More Holiday Gifting - Software Upgrades

While you’ve all been goofing off and having fun during this holiday season, we’ve been hard at work doing the setup for a few highly requested software upgrades!

Here’s the list of upgrades:

1. Imagemagick upgraded to version 6.2.4

2. Subversion upgraded to 1.3.2

3. Ruby upgraded to 1.8.5

The first two are already installed on around 75% of our servers and will be on all of the rest by the end of the day.

The Ruby upgrade may cause some complications so we’d like to take it a bit slower. If you are a Ruby user and you gotta have the latest version, let our support team know and we’ll install it on your server first.

You can’t say we never gave you anything now! And before you give us grief that one of these upgrades is not the version you wanted, take a moment to consider all the people out there that don’t even have what you have and appreciate what you do have. This is the holiday season, after all!

Scooped!

Man, leave it to the UNofficial DreamHost Blog to post the news before the OFFICIAL DreamHost Blog!

We passed 400,000 domains this week.. officially doubling in less than a year!

I don’t think we want to do THAT again.

A Christmas Present for You!

Yep, a Christmas present. Christmas. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. It had to be said.

Anyway, I’m sure you’re all more interested in getting that present than in another tired annual discussion of how “nobody’s allowed to say Christmas anymore”. I know not everybody got FOUR Wiis in their stocking like I did, so I better cut to the chase!

Really, it’s not so much an actual, physical, “present”, as just a couple of cool tips on how to scam yourself some of those impossible-to-get gifts on every kid’s wish list this Holiday season: money!

Cool Tip #1

Bank of America’s Keep The Change

Bank of America has this supremely lame promotion called “Keep the Change” where every time you make a purchase with your Visa Debit Card, they’ll round up the charge to the nearest dollar, and take the difference and transfer it into your savings account. It’s supposed to be a weird way to help you save money because you don’t have the COLD HARD DISCIPLINE to do it yourself.

The only semi-cool thing about this program (and in my opinion, Bank of America period), is that for the first three months after you sign up, they’ll DOUBLE the savings (after the first three months, it drops to just a 5% bonus), up to a total of $250 a year. Heh, and the fine print says they’ll credit you that matching amount only after 14 MONTHS!

That doesn’t add up to that much potential scamming, and I wouldn’t recommend signing up for Bank of America just to do this. However, IF you already use BofA (poor, poor, you.), you should go down to your local gas station and buy 1 cent of gasoline on your debit card… 253 times in a row. You can probably do that in about 3 hours or so. And if you don’t make at least $80 an hour, it could actually be worth it!

Not to mention the warm fuzzy feeling you’ll get knowing that you just made $250 off of Bank of America 14 months from now!
(Never you mind the fees they will have made off you in that time will most definitely far exceed $250! You reap those sweet sweet rewards!)

Cool Tip #2

The mystical ATM fee double-rebate!

Here’s an even better way to take advantage of the banking system. Don’t use Bank of America at all!

Use an Internet bank! They generally pay much better interest, have little to NO fees, and coolest of all, AUTOMATICALLY pay you back ATM fees!

At least, my Internet bank does. Which will remain nameless so they don’t catch on to this awesome scam I’ve been perpetrating on them that I am about to reveal to the countless dozens who religiously read this blog.

Okay, let’s focus on the part that goes“AUTOMATICALLY pay you back ATM fees!”… let’s think about how a bank would go about doing that exactly? You may have noticed when you look on your bank statement that you don’t see two entries for ATM withdrawals a la:

ATM WITHDRAWAL: $200.00
ATM FEE: $1.50

No. Instead, you just see something like:

ATM WITHDRAWAL: $201.50

And they leave it to YOU to remember that that $1.50 was the goddam fee. The ATM system doesn’t seem to actually pass any information to your home back other than the total amount they need to remove from your account. Hmmm.

So, one day last February while in Hilo, Hawai’i, I came across this ATM in the local Wal*Mart that actually allowed $1 increments. I couldn’t believe it, so just to be silly, I withdrew $299. Sure enough, out came 14 twenties, a ten, a five, and four ones! What a wacky ATM machine! And best of all, Wal*Mart didn’t even charge a fee! You could come by and pick up $3 from the ATM whenever you wanted with no penalty.

