What the hell are you doing? I’m glad you guys are cleaning up, I always thought you would. But.. this is stupid. I think I.. hate you a little. Like you’ve been the best webhost I ever had, and you keep getting better, and you’ve been suffering these growing pains, and I’ve known that you don’t like them any more then I do. And while this wont affect me, it will effect my future clients and everybody I refer.

Please.. don’t do this. It’s childish. (Even if it’s almost trivial.) At least let people using referrer codes bypass this madness.

I don’t plan on doing it any time soon, but if I ever stopped hosting with you I’d still read this blog. You’re hilarious. IN fact, even if the only way to read this thing was to be a paying subscriber I’d keep my account JUST SO I COULD READ THIS BLOG!

Snoochie boochies.

Josh, it looks like you were scooped by the unofficial dreamhost blog again.

;-)

yep.. just not my typing… there.

Like I said, needs a preview button.

Here’s a crazy suggestion that your service guys probably won’t like.

I’ve been wanting to use some of your great disk space offerings as remote backup for my personal computers. The problem is, my upload rate from home (via cable modem) is impractical if I want to upload, say, a couple gigabytes (e.g., if I wanted to backup photos of my daughter). What would be GREAT is if I could mail you guys a DVD and have it dumped into the directory of my choice.

I know, I know, it would be a huge hassle and would require lots of man-hours. I still would like it if there were a better way for me to get around my upload bandwidth restriction to be able to use just some of the disk space I have available through my DH plan.

Ive never had a problem with Dreamhost… almost 3 years running now… never, once.

I agree with Francis and Nic, the gradual decrease of space/bandwidth is a silly idea and will do nothing to restore DreamHost’s reputation, assuming it actually needs restoring. The growth in customers over the last year would suggest the reputation is doing fine.

I suspect the real reason behind the move is to generate some free publicity (a move like this is sure to be mentioned a lot) and create an influx of new customers.

Mark

BTW: I had to enter this post twice, for some reason WordPress ate the first one. :(

LOL, gotta close that i tag that Nathan opened and didn’ t close properly ;-)

You guys are completely insane! :-)

I’d really like to see some statistics if this insanity helps or not with your rep. (Probably not, but it’s funny and draws attention, heh)

I almost thought it was April 1st but sadly it’s not the case. In my opinion it’s sales suicide.

(See if I can close that annoying italics).

I’ll throw in my agreement with others that lowering disk space and bandwidth incrementally is silly and annoying. First off, a brand new signup won’t get “200 Gigs” of space, which is an easy number to remember and say. There is a perceived loss of resources to someone who wants to sign up.

A better idea would be just to more strongly address people’s gripes that lead to claims of overselling. And then do a better job of promoting these improvements.

Symbolic changes mean nothing to your current customers who are the main source of complaints. Real actions mean everything.

I have a crazy idea that might just improve your rep while avoiding a high-pressure sales situation. How about guaranteeing 100% up-time for various services and offering a discount for every hour of downtime. Select three services provided by three different companies to audit your uptime each month and offer the discounts based on the results of those audits. This way QOS is built into the price of hosting.

http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html

^^ Is down (well severely knackered) at the moment.

everyone is complaining and saying it won’t do much, I don’t think new customers will notice or know what is going on anyways for the most part, so I don’t think it’s a bit deal and I do hope it works for ya :)

Wayne: What do you like/need about PostgreSQL?

this is the corporate blog of the year 2007, already now. definitely. go write a book.

This is dumb. If the problem is your declining reputation, due to the stability issues of the past year, then the solution is to provide better stability. You’re claiming that this will be the case, which is good; but it takes time to prove that you really are more stable now. Gimmicks, especially STUPID gimmicks that actually TAKE AWAY good stuff, are not a solution.

@Jon H

>> Wayne: What do you like/need about PostgreSQL?

I host a commercial web application. I use such features as foreign keys, stored procedures and views in my application. As you can imagine, data integrity is of the utmost importance to me since I host other peoples information (database with ACID compliance is a must).

