Some Late Night Moves!

Last night we made some moves.

Patrick and I moved about 60 servers!

And I only dropped one! (Sorry about that, bomberman.)

It took about two hours, and here we are, wrapping things up:

Stage 2? At 12:30 in the morning, after moving 60 servers, what else could we possibly want to move for a STAGE 2?

Hmm… something about “Brea”?

We passed this car in the parking lot.. and soon, we were at the OTHER DreamHost office.

We waited.. THE CON WAS ON!

Patrick had told Pete (who lives right by the office) that he was just in the area, at 1:30am on a Wednesday, and I wanted him to pick up some WWF glasses for the downtown office. But, HAD PETE PLAYED US FOR FOUR FOOLS?!

Apparently not….

We made short work of the coveted sign.

And then I decided to go raid the kitchen…. WHAAaaaa!!!!

Yes, very funny, Brea. But who’s wearing the cool shades now?!

As long as we were there, we thought we might as well have some fun…

And some more fun…

We took our time. We even checked out the Official DreamHost Museum!

Why hello there, Señor Corona, you sure are working late tonight!

Of course, we couldn’t just leave those poor, unsuspecting Breaites bare-walled!

Around 3:30, we were back “home.” Mission complete. Tired. Satisfied. Ugly.

The neon sign was finally where it has always been destined to be. Down in our NOC. The HEART of DreamHost.

Epilogue…

We’ve been burgled!

Last night DreamHost’s Brea office was burglarized.

Someone gained access to our building, broke into our locked office, and stole a critical piece of hardware.

Our neon sign.

This one-of-a-kind artwork was commissioned for our 2006 Christmas party and had been proudly hanging on the wall of our office in Brea ever since. Until today.

The thieves left this sign in its place.

What confuses us most is that the thieves didn’t steal any computers. Those 20 inch LCD displays? They’re still there. Dell and Mac desktops? Check. Foosball table and arcade machine? They were all unmoved and seemingly untouched.

We have no idea who could have done this. Our building and our office are locked up tight after hours. We had people working here until the wee hours of the morning and nobody saw anything! We’re stumped and the Brea police department has never seen anything like it.

Sure, there’s plenty of people out there who want to blow us up and some who even want to kick our f$ckin’ a$$es. But who would break into our office just to steal a neon sign?

It is a mystery.

If you happen to come across our sign, we’d like to know about it! We don’t have any leads to go on, and that sign holds great sentimental value to our employees. Please contact us if you see or hear anything!

No Run-Of-The-Mill Week, This!

MONDAY!

We started the week off by having a little MLK, JR. weekend sale on our web site. Apparently, some of our affiliates hate civil rights because we got some angry emails that our little MLK, JR. day stunt was stealing their referrals by putting a promo code of our own right on our website!

They have a good point. Why would somebody use the promo code they were given when they get to the website and see a better one in a pop-up window! All these affiliates are working super-hard in the hopes of some good paypal lovin’, only to find out the very company they’ve been shilling to all their croneys has turned around and STABBED THEM IN THE FACE!

Et tu, Joshé?

Now, why so ever would we do something like that? Of course we don’t want to hurt our affiliates! So why steal their referrers in this way? Especially when our promo code was more than $97, it actually costs us more to “steal” these people about to sign up with some other promo code.

The strange, but true, but unbelievable, but really honestly true, but you-can’t-comprehend-it, but it’s for reals, truth is we’ve found that putting a pop-up promo code like that on our main site actually helps all signups, ACROSS THE BOARD.

We’re not sure why ourselves, but we get more no-promo-code signups, more affiliate-promo-code signups, and of course, more DreamHost-promo-code signups whenever we have that pop-up there! And, it seems to also have no residual effect on signups on other days afterwards.

Maybe people just feel some loyalty to their original promo code. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they just don’t see or read the pop-up. Maybe seeing that code gets everybody in some kind of weird web-hosting frenzy and they just decide to sign up, whether they use the code or not! I know, it’s CRAZY, but that’s why I like marketing!

So basically, please please PLEASE trust us, affiliates! We try our best to only take actions in everybody’s best interests, and we’ve got nothing to gain by “stealing” your referrals!

TUESDAY!

Brett was checking the public voicemail when he came across this little gem apparently from a phone number in British Columbia.

Now, most of us didn’t really think that was the scariest bomb threat they’d ever heard. But, it was decided to notify our main data center building anyway. They then called the LAPD, and so a lot of Tuesday was spent explaining what “we do,” and how we have a “voice mail” in a “computer file”.

Also that “Brea” is a city in the LA area, different from “La Brea”, a street.

P.S. No bomb so far.

P.P.S. And really, what sort of threat gives you a deadline that’s a 48-hour window?

WEDNESDAY!

