Let’s get Earthy

April 22, 2008 on 12:48 pm | In Business, Insider View, Promotions by Brett |

Today is a day for celebrating the air that we breathe, the land beneath our feet, and all the creatures that call this blue ball ‘Home.’

We’re really sitting on something special because from what I’ve heard there’s not a lot of blue balls out there.

Today is Earth Day!

And to celebrate, we’re doing nothing! Not a thing. We’re not even singing to our plants.

We must hate the Earth and be horrible people, right?

Wrong!

We’re not doing anything special because we already rock the earth-friendly workplace every day!

With this being the Earthiest day of the year, it bears repeating that DreamHost is a carbon neutral company. In fact, we’ve been carbon neutral for an entire year!

To date we’ve neutralized over 2800 TONS of carbon emissions and are on track to wipe out a total of 3400 by June of this year.

To give you some idea of just how much that is…One ton of emissions are created when you…

• Travel 2,000 miles in an airplane.
• Drive 1,350 miles in a large sport utility vehicle.
• Drive 1,900 miles in a mid-sized car.
• Drive 6,000 miles in a hybrid gasoline electric car.
• Run an average U.S. household for 60 days.
• Have your computer on for 10,600 hours.

source

All those servers in our datacenter use up a lot of juice - life-giving electrical juice which in turn is created by burning lots of dead dinosaurs. And therein lies the problem!

We’ve already switched to using lower-power CPUs in our fleet of hardware, and just last year we introduced DreamHost PS!

A DreamHost Private Server gives our customers a greener alternative to truly dedicated hosting. Why get (and pay for) a complete dedicated server when in reality you may only need a fraction of its resources? On-demand resource scaling and flexible pricing ensure that servers aren’t sitting idle, sucking up all that dino-juice willy nilly. Customers can apply for PS hosting now from their web panel.

DreamHost PS represents a new earth-friendlier way of doing business and we’re proud to be the kind of company that’s able to offer it.

And remember, if you’re a DreamHost customer and want the world to know that your own website is green, just visit the Home > Green Hosting section of your DreamHost account control panel to get some green icons. After all, what good is being green if you can’t yammer on about it to anyone who will listen!

By the way, thanks for listening to me yammer on!

24 Comments »

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1. 1

   @Dreamhost

   Talking about the Private Servers, I have one myself and absolutely *LOVE* it.

   However, with VPS prices dropping all over the web - your offering is nearly double the price of your competitors like Amazon (EC2), Slicehost and Linode.

   As an example, at Amazon - you can get 1.7 GB RAM / 1.7 GHz machine for $72 a month. At Dreamhost, that would cost you $170 a month :(

   Hope you guys drop the prices down to somewhere in the range of $0.50 per MB RAM / MHz CPU.

   Thanks … you guys are awesome btw.

   Comment by Steve — April 22, 2008 #

2. 2

   One of the reasons I love Dreamhost is that they’re green talking points become our green talking points.

   One reason I loathe Dreamhost is that the funny title attributes on your images are now just alt attributes, so I have to use Firebug to realize full chuckle potential!

   Comment by Ryan Cannon — April 22, 2008 #

3. 3

   @Steve See if you can get the same amount of bandwidth and storage that we provide with our private servers and factor that price in. The Amazon price you’re quoting there is with no bandwidth at all and they charge you for all bandwidth in and out of your server. You also have to configure it all and manage it yourself.

   The plans on other VPS specialists like the ones you mentioned are also with much less disk and bandwidth than we provide.

   It’s just not apples to apples comparisons you’re making.

   Comment by Dallas Kashuba — April 22, 2008 #

4. 4

   @Dallas

   I’m curious to know what percentage of people come even close to using the amount of (over sold) bandwidth and disk that Dreamhost has to offer.

   Because if most people don’t use nearly all of their bandwidth/disk, it’s a moot point.

   Comment by Doug — April 22, 2008 #

5. 5

   For use DreamhostPS customers, will you pleeeeeeeeeeease allow us to install packages that, for understandable reason, can’t be installed on a shared server.

   For example, memcache.

   I know I’m not alone on this, and it’s completely understandable why on a shared server installing memcache wouldn’t work, but for us on a PS - it’s makes a lot a sense since we a leasing a fixed amount of RAM (that no one else can use).

   Please of please, can us PS customers get memcache … and maybe even setup a tiered service where PS customers get more packages installed like this that don’t work well in shared environments but works great in dedicated/VPS situations :)

   Comment by Doug — April 22, 2008 #

6. 6

   I’m happy that you have private servers available. That said, I’ve been on the waiting list for a dreamhost PS since November of last year, and last time I emailed support there was no guess about when I might actually get one, so I’d hope that you stop advertising them as something you have when you don’t actually have them.