If I wanted to use MySQL with such features I would have to use the InnoDB engine. However, InnoDB in a commercial setting costs a good amount of money.

Postgres provides all of the features an enterprise database offers (ACID compliance, foreign keys, stored procedures etc.) , and is arguably outperforms MySQL while remaining 100% *free*.

I only ask DreamHost to include Postgres (version 8.2 preferably) because I truly believe DH provides great service and I absolutely love the tools they provide (e.g. the panel).

So I can only hope that someday DH will offer Postrgres, so that I can move my business back to DH.

Wayne
P.S. For what it’s worth, I’m paying more at my current web host and receiving less services than I did at DreamHost … though they provide Postgres.

This method trying to restore your reputation is totally bass ackwards! Do you expect to have a _better_ reputation by offering _less_ disk and BW? Sure, existing customers wouldn’t mind, they already have their space and it won’t be touched. But new people will say: Hey! They have less space than so-and-so (hopefully not /GoDaddy/ *shudder*), so I’ll just go with those other guys! In fact, I don’t really need Perl, Python, or Rails, so it’ll be fine that I use the other guy! Yippie!

Dreamhost, are you _/that/_ dumb?

[...] Today they announced on their company blog that they would begin lowering the amount of available disk space and bandwidth for new customers!? This is absurd and never heard of before… they claim to be doing this to regain the reputation they lost during 2006 where people started saying that they were overselling their services. [...]

I had faith it was a transitive problem. I stuck by you guys, kept pushing your services. And here I’m vindicated. I deserve a cookie. I WANT MY COOKIE. ;)

Hey, congratulations Josh! You really made what you set out to do, and this is to create a buzz around Dreamhost!!! :-)

(Even though I agree with most of the comments that says that fiddling with the disk/bandwidth allowances isn’t that good for affiliates, you at Dreamhost will however get more business in the end due to the “little earthquake” you just created!)

Have a good 2007 everyone!!!

@Norm

ROFL Gold!

Hi,

The rep issues are easy to understand: Hummans remember things that happen, they don’t remember things that don’t happen. This theory has been proven by many tests. See “Stumbling on Happiness” by Gilbert, pg 96 and many other sources.

For DH, this means:
1) People remember the outages, the slowdowns, etc.
2) People don’t remember when “nothing” happened–the (usual) times when everything is working properly.

Solutions:
There are some studies that people will start to realize that things are good when the good times have lasted 3-5 times longer than the bad times.

Other than waiting a long time for the ‘rep’ to improve, the idea of providing an uptime guarentee (as suggested by another poster) sounds smart to me.

DH could certainly put some creativity into an uptime guarentee that would be meangingful, yet limit the max costs to DH.

It’d certainly be a better use of their resources than decreasing the products being offered. (Decreasing the disk space.) That’s a dumb idea and the justification provided (even though tongue-in-cheek) was laughable.

Regards,

Larry

Does your rep really matter that much? I think it’s a dumb move to lower your massive offerings. It won’t fix your rep, it’ll just drive potential customers away.

I’ve had people instantly interested the minute I mentioned how much space and band you guys offer.

Maybe people just can’t understand that you’re a better host for overselling? Just because you offer more than you could provide to each customer doesn’t mean it’s even remotely possible for everyone to take up that space.

Trust me, I’ve been trying to eat up the most space and band possible for the last month and have only just got to 1%. Using everything that you guys offer is really difficult!

What’s with the popup on the main dreamhost.com page?

It’s kind of annoying when I got there to log in, since I already have an account.

Small beans since the popup blocker in FireFox catches it and all I get is the yellow notice that it’s been blocked, I know, but it still seems a bit overkill.

AJ:>”What’s with the popup on the main dreamhost.com page?”