Head Honcho Michael is out of town right now, so apparently ANONYMOUS LAZY HAPPY DREAMHOST EMPLOYEE thought it’d be fine to sneak in a little nap on his office couch. And it would have been fine, if he could have only kept his pants on.

(Notice the huge amounts of DreamHost power that permeate the office?)

THURSDAY!

Aw shucks! We just got a huge shipment of World Wrestling Fund (or something?) pint glasses and travel mugs for thanks for the generous donation DreamHost and her customers gave a few months ago! Well, we’d split all the glasses in half with you, but I guess we’re just pessimists.

Consider them gifts from you to us for keeping prices down while we REDICLOUS-LY add (and subtract) bandwidth and disk space!

FRIDAY!

Whoops, did I spell something ridiculously wrong up there?

My apologies, I must have just been influenced by this SECRET PACT email I received today from an UN-NAMED WEB HOST!

I’m just trying to get some key players in the industry to agree on a few things:

a. That the current disk space/bandwidth allocations are rediclous
b. To cap them at a specific range (based on price)
c. To create a self-enforcement method for the industry

I was wondering if DreamHost would be interested in joining the discussions. So far, I have spoken to almost every major hosting provider in our segment.

I guess somebody doesn’t read our blog! Doesn’t he know our whole “lowering disk and bandwidth” thing is just a coy marketing ploy?

And in summary, what a wild, zany, not-run-of-the-mill week it’s been!

And, OH, I just remembered.

This IS a run-of-the-mill week at DreamHost!

Busted!

Web Hosting Haiku

Haiku.

The ol’ five-seven-five.

It stimulates the mind and soothes the soul.

Here’s some stuff we’ve come up with around the office today.

Where did my site go?
Pictures of Grandma, bye bye
Should have paid the bill
-Nick L

Dreaded five-oh-three
Posted on Digg, now it’s gone
Time to upgrade, friend
-Nick L

Your app is so slow
Every other page times out
Welcome, shared hosting
-Nick L

Can not log in now
Several times, my site down
What the f#ck, DreamHost?
-Jeff H

I host my site here
but, where oh where has it gone?
I’m losing thousands
-Steve D

Your site is offline
how the hell did that happen?
Oh yeah, server died
-Steve D

500 error!
What has happened to my site?
is anyone there?
-Steve D

My site makes thousands
I pay you very little
You guys are suckers
-Steve D

Working hard to fix
this person’s critical site
Twelve gigs — goatse art
-Charlie T

Thanks for the soft porn
sent to the ‘all’ mailing list
Nick you are so fired.
-Brett D

Hey have you seen Ralph?
No, he’s been gone a long time.
He must be pooping.
-Brett D

Hey guys let’s go eat!
Guys? Hello? Anyone there?
They left without me. :(
-Brett D

What do you mean by
“Bittorrent is not allowed?”
I only trade warez
-Jason C

Why am I getting
a panel fatal error?
perl -c ran fine!
-Pete V

Comment Post Spammers
Scum bags of the interwebs
Please die in a fire!
-Justin K

Charlie sends me links
Don’t open them while eating
Double-U Tee Eff
-Justin K

Be sure to index
Your large database queries
Team DB find you!
-Justin K

HELP! My blog is down!
Now how will my readers know
when my cats make poop.
-Charlie T

I cannot log in
sixty times I try password
thought it might work durrr
-Nick L

We were such good friends
trading emails back and forth
Earthlink forsakes us
-Nick L

Why is server slow?
Great. Now my twenty proxy
sites don’t work nicely
-Terri I

What is this “TOS,” Jeff?
MySpace phishing isn’t wrong!
Reenable me!
-Jeff C

Error: IMAP dropped
OMG people are dead
Everything’s fine now
-Craig Y

Gentle breeze, flames, smoke
my WordPress has exploded
I hate comments spam
-Craig Y

.htaccess file
they play evil trick on me
dots, invisible
-Craig Y

I referred myself
Please move over my domains
I’ll pay less money
-Dastyni L

I paid through Google
You still have credit card charge
give me my refund
-Dastyni L

I know my eBay
I know you are try to scam
Now you no scam me
-Dastyni L

Sorry English bad
I try use the translator
Fix my hotel now
-Dastyni L

Queue is not empty
Did you hit your quota yet?
Ralph will be so pissed.
-Micah S

Brett say, “Make haiku”
horrible pain, torture, death
“Make haiku”, Brett say
-Craig Y

Think you can do better? So do we! Prove it in the comments!

Apple Welcomes Us!

I think I’ve been blogging far too much recently.

I’ll try and make this a quicky.

As the three of you reading THIS blog probably know, Apple is announcing something BIG tomorrow.

So big, they’ve put a picture on their home page proclaiming, “The first 30 years were just the beginning.”

Wow.

That’s some powerful stuff. I’m getting excited.

