real-deal SIP address @sipphone.com, totally for free. Like Vonage, they also sell VoIP routers so you can use a regular telephone with your new flame.

So, why hasn’t anybody heard of them? Besides the lack of cool orange TV ads, I think it’s because they don’t offer an unlimited domestic calling plan, and you can only get phone numbers in the 747 area code. C’mon guys, get on the ball! We’re pulling for you over here!

SIP has some other boyfriends too:

There’s Stanaphone.com, who’s sort of like the worst of Vonage and SIPphone put together… you can only get a 517 area code phone number, there are no unlimited domestic calling plans, AND they seem to block SIP from the rest of the world. But they do have the best looking web site.

There’s also FreeWorldDialup.com who is a totally free SIP-only provider. Like some sort of deadbeat hippy, FWD can’t make calls to the regular POTS, but hey, ten years from now nobody will need to, yeah?

There are also some funny characters like KallFree.com who will provide a disguise for SIP when she goes out in public. KallFree.com will map a real POTS phone number (in this case a 360 number) to SIP (if she’s not locked up by Vonage or Stanaphone).
But you can’t call out with it.
Which I guess is useful for mutes.

Finally there’s Skype, who actually made their own pretty cool P2P VoIP implementation (without SIP!), allow you to get lots of area code phone numbers, and are by far the biggest VoIP provider in the world. However, without the loving tenderness of SIP, I think they’re headed for a cold and lonely demise.

But WAIT… just two days ago Skype announced they were creating the “SkypeNet API”! That is, they are committed to opening up their protocol to the world. Theoretically this would allow somebody to make a SIP-to-Skype service (and vice-versa), which hopefully won’t be as flakey as some of the Jabber transports we know and love.

…

But WAIT again… that’s kind of WEIRD how Skype announced the opening of their protocol so recently, no? I wonder if it could have anything to do with, I dunno, GOOGLE TALK?!

Methinks it might.

Skype’s no Google, and even though as of Monday Google had exactly no VoIP or IM customers, I don’t think anybody would be too surprised if they had more than 20% of the market by August 22nd, 2006.

And since Google’s making the right move (ironically also the easy move, because by using the pre-existing open standards they probably saved themselves butt-loads of work) they’re forcing the rest of the industry to think long and hard if they should fight to keep their customers locked inside their “walled gardens,” or whether they should open the doors and get to work making their gardens the best on the Internet.

There are already rumors that Yahoo! is working on Jabber-fying their IM system. It makes sense that they’d be the next to do it, since they have the second smallest market share (after Google). Next will probably be Microsoft, and finally AOL; last as usual because they’ve got the most to lose. But they’ll switch over (or at least make an ultra-reliable Jabber-to-AIM gateway) eventually, or risk losing all those great young eyeballs.

The same thing will happen with VoIP, but I think even faster. The VoIP market is still much tinier than the IM market, and much less mature. The providers are all (except for Skype, who’s opening their API) already in bed with SIP and Google will probably grow pretty quickly to be the #2 provider (after Skype).

I’m 100% certain that by August 22nd, 2015, the entire world will be using SIP addresses for entirely free wireless phone calls. And if I’m wrong, I swear to God I’ll deny the whole thing.

In summary, all of this is a roundabout way of saying, DreamHost is going to start working on providing SIP service @yourowndomain.com. I can’t give you any sort of timeline, but if we don’t do it soon, we’ll do it later. In a few years a web host without SIP and Jabber support will be as rare as a web host today without email support.

Just so that for $100/year you can have a phone number like bob@bobstires.com instead of bobstires12@gmail.com!

It’s a fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud world.

You don’t need me to tell you there’s a lot of skeeziness on the Internet.

Stolen credit cards, spyware, Nigerian 419 scams, identity theft… if it’s possible, some Vietnamese or Romanian is trying it to reunite themselves with your hard-earned cash. (And I don’t mean all Vietnamese and Romanians of course… I just mean that 99% of the sign-ups we get from those countries are FRAUD FRAUD FRAUD FRAUD!)

And quite a lot of them are hosted with DreamHost.

Not on purpose! And not for long.. as soon as we detect their first string of spam or fake paypal website, we shut them down and clean up the mess. But it’s really hard, and recently getting harder, to catch them all before they make their first move. Nowadays, about 20% of our daily sign ups are with stolen credit cards (or stolen paypal accounts), and are for the express purpose of spamming, conning, storing “warez”, or cracking (our system or somebody else’s).