That would be the ‘one-day-only!’ anniversary sale, which seems to occur every 2nd or 3rd day lately. :P

Mark

Deanna -

> Maybe people just can’t understand that you’re a better host
> for overselling? Just because you offer more than you could
> provide to each customer doesn’t mean it’s even remotely
> possible for everyone to take up that space.

We’ve tried to explain that – even posted a couple of weblog entries about it – but it’s impossible to fight perception. A lot of people aren’t really familiar with the economics of web hosting and assume that we’re going to go out of business by offering tons of disk space, etc.

As a company, we have precious little time to explain these things. We have a chance with our _current_ customer base, but not so with random people who stumble across us.

Bryk -

> How come y’all still offer QT/Darwin Streaming Server and
> not RealServer?

People still use that?! :)

> I mean, anyone that doesn’t blow kisses to a glossy 8″x10″ > of Guy Kawasaki before their mummy tucks them in for the
> night.

I’m confused. Is that not considered normal?

Chiisana -

> Though, I don’t think that’s too good of an advertising
> campaign… after all, with google doing the “we’ll increase
> it daily” thing on gmail, it looks odd for you guys to go
> the reverse direction.

We do the daily increase automatically thing, too, once a customer signs up. There’s still incentive to stick with DreamHost once you’re already here. This decrease is just for the “starting point.”

…

Anyhow, I too am curious as to how this will work out. Rest assured, if it’s a complete disaster we’ll give it a re-think (as this doesn’t impact existing customers so we’re not worried about any catastrophes – worst case scenario we notice a dip and decide to change course).

- Jeff C. @ DreamHost

wow, what a humorless group you commenters are.

Can I just say that I ♥ DreamHost? Thanks! I don’t refer many people, I’ve only been here about a year, but your blog is teh awesomest (the newsletter rocks too!) and I have been very pleased with your service. I haven’t been with a great many web hosts, mostly because of the hassle of moving, but I’m so thrilled to have found the best one of the few I’ve had. I thought about signing up for DH a long time ago but didn’t, and I wish I had back then. DreamHost is teh r0xorz!

Honestly I really respect what Dreamhost are doing. I’m kinda known to very publicly bash other hosts who oversell and basically undervalue and mess up our industry standards.

On a side note: At this rate most of the web hosts out there are driving their businesses into the ground which makes my job a lot easier ;)

Without saying the “W” word .. we have too many Web Hosting +*%^#@ [rhymes with oars] devaluing an industry I’m personally proud and passionate about .. which basically breeds doubt, the perception of shady used car salesmen types and screws with our bottom line and the quality of services we can offer.

The way I see it Dreamhost have 2 choices. Continue at this rate and ruin their company and further damage their rep, or take their business and their obligation to their customers seriously and start making some necessary changes .. *before* they drive themselves and you all off a cliff into offline land. [Ok yes that was a lame attempt at humor but it is Friday and it just ‘aint happenin’ for me right now ;)]

As an existing customer I would feel reassured that your web host is stepping up as we have, setting an example and not caving by selling shared hosting promoted as “Dedicated Hosting” resources. My hope is this move will further influence expected web hosting industry standards and start a new trend.

Seriously.. other hosts are bleeding right now. We’ve been doing this for years and we know what it takes to be profitable and still provide solid web hosting as do DreamHost.

I applaud this ballsy move and look forward to the DreamyTeam joining us at an elite level where we are both stars in our cyber galaxy *sigh

i.e. Lunarpages and Dreamyhost shine and prosper as all good web hosts should.

It’s about reliable hosting and good customer service. Simple.

Good luck to you :)

Amy Armitage
Lunarpages.com

^^We support Postgres.. thass right .. lol

***Josh, Jeff, Brett .. are you guys attending Affiliate Summit in Vegas this month?

How about for Sunday, your one-week-post-new-years resolution, you get gallery 2 to load faster than 12-15seconds after submitting the url? :)

Honestly, that’s my only complaint. Sure, site has been down two or three times, for a very short period, IN OVER A YEAR…with the prices you set, I’m overly happy.

