178 Comments

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1. 1

   Hey, great to hear it. I’ve stuck with you, and have actually noticed that my site is a bit faster. Perhaps there’s a correlation, perhaps not, but cool!

   Comment by Andrew Sutherland — January 3, 2007 #

2. 2

   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.

   Comment by Francis — January 3, 2007 #

3. 3

   Since the space & bandwidth start increasing weekly as soon as you sign up, Francis, it shouldn’t really affect your customers referrals all that much. How many sites do you launch that need 200 GB at their outset?

   Personally, DreamHost, I don’t care what you do WRT your space & bandwidth offerings, but I’ll continue to have a hard time referring anyone to your plans page until you change out those absolutely freaking hideous animated Sign Up Now buttons.

   Comment by Rob L. — January 3, 2007 #

4. 4

   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.

   Comment by greggles — January 3, 2007 #

5. 5

   I was a very happy customer and decided to leave because I needed a dedicated server. (I left when DH was unable to provide dedicated servers as mentioned in the post).

   Now my current web host provides the PostgreSQL database. I am absolutely in love with Postgres now and can’t live without it.

   I would greatly like to move back to DreamHost on a dedicated server solely for the use of the great panel DH has. Though I won’t until Postgres is available.

   I still read this blog b/c it’s fun and entertaining.

   Wayne

   Comment by Wayne — January 3, 2007 #

6. 6

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

   ;-)

   Comment by Dan — January 3, 2007 #

7. 7

   > 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.

   Really? I hadn’t heard of current customers being moved to different servers to lighten the load. I understand that this applies to new customers, but what about a server with a bunch of old customers, none of whom want to quit any time soon? How do they get fewer other users on their server withought themselves having to move?

   // also, I’m curious to see if italics, and bold tags work here. if only this comment box had a PREVIEW button…

   Comment by Nathan Friedly — January 3, 2007 #

8. 8

   yep.. just not my typing… there.

   Like I said, needs a preview button.

   Comment by Nathan Friedly — January 3, 2007 #

9. 9

   I agree with Francis, this seems to me like a silly, gimmicky, high-pressure sales tactic that I think will turn prospective customers off and making planning new sites and comparing hosts more difficult for everyone.

   Price stability has value too, you know. Just imagine if every host did this — it’d turn the hosting industry into a Confusopoly where you wouldn’t know who was offering what at any point in time. Please reconsider.

   Comment by Nic — January 3, 2007 #

10. 10

    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.

    Comment by Tom N. — January 3, 2007 #

11. 11

    Hilarious. Well I have been extremely happy with Dreamhost from the start. You guys are great.

    Comment by Kevin Hatfield — January 3, 2007 #

12. 12

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

    Comment by Chris Garver — January 3, 2007 #

13. 13

    I agree with Francis and Nic, the gradual reduction in space/bandwidth is a silly idea and will do nothing to restore DreamHost’s reputation, assuming it actually needs restoring. DreamHost’s growth over the last 12 months would suggest that the reputation is doing fine.

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

    Mark

    Comment by Raz2133 — January 4, 2007 #

14. 14

    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. :(

    Comment by Raz2133 — January 4, 2007 #

15. 15

    Wow, the first post made it after all. I guess it got sidetracked somewhere.

    and yes, I did refresh the page numerous times waiting for it to show up. :)

    Mark

    Comment by Raz2133 — January 4, 2007 #

16. 16

    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)

    Comment by dipnlik — January 4, 2007 #

17. 17

    Funny and interesting as always.
    But what I really really want to see is dreamhost datacenter in Europe or at least decent upload speed from Europe.
    Currently it sucks (well, at least where I tested it from)

    Comment by Vladekk — January 4, 2007 #

18. 18

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

    Comment by Web Hosting Review — January 4, 2007 #

19. 19

    Hmmmm.

    As an existing customer, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the number of sign-ups you get, and here is why: I am not aware of any correlation between the number of customers and the reliability of service. The only thing I noticed is that during your fiercest period of growth, there was a slight increase in the amount of time it took to get a response from the support team. Besides that, and the well-publicized power outage, everything was hunky dory.