What’s a poor host to do?

Just like there’s no 100% accurate way to filter spam, there’s no 100% accurate way to catch these fraudsters before they’re approved. Even with a 99% success rate, that means a few a week get by, spend a bunch of spam, and get us in trouble with AOL, Paypal, Bank Of America, etc..

We could do something like require a faxed rubbing of the actual credit card for every new sign up, but what a hassle for the 80% of people who aren’t fraud! We could manually review each account for tell-tale signs of fraud, but that would mean longer waits for new account set ups, not to mention more work for us!

That’s where FRAUDINATOR comes in!

FRAUDINATOR is our hueristics-based system for determining if a new sign up is fraud. Inspired by Spam Assassin, FRAUDINATOR runs dozens of automated tests on new sign ups and attempts to determine automatically if they’re fraudulent! Each test has been given a score from -15 (very un-fraudy) to 15 (very fraudy), with the scores based on running the test on old accounts that we know to be fraudulent or not. If the sum of the score of all the tests you pass is above a certain threshold, your account is automatically disabled. If it’s below a certain threshold, it’s automatically approved, and everybody else we actually look at a few times a day and decide for ourselves.

Those ones we look at ourselves are the problem ones: it turns out humans are even worse at determining if an account is fraud than we are at determining if an email is spam! Fortunately, only about 2% of our sign ups fall into this range. Our false positive rate for auto-approved and auto-disabled accounts is less than 1%, which could be better but isn’t totally unacceptable.

So what sort of things does FRAUDINATOR look for?

Even though we’re pretty sure most of the people reading this blog arean’t doing this stuff, we’d prefer to keep that a secret! “Security through obscurity,” we say!

Suffice it to say there are a lot of tests, with a bunch of really obvious ones and a few not so much so.

And that’s all I have to say about that,
THE BLOGINATOR

Let’s Save Our Environment Lyrics!

We have now mostly deciphered the lyrics to the video for which we are now having a
remix contest (courtesy of my uncle’s transcription service):

Chorus

Let’s save our environment that we may be free
Free to enj-hoy the beauty of nature’s serendipity

Our rivers are full of wealth
Fish and transport bring us health
Lily’s pistil arches its head inviting honey bees to bed
Is satisfying wants answer, our loved ones finding cancer
Let’s, Let’s modify our greed, add non-pollution to our creed

Chorus

Gliding with the playful dolphins
adventurous spectacles to revel in
Varied and vibrant color fests are new england’s forests
Our air, water and sea spray have become so FOUL!.
We cannot [imbibe or inveigh] what is free, free like a good vibe.

Chorus

Couldn’t we prefer a propriety with less violence in our society
Where our own warm vibes, comfort ourselves and our tribes
Is destroying beauteous life worth a third wing to impress your wife?
What kind of life is our greatness when we think kindness a weakness

Chorus

Touching! If anyone can figure out the ?????? part, please post in the comments! (Update: It’s probably “Fish and”!)

Adventure on the high trees!

The east DreamHost office has windows that overlook a parking lot, and in this lot are some seriously huge (four story tall) palm trees.

Not too long ago these palm trees were trimmed! Work in the office ground to a halt that day as we stared in awe and took pictures of tree trimming acrobatery the likes of which few have seen.

First the gardener climbs the tree. He had spikes on the insides of each of his shoes and a single rope straddling the tree. That’s it. He also had one long rope which hung all the way down to the ground. More on that later!

Once the guy makes it up to the top he unhooks a chainsaw from his belt, fires it up, and pretends that every palm frond in front of him is an appendage on the body of his boss, ex-wife, or the bill collector who WON’T STOP CALLING and NO I DON’T HAVE THE MONEY AND AKAKAKGUWAHAHAAAA!!!

“I don’t pay you fifteen hundred in child support so you can just stand out here on the street in your fancy new outfit! Our kids deserve better than that, you selfish AKAKAKGUWAHAHAAAA!!!”

The palm tree does not take this aggression lightly. It retaliates by unleashing a swarm of bees to do battle with this assault on its character! The bees prove ineffective, as the gardener cuts-on, blinded by rage and oblivious to their stings!

At this point the tree trimmer begins to crave even more danger. He thinks about his life and how his car needs fixing and the rent’s due and his kid’s not talking to him anymore, and he thinks that maybe if he fell to the ground it wouldn’t be so bad. So he gets bold. (See what I did there?)

