600,000 Reasons to Eat Candy!

According to webhosting.info we broke the 600,000 domain mark this week!

Just five and a half months after hitting 500,000 and here we are.

That makes us the 14th largest web host in the world…we’d rank even higher if you don’t count domain registrars that don’t offer real hosting.

As you can see, Godaddy/WildWestDomains has been allowed to become far too powerful. We’ll need to take them down a notch.

Thank you to all our customers – old and new – who helped us get here. We couldn’t have done it without you! And we hope we continue to live up to your expectations. We know you’ll let us know if we don’t. :D

Now get out there and party tonight, but be careful. You don’t want to end up like this guy.

Hey did you get a keychain?

The Time: 7pm to midnight
The Place: Elevate Lounge
The Date: Three days ago
The Reason: DreamHost’s 10 Year Birthday Blowout Extravaganza

DreamHost turned 10 a month ago and this week we had our official 10 year party!

We usually have a Halloween party around this time of year, but we decided to go high class in a high rise for 2007.

Seriously, check out this view.

Every current and former DreamHost employee dating back to the early days was invited along with a guest for an evening of dancing, drinking, and reminiscing! That’s like…at least a hundred people.

I saw people that I hadn’t seen in years! And I even remembered most of their names! I was so proud.

Yes, there was dancing!

Yes, there was even an open bar! So, so open.

And oh yes, there was swag.

We had special blue M&Ms made with DreamHost.com’s whois Creation Date stamped on them! Funny thing about those…when they come back up, they’re not blue anymore!

I also had some limited edition keychains made special for this event. Four martinis later and I really wanted to make sure everybody got some. In fact, I made it my business to personally invite every single person to get keychains before the night was over.

Or at least that’s what they tell me.

Despite my best efforts, however, I found myself at the end of the night left with a whole lot of keychains stamped with a date that will lose its freshness once 2008 rolls around.

These are nice, nice keychains. Look how they glisten and shine.

So shiny. So pretty.

Shiny.

Did I mention how shiny they were?

Did I also mention that only 500 exist in the world?

Current and former employees have had their fill, so I’m giving away the rest! If you’d like one of these keychains (and maybe some other small goodies…) you need only send a self-addressed stamped envelope to:

DreamHost
Dept: Brett is Awesome
PMB #257
417 Associated Rd.
Brea, CA 92821
USA

Make sure that your self-addressed envelope has at least $0.75 of US postage on it or INTO THE TRASH IT GOES! One envelope per person please.

If you’re outside the US you’re welcome to try sending a stamped envelope, but you’re on your own when it comes to postage (3oz envelope). I’ve heard rumors that international mail is run by an unpredictable cyclops who answers to no one and eats paper like I drink milk. (A lot.)

The friendly people at your local post office can teach you how to mail a letter in case you’ve forgotten. My hangover should be gone by next week, so get those envelopes in the mail to me right away and I’ll start stuffin’ and sealin’ just as soon as I can.

(I’ll update this post when I’ve run out of goodies.)

If you’d like to attend our next party you just need to send us a resume and get hired! We’re always looking for good technical support people, and we’ve got a few open admin/programmer spots as well.

The DreamHost 2017 birthday party is not that far away and we’ll probably have free hoverboard rides. You do NOT want to miss that.

-Brett!

Open and Shut

It’s not just what you do to a door.

Nor is it only a type of case.

And I’m not thinking of following it with the word up, either.

Honestly, I should have probably titled this post “Open and Closed,” but isn’t it way more intriguing since I went with shut.

I’m talking about standards.

I think it’s been over two years since I last thought about this, and I think that’s long enough. After that long it’s okay if I repeat myself.

The Joy of Open

As I said back then: In the end, the best standards, protocols, and Beard Papa’s are the open ones.

Nobody likes to design a product based around a standard that some other company has control over. And nobody likes to buy a product that doesn’t interoperate with the different product all their idiot friends bought. Or a product that doesn’t even work with other products their idiot self bought. Like Guitar Hero controllers.

Eventually, natural market pressures force the most ubiquitous standard to win out, and all the other ones dry up and wither away, like dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind. Of course, the most ubiquitous standard is not always the most open standard. Like in the case of Word Docs, PDF, Flash, Gif, MP3.. and I bet even another one I’m forgetting!

The way these formats got to be the de facto standard without being truly open is simple:

They started with the best implementation.

A standard is zilcho without an implementation. You might have the most GPLed, flexible, extensible, well-documented, feature-complete standard on the face of the universe, and if your standard is a beee-yotch to implement (or has a stupid Ogg-something name) it will be born still.

Of course, to become de facto, a non-open standard needs to be open enough. As in, even though some evil corporation “owns” the standard, they allow anybody to use it for free, and for any purpose, without permission… and probably also give away some good tools that actually implement their “standard.”