    So that means that this new tactic makes absolutely no sense to me at all. DreamHost has a reputation for being a bit quirky, but this is just plain idiotic. Obviously, the perception that DreamHost is unreliable needs to be addressed, but surely an allocation freeze would accomplish this with less risk than actually cutting them back?

    And what exactly do you mean by your “precious rep” anyway? You are hosting over 400,000 domains now. What fraction of that enormous customer base is claiming unreliability? And if the perception is that DreamHost is unreliable, why is the number of hosted domains still rising so dramatically? Je ne comprends pas, mes amis!

    Comment by Simon Jessey — January 4, 2007 #

20. 20

    (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.

    Comment by sdayman — January 4, 2007 #

21. 21

    Of the 400,000 domains hosted at DreamHost, how many of those are top level domains (TLD)?

    It’s one thing to have 400,000 TLD and another to have … say, 70,000 with a ton of subdomains (e.g. xxxxx.dreamhosters.com, webmail.example.com). Simply the fact that webmail is a subdomain would 2x the domain count for any customer.

    Comment by Doug — January 4, 2007 #

22. 22

    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.

    Comment by shmuel — January 4, 2007 #

23. 23

    To #7: users are regularly moved off of overly loaded servers (web and database) to rebalance the resource use and improve load times and stability. That’s done to any server regardless of how long the customers have been with us. Your opinion of ‘loaded’ may differ from ours, though! If you do think your server is overloaded, let our support team know so it can be investigated. It may have slipped under our radar.

    To #21: The 400,000 is based on our DNS servers so it’s essentially all top level domains. ‘webmail.domain.com’, etc are not counted, and neither are any of our .dreamhost.com or .dreamhosters.com subdomains. It’s a very rough measurement all around.

    Comment by Dallas — January 4, 2007 #

24. 24

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

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

    Comment by Oli — January 4, 2007 #

25. 25

    This is really not the sort of thing I expect from you guys. Please don’t behave like a shady used-car dealer.

    Comment by Daniel Drucker — January 4, 2007 #

26. 26

    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 :)

    Comment by pixie — January 4, 2007 #

27. 27

    [...] Dreamhost webhosting has posted an article about their new year resolutions. If your site was bugged with web hosting server issues last year, this year may be better. Some reflections from their post show a reason to smile for Dreamhost customers. “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!” [...]

    Pingback by Dreamhost Promises Better Webhosting in 2007 — January 4, 2007 #

28. 28

    Wayne: What do you like/need about PostgreSQL?

    Comment by Jon H — January 4, 2007 #

29. 29

    Hey Francis,

    Hmm, maybe that’s a good idea.. okay, as of NOW, people who sign up with a promo code get the original disk and bw allotments (200GB/2TB through 500GB/5TB)!

    Yet another way to convince your friends to sign up and to use your promo code, ehhhhhh?

    Comment by Josh Jones — January 4, 2007 #

30. 30

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

    Comment by helge — January 4, 2007 #

31. 31

    Complete nonsense, Josh. I think you’re taking yourself a bit too seriously with the master-of-x self-impossed titles. This tactic reminds me of a car dealerships “deals.” Or worse still, reminds me of one of those rubbish infomertials…”if you call in the next 10 minutes we’ll add …” Your rep as quirky web hosts might dim, however, the rep as a high-pressure sales shark will surely add insult to the injury.

    I beleive you’re worrying too much about “what other people think.” Your rep as a solid host will come with time and word-of-mouth not with silly sales tactics.

    Comment by Toord — January 4, 2007 #

32. 32

    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.

    Comment by Anthony — January 4, 2007 #

33. 33

    What a hoot! In spite of all the comments of those that categorize the “decreasing resources” tactic as a “sleazy marketing ploy”, I think it’s hilarious.

    In most cases, the real impact on the usability of a hosting plan by reducing the *ridiculous* quotas currently in place is negligible; Dreamhost will *still* be a *great value*.