   -Keith

   Comment by Keith Stattenfield — April 22, 2008 #

7. 7

   #4 - Different types of hosting customers have different needs and there’s lots of good options out there. As #6 pointed out we’ve got more demand for DreamHost PS than we’ve been able to keep up with so far so there must be some people who like our particular formula.

   #5 - You are free to install memcache yourself and use it. I’ve not done it but I suspect it’s not that difficult. It is obviously easy for us to install the debian package but I don’t think that really gets you very far into using it, does it? We’ve got lots of PS customers using custom software setups already. We’ve also been adding highly requested software such as Mongrel, little by little.

   #6 - We are behind on DreamHost PS orders (moreso in some clusters than others) but we have been catching up slowly but surely. A few hundred people have gotten theirs in the past few weeks, for instance. After our recent data center migration we’re in a pretty good position to start getting all the backorders filled. It does suck that it’s taking so long to get some of them set up, but it is being addressed.

   Comment by Dallas Kashuba — April 22, 2008 #

8. 8

   Yeah, I second: promoting something that is not available is not very polite.
   My site is almost dead due to imposed limits, and PS is at least month away from me.

   Comment by Vladekk — April 22, 2008 #

9. 9

   This is obviously one great post. Yes, we have to celebrate it and make people be aware of the evils wrought by global warming.

   Comment by Aurelius Tjin — April 23, 2008 #

10. 10

    How come Dreamhost doesn’t respond to Support tickets?

    Comment by Dreamhost Customer — April 23, 2008 #

11. 11

    I agree with Steve (#1) that a reduction in DreamhostPS pricing would be very nice.

    Especially since at Linode you can get 720 MB of RAM for $39/mo.

    Comment by Marc — April 23, 2008 #

12. 12

    Love the green-ness of Dreamhost. I definitely plan on sticking one of those icons on my site.

    Comment by Anne — April 23, 2008 #

13. 13

    Would Dreamhost ever host websites for UK customers. Iv heard so much positives about Dreamhost and I cant wait to try out their services. Just waiting for them to enter into the UK market

    Comment by Football Credit Card — April 23, 2008 #

14. 14

    NICE blueballs reference.

    Comment by Mike — April 23, 2008 #

15. 15

    > Just waiting for them to enter into the UK market

    We have a ton of UK-based customers! I haven’t looked at the stats super recently, but the UK is probably either the 2nd or 3rd most well-represented country making up our customer-base.

    DreamHost has customers from pretty much every country in the world that has an Internet connection, actually.

    In any case, if you’re interested, feel free to sign up. :)

    - Jeff @ DreamHost

    Comment by Jeff @ DreamHost — April 24, 2008 #

16. 16

    #2 - no need for firebug — right click on the image, then choose Properties.

    Comment by Josh — April 24, 2008 #

17. 17

    +1 for lowever Private Server prices.

    Given that you pay $1/mo./MB of RAM + a normal $7.95/mo service plan - for a simply:

    - 256 MB of RAM
    - a measly, unbelievably slow, 250 MHz
    - it cost’s $33/mo

    Now, take as people mentioned above, Linode … for $29.95/mo (less money) you get 540 MB of RAM (over double).

    So, yes - you get literally double the VPS at other places for the same price.

    Comment by Ben S. — April 24, 2008 #

18. 18

    I think, we can introduce some good lessons at school about the green planet. It is important that kids understand the problem now and help their parents, who are hard to convince.

    We can’t cut off carbon emission, we are too much dependent on products and services that produce it, but we can make one step closer to a better and greener planet today by educating our kids - a generation of tomorrow.

    Comment by Back to school — April 25, 2008 #

19. 19

    When the last water evaporated
    When the last tree logged
    When the forest were washed up
    Now, everything to late to awareness
    We can’t eat money

    Let save our lovely earth

    Comment by addacompany — April 27, 2008 #

20. 20

    +1 for lower DreamhostPS prices.
    I agree, it’s a bit steep for what you get.

    Comment by Cody — April 28, 2008 #

21. 21

    I just wish Josh will show us his truly green attitude by painting himself green and posting the picture here. That would be something. I’ll even paint myself green and send the picture to Josh ;-).

    Comment by Sharon McCormick — April 30, 2008 #

22. 22

    +2 for lower Private Server (VPS) prices ! :)

    Comment by Greg Benson — April 30, 2008 #

23. 23

    Please upgrade PHP to the current version (5.2.6).

    Over 120 bug fixes where included in this release.

    Thanks

    Comment by Tim — May 2, 2008 #

24. 24

    We can’t cut off carbon emission, we are too much dependent on products and services.However we can educate our kids

    Comment by Zaman — May 5, 2008 #

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