The Case for Shut

The number one thing a new open standard needs is users. There’s that old chicken and the egg thing again.. nobody wants to go to the trouble of using a standard until it’s been proved good, and you can’t prove a standard is good until people are actually using it.

Generally, the way to beat any chicken and egg problem is by throwing a lot of money at it. Skype had a big C&E problem, PayPal had a huge C&E problem, and eBay had the gigantorous C&E problem of all time! (Hmm, all three are now owned by eBay. Weird.) It just takes a company willing to burn through cash sometimes to beat a chicken and an egg. And, as they’re taking all the risk to develop this new platform, they want the reward… which is easier to keep to themselves by keeping their platform shut.

Not to mention, it’s a lot easier to make a hidden system than a public one. You don’t have to worry about publishing an API, or even documentation, or having months of tedious peer-review everytime you realize something needs to change. You can control the entire environment the system is running on, you can make sneaky like optimizing hacks that just wouldn’t work in the general case, and sometimes you can even add an awesome new feature in a single bound.

I remember wayyyyyyyy back in 1998, I was telling Sage there needs to be a way to email money to people. I was thinking it should be some sort of open standard tied to bank accounts, and some sort of encrypted file that was somehow tied to the government, and you could just attach a “cash file” to an email and it’d automatically transfer the money out of your bank account and into theirs. Or something. The details were a little tricky, but I just thought, “You should be able to email money.”

Of course, less than a year later, PayPal (and X.com) came around and just CHEATED. They just made their own centralized system and had everybody sign up with them! And it worked, and was simple, and nobody cared that they had to sign up for PayPal to do it instead of running their own “encrypted cash server” at their own domain like I was sort of envisioning.

Gah, if I’d have only thought of that kludgey hack, I’d be building rockets and video sharing sites, and DreamHost would have never grown bigger than a few dozen hentai sites.

Just Do It

I guess the moral of the story is, if you’ve got some great new idea, just do it yourself. Any way you can. Even if it is the kind of thing that needs “network effects” and really lends itself to an open protocol or standard, don’t worry about that!

The first thing you need to do is make it work, and make it popular. Then the rest of the Internerd community will take notice and start working on their open standard implementation. But until you prove it’s something worth working on, nobody will.

And eventually, that open protocol will take over, and get included for free in everybody’s DreamHost account… emphasis on eventually.

In the meantime, you’ve probably been bought out for enough money to start working on that space harem I dreamt about last night.

And I’m off to continue rocking the Guitar Hero III demo!

Robbing Your Customers

It’s something we like to do every day!

Yep, the secret to our crazy low prices and amazing ferraris, finally revealed:

We take your billing address and go to your homes at night to steal your jewelry, plasma TVs, and all valuable toiletries!

Not to mention all the credit card numbers we get fund our wild vegas benders (roulette is a great way to launder money) and illicit basketball leagues!

(Damn PayPal and Google Checkout, not sharing the credit card info with us!)

Yeah, 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, coppers!

Okay Okay Okay

Although I admit what we’ve been doing has been pretty bad, it pales in comparison to what I just found out one of our favorite competitors Lunarpages just did to rob their customers.

According to this thread at Web Hosting Talk, Lunarpages a few days ago turned the default 404 pages for all sites they host (who haven’t specifically customized them already) to one of those ultra-sleazy “domain parking”-style setups. It still happening right now… and here’s an example of a 404 page on a site some poor shmoe has hosted by them, aeroeco.net!

I’m impressed! So roundabout, so complex, so sneaky! We only ever do the simple stuff like read our customers email for blackmail material, or kidnap their pets and their kids.

Maybe Lunarpages doesn’t agree, and maybe it doesn’t seem sooo bad to you, but what they’re doing is outright theft. It’s the Internet equivalent of shoplifting.

For websites, traffic is everything. Stealing a site’s traffic is nothing less than web homicide!

You see, anybody who got a default 404 error before this change, probably just backed up to the site they were on and continued. But now, it seems probable they’ll end up clicking one of the links they see there, or possibly use the “search this site” form, which does nothing of the sort! It searches “http://searchportal.information.com/” instead and Lunarpages gets a kickback!

Of course, Go Daddy has been doing stuff like this for ages.. if you register a domain with them and don’t set anything up on it you’re going to get a lame page filled with lame affiliate links. But at least with parked domains, it’s not like there’s an actual site up that you’re injecting content into! Not to mention, they’re Go Daddy. We’d expect nothing less from them!

And, remember the time four years ago where VeriSign tried exactly this with every non-registered domain? ICANN made them stop less than a week later, after a huge (by Internet nerd standards) public outcry.

These sorts of scams (and the entire domain parking industry) are just a server variant to good old desktop spyware that changes your default search engine or dns error pages on your browser. But just because they’re not surreptitiously installing anything on end users computers doesn’t mean it’s not crooked.