I still stick with the original gallery though…once the Gallery 2 starts loading within 5 seconds of submitting the URL, I’ll convert.

Some of your postings is interesting, but your blog page is too long.

http://www.utesturm.info

go dreamhost, go .

Are you serious? This doesn’t make any sense, it’s like seeing a bag of chips in a store saying “NOW 10% LESS CHIPS FOR THE SAME PRICE!”.

I’m glad I got in when I did last month before this crazy drop in services. I’m using over 2 terabytes of bandwidth a month and growing every day, I need every ounce of bandwidth I can get.

I suggest a complete redesign of the web site. The current design is, well, outdated to say the least.

[...] DreamHost Blog » New Dream Resolutions [...]

Don’t know if you all read the newsletter but you can use the suggestions feature in the panel to help push a modern clean web design.

P.S. I Agree.

I’ve stuck with you guys for several years now. Working in an enterprise environment is hard enough without people throwing you to the fire every day.

IMHO you’ve always given too much disk space and bandwidth to starting accounts. I don’t know anyone who needs more than a few GB to face a good site these days. Of course, that need does grow over time… However, if you need more than that, you should pay for more than that. Keep the small quotas cheap for the rest of us.

I agree with a lot of the previous comments that reducing 1GB per week is going to lead to sales issues. My recommendation would be to cut it in one or two motions – say, down to 150GB then to 100GB, and keep falling as required. The threat of “sign up now or miss out on 1GB” is not going to help your sales as much as it will harm them.

That aside, keep up the great work. You are a comedic genius.

“people are telling us we are sh1t, and we are telling you that they are right, even though their justifications for telling us we are sh1t are wrong!”

I think this is a bit of suicidal marketing, but I noticed improvements and less hickups on the websites hosted here.

I think such a move is very hard to implement, but in the same time Dreamhost made it quite well as they now offer an incentive for new signups and reassurance for old members.

Well done! If only the December newsletter would have been less insane…

I have appreciated Dreamhost’s candor and humor, a very rare and human combination in a technology services field. I recommend you use these to your continued benefit:

- Candor. How about publishing all the metrics which I suppose no web host publishes? Bandwidth and storage headroom, power usage versus ceiling, software processes per cpu per minute at peak and low water marks, or whatever along those sort of lines really drives/avoids problems. Show your users, and prospective customers, a (near?) real time panel of gauges that show how you guys are doing – whatever those measurable factors are that really matter. This could instill customer confidence from your customer base, throw a gauntlet to other web hosts, and having it publicly visible will keep you guys focused on it to be and remain number one in reliability.

- Humor. Yes. Order more from Cisco, Juniper or whomever. Get the pink ones. With the clown noses.

As far as allocations… there is probably a moving (increasing) sweet spot in terms of customer perceptions (new accounts) but generally higher allocations makes you look more reliable because apparently you are either shady or have tons of bandwidth and storage to spare.

When your network is really hosed, that’s when you need to give away more bandwidth to make you _look_ more reliable.

So… now that you are giving away less, I KNOW that you have reached true stability.

But if you had real bandwidth headroom, you could deliver a pizza to my router. I am waiting (and hungry)

EP

I agree with Jessica. Drop it sharply once or twice. If you keep dropping daily, it gives a sense of “hey, you better rush”, even though it won’t make any difference to them, even if they waited a month probably.

I also agree with Sam about more support people. I don’t know if this is logical, depends how many of your clients are actual webmasters, and how many are just run-of-the-mill people with only a slight inkling of what they’re doing (like me). For these, on-hand help with actually creating a website would be really swell. I know there’s the wiki, but not every problem is covered in there, and not all are catered to the same level.
This is something that, imho, you could do cheaply and reasonably massively by outsourcing, say to India (with an indian accent), and if necessary provide as an extra service. As long as it’s not too expensive, I would pay for it.

Sorry if any Indians found that offensive, and sorry if Americans find “outsourcing” offensive, dunno…I’m reading the book “The World is Flat”, which gives a pretty good perspective on it, imho.

