I just got an email from Register.com. I can pay them $9 bucks so my address and phone number isn’t easily accessible via WHOIS information even though ICANN decrees it so. There are a plethora of other places to find……

You could be right, I aint as young as I used to be and the old brain does play tricks on me from time to time.

However, the MSN cache seems to share my imagination. :)

http://cc.msnscache.com/cache.aspx?q=2879504913296&lang=en-US&mkt=en-US&FORM=CVRE3

You will notice that comments 10,11 and 12 from that cached copy are most definitely gone from the current page.

I think this may be a simple case of a software glitch, given that you are correct and DreamHost does seem to tolerate dissenting opinions, both here in the blog and on the DreamHost forums.

Mark

We’ve only ever hosed spam or really nasty swear words. There are comments here and there with people who don’t love us; for example, #10 above!

If memory serves me correctly, these comments may have painted DreamHost in an unfavourable light, but otherwise were quite reasonable, no bad language etc.

Censorship, if this is indeed what has occured, is a very slippery slope.

Mark

In terms of valuing Google, Amazon, or even your business.. while growth is often good, the driver of value is profits. Companies are just a cashflow (an investment), and you can treat it that way. If a company can only generate 5% return on its invested capital, you’re better of shutting it down and putting that same investment into something else like bonds because it takes less effort to get the same return.

The reason that Amazon and Google are/have been so highly valued is that investors are considering future cash flows and the profits associated with them. It’s OK to lose money at various periods, as long as the net present value of those cashflows is positive, and better than alternative investments. You can say that investors are irrational in their valuations, and you’re probably right in some sense, but the major institutional investors have spent a lot of time on these types of estimates.

In your situation (you guys must have high capital costs because of hardware), you can calculate the cost of your capital (loan or leasing rates on hardware), and then look at the expected cash flows from it. If your overall return is higher than a certain %, it’s worth it. Nearly all businesses reach a point of diminishing returns, where the cost to bring on an additional customer results in a lower average profit per customer. One possibility in your business is the point where your datacenter is physically at capacity and the only option is to build a new one (note there are cases when this is still financially viable, based on sales projections). The other scenario (and this happens in nearly all businesses) is you grow so big that your staff spends too much time coordinating and not enough time “doing”. Ask anyone in a professional (i.e. not manufacturing or selling hamburgers) company with 1,000+ employees what % of their day they spend in meetings versus doing their work. You’ll find it’s a whole lot higher than people in a 10-person company. Big businesses do well because despite this overhead of coordination, they have large economies of scale, and in some cases other barriers to entry.

My advice to you is to look at profits over everything else. Figure out what type of customer you want to grow with, which will generate the greatest profits (compared to the expense you have to spend servicing that customer). I don’t know what customer profile that is, but such a strategy could serve you well, especially against your competitors. Your cost structure is likely very similar to theirs, so your advantage will be to generate the highest average profit per customer.

Best of luck to you… I can say that I’ve been very satisfied with your service and I’m glad to see the company is doing so well! Cheers.