Finally, a reason to go to Wal*Mart!

Later, I noticed my ATM fee reimbursement amount for that month seemed a little high. After looking it over, it turned out to be exactly $4 a little high. “Weird,” I thought. “Am I dumb?”

I am dumb, but that’s not important right now… because it turned out, THEY were too!

I realized the $4 must have been for my $299 withdrawal! It dawned on me that my bank must figure out the ATM fees simply by dividing all ATM withdrawals by 5 and assuming the remainder is the fee.

This works fine based on two assumptions.. that no ATM fees are $5 or more (I guess they’ve never been to a strip club), and that no ATM gives out $1 bills or less (I guess they’ve never been to the Wal*Mart in Hilo!).

To test my theory, the next month I went to a Wal*Mart when I was visiting my in-laws in Virginia, and I withdrew $4, $4, $9, and $24.. and sure enough, the next month I had $16 extra dollars reimbursed to me!

You’d think their algorithm would at least not give $4 back on a $4 withdrawal! I mean, who pays a $4 fee for the privelege of withdrawing $0? I guess Wal*Mart patrons do.

Since then, I’ve made it my mission to find all Wal*Marts that have these SUPER-ATMs .. and sadly, I’ve only found them in two places: The Big Island of Hawai’i and Northern Virginia. Wal*Marts I’ve tried in Los Angeles, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and even Tampa have all come up empty.

In fact, the last time I found one (back in Big Island), Wal*Mart had started adding a $1 fee to each withdrawal. That makes the deal somewhat less sweet, because now you have to only withdraw $3 at a time, which drops your effective hourly rate you can make at one of these ATMs 25%. I timed myself and can do a full transaction in about 45 seconds, which would put me making $240/hour. So, clearly not worth MY time, but perhaps YOURS… snark, snark!

Overall I’ve only made $32 total the three times I took advantage of this bug. And I think it makes up for the few times I’ve had $6 ATM fees (cough, cough) only reimbursed $1s worth. But boy, there is no thrill greater than going up to that ATM and withdrawing three crisp, new, FREE one-dollar bills!

SHAME ON ME!

For taking advantage of a helpless Internet bank and a flaw in their code!

But do I feel bad? Nope, not in the least!

In fact, I think it our moral DUTY as consumers to take full advantage of all loop holes, programming bugs, and outdated policies we can find! And I know the people at Fat Wallet and Slick Deals are with me!

Businesses make these CRAZY promotions with the understanding that 99% of their customers aren’t going to take FULL advantage. YOU just want to be in the 1% that does!

Please, don’t feel too bad for the poor companies… if too many people start taking advantage, they’ll just shut it down. No big deal, it had to happen some day, and everybody’s a bit wiser.

It’s not the same thing when dealing with another person. If you make an agreement with somebody, you should strive to uphold the spirit of it, not just the letter. When dealing in business-to-business transactions too, things just work out better when you are straight-forward, honest, and direct.. not when you’re trying to screw each other over with contract legalese and under-the-table shenanigans.

All I’m saying is, in a business-to-consumer transaction, as a consumer, morality just doesn’t enter into it. The business makes an offer, probably with a fair amount of fine print, and the consumer can choose to accept the letter of it or not. That is it.

I feel this way even though I’m one of those businesses who gets taken advantage of!

For example, earlier this year there was a bug in our system where one guy was getting all the secondary referrer money for people who had no referrer! It’s fixed now, but that guy ended up succesfully cashing out about $30,000 and then disappearing! Oooooh, that stung, but it was our own dumb fault!

More recently, people have been “taking advantage” of our new-customer-only promo codes by canceling their accounts after a year and deleting their domains from our system, then re-signing up again with a new credit card and another promo code and then re-adding their old domain. This results in a day or two of downtime for them, but I guess that’s worth it for some people.

Well, now we just log all domains that have been deleted from our system and don’t allow them to be re-added to a promo-coded account for at least a year. So, eat a big pile of that, loop-holers!