Entertaining stuff as always, Josh! I always copy and paste passages of the e-newsletter to all my friends regardless of whether or not they know anything about hosting, it’s just that damn amusing!

Oh also I guess your hosting services are pretty okay (re: I love them tenderly ever since I signed up 2 years ago).

Also also: Extra brownie points for quoting Princess Bride!

I think one of the problems with dreamhost’s perceived lack of reliability, apart from power outages, is that some things actually aren’t that reliable.

I use my domains almost exclusively for e-mail. Webmail is frequently either down for an extended period, or it’s down 5 seconds at a time (keep hitting F5!) or it’s just dog slow. My friends that have e-mail addresses on my site complain about pop3 not working.

Of course, all these problems happen pretty much at random, so by the time the techies get to check it out, the problems, coincidentally, don’t appear any more.

Perhaps one of the things dreamhost should focus on is getting (and keeping) the basics right first, and only THEN add features. Maybe monitor things better, or eat your own dogfood..

[...] # 恩，希望网线风波过去后，使用 dh 空间的朋友都能顺利登陆后台 – -链接 | 来源 Tech Industry News [...]

Nice move :D
This should pump up the value of promo codes, so why do you people even care? It profits you :)
And don’t worry – DH knows what they’re doing. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be all here, smiling :)

All the best for 2007, you have a LOT of work to do if you really want to “Become once again renowned the Web-over as a stable, reliable, robust, high-performance webhost!”

And here I thought Dreamhost 2007 resolutions would include a new web statistics tool that wasn’t made in the stone age. A bad stats tool is one way to keep customers away and lower bandwidth usage!

Nao da para entender essas pessoas… se tem pouca banda e/ou espaço, reclamam, se tem muito nao dão credibilidade ao serviço!

Eu estou completamente satisfeito ate hoje.

I’m from across the pond so my sense of humour may be different but this is clearly tongue in cheek,no?

This is just the kind of stuff we Brits love – sarcasm :)
You blame overselling? OK we’ll undersell, smartypants! He, He. Great stuff.

Josh says he’ll reduce the limits until people start to respect Dreamhost again. This is like Kubrick withdrawing Clockwork Orange from the UK because it was being blamed for an increase in street violence. Nice viral marketing though. Expect some sort of ‘clarification’ soon. Watch this space!

I agree the lowering of HDD and bandwidth is a bad idea. I say this mainly as Dreamhost has been kind of been the leader for upping size and bandwidth like gmail was at first forcing others to raise as well. So thus if they start lowering size they would loose out to others that are doing the same. I just worry this may have the opposite effect now and actually drop dreamhost into getting less new customers as I know I will have a hard time continuing to pimp them out to people.

Guys, I love your company! Great controlpanel, great service, great support and of course, great prices! :]

Well, Josh – there you have it. An endorsement by Raven Riley.

Clearly, your new marketing and pricing approach is starting to pay off.

In the competitive world of high technology services, nothing trumps a stamp of approval from a web services connoisseur whose home page features many high-resolution photos of themselves with a penis in their mouth.

I have no idea how much this costs, but…

It would be cool if webhosts voluntarily had their systems audited by a reputable company (like PriceWatherhouse Coopers), and make the figures public. Then we can see who is really overselling.

It would probably boost your reputation if you were the first ones to start this.

Is this at all feasable? Will the figures give too much info away to the competition? Am I crazy?

This is quite possibly the most ingenuous method of selling hosting space I’ve ever seen.

I agree with Josh,
if I would be looking for a web hoster and I’d see what Dreamhost has to offer, I’d say it’s too good to be true!!!

I’d keep lowering the entry Disk/Bandwidth but maybe increase the rate at which they increase until the new customer get to the point they would have been by past with the entry Disk/Bandwidth and give them the same growing rate as the old-timer customers when they’ve reached that level.

Keep up the good work, I’m behind you at 100% best host I ever got!

