Are you older than a Fifth Grader?
September 24, 2007 on 2:36 pm | In Business, Insider View, Musings, New Features, Promotions, Tech News by Josh Jones |
We are!
Well, maybe not ALL fifth graders, but I’m sure at least A fifth grader.
Like, one who skipped first grade or something.
Like me! (I was too tall smart.)
Anyway, DreamHost is TEN YEARS OLD!!!
Domain Name: DREAMHOST.COM Registrar: NEW DREAM NETWORK, LLC Whois Server: whois.dreamhost.com Referral URL: http://www.dreamhost.com Name Server: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM Name Server: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM Name Server: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM Status: ok Updated Date: 21-sep-2006 Creation Date: 23-sep-1997 Expiration Date: 22-sep-2013
In dog years, that’s SEVENTY!
In Internet years, that’s ONE THOUSAND!
In waiting-for-tech-support-to-get-back-to-you years, that’s INFINITY!
To celebrate, I’m doing this super-long blog post retrospective… and if you read the whole thing, you might feel a little less let down about the announcement I mentioned last post just being a freaking birthday announcement.
Stupid Beginnings: Pre-DreamHost
Man, I was just looking through some old emails from 1997, and one thing I can say is, boy, were we dumb!
It’s nice to know some things never change.
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 15:06:32 -0800 (PST)
From: Josh “Evening Optimist” Jones
To: Honchos
Subject: Plan?Maybe we should piece together a mission statement or guidelines for
business or goals or something. Maybe we should also come up with some
different plans for pricing web hosting. Like some amount for a small
business site (at most 500 hits a day or so) and some amount for a large
site, with a discount if we were the ones who made the site. All should
probably have 20megs of space, with $5 per 10 more or so (I’m of course
wide open to specific price suggestions, these are just round numbers).
Maybe $30 for a small, $45 for a large, plus maybe $5 more per some number
of hits. Also more if they have a domain name. If we made their site
though, how about $15 off the base price?Anyway, I was thinking we need some reason that people would want
to use us instead of our competitors. Why would they now? We are good at
design and graphics and programming, but honestly there are plenty of
places that are good at that. We have to be something others aren’t. Like:
quicker at getting the job done, better sites, cheaper sites, or maybe
even something like better customer service or even more advertising. The
reason I thought that low price would be a good way to go is because we
have an advantage over most other places in that. We aren’t actualy
dependent on this (at least not _yet_) whereas others are. I don’t think
we have an advantage in speed, especially since we are all full time
students. We are good at design but it’s hard to sell people on our sites
being the highest quality I think. I can imagine some people really liking
our work and other people not so much, there is a lot of personal taste
involved. Another thing which I guess is sort of obvious is that it would
be good to get some large sites that we need to change a lot and sort of
constantly maintain and add things to, because we can keep charging for
that. Like when we get a job, we should outline clearly what is included
in the setup, and additional things (like more pictures, etc..) are
clearly going to cost more later. Okay thats it. I would have written this
earlier, but my connection was flakey yesterday.Josh
But wait, isn’t that email dated January 1997?! We didn’t register dreamhost.com until September! What oh what were we doing in the meantime?
The thing is, the actual company over here is really called “New Dream Network” .. and the goal was never (and still isn’t!) to be a web host. We did some web hosting on the side to try and cover the network we were stealing from a friend, but we generally didn’t want it to ever get too big.
Buuuuuut, once we started actually raking in the dough, that mentality changed quick. Let me give you an idea of how much dough there was to be raked back when we decided to get serious and get an actual domain name..
07.29.97 pillar Pillar Communications $20.00
07.31.97 pinzler Andrew Pinzler $48.00
07.31.97 jbark Joseph Bark $46.00
08.06.97 tim Timnet $126.00
08.12.97 threnody Cheryl Dowling $136.00 VOID
08.12.97 jhb5 Vickee Sepich $46.00
Here’s an interesting little exchange I found too… the origins of the DreamHost name:
Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 14:06:21 -0800 (PST)
From: Dallas Bethune
To: Honchos
Subject: Re: everyhost.comHey,
I just discovered that dreamhost.com is not taken!
We could snatch it up! What do you think?
I’m making an ad for hosting right now, BTW…
->Dallas
> > Hey what do you guys think of everyhost.com? We could make it our mission
> > to make having a website with a domain name easy and affordable for
> > everyone from private citizens to small to large businesses. Therefore..
> > everyhost.com (it’s not taken). Also Dallas, are front page extensions
> > still installed somewhere? I’m going to take advantage of the beta status
> > of FP98 to download it and see if we can get our server to work with their
> > extensions. It would be good to put at least on our hosting server once we
> > get it.
> >Josh
>
> I’m not that taken by everyhost.com. I don’t think I would personally want
> to have my site there. It would be fine if we were trying to focus on
> sites with their own domains, though.
>
> I believe I deleted the FrontPage stuff. We never got it working right,
> and were low on space at some point.
>
> I’d almost rather not have FrontPage going on our servers. It seems kinda
> neat, but I’m still worried about what access to our server that it seems
> to require…
>
> ->Dallas
Ha, EveryHost! Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
I do feel somewhat vindicated that everyhost.com was snatched up less than two years later!