Every day, there are more “exploits” of our system’s code and policies that come to our attention. Some we just let go because they’re not that wide-spread and it’d be more trouble to fix it than the damage it’s causing. Others we patch up and then move on.

It’s like a never-ending tap-dance between the tiny “hot deals” segment of the consumer market… those who have more time than money… and the marketing departments of companies the world over who realize there are a lot more people who think they have more time than money than those who actually do.

Now, please go spend the $300 you just scammed based on my advice on Best Buy gift certificates!

Nothing but a DH partay.

Yo.

Last night we had our First Annual Real DreamHost Christmas Party at the Museum of Neon Art in Downtown LA.

I see we weren’t the only web host who thought it was a good time to party.

We are however, the best looking one.

Not to mention, so classy.

What with our widescreen pictures and flash videos!

In the words of Teen Girl Squad:

Soooooo good!

I Want Some of That Action

I’m sure everybody heard a while ago about that hot Goo-Tube action that got everybody all excited.

Google bought YouTube back on October 19th (I think it was) for 1.65BBBBBBBBBBBBillion in stock. Immediately after the announcement, Google’s stock went from $420.23 to $458.99… implying the total value of Google went from about $128BBBBBBBBBBBBillion to $140BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBillion!

So, essentially Google said to YouTube, “Yo, Tubey, let’s hit it,” and the world decided they were BOTH worth more money for it. Heck, even the RUMORS Google was going to get with YouTube put their stock up more than $1.65BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBillion worth of market cap. Sigh.

Since then, Google’s gone to $487.25, putting their market cap at $149BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBillion and the value of the YouTube portion of Google at $1.9BBBBBBBBBilllion. And for what? YouTube is basically a pared-down free web host that can only show video. P-SHAW!

WE are a FULL-Featured PAY web host, that can show video, images, audio, flash, send email, instant messages, store databases, run applications, store files forever, and even update a blog about as often as we send a newsletter!

Of course, YouTube has about a thousand times the “customers” we have.

Of course, I’d say each one of you PAYING guys has gotta be worth at least 100 times some anonymous YouTuber, right? So, we’ve gotta be worth at least $190 Million in Google stock, right? Maybe not.. I was never a very good business man.

In fact, I bet just by posting this, I could start some rumors a la “Google in talks to buy DreamHost for $190,000,000.” Then, if based on those rumors Google stock went up just sixty-six cents, my rumors alone would have more than paid for itself. In a way, Google would be obligated to buy us! And when they did, I bet their stock would go up at least another 33 cents, meaning they just made a 50% profit! They’d be a bunch of Yahoo!s not to snatch us up!

Now remember, I’m not saying Google’s in talks to buy us. Far from it. I don’t even know anybody at Google. I don’t even know anybody who knows anybody at Google. I don’t even know anybody who uses Google. I don’t even know what this “Google” is.

And we’re perfectly content with what we are now, nice and independent and small(ish).

But, if sometime later today Google’s stock were to, say, hit $487.91 a share, I’ll be expecting a call.

P.S. Just in case that call comes, we’re all set with some awesome new Google-esque features!

#1: I just filmed this UNBELIEVABLE video of a crazy raccoon out in front of my place last night! I want to share it with you all, but I don’t trust no YouTube with my ultra high-quality HD videos! That’s why I’m using the all new https://media.dreamhost.com/ flash media tools we just released!

Wasn’t that great? Way better than 98% of the stuff on YouTube!

#2: When the inevitable merger takes place, how are we going to make all our customers suffer? Oops, I mean pay? Google Checkout of course! Good thing we already accept Google Checkout now as yet another way to give us your money!

Test it out today.. go buy some more hosting!

#3: We started trying out Google Adsense on DreamBook (you know, our free Guestbook server, circa 1996), and it is reallllllly raking in the bucks! When the day comes that we are Dreamgle, Google will be able to keep the ENTIRE hundred bucks a day in ad revenues for themselves, instead of splitting it with us!

#4 Finally, don’t forget everybody using Google Talk can already talk with everybody using Jabber on DreamHost. Such forward-looking management we have!