So instead of climbing down the tree, then climbing up the next tree, he simply hooks his long rope onto the tree and SWINGS ACROSS to the next one Tarzan-style!

“AKAKAKGUWAHAHAAAA!!!”

Up until this point, all of us DreamHosters had considered ourselves to be tough bad-asses. When that guy swung across those trees hanging from a rope with a chainsaw on his belt, women wept and grown men crapped their pants. We were in the presence of greatness.

When the job was over, he pulled a Spiderman to lower himself to the growd.

Witness the discarded remains of his oppressors.

The next time you see palm trees, take a good look at them and realize what it took to make them that way. Palm tree trimmers of the world, DreamHost salutes you.

DreamHost is hiring! AGAIN!

We’re still looking for that bookkeeper, but now we’ve also got an opening for a tech support team member!

If you’re located in or around the Brea (California) area and have Unix/Linux command-line experience, and (preferably) some customer-support experience, we’d like to hear from you!

DreamHost is looking to hire a full-time customer support rep, and if you’re interested, we may have a spot for you on our team. Technical support here is 95% email and 5% phone calls.

We could go on and on about how we’re looking to hire “dynamic individuals to work in a fast-paced environment,” and that ideal candidates would possess “a combination of solid technical knowledge and interpersonal skills to interact with a cutting-edge team of professionals,” and blah blah blah. We could say all that, but companies say that crap all the time and they don’t really care about who you are, just what you know.

We are SO not like that! If you’re cool and enjoy jokes about robots and astronauts, you’ll probably get the job. If you come to the interview wearing a tie acting all high and mighty like it’d be some kind of honor for us to hire you, you probably won’t get the job. You laugh now, but it’s happened before!

This is a Monday through Friday position, however please realize that you will be working from 6AM to 2PM. Did we just lose you? Sorry.

Salary starts at $30-35k, based on experience.

Benefits include:
.Full health/vision/dental
.401(k) plan
.Generous time-off (up to 5 weeks after 3 years!)
.Laid-back atmosphere
.Free snacks and soft drinks
.Free web hosting!
.And more!

Qualified applicants please send your resumes to us at jobs@dreamhost.com.

Plaintext is preferred, .rtf will work too. If you send your resume as a .doc file we will know that you suck at following directions!

Why web hosting is important.

Hey, enough with the “Why web hosting is…” posts already!

This is the last one, I promise. After this I’ll try and think of something else to talk about, for real.

Why is web hosting important?

Well, they say the thing that makes the Internet different from (and better than) TV, besides the sheer volume of content, is that everybody can be a producer. They say the Internet is cool because, unlike most streets in Boston, it’s two-way. They say the Internet gives anybody with something to say a soap box to say it from.

Ever since the days of Al Gore, just by getting on the Internet you’ve added to it. Just by being connected to it, you’ve contributed to it. As soon as you send your first email you’ve become a part of this thing, and your contributions are as important as anybody else’s, except for mine.

If nobody watched TV or listened to the radio, the networks could (and probably would) keep broadcasting anyway. But if everybody disconnected from the Internet, there would actually be no Internet.

Today’s Internet, like the big dig, is wider, faster, and handles more traffic than ever before! But Today’s Internet is something like a tunnel with eighteen lanes going south and just one going north. Even as consumer broadband download speeds pass 6mbps, upload speeds hover around 384kbs.

Not to mention, just about every ISP has in their terms of service something like:

You are prohibited to run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited services and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;

I don’t blame them! If they allowed servers and 6Mbps uploads, there’s no way they could provide what they do for the price they do. And truth be told, Mr. Joe Everyman doesn’t have the knowledge or desire to contribute more to the Internet than the occassional “me too!” Way less than 20% of the people on the Internet ever create any content, which is also a big part of why broadband is $40 a month and web hosting is $8.

ISPs are the yang of the Internet.

Hey, it’s their business, and they can run it how they want. If it weren’t for them, .edu and .gov would still be the top two TLDs! And, if they did somehow offer 6Mbs uploads and servers for $40/month, web hosts would be in big trouble. (Well, not that big, since web hosting is hard!) But as it is now,

Web hosts are the yin of the Internet.

The Internet needs both. The Internet needs content to be worth-while for people to visit, and the Internet needs visitors for it to be worth-while to create content. And thanks to web hosting, the content providers and visitors are the same dude. Mr. Tetsuya Everysan can afford both broadband to visit the Internet and a web hosting account to contribute to it.