(One thing sort of funny is… we were assuming most people would be getting sub-domains of our main domain. Dallas was saying that he wouldn’t want dallas.everyhost.com as much as dallas.dreamhost.com! Of course “It would be fine if we were trying to focus on sites with their own domains, though.”)
A Nightmare is Born
Woooooheeee! Thanks the Wayback Machine I’ve been able to find and recreate the entire history of DreamHost.com and lay it out for you here, complete with what I think are the most interesting points in each design! Unending boredom awaits..
This was our first design!
Designed by Dustin Vannatter, New Dream Member extraordinaire, I’ll always hold a special place in my heart for this one!
Back then, we actually had specifically an “adult site hosting” plan.. it was $99.95/month and, like all our plans, included unlimited bandwidth! As unlimited as half a T1 can be! It came with 100MB per 5GB of transfer you used, which was really weird in retrospect.
We also had our Crazy Domain Insane plan for $9.95/month with 20MB of storage, Archive Boy for $17.95/month with 40MB, Code Warrior (we hadn’t gotten that Cease and Desist from Metrowerks yet!) for $23.95/month with 50MB and a telnet user and CGI access, and Strictly Business for $44.95/month with 100MB of storage along with 20 email addresses and anonymous FTP!
It turned out, that Adult Site hosting plan with unlimited bandwidth was the only thing that kept us solvent those early months. As soon as we put that “too good to be true” offer up there, we started getting deluged (as in, multiple PER WEEK!) with signups for it! And these were big customers too.. $100/month!
It took about a week before we realized that unlimited bandwidth plus adult content equals not good. Some of these people were using over a GB a day of transfer.. and according to an early email from michael, we needed to be making $200/GB to stay afloat! We immediately had to re-negotiate with some of those early adopters.. one guy began paying $700/month, and others left.
We did learn an important lesson though, and that was that some of those $100/month adult sites used hardly ANY bandwidth at all! And thus, the truth about overselling was realized!
(Ha, if you thought having a dedicated adult hosting plan was crazy, before dreamhost.com launched we had a dedicated warez hosting plan!)
We also had “colocation” options back then:
For $995/month you got 50GB bandwidth, 64MB RAM, a 3GB SCSI drive, on a Pentium 200Mhz!
For $3000/month you got a PII 400Mhz, 256MB RAM, two 9GB SCSIs and 300GB of bandwidth!
The deals would have been a little sweeter if I’d had my way though…
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 11:35:29 -0800 (PST)
From: Dallas Bethune
To: Honchos
Subject: dreamhost.com siteI looked at it…
I’m alarmed by the colocate page.
How do you think we’re going to offer
200MHZ Pentium II
64 MB RAM
4.2 GB drive
Full Debian Linux DistributionOnly $300 setup
$300 a month.At this ridiculously low prices?
We’re trying to make money…!
The offer I was talking about would be a 100 MHz Pentium with 16MB Ram and
2 gig drive for $1500 setup and $500/mnthThat price is even low…
Also, I’d rather not give everybody full CGI access that is a client of a
reseller. That would be a good way to open ourselves up for a lot of
attacks from people we don’t even really know at all. I think we should
develop a set of cgi scripts that most people would want to cover people’s
want or need for CGI without opening the server up. We can’t afford to
get new hardware too often…I also feel especially unsure about granting full CGI to people with warez
pages. They would be the ones most likely to try to cause trouble,
right? (maybe I’m just getting old)Most people don’t need cgi except for little things. If we can provide
those things, we can secure ourselves from big programs that use up the
processor or what not. I’m paranoid.I think we may have to discuss our prices overall, as well. We are way
lower than a lot of places. This helps us get business, but we may need
to reassess our costs, and our income, and all that.->Dallas
Yeah, early on you got ONE mailbox, ONE hosted domain, ONE ftp user, and NO cgi access unless you were at least on Code Warrior.. and you liked it! Not to mention domain registrations were $70/year from Network Solutions (and only Network Solutions!)
From the very beginning we had a “reseller program” (you’d get 20% off) and in November 1998 I started the monthly newsletter. Oh yay.
So yep, that was it, one server, four honchos, and $200 in the bank.
Two Years Pass: September 1999
First thing I noticed on this redesign.. our 1-888-261-4484 is nowhere to be found! I must have gotten tired of all those voicemails setting off my pager. Good riddance to phone support! It wouldn’t return (in the form of callbacks) for three years.
By our two year birthday, DreamHost has grown from the four honchos to 19 people.. and gone from no profit to profit to no profit again, thanks in large part to Sage’s WebRing millions!
We’d dropped the unlimited bandwidth, but added some “extra options” at this point: get an extra ftp username for $5/month, and extra mailbox for $2/month, and extra storage for $5 per 10MB!
We’ve dropped the adult plan, added a domain parking plan for $30/year .. NOT including registration (but refunded if you upgraded to full hosting!), renamed “colocation” to “dedicated” (after all, we still don’t have our very own data center!), started offering squirrel mail webmail, and were giving away a free iBook! This was back when people used to read books!