(Oh, speaking of crooked.. yesterday our cool anti-spam site spam.la stopped working, as though the domain had expired. Looking it up, it was paid through July 2008 though! Upon contacting the registry, it turns out that although we had paid Domain Discover to renew the domain in July, they had never paid the registry! Yet another creative way to rob your customers that we should try sometime!)

Why, Lunarpages, Why?

I’m guessing it’s the money?

But come on guys, is it really worth it? How much money are we talking about?

I remember one time when this skeezy SEO guy was asking me “How many domains do you guys host?” I told him “zillions”. He said, “How many are parked?” I said, “I dunno, some fraction of a zillion?” He said: “Do you like to make money?” And I said, “I dunno, it depends…” To which he said, “Do you like to make money?” To which I said, “It depends, is the money one dollar and how much **** do I have to suck to get it?”

Okay, I didn’t really say that, but it was what I was thinking. And in a real tough, bad-ass voice too.

It’s obviously a stupid question, “Do you like to make money?” The question is, “Would you do X if I paid you $Y?“

Lunarpages must be hurting pretty bad right now to sink this low. I also noticed they dropped their 1-800 number and only have a 1-714 now! Shoulda been like us, and not offered phone support in the first place, eh?!

But, I gotta give them a break. It’s easy to be all high and mighty and to “Don’t be evil” when you’re rolling in the dough like Google. But the ethics get a lot murkier when the choice is between stealing a tiny bit of traffic from your customers and selling your first born.

(Take Yahoo! for example. Back in 2000 (stock price $100) we tried to advertise with them, and they were all high and mighty about “no animation, no hard sell, no general trashiness.” Now (stock price $28), their site is covered in expanding flash ads, including some for… gasp… Lunarpages!)

Who are your customers?

It’s a good question!

And I don’t mean, are they small businesses, web designers, women, dwarfs, fifth graders, deaf, or asian? I mean, are your customers “People who need a website host” or are your customers “People who pay for traffic”? It seems Lunarpages is trying to get both.

But, you can’t have both. You really have to choose just one and stick with it!

It’s pretty simple in the beginning… your customers are the people (or businesses) who pay for your product (or service). But then later, as you grow, you start to realize that entire “customer base”… that “audience”… is a potential “product” in and of itself. And there are plenty of other types of “customers” who will pay handsomly for it.

Don’t fall for it!

Because your customers don’t like being a product! And, when they finally catch on that they’re PAYING to be SOLD, they’ll vamoose! And you’ll be done… stuck without customers or product!

Just yesteday there was some talk of eBay pissing off its sellers by putting targeted Google ads on their listings… effectively trying to steal their customers’ customers.

This is actually an interesting case.. because who are eBay’s customers, really? Is it the sellers, who directly pay Ebay? Or is it the shoppers, who are the originators of that money the sellers then use to pay eBay?

I’d say, it’s the shoppers. Because even though auction sites are sort of a weird “chicken and the egg” problem, in actuality, it’s just an “egg” problem, and the egg is shoppers.

Because, one thing I’ve learned in this world, is that if you’ve got people trying to spend money, you’ll have no problem finding people trying to take it!

So actually, I’d say eBay is probably fine putting those ads in. If they can help the shoppers find what they’re looking for, even if it’s not through an auction on eBay itself, they’ll be satisfied and come back. The “power sellers” can go suck an egg.. if they leave there’ll be plenty of other sellers who aren’t quite as proud to fill the void.

What to do?

Well, being completely unbiased in the matter, I say vote with your feet!

Any Lunarpages customers who want to switch to DreamHost, we’ll be happy to have you… and we promise to never, never, ever, ever, do anything of this sort, ever! You’re already paying us for hosting.. that should really be enough! (And Lunarpages, if you’re hurting so bad.. just raise prices!)

P.S. Use the promo code LOONEYPAGES when you sign up and get your first year completely free.. it works for current Lunarpages customers only!

We Keep it Moving

Turning 10 wasn’t the only thing we did last week. We also moved offices.

Well, we didn’t exactly move… we were evicted! And our new office space isn’t even ready yet! So really we just ended office.

Just a little bit too much bringing alcohol into the building, playing pool, neighbor complaints about loud profanities, and one too many bomb threats I guess.

The situation is all very complicated, and came about pretty suddenly, but fortunately we were able to get a REAL LIVE MOVING PIRATE from “Starving Students.” (Starving Students is an equal-opportunity employer and will hire any qualified applicant. Any.)

Things happened so fast, we ended up just trash compacting about 200 old 36GB fiber channel hard drives that had (private) customer data on them we couldn’t let get into enemy hands…

… as well as moving a bunch of leftover drinks down to the NOC our temporary office space for at least a month.

Before.

After.

(Exactly how it looked when we originally moved in!)