@Shawn

That would indeed increase dreamhost’s credibility (independent audits). However, I don’t think they would be willing to open their “books” just like that. But if they do open their “books” for independent scrutiny and rating then my trust on Dreamhost as a serious, reliable, stable host would definitely increase and thus would make recommend DreamHost as a viable solution to serious customers who usually stay away from garage-teen hosting (which is the image DreamHost currently projects).

I’ve been on Dreamhost for almost 6 years. It is still my default hosting solution for clients, despite all of the issues.

I did have a major client move to Rackspace in 2006 and start to fork out a ridiculous amount of money per month for a dedicated server, purely to escape the stability problems. They had stuck with DreamHost for 4 years before having to throw in the towel.

I say all of this only to illustrate that I support the idea of #22 above: Focus on reliability, with tangible metrics, to restore the DH reputation with existing customers. Continue to offer whatever incentives you need to get the new customers you need to grow, so long as they do not affect reliability.

Put into place a system that checks to make sure that every site is up, and refund a portion of the DH monthly fee for any section of time where the site is down, for any reason.

Over time, you will find that people will pay you more, perhaps a lot more, than they are paying now for the same service, so long as they know that your service is reliable and their reputation will be intact after recommending you.

I can talk someone into shelling out a lot more money for web hosting if I can (objectively) show that a prospective host has 99.99% uptime and will automatically credit your account for downtime.

Even if DH is already reliable, this shows prospective clients that you have an incentive to keep the lights on, not just to convince them to use your service.

With all the improvements currently rolling out I am thinking that I might become a customer of yours sometime in February/March of this year.

I look forward to doing business with you. Oh yeah!

This is really irritating. I am an existing customer, so I almost feel “important” in the sense that I am going to have higher disc space than anybody signing up new. BUT it still puts a pretty bad taste in my mouth regarding dreamhost.

Please stop this BS and put it back to 200gb (etc etc)

Not that I am any kind of expert on this sort of thing, but dreamhost has been the best web host ever. I have never had any problems at all in the years that I have been here.

I’d say, even with the drop in bandwidth and disk, you’re still one of the best. I don’t understand the whole overselling thing.. I mean.. if it’s working, why change it?

This is great! I managed to buy at the top of the bubble! This sort of makes me, and everyone else in the room, appear wise.

Plus, I like the message from DH, that they have indeed maxx’d out, and signaling its only going to get better from here. (No more ‘continuous market share/growth, but instead more concern for active clients’)

-337, (w/ shell to a Debian server in LA and 215Gb of disk, and some other freaky large number of bandwidth, that’s still growing… he he)

…but oh Please DH, fix spam for us all. I’ll brag about it if you do.

I have been using dreamhost for a while and have loved it. Not once has there been a real problem. And even if there was I would stick since I know that dh will solve it as soon as possible and be very nice about it.

Once my login id got mixed up with someone else’s (my password and user logged into someone else’s account. It got cleared up quickly and efficiently. Great work!

[...] My Web hosting company, Dreamhost started a new marketing concept: Reduce the resource offered to new customer in order to better serve old customer and to increase reputation. This decision is anounce on their blog: 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. [...]

I just have to say that I have never been uphappy with your service.

I have loved you guys since the day I found out about you and I am currently using 0.00001% of my bandwidth and disk space. I’m glad to know it’s there though in case my site flukes out and suddenly becomes hugely popular.

You can blame the electric situation if you want, but you guys have/had hardware failures all the time without adequate backups, you have software issues that take too long to resolve, etc. It is NOT just some electric situation…

[...] DreamHost to LOWER disk and bandwidth quotas in 2007 [...]