We later had a lot of other giveaway contests.. DreamCasts, Handspring Visors, Game Boy Advances, and even, on the launch of “DH2″, a PS2!
DreamHost 2: September 2000
Pretty much since I graduated from college in May of 1998, we’d been working on “the future of webhosting.” We were going to call it “DreamHost 2000″ in the theme of “Windows 2000″, but by the time we actually got it out and done, the year 2000 didn’t really seem like the future anymore, so it was just “DreamHost 2.0.”
What did DH 2 bring?
Well, mostly the panel as you more-or-less know it today. We also had a system that should have pretty much seamlessly scaled from 3 or 4 servers to 3 or 4 thousand. And I guess it more-or-less did.
We also started doing our “own” domain registrations (through register.com, then joker, then tucows, and finally, many years later, our own ICANN account!) for $30/year.
We dropped the “Archive Boy” plan and created “Sweet Dreams” and upped our storage offerings to 30/75/150/250MB, our bandwidth to 2/4/7/12GB a month, and our mailboxes included to 3/10/20/40!
We also raised our prices to $10/$20/$35/$60 per month and added more extras: discussion lists for $10/month each, SSL access (not including a cert) for $20/month, extra MySQL DBs for $7/month each, and extra bandwidth for the rock-bottom-remainder price of $15/GB!
We also didn’t include any sub-domains on Crazy Domain Insane back then.. or even CGI access! We did however have an official logo! And 31 employees though.
Promo Codes, DreamServers, and Disaster: September 2001
September 2001: did you forget that American flags weren’t just in meatspace? We got on the bandwagon ourselves.
Witness, the humble beginning of promo codes… originally a way for us to give college students a discount! We also started giving away a free registration with hosting, and had a domain checker right on the front page. We created the KBase and launched DreamServers; starting at only $395/month now.. for 40GB of bandwidth, a 10GB disk, and a 600Mhz Celeron with 128MB RAM!
We were now hosting 29,380 domains! And.. we went crazy and way upped disk to 60/300/600/1000MB, and bandwidth a smidge to 2/5/10/30GB, and dropped pricing for overage to $15/$10/$10/$5 per GB.
Even crazier… on the front page, a huge form where you could specify how much of each feature you wanted and how much you were willing to pay, and we would “recommend” a plan for you! The actual point of this feature was market research though.. after months of data collection I would go back through and decide how to best update our plans to maximize revenues!
At this point we had gone through our own little mini dot-bomb.. our head count was only 28 since we decided to stop borrowing money from Sage! Fortunately, our stock art head count had tripled in the same period.
Rapid Growth: We Turn Five!
Really, we started growing faster a little bit before this completely sweet redesign. It started when I analyzed all those “recommendation” requests and realized we really should just be giving more away on our cheapest plan. Sure, less people are “up-sold” on our more expensive plans, but really, those people were just going to our competitors.
So, we gave CGI on CDI, upped our disk to 100/400/900/1500MB, our bandwidth to 2/10/20/30GB, our mailboxes to 20/60/140/300, and gave away unlimited MySQL databases on all plans… I believe an industry first? Oh ho ho!
Of course, we did put a limit on the database usage you could have… the short lived “conueries” metric! 25 times your connections plus your queries! And you got 10M “conueries” per month on CDI!
But still, the redesign was nice too.. we did it thanks to the prodding of a PR company we hired for the still-ridiculous price of $10,000 a month. The biggest thing we learned from that was how easy PR is.. in fact, they even told us they couldn’t have done our press releases (they made us do) any better.
With the fifth birthday, we renamed Code Warrior to Code Monster, upped disk space another 50MB each (of course, all old customers got it as well!), and jumped bandwidth up to 20/25/30/40GB a month. DreamServers was now just DreamHost Dedicated (too many brands the PR company said!), and for $199/mo you got a 1.6Ghz P4, 256MB of RAM, a 30GB drive, and 75GB of bandwidth!
Another critical thing we started here was the ability to cash out your rewards (10% of all payments for people you referred, plus 5% of people they referred), instead of just applying it towards your hosting bill. That was a pretty big deal for our burgeoning affiliate crowd!
We were down to just 24 employees, and $300,000 in the bank!
The Sale Era: September 2003 and 2004
A lot of you reading this probably trace your history with DreamHost back to this period.
Although 777 on our 7th birthday was the culmination, the beginning was actually back on our sixth birthday, in September 2003, while I was actually in Hawaii at a friend’s wedding.
We decided to try, as a lark almost, giving our Strictly Business plan (1.6GB of storage and 40GB of bandwidth plus every other feature) for the price of Crazy Domain Insane, forever.
At that time, we were peaking at about 30 new customers a day. I thought, optimistically, the sale would give us a 50% bump.
The day I turned it on (from Hawaii), we got 300 new customers. The next day, 600! The third day, at which point everbody was screaming for me to turn it off, 1200! In a period of 3 days, we’d provisioned as many accounts as we usually got in 3 months.
It was a hectic time, fo’ sure. The support team hated it. Fortunately, they’re not in charge!