And Mr. Mohammed Bin-Every can keep driving to New Hampshire even as the rest of the Internet seems headed to Rhode Island.

Let’s Save Our Environment REMIX Contest

In a shameless effort to make “Let’s Save Our Environment” even more of an “Internet Sensation”, we at DreamHost request all those capable, to create remixes of the afformentioned video. The winner will receive a free CDI webhosting plan for life. Post your remix links in the comments of this post! The Rules are : 1. Anything goes. 2. The best one will surely have modified audio + video 3. The deadline is November 11th, 2005. 4. Once a video is posted in the comments we’ll mirror it on our site to save you bandwidth! 5. There’ll probably be some other pretty good prize for every (reasonable) entry too!

DreamHost is hiring!

It doesn’t happen often, but we’re ready to hire yet another employee!

If you’re located in or around the Brea (California) area and have some accounting experience, we’d like to hear from you!

We are looking to hire a full-time bookkeeper who will handle the day-to-day financial goings-on of our 25 employee-and-growing company! Mainly you’ll be paying the bills and keeping our financial records in order. You’ll also be responsible for administering our health insurance and 401(k) plans, payroll, ordering office supplies, getting the mail, that sort of thing. You’ll report directly to our CEO.

Ideally you’ll have some accounting experience (5+ years preferred,) preferably with a degree in a related field. Experience with QuickBooks will make your resume stand out like a glistening Excalibur in the mists of Cornwall.

You should be analytical, detail-oriented and very comfortable with spreadsheets.

We don’t throw every resume we get into a massive keyword-searchable database - we actually read them. Please don’t waste our time if you don’t want what we’re offering! If you think you might be a good fit, you’d be a fool not to contact us!

This is a five-day-a week (M-F) salaried position.

Benefits include:
.Full health/vision/dental
.401(k) plan
.Generous vacation time (up to 5 weeks after 3 years!)
.Laid-back atmosphere
.Free snacks and soft drinks
.Free web hosting!
.And more!

Plaintext resumes are preferred, .rtf will work too. Send ‘em all to jobs@dreamhost.com!

Why web hosting is easy.

At DreamHost, all websites are not hosted on state-of-the-art sgi origin 3000 supercomputers.

Web hosting is too easy for them!

Even if web hosting is one of the hardest Internet businesses, compared to the rest of the business world, it’s still pretty darn easy.

Web hosting is really competitive and yet still a very lucrative because it provides a value that is literally thousands of times the cost. For around $100 a year, a business or individual gets a world-wide publication and communication tool that’s available all the time (*cough cough*) with zero effort. Twelve years ago, you could spend a billion dollars and not have something even remotely as great!

And yet, when you get to a certain size (like say, DreamHost size) the cost to provide that service is itty bitty. Our data center and network expenses, i.e. our “Cost of Revenue”, is about 5% of our total revenues.. and it drops every year.

Of course there are plenty of other costs. There’s hardware, people (ohh, the people!), office overhead, credit card fees, insurance, benefits, and pizza (not always a benefit). But in theory, all the amazing value that hosting provides could be had for like $5/year.. and in 2006: $4.50. Of course, we can’t actually charge $5 a year! Nobody would sign up.

This hugantic disconnect made possible by the amazing “computer” is why I say web hosting is easy.

You can survive a lot of stupidity when you’re able to mark everything up 2000%…

Did you know in 2000 we had twice the employees we have now, with one fifth the revenues?
Stupid!
(Good thing that still put us at about a 50% margin!)

Did you know we had TWO full time handymen for the office space we were renting?
Stupid!

One of whom did cocaine at his desk (yes, the repair guy had a desk) every morning?
STUPID!

They say the key to business is not making any fatal mistakes. Well, the more revenue you have coming in, the bigger mistakes you can survive. Fortunately we were apparently super-glued to the biggest cash heifer this side of Ebay.

Which is why I’m always confounded when hosts go bankrupt, or like Interland, can’t seem to find a profit even with $100M in revenues. Could they really have more crack heads working for them then we did? Do they take longer trips to Burning Man? Do they use more sgi servers? Perhaps they’re getting that really nice Internap bandwidth? Are their credit cards charging them 70%? Maybe they’re buying ads in the back of Wired? HostingTech?

Whatever’s killing their cow, it can’t be the cost of providing web hosting.

It’s just too easy.