There are some people talking about this.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=574861

Have fun. :)

I must cast my vote in with the group that says the gradual inclusion plan. As a fairly new customer to dreamhost I must say that I would have run away in fear of that pricing/bandwidth growth chart. I wanted some thing simple with a low price advertised clearly and a lot of bandwidth (even if I don’t need it) I think sheerly from a marketing standpoint the idea makes no sense. Anyway the reason I came to dreamhost was that people said you have a great rep!

okay as I think about it slightly I am realizing that in a way tharketing might not be bad for getting the name out there…however I do think the chart should be less confusing for simple minded folks like myself

B r i l l i a n t !

I think it’ll be a great 2007. Thanks for the great hosting.

I’ve been a customer just 2 months. I read about your network problems from the summer before I signed, but so appreciated that you took the time to communicate you customers and explain how you would improve, that I decided that you were the host for me.

I’ve used about 5 hosts in the past and so far you guys look to be the best. We’ll see how you handle things now that our DB load is getting heavy.

Two areas need improvement lately: response times (maybe it was just b/c of the holidays) and, as someone above pointed out, your stats package.

I once thoroughly researched Web Analytics packages and was very interested by NetTracker, so that might be worth looking into. It’s pricing, easy of use, and features bested many competitors. However, I never got to fully implement it, so I can’t say for sure.

Regarding the present issue, I think there are much better ways. One thing that REALLY almost stopped me from signing up was when I read that your Better Business Bureau rating is (or then was) an “F”. I believe I confirmed that on the BOB’s site. That should be addressed. If it can’t be resolved, then perhaps you might want to explain it. That way when people like me search for “dreamhost better business bureau rating” your explanation could also be found and read.

If your rep is tarnished, why not just write a blog entry inviting people to write about experiences good or bad (which we do anyway). Better yet, run a survey (but be sure to explain it’s purpose). You might encourage clients to specify their disk and bandwidth and connuary levels. You can then hold up the results and impress prospective customers.

Good luck

I was going to sign with you , but now I am a bit confused.
I don’t think that your reputation gets better just because you drop down your offer. If you think you give a good service , you should stick to that no matter what a bunch of people say.
Now , if you give 1.9xxx space and bandwidth instead than 2, but than it will increase weekly, what’s the difference for the server stability ? Either it is stable anyway (so why to drop down the offer) or it is not (so you should not increase it weekly).
I was lucky to find this blog , other way I would have just passed by and go to sign with Hostmonster or Bluehost .
I am sure many people will do that.

Please , reconsider it . I am afraid this decision will not bring you any good.

As far as I am concerned, I will wait for a while and sign only if the offer will be the same as before.
I hope I will not wait for nothing.

Happy new year to everybody !

I LOVE YOUR POLICY GUYS!
You are giving my website the chance to exploit its full potential! If things go as it looks like they are going, we may retire together before the 30s mate! That’s why internet is great: you just need a good idea, a dream. When this dream catches the people, it’s done.

Thanks for hosting my dream. Have a nice day!

[...] Oczywiście, nie dla istniejących klientów. W notce o postanowieniach noworocznych, załoga DreamHost poinformowała, że w trosce o dobre imię hostingu, będą codziennie obniżać dostępne miejsce i pasmo dla nowych kont. [...]

[...] DreamHost Blog » New Dream Resolutions (tags: Hosting DreamHost) [...]

Good to know the problems are behind us and the future looks bright(er).

In fact, the unoffical blog, which does not seem to like comments (so what’s the point?), claims

“This also means that DreamHost are now finally in the top 20 of the biggest hosts in the world – currently as number 19!”

But the list they show does not even mention Big Daddy, so isn’t that just a little suspect?

Where does Dreamhost REALLY come, compared with the Big Boys?

I don’t understand this dropping of the entry disk space and bandwidth idea. If you’re going to do this, at least offer periodic promos with the 200 gigs/2TB we’ve all become use too. One of the key reasons for me choosing to go with DreamHost was the nice high disk space and bandwidth, as I primarily want to have space to back up files off site from me. It’s easy to recommend you to others when I can say they offer this much storage and transfer at signup. Now what do I tell perspective new customers, that you use to offer 200 gigs of storage and 2 TB of bandwidth, but now I’m not sure what’s being offered because yesterday 198GB was being offered, and if you wait too long, pretty soon you’ll only get 2GB of storage and 50GB of bandwidth? It makes no sense to me. I’m glad I got in when I did as I could start on an easy to remember number of 200/2000. As I said though if you’re gonna continue this strange way of doing this, at least offer pomotions every now and then giving the original values, maybe like you did with that one day only 9999 deal which I’m glad I took advantage of!