As a result of the incredible demand we witnessed, I was able to convince everybody to allow me to up our offerings a few months later to 500/1000/1600/2300MB of disk and a bit more bandwidth too. We also dropped the price of Code Monster to Sweet Dreams “temporarily.”
The next year, we did essentially the same thing, except we tried just making our cheapest plan SUPER CHEAP.. the 777 sale allowed you to get a year of CDI for just $9.24! Are we Crazy? Insane? Domain?
At that point we’d also already upped disk to 800/1600/2560/3680MB doubled bandwidth to 40/48/64/88GB (and dropped overage to $4/$3/$2/$1 per GB) as well as tripled the number of included mailboxes. We’d also started giving a 20% discount for pre-paying for two years. Pretty much just so we could say our price was $7.95/month!
We also started offering a 91-day money back guarantee (since 1 and 1 had appeared on the scene offering a 90-day!) and allowed opting for a one-time payment of $65 for referring somebody to DreamHost!
Our dedicated servers had a $99.95/month option with a Pentium 4, 512MB of RAM, a 30GB disk, and 500GB of bandwidth.
We had 23 employees for the entire two year period, had paid Sage off the money we’d borrowed (without much interest, which turned out to still be a pretty good return for 1999-2002), and had a cool mil in the bank!
It Gets a Little Ridiculous: September 2005
So, in January 2005 we decide to triple disk and bandwidth to 2.4/4.8/7.6/11GB and 120/144/192/264GB! We had to, man! It was like all you had to do was up those numbers and you got more money!
In the “Spirit of ‘97″ (not at all because others were offering more, nope!) we upped our rewards payout from $65 to $97, as well as our money back guarantee from 91 days to 97. In March we hit 100,000 domains!
And that’s when our power problems began.
I won’t get into it tooooooooooo much right here, but our main data center essentially ran out of power over two years ago and is still out today. We immediately stopped selling any new Dedicated Servers (at that point we were adding about one a day). I wasn’t too heart-broken because my first love had always been shared!
So never mind all that!
We added Ruby on Rails support shortly thereafter, and this blog got started in July with let’s save our environment, truly one of this generation’s great folk hits.
We double disk again, and added the feature where your bandwidth and disk grows every week you stay a customer with us… we’re still the only host who does this that I know of/care about!
Anyway, the 888 promo code only gave you 80% off, and wasn’t nearly as big a deal as 777 (which we’d actually secretly still left working for most of the year!), but we did also up all our plans to finally include unlimited domains and sub-domains, something customers had been asking for for years, which gave us a pretty big boost.
Domain registrations also dropped to $9.95/year and extra bandwidth was now $1-$0.50/GB. We had 30 employees now.. an unsettling trend in my book!
I Just Like This Fat Kid
That was our website in January 2006, when we went completely insane and finally upped our disk FORTY TIMES and our bandwidth TEN TIMES to 20/40/60/90GB and 1/1.2/1.6/2.2TB.
Around now was when we got sick of just losing all those potential dedicated server customers (still no power) and decided to just start linking them over to hosting.com for some affiliate sugar.
Fan Gets Hit With It: September 2006
That summer there’s more power outages and we have TWO FULL MONTHS of pretty darn bad service. It was pretty sucky all around.
We did about the only thing we could do.. made a new site all based on “community” and doubled bandwidth and 10 timesed disk again!
At this point we’re also giving away 3000/6000/12000/24000 mailboxes and 75/175/375/775 shell accounts. We have a 999 promo code which gives $99.99 off (again, it’s no 777!) and take it a little easy.
We’ve got 300,000 domains, 50 employees and a lot of infrastructure stuff to deal with.
Everything Is Wonderful: September 2007
In January of this year, we took a step back. A step away from everything that’s made us who we are, our very essense, and we actually started reducing how much disk and bandwidth we included on our plans.
We had (close to) no promo code sales all year, and never upped those quotas a smidge. It’s been very very very painful for me.
Well… sweet release is finally here!
The Payoff
If you’ve read, or at least scrolled, this far… you deserve something!
And here it is.. for the big One - Oh, DreamHost is now offering only one plan! It’s called “Happy Hosting” (though it doesn’t really need a name when it’s the only one) and it comes with 500GB of disk, 5TB of bandwidth per month, and unlimited users and mailboxes, etc, etc, etc…
Current customers immediately get the unlimited users and mailboxes, and their bandwidth doubled. We’re also doubling your existing disk space, but it will be rolled out incrementally. If you want to switch to the new plan, you can today from our panel!
It’s $10.95/month, but if you prepay for 1 year it’s $9.95/month, 2 years it’s $8.95/month, 3 years it’s $7.95/month, 5 years it’s $6.95/month, and 10 years it’s $5.95/month! There may be a crazy 777-ish promo code too (for new customers) if you look around.
TEN YEARS?
Who would pay for ten years in advance?
I dunno, but at least we’ve finally shown we can do ten years!
Happy Hosting!
P.S. And, when you renew in 2017 you’ll (most definitely) be up to 12.5 PB of storage and bandwidth for $1.95/month!