I mean, Apple’s done a lot of earth-shattering stuff in the last 30 years.

They popularized the graphical os.

They popularized aesthetic computers.

They popularized the mp3 player.

Hey 2007-2036, those are some pretty big shoes to fill!

So big, in fact, I couldn’t help but think to myself, “Self, what in the world could Apple possibly reveal that would make a statement like “The first 30 years were just the beginning.” not feel at least a little bit over-the-top?”

Remember back when I predicted there’d be a Video Airport Express? Well, I was a year-plus early, but I was right.

And they don’t call me Lightning-Strikes-Twice-McJonesey for nothing.

Josh’s list of things that would make the last 30 years of Apple look like over-cooked monkey-snot:

#1. Apple introduces teleportation.

That’s right, real deal, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, mother f-in teleportation. Holy creole-y, the world would be a DIFFERENT PLACE.

#2. Apple cures aging.

That’s way up there with teleportation, man, because who cares how long it takes to get somewhere when you don’t age?!

#3. Apple creates perfect virtual reality.

A lá The Matrix. Where it doesn’t really matter if you age or not, because your brain can live forever in a tube being fed perfect virtual reality. And then teleportation doesn’t matter either because you could just load up a new virtual reality and you’d be there. Although, what do we do when a meteor hits Earth and destroys all our brain tubes? Well, that’s why real teleportation is #1.

And that’s it. Seriously. Their statement has set the bar so high, that I’ll be disappointed if it’s anything outside of those three things.

Okay, now that we’ve pretty much accepted that I’ll be disappointed, maybe I’ll try and come up with the three things I think there’s actually a femto-scopic chance Steve possibly could announce tomorrow that I’d be most satisfied with.

#1. The iTunes Mega Store

iTunes now has every movie and TV show, ever. Plus, you can re-download any content you purchase. As a bonus, there’s no DRM. (ha!) Alternatively, you can subscribe for like $60/month and watch whatever you want. TV shows are available the minute they are shown on TV, including sports. Movies are available the minute they’re released in theaters, including internationally. Everything is available in whatever resolution you prefer, up to 1080p.

Now THAT would be something. And it’s something they could do. And it’s something we’ll eventually, inevitably, definitely, have. The question is just if it’ll be Apple providing it, and if it’ll be Apple providing it tomorrow. The odds are femto-scopic, but hey, it’s at least something Apple could do!

#2. The iPod Crumple

Apple releases the iPod Crumple… the first iPod printed on a paper-like material with a flexible screen. I mean, how long have we been hearing about flexible displays and digital ink? And for how long have we had that technology in sci-fi movies? If there’s anything that says “the future” more than rocket packs and sex-bots, it’s computers you can crumple up and hide in your backside!

Anyway, the iPod Crumple would basically be a piece of paper, the whole face of which is a flexible “touch-screen”, which you can fold, roll, crumple up, or whatever. It has built-in wifi, evdo, gps, bluetooth, 1TB of storage, lasts at least 16 hours on a charge, takes hi-res pictures, and has gangsta-hi-fiving bass. And it doesn’t really matter how much they cost, they’d sell a trillion. (Every human on earth would buy at least 166 of them.)

#3 iTV, All-In-Thee!

Apple releases the iTV, but it’s not just a glorified “Video Airport Express,” it’s a gaming system. I’ve been downloading retro games with my new Wii and Xbox 360, and it’s pretty sweet. Games are the one “entertainment piece” missing from the “iTMS puzzle” right now.. and the new iPods even play games! The iTV should work with all controllers on the market today, including the Wii-mote, and play all games on the market, ever.

How do they do this? Look, did you ask how they make the iPod Crumple? Or cured aging? Or frickin’ popularized candy-colored computers? Who cares! Maybe they just include every system inside, plus emulators! Maybe the thing costs $2000. Maybe they just create a “standard video gaming protocol” where every controller sends inputs that conform to this protocol and every video game system sends a/v replies back and they just stream it all over your new home FiOS connections to their super server farms in Underground Kentucky!

Who cares! The point is, with all the talk of “converging devices” and “the fight for the living room,” I know I’m sick and tired of having a TV, a cable box, a receiver, an Xbox, an Xbox 360 (thanks, Santa!), a Wii, and 22 controllers fighting in my living room! If I’m going to add an iTV, it better be getting rid of at least one other device… preferrably all of them! And everybody says video games are a huger and huger part of the entertainment world, so I can’t be the only person who’s got a few.

Anyway, there you have it. The three things that would impress me the most for Apple to announce tomorrow, followed by the three things Apple-has-a-fireball’s-chance-in-heaven-of-possibly-announcing that would impress me the most.

I’m prepared to be disappointed.

New Dream Resolutions

Happy New Year!