Im also a new customer. I have an idea. Dont sitck with the numbers. Freedom always makes people happy.
Why dont you let the new customers to choose how much space they wants? You know your limits. If someone wants 200GB, he can get it! I dont think if there will be much people who needs that much space, but we can says to everyone that “with my host you can get as much space as you want!” Who wants better promotion than that? I know there will be some people who wants to “stress” your limits or they really needs a lot of space, but you can connect people if they want 200TB space or something like that.

I tell allm y friends how much I love dreamhost and thier moto :-) However I also tell them about the unbeatable prices…I’m really sorry to hear about this decrease in resources, I think with time the power outage will blow over. Reading this blog alone made me ignore the power issues when I decided to sign up. I wish you guys reconsider so you can not only be baddass and reliable but have uber resources as well! Well we’ll see what happens…still makes me angry you guys felt you needed to increase prices (decrfease allocations). Like Price (how ironic a name) said, “Freedom always makes people happy.”

[...] That means, $97 is (usually) the maximum amount you can save on your web hosting purchase at DH. There’s one advantage besides the obvious cost cutting when you use a coupon code. You enjoy higher disk storage and bandwidth. [...]

Agreed with Ben B.

Grow up DH!

Hi, I know I’m late to the party but I just thought I’d let you know what I thought, which is that Dreamhost’s prices and offerings are really high-quality as they are, and don’t change them. When I got my first hosting account ever with you guys, I was really nervous about things like domain name fraud and other obnoxious scams. My priorities are: bandwidth, trustworthiness, ease-of-use. I’ve become convinced over time with your transparentness and kooky attitude that you’d never just decide to rip someone off, but I think this move is not the best way to communicate that trustworthiness to new customers. If you agree that it’s a high-pressure sales tactic to reduce your offerings weekly (medium-pressure? some kind of pressure, at least), then I think you can see that it’s not going to leave potential customers with good tastes in their mouths.

That said, I’m new to hosting in general and I don’t know the landscape as well as other commenters seem to, but I thought I’d offer my perspective as a satisfied Dreamhost customer.

Best wishes from the East Coast!

Ethan

I vote for abandoning the lower bandwidth offerings. Stick to your guns. If you have problems with your system, fix them, and make sure the public knows about it. I don’t think the subtle reduction of disk space and/or bandwidth is going to do anything but confuse newcomers.

FYI: I have had good performance across the board since moving to DreamHost, although I’ve noticed you’ve had a couple of problems with the control panel going down briefly.

Peace,
Gene

[...] As a consumer who generally takes a cynical view of business in my own personal dealings, I was quite surprised at how successfully the post worked at dissipating my anger, and creating a stronger personal affinity with Dreamhost. However their recent New Dream Resolutions post has to go down in the books as the reference post for any businesses wanting to adopt an hilarious, tongue-in-cheek, outrageous tone in communications with customers. (It worked too. I actually reneweed with them for another year just last week.) [...]

this is the stupidest idea ever!

dreamhost is the stupidest webhosting ever. i’m a customer, and i guess that makes me pretty stupid too.

i forgot what i wanted to say now.

That is very good! I support you

[...] je sais la vie est dure, mais il y a une explication simple : Dreamhost a souvent eu une reputation d’overseller (cad qu’ils vendent plus que ce [...]

So hows the lowering of quotas working out for you? I see you guys have been providing sub-standard service across the board since the power outage, up until that point things were tolerable, since then its all gone to pot. I guess the lowering of quotas have had a really great affect on improving your rep with customers.