94 Responses to “Are you older than a Fifth Grader?”
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September 24th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
HAPPY BIRTHDAY EVERYBODY AT DREAMHOST! =D
*hugs and kisses* \o/
September 24th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
New Pricing Structure at DreamHost…
Looks like DreamHost is launching a new pricing structure together with their birthday promo.
There is currently only 1 service plan (which includes 500 GB disk storage and 5 TB monthly bandwidth) and a number of new add-on options:
Premium Phone Sup…
September 24th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
DreamHost Birthday Promo…
The promo is live now :
500 GB Disk Storage, 5 TB Monthly Bandwidth, plus many more features - from $5.95/month!
Sign up for hosting with DreamHost TODAY and prepay for a year of service (or more) using the promo code 10ten10diez10dix10dieci10shi and…
September 24th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Just when I thought I would finally be able to see 1% usage of my bandwidth you go and increase it.
Well, I guess now if I get tasered or something at least everyone will be able to view my website.
September 24th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Happy Birthday DreamHost!
http://digg.com/tech_deals/DreamHost_Birthday_Promo_First_year_9_30
September 24th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Happy Birthday guys and congrats on the fantastic journey the last 10 years have been…
September 24th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
This is why I love DreamHost!
September 24th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Wow….definitely happy birthday! The increase in users have certainly made me very happy!
September 24th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
That’s great Josh, but I was kind of hoping you’d celebrate by giving me an iPhone with 2 years of service.
*sigh* Happy 10 Guys, happy ten.
September 24th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Congrats Josh and DreamHost for this 10 years of happy hosting. And thanks for doubling our quotas. Perhaps for the 20th anniversary you offer a higher speed network!! :0)
September 24th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Yaaay! Happy Birthday!
DreamHost is amazing. :)
September 24th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Happy Birthday! Thanks for the upgrades.
September 24th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Congratulations on 10 years. While I’ve only seen two of them, I’m very happy with the service I’ve received.
Also congratulations on managing to spin a $1 price hike for most customers as a wonderful gift, Josh ;)
September 24th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
lbft: actually, if you’ve got a standard $9.95/month account, the price doesn’t change! Check your billing page. If you want to upgrade, they’ll charge you the extra $1.
September 24th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
[...] Pharma. & Medical Packaging News wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIn Insider View , Business , Promotions , Musings , Tech News , New Features by Josh Jones We are! Well, maybe not ALL fifth graders, but I’m sure at least A fifth grader. [...]
September 24th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Good work guys. That’s a very nice history. And i hope you make after 20 years another history like this one
September 24th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
So when I need to renew my 2year plan in a few months I will have to MORE, this might sound nice at start but in fact all this does is force me to spend more money.
September 25th, 2007 at 12:20 am
It’s a good thing that the customers who have been with you year after year after year aren’t getting screwed around. But yeah, happy birthday. :) It’s crazy that I’ve been with you guys since the beginning.
September 25th, 2007 at 12:34 am
Happy birthday Dreamhost!
On to the next 10 years and the 20th anniversary! ;)
September 25th, 2007 at 1:11 am
Josh,
Can you make a nice reward button/banner for Dreamhost 10th birthday celebration that I and other customers can put on their website?
Like a nice button that says Dreamhost is running for 10 years, has 300.000 domains and is still rocking or something like that :-)
September 25th, 2007 at 4:36 am
OMG another 2TiB of bandwidth, you’re just awesome!
September 25th, 2007 at 5:31 am
So… there’s really no reason to continue paying $19.95/month for Code Monster? =)
September 25th, 2007 at 6:12 am
Just yesterday I was thinking on how to prepay more than 2 years… jeje.
!!!By the way Happy Birthday!!!!
WOW… 5TB and just when reached 80GB monthly…
How about making new promotional logos and stuff? I want to put some on my sites ;D
September 25th, 2007 at 7:12 am
You really are crazy. ;) But things like these really keep me with you as a customer. Although I will probably never use 5TB bandwidth.. The diskspace is nice, though!
September 25th, 2007 at 9:16 am
So I would like to see how a hosting company such as dreamhost actually operates. All these clusters and neat infrastructure. Id like to learn how to build for high availability… Any ideas? :)
September 25th, 2007 at 11:07 am
[...] swoje 10 urodziny! Powstał 24 września 1997 :) Na ich blogu, mozecie przeczytać sobie ich historię… Z tej okazji dla pierwszych (od 24.09) 1010 klientów mają kod zniżkowy wysokości $110. [...]
September 25th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
What about SSL?
September 25th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
[...] my current web host, apparently turned 10 the other day. They posted a pretty amusing history of DreamHost (I remember that old cloud-themed layout! They were crazy expensive back then) and ended on a [...]
September 25th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
I read that article. You left out all the parts about when you could have bought into Google pre-IPO. Those are the kind of stories that make people remember the good old days.
September 25th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Happy 10 years, guys! It’s hard to believe it’s been that long or that I’ve been hosting with ya’ll since 2000, myself o_o
September 25th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
The Lord is very happy… when He was looking for servers to make his own, He knew that you were the right choice. There were many doubters, but for those who believed this is their reward.