The snow’s not even dry on the rooftops of LA and we here at DreamHost already have a pile of resolutions for, as the cool sports video gamers call it, the 2K7.

In 2007 we do solemnly resolve to:

#1. Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

#2. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!

#3. Become once again renowned the Web-over as a stable, reliable, robust, high-performance webhost!

As those of you who’ve been playing the home game know, we had some troubles in 2006.

But actually, the root of those troubles began WAY back to June 2005, when the building our data center is in informed everybody they were unable to provide any new UPS and generator-backed power, period.

Moving data centers wasn’t really doable back then, and so for the next year or so we were forced into “low-power mode” .. scrapping our Dedicated Servers option and squeezing every last bit of power efficiency we could from our operations, even at a fair amount of expense.

Somehow, we kept going. And going. And going. And gahhhh, you get it.

And really, our service didn’t suffer for it.

But then, exactly one year ago today, something changed that seemed to affect our reputation for the worse ever since.

We started giving away a lot more disk and bandwidth. Like 8 times. As. Much.

That’s when things went downhill.

Well, not really.

In fact, we had exactly the same amount of problems (actually less, per customer!) we’d had the last eight years, but now finally people could put their finger on a REASON for them!

We were overselling!

Clearly, every problem we had stemmed from the simple fact that we gave away too much disk and bandwidth!

Well, I’ve already covered “overselling” plenty, and ALL the quota increases really did was increase the number of new customers we got!

But still, all through 2006 our rep seemed to slowly decline.

Every time we had a server crash; “Overselling.” A network fubar, “They’re overselling.” A panel bug: “Didn’t your mama ever teach you about overselling?” A power outage? “Oh yeah, sign up for DreamHost if you happen to like a fresh bunch of OVERSELLING!!!”

Of course, the power outages didn’t help. Nor did the weird problem between our two core routers that made our entire network suck eggs for six weeks this summer.

But in a way, those power outages were perhaps a blessing in disguise. A disguise that reminded me of a big mob of angry customers.

Those outages forced us, and our building, to really DO something about the power situation… which as you may recall is the real foundation for any stability problems we’ve had in the last 12 months.

After the power outages this summer, the building started literally BLEEDING data center tenants, figuratively.

This had two effects. Ichi, it forced them to start taking their UPS and generator problems seriously, and as of now they actually seem to have things in order. In fact, believe it or not, just TODAY the building experienced a power outage from DWP… and for the first time ever we were not affected at all!

Memo
DATE:             January 3, 2007
TO:                All Garland Tenants
FROM:            Timothy J. Moore
RE:                 DWP Power Outage Today

This is to advise you that at approximately 11:50am today, the Garland Building received a power outage from the Department of Water and Power.  The outage lasted less than one minute and all systems worked according to design.

The Building’s loads were transferred to the Emergency Generator System.  Upon stabilization of the DWP service, all ATS Switches transferred back to normal DWP power.

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Office of the Building.

Sincerely,
The Happy Office of the Building Team

Oh BOY was I ticked OFF when I saw how they stole our signature signature!

Ni, by bleeding those tenants, a lot of power was freed up for us! And by us I mean you! LITERALLY.

Also, we were now of a size (thanks, ironically, to our generous bandwidth and disk allocations!) that expanding to more than one data center was finally feasible.

So, this fall we expanded to two more facilities, with dark fiber connections between all three.

With all this new power available, we were finally able to spend more on hardware! So we did, and have been, and are, and will be! We’ve put many many fewer users per web server, mysql server, and mail server, added load balancers, beefed up our network equipment, and have added new targets (that we now have the power to attain) for server stability.

In fact, we spent over ONE MILLLLION DOLLARS on hardware in November alone! That’s more than we normally spend in a whole quarter! And in fact, things are quantitatively more stable now across our whole system than they’ve ever been in the past.

But our reputation as an “overselling host” seems to linger!

How can we fix it? Aren’t people just going to notice things are a lot better? And start telling their friends?

Won’t they just believe this blog post?

Probably not. It’s a stumper!

Fortunately, I pulled deep into my master-of-public-relations pouch, and pulled out this gem of wisdom:

People aren’t going to consider us a “stable” host until we offer LESS DISK AND BANDWIDTH!

But…ARGH! More disk and bw => more sign ups => more money => more resources => better service!

What to do?

Fortunately, I have a master-of-marketing pouch too (double-major).. so here’s what we’re doing:

Every day, starting tomorrow, the amount of starting disk and bandwidth we offer new customers (this does not affect existing customers at all!) will drop. You can see the amounts here.

(Don’t worry, once you sign up, your disk and bandwidth allocations will grow weekly just like before!)

And we’ll keep dropping them daily until our precious rep is restored!

(Or it cuts into our sign-ups too much.)

(Whichever comes first.)

(Reputation be damned.)