    Now you just have to worry about “overselling” charges that folks will fling your way when the sheep panic, yelling, “OMG NOW I ONLY GET 175GB FOR $7.95 A MONTH! I BETTER SIGN UP RIGHT NOW!”, and rush to sign up. Ha!

    Rock On!

    Comment by rlparker — January 4, 2007 #

34. 34

    @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.

    Comment by Wayne — January 4, 2007 #

35. 35

    I simply love this idea!

    DreamHost provides such a massive amount of disk space that this shouldn’t matter for new customers. If people cannot see the fun in this, then I think it is their loss :-)

    Comment by Martin Geisler — January 4, 2007 #

36. 36

    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?

    Comment by Glenn Kerbein — January 4, 2007 #

37. 37

    I think it’s a funny strategy. Many people will write about this, so you will get some advertising :)
    But in terms of changing the opinions of anyone… hum… I’m not sure…

    Comment by Coupons — January 4, 2007 #

38. 38

    [...] 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. [...]

    Pingback by Martin Geisler Online » DreamHost Fun (Madness)! — January 4, 2007 #

39. 39

    Well after reading all the comments… I had time to think about… and maybe it work… yes sounds crazy, but for starters the best competition product I know offers 50GB HD, ~250GB transfer monthly… I think that far from these numbers the new regs will begin, and this will stop.

    Anyway… I love this blog… and the addresing of the ‘hot’ topic got me laught. Keep the good work!

    Comment by vicm3 — January 4, 2007 #

40. 40

    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. ;)

    Comment by Grey Hodge — January 4, 2007 #

41. 41

    Seriously, now, the cutting of specs a little day by day is just plain rude. It’s an icky, rude way to try to conjure up sign-ups sooner rather than later. Did I mention rude?

    Either cut it all at once for new accounts or don’t tinker at all.

    Comment by Sean Hayford O'Leary — January 4, 2007 #

42. 42

    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!!!

    Comment by Henrik — January 4, 2007 #

43. 43

    Will Brett be creating some new link graphics that we can add to our web pages showing the decreasing webspace and bandwidth? Should be fun to see how he does that :)

    Has anyone forcast when the amounts go negative and new users have to start giving DH webspace and bandwidth? Is that called underselling?

    2007 could be the year of the question?

    Comment by Norm — January 5, 2007 #

44. 44

    @Norm

    ROFL Gold!

    Comment by David — January 5, 2007 #

45. 45

    Wayne, I think (check with DH support though) that on your dedicated server you can install Postgres (or have a dh admin install it for you); in this setting the database server will be installed on the same server as the web server (MySQL is shared even for those on dedicated servers).

    Comment by Andrei — January 5, 2007 #

46. 46

    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

    Comment by Larry — January 5, 2007 #

47. 47

    I’d like to add my support for Postgres, if possible.

    It does two things.

    Firstly it provides much more robust ACID compliance.

    Secondly, by providing a set of features (sequences etc) that are not just essential but similar to Oracle, it provides a clear upgrade path.

    So you can promise clients that if they shit hits the fan and they become mega-successful, we can just do a quick port to Oracle and then they can just throw money at Oracle till their database scaling problems go away.

    So, wherever database usage is non-trivial (i.e. more than one or two tables) we always use Postgres.

    It’s about the only thing stopping me recommending to clients to host with you guys.

    (Note: MySQL 5 is getting better, but STILL doesn’t have sequence support, grrr)

    Comment by Adam Kennedy — January 5, 2007 #

48. 48

    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!

    Comment by Deanna Marie — January 5, 2007 #

49. 49

    Been here for a while now (more than 1 year … less than 2 … I think), and I am glad to stick around. There are a lot worse things a host can do (be unresponsive, nothing, close shop), and I find the constant badgering, I mean, informative ways of Dreamhost much preferable to the other options. Here’s hoping your idea works!

    Comment by Dana — January 5, 2007 #

50. 50

    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.

    Comment by AJ — January 5, 2007 #

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