Now, The Lord only asks one further thing of you… He wishes for you to make the MySQL servers faster like The Devil’s are.
September 26th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Wait, how do I upgrade to this? in the panel it says:
Which means I’ll have payed for what I’ve used and pay for another 2 years. What if I don’t want to continue for an extra two years, but want to take advantage of this and keep the same price? (someone up there said it was the same price as the CDI 2 year deal)…
September 26th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
What if I sign up for eh… a hundred years! Do I get everything free since I am that eh… Well, what am I…
September 27th, 2007 at 1:39 am
I just switched down from Code Monster - you get a pro rata refund for any time remaining on your old account. So while I do have to pay a bit at the end of this month, all the money that was left on my old plan is credited towards it.
September 27th, 2007 at 10:25 am
And google turned 9 today!
Good thing DH got a full year’s head start on them!
September 27th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Maybe it’s time now to figure out ways of providing some sort of SLA… If your really looking to keep customers for 10 years, you gotta do something to keep them happy for that long.
September 27th, 2007 at 11:51 am
I’m glad they leave that marketing trash to their competitors.
Throwing up an SLA is easy… it’s typing up all the fine print that saves you from paying out on it that takes the time.
It’s also completely worthless if you’re not dumping a bunch of money per month. There’s no way throwing someone a few pennies for a few hours of down time will stop the crying. Or did you think 10 minutes of downtime would entitle a free month?
Dreamhost is offers too much for the money to worry about an SLA.
September 27th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
I just wish my affiliate links converted like they used to. I got used to being paid for hosting with you and this year I actually had to pay money, which came as a bit of a shock.
September 27th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
Considering I nearly dropped dead when I saw my BW double just now, I’m considering changing my plan.
Happy BDay Dreamhost.
September 27th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
Ok, I accidentally changed it, but oh well, still love dreamhost, lol.
September 28th, 2007 at 2:51 am
Congrats!!!!! Josh and dream host for this 10 years of happy hosting. HAPPY BIRTHDAY DREAM HOST!!!!!!….
Thank you for your awe somatic service till now.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:19 am
[...] 10th birthday on September 24th. Another one of the old boys in the hosting industry, there is a great post on the Dreamhost blog chronicling their evolution over the last 10 years. Although I’m not [...]
September 28th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Web Hosting Blogs: The Big List…
Our big list of blogs writing about the hosting industry….
September 28th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Has anyone noticed on the homepage of DH that ‘guarantee’ is spelled wrong on the box?
September 28th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Man I cant myself… here
September 28th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Man I cant myself… http://shoughunsecondlife.blogspot.com/
September 29th, 2007 at 10:53 am
[...] DreamHost 的十周年。新用户的配置好的吓人。有想买 DreamHost [...]
September 29th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Happy birthday guys.
And thanks for all the fish, bandwidth, disk space, etc… :-D
September 29th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Can we still have the FiOS to our homes? With all that disk space, I need a faster way to fill it up. All this generosity makes me think you’re having a fire sale. You make Crazy Eddie look sane.
September 30th, 2007 at 8:02 am
Happy Birthday! You guys are the best.
Woot now i can double my disk use from 0.3% to 0.6% yippy and bandwidth from 0.0% to … umm lol
No if you can start Dream Electric & Gas, Dream Cell Phones, and Dream Cable, I’ll sign up for life.
September 30th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Is it as sad as I think it is that I *still* have the grandfathered Archive Boy account? Perhaps I should do something about this one of these days. Ahem.
Happy Birthday, Dreamhosties!
October 1st, 2007 at 6:36 am
How long is the incremental roll out of extra disk space expected to take? I’m not in need of said space at present but was just wanted to know the expected time :)
Also one last question (if you can respond that’d be awesome) if I upgraded to the new plan now having prepaid for a year only a month ago, if I prepay for another year does the remainder of my current plan get upgraded as well?
Aside from that keep up the good work!
October 1st, 2007 at 1:35 pm
I’m pretty happy overall, but wondering why the last real completion of a suggestion was in January? There are many of us wishing you could offer some kind of shared SSL.
October 2nd, 2007 at 4:17 am
What would you guys charge for High Availability web hosting?
Something beyond the ‘best effort’ I consider dreamhost to offer.
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:32 am
Hey,
Congratulations to the entire Dreamhost team on its 10th anniversary. I must say that you’v done a great job.
Nice being with you all.
Btw just a suggestion, you guys should consider reducing the price for the addiditional domains, cause we’v got couple of people out there who are normally giving .com domains for $5 and some even to the extent of $1.99 . So basically $9.99 is now a lil’ bit old fashioned, you should consider reducing the prices a lil’
Dreamhost rox !
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:00 am
I really appreciate the history lesson, but am unsure how upgrading my $9.95/month plan that I don’t come close to using to a $10.95/month plan that I won’t come close to using will benefit me.
Surely if a person maxed out on either plan they would crash a shared server?
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:12 am
[...] 从DH官方博客的“Are you older than a Fifth Grader?” 文章里可以找到相关的信息: 那是篇很长的文章(貌似从头回顾了一边Dreamhost的10年历史),我也没兴趣看完,只摘录最后部分: “//”后面是我写的关键文字的注释和简易”翻译” [...]
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:31 pm
I love that fat sleeping kid! That was the main thing that convinced me that THIS was the host for me.
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Hey lads,
I must admit, i allways get a bit wiped out when my hosting providers send out a long page of stuff they had on their mind lol
It’s all good, you know what you’re at, unfortunately, i’m not havin the same luck, so keep up the good work lads!
And i was wondering when i saw the ten year birthday notices on your site, are they gonna upgrade existing customers to the newer fatter plans?
Peace out
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:25 pm
I like dreamhost. If you do not like dreamhost you must be some kind of jerk.
Happy 10th.
October 3rd, 2007 at 7:10 pm
“If you do not like dreamhost you must be some kind of jerk.”
Or… of The Devil.
October 4th, 2007 at 1:10 am
i *heart* you… Happy birthday.
Oh, and if you are brave, you should post your gamertag, so us dreamhosters can rival you @ some halo3 ;)
October 4th, 2007 at 1:53 am
Happy birthday DH! Rock ‘n Roll…
October 4th, 2007 at 2:04 am
Happy birthday to you big guys!!
I am with you since you were 7 - got the amazing “all in 0.77$” deal.
Keep it up! :-)
Michal
October 4th, 2007 at 2:41 am
Unfortunately, you almost always will be banned for overusing server before your reach even 1 TB. I mean, if you have web site and not using DH as backup service.
This is the facts of life.
October 4th, 2007 at 4:08 am
Congratulations on 10 years in business.
I didn’t get to know about your hosting till last year, when I helped a non-profit get hosting on your site ( they really couldn’t believe what I told them, it was literally their dream come true). They hardly use 100 MB of disk and 250 MB of bandwidth. But what impressed me was the up-time. It’s been months and not a single issue (well, one issue, not major, but your tech support handled it promptly and POLITELY.
So later I registered a domain of my own, almost out of sheer gratitude. Whatever little I paid, it was still a bargain - make that a steal. With a free domain name.
I had read reviews and complaints about your customized control panel, but after using it for a few months, I dig it. It’s like warm beer, an acquired taste.
The non-profit outfit actually looked at your newsletter format (or lack thereof) as a better alternative to all those jazzed up HTML newsletters. It was an easy decision: People want to read interesting material, and not have to figure out which color stands out most. In a zillion years, have book publishers changed the layout - chapters, text, on plain paper? Whoever decided people would be more impressed by cool-looking newsletters and read it regularly for that reason? Only reason I haven’t unsubscribed to many of them is because email providers offer so much storage, it doesn’t hurt and maybe there will be something interesting based only on the subject line of the emails.
Anyway, thanks guys, and rock on.
October 4th, 2007 at 4:09 am
I still remember when I signed up in Nov 1999.. I had been using the Dream Book guest book thingy and started looking around and was like what is this New Dream Network/Dreamhosty thing and then clicked around some more and I was like “d00d Josh is effin *hawt* I need a domain like now.. + $9.95 is just CrAzy (DomaIN) InSAne.”
Good times!
I try to tell my friends about DH when I can coz all those other hosts are lame plus they don’t have teh JOSH. He rocks my world. I try to encourage my employer to BE LIKE JOSH too but they are too chikcen. I guess there can be only one Josh Jones in this world after all.
October 4th, 2007 at 4:37 am
Well Happy Birthday!
I’ve been a Happy Loyal Dreamhost customer for many years, and I’m glad to see the pre-pay plans finally because I intend to stay here for many more.
Your tech support is amazing (and I work in tech support, so I know!). Your service is reliable and responsive. Have my web babies.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:22 am
Uh, I got the latest newsletter and you guys were looking for a replacement for activeCollab. It’s called “Pier Project”, a fork of the old open source activeCollab. I wish I could have contacted you some more conventional way, but there was no e-mail address in the e-mail, and Josh’s e-mail is nowhere to be found. What a company, can’t tell them the answer to their question.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:09 am
Promotion incroyable pour les 10 ans de dreamhost…
Ça faisait un bon moment que je n’avais pas parlé de mon hébergeur dreamhost car ils n’offraient plus de promotion intéressantes et depuis quelques temps, leur offre avait rétrogradée. Mais ceci à changé avec leur 10e anniversaire….
October 4th, 2007 at 8:56 am
WOW! Congrats… and you are exactly *1 week* ahead of me! I just celebrated my 10 Year Bloggoversary last Sunday… Crazy! I can’t believe it’s been 10 years either.
Here’s to another 10 — Love the blog, guys!
October 4th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
[...] Turning 10 wasn’t the only thing we did last week. We also moved offices. [...]
October 4th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Great news, Josh & the people at DreamHost! :) And great articles, by the way. I can’t belive that someone still writes extended blog articles nowadays, such as yours are.
October 5th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
thanks for the free unlimited ftps.. appreciate it man!
October 6th, 2007 at 5:51 am
[...] Para los que quieran ver un poco de la historia de DreamHost en estos ultimos 10 años hagan click aqui. [...]
October 6th, 2007 at 8:18 am
Hey, somebody nominate listenlight.net for DHSOTM. I gotta have it, gotta rock those bits!
October 10th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
[...] overall it’s a pretty sweet scheme we’ve had these past 10 years; and now that we’ve gone into hiding you’ll never catch us, [...]
October 14th, 2007 at 4:00 am
Congratz on the 10 years :)
October 15th, 2007 at 7:28 am
[...] 我买了Dreamhost为庆祝十周年推出的特惠500G主机 原价是119.4刀 使用原先的优惠码可以优惠到$22.4 [...]
October 15th, 2007 at 9:59 am
Congrats…nice knowing you’ve got so many sites hosting with you, but somehow I don’t feel as unique as I did back in the days when there were only a few of us…
Keep up the good work. Oh and by the way… this 10 year prepaid thing….you guys don’t by any chance have plans to open and off shore account and vanish after we all prepay do you??? ( just a joke….of course you don’t…do your?)
October 17th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
[...] The page that used to have the service tiers indicates that there are two. And if you read the long, long blog entry about the company’s history, you eventually learn that everyone’s under the [...]
October 23rd, 2007 at 6:14 pm
[...] maki wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAre you older than a Fifth Grader? We are! Well, maybe not ALL fifth graders, but I’m sure at least A fifth grader. Like, one who skipped first grade or something. Like me! (I was too tall smart.) Anyway, DreamHost is TEN YEARS OLD!!! Domain Name: DREAMHOST.COM Registrar: NEW DREAM NETWORK, LLC Whois Server: whois.dreamhost.com… Read the full post from DreamHost Blog Tags: Musings, Business, Tech News, New Features, promotions, Insider View via Blogdigger blog search for cheap domain registration. [...]
October 24th, 2007 at 1:20 am
[...] maki wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAre you older than a Fifth Grader? We are! Well, maybe not ALL fifth graders, but I’m sure at least A fifth grader. Like, one who skipped first grade or something. Like me! (I was too tall smart.) Anyway, DreamHost is TEN YEARS OLD!!! Domain Name: DREAMHOST.COM Registrar: NEW DREAM NETWORK, LLC Whois Server: whois.dreamhost.com… Read the full post from DreamHost Blog Tags: Musings, Business, Tech News, New Features, promotions, Insider View via Blogdigger blog search for cheap domain name registration. [...]
October 25th, 2007 at 12:51 am
[...] maki wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAre you older than a Fifth Grader? We are! Well, maybe not ALL fifth graders, but I’m sure at least A fifth grader. Like, one who skipped first grade or something. Like me! (I was too tall smart.) Anyway, DreamHost is TEN YEARS OLD!!! Domain Name: DREAMHOST.COM Registrar: NEW DREAM NETWORK, LLC Whois Server: whois.dreamhost.com… Read the full post from DreamHost Blog Tags: Musings, Business, Tech News, New Features, promotions, Insider View via Blogdigger blog search for cheap domain name registration. [...]
October 26th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
[...] turned 10 a month ago and this week we had our official 10 year [...]
October 26th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
[...] maki wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAre you older than a Fifth Grader? We are! Well, maybe not ALL fifth graders, but I’m sure at least A fifth grader. Like, one who skipped first grade or something. Like me! (I was too tall smart.) Anyway, DreamHost is TEN YEARS OLD!!! Domain Name: DREAMHOST.COM Registrar: NEW DREAM NETWORK, LLC Whois Server: whois.dreamhost.com… Read the full post from DreamHost Blog Tags: Musings, Business, Tech News, New Features, promotions, Insider View via Blogdigger blog search for cheap domain name registration. [...]
October 30th, 2007 at 12:22 am
The Big 6-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!…
Just weeks after DreamHost could celebrate their 10th anniversary, they can now celebrate another milestone. DreamHost is now hosting more than 600.000 domains according to WebHosting.Info.
They are thereby continuing their explosive growth and are st…
November 4th, 2007 at 12:42 am
[...] admin wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIt turned out, that Adult Site hosting plan with unlimited bandwidth was the only thing that kept us solvent those early months. As soon as we put that “too good to be true” offer up there, we started getting deluged (as in, … [...]
November 11th, 2007 at 3:24 am
very very nice information thanks..
realy nice blog.i will come every time here.thankss..
January 15th, 2008 at 9:52 am
[...] overall it’s a pretty sweet scheme we’ve had these past 10 years; and now that we’ve gone into hiding you’ll never catch us, [...]
January 15th, 2008 at 9:59 am
[...] overall it’s a pretty sweet scheme we’ve had these past 10 years; and now that we’ve gone into hiding you’ll never catch us, [...]
January 15th, 2008 at 10:33 am
[...] overall it’s a pretty sweet scheme we’ve had these past 10 years; and now that we’ve gone into hiding you’ll never catch us, [...]
January 15th, 2008 at 11:27 am
[...] overall it’s a pretty sweet scheme we’ve had these past 10 years; and now that we’ve gone into hiding you’ll never catch us, [...]
May 14th, 2008 at 2:04 am
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