It’s That Time of the Year Again

Can you believe it’s already that time of the year again…?
Apple iPhone rumor time-of-the-year that is!

I’m sure you remember back in early 2007 when I predicted Apple was about to announce the iTunes Mega Store, the iPod Crumple, and the iTV (which actually did get announced as Apple TV, but was missing the video games part).

Well, to not risk my perfect 0-3 record, this time I’m NOT making any predictions (after all, everybody already knows it’s just going to be the same phone but with 3G, GPS, more memory, 3rd-party apps, thicker, more expensive, and pretty colors). No, instead I’m just going to make a standard run-of-the-mill wish list.

After giving away an iPhone last year, I eventually got (a used 4GB unlocked/jailbroken) one for myself. And I gotta admit, it’s pretty durn good. I generally hate Apple, OS X, their stores, their ads, their employees, their employees shirts, Steve Jobs, and everything he stands for, but it seems like their design “mantra” just works for a portable device. Perfectly.

Except for three things. Well, four. Well, really zero.

The phone is just fine how it is.. but I just think it could be slightly better if it could only….

1. Control iTunes!

If your iPhone is on a wi-fi network and sees an iTunes share, then the iPod app should show a little select box at the top and let you toggle between music on your actual iPhone and music on the iTunes share. Plus, if your iPhone sees any remote speakers connected to Airport Expresses on that same wifi network, it should give you another select box to choose beetween outputting the music to your headset, the remote speakers, or both!

It’s stuff they already do with iTunes on a computer; if they just added it to the iPhone (and iPod Touch), they’d have a pretty dope competitor to the Sonos Digital Music System that everybody raves about.

2. Print!

Yeah, I know.. who prints anymore? I don’t that much.. but when I do it’s always an email attachment somebody wants me to sign and fax back to them.. and the office printer/fax is kinda far from my office.

Just this week there were forty-six times when I’ve gotten all the way to the printer, only to realize that I somehow missed printing the eighth attachment! Or even worse, got a PC LOAD LETTER! Of course, from there I can still VIEW the attachment right there on my iPhone, but I sure as toner can’t print it.

But forget me, if Apple allowed printing directly from an iPhone (again, by seeing a bonjour-enabled printer on the wireless, perhaps via an Airport Express), the iPhone could become a complete computer replacement for millions of parents and grand-parents world-wide!

Think about it… what do people over 55 use a computer for (if they use one at all) these days? Email, web browsing, photos, to do lists, maps… that’s pretty much it. The iPhone is honestly a completely passable way to handle these things, especially in the low quantities required by The Greatest Generation.

The only thing missing is, these people love to print. LOVE IT. L. O. V. E. I. T.
Web pages, email attachments, notes, maps, calendars, photos, whatever… if it deserves to be seen, then it deserves to be printed.

If all you had to buy your dad for Father’s Day was an iPhone, an Airport Express, a printer and some speakers for your folks to have a painless “Internet and Digital Music Experience”, I think that’d be a pretty solid value proposition. Especially with gas prices how they are these days. Or something.

3. Support UMA!

Unlicensed Mobile Access is the thing T-Mobile’s HotSpot @Home uses… it’s the technology that allows for “seamless” switching between free VOIP calls (when you’re on wi-fi) to regular cell network calls (when you’re not), all at the same phone number! I had it before my iPhone, and I loved it… since it meant I had great (not to mention unlimited free) reception in my house, office, and datacenters; all of which normally do not.

Unfortuantely, the iPhone was too awesome, and I dropped the HotSpot @Home service. But now when I’m in the office (where reception is spotty) I’m forced to set up call-forwarding to a Skype-in number that rings on my computer. Which is almost as annoying as it is stupid.

So hey, Apple… add UMA support to the iPhone! I know AT+T doesn’t support it, but think of the millions of people who’ve unlocked their iPhone and use it on a network that does. This feature alone would probably mean the switching of our entire admin team over to iPhones, since they all need “smart phone”-type devices and spend a lot of time in underground data centers where there’s wi-fi but no cell reception.

IN FACT.

I hereby officially offer a $10,000 bounty, (payable by DreamHost) to anybody who releases a UMA application (it can be an official app or only work with jailbroken phones) for the iPhone! The only requirement is that it work with T-Mobile’s HotSpot @Home service as well as any other UMA phone does. Ideally, once installed it’d just seamlessly run in the background, and if you’re on wi-fi it would just change your little “T-Mobile” carrier name in the top to the name of the 802.11 network you were on.

If you make this UMA app, feel free to charge whatever you’d like for it, but for the $10,000 BOOTY, DreamHost gets an unlimited license to use it for all their employees. Deal?

(4. Be a Universal Remote!)

Okay, this isn’t really something I expect Apple themselves to add, but it’s an app I think somebody should make. Or if somebody already has, please let me know in the comments.

I want to completely control my home entertainment system from my iPhone. I barely dare imagine it… no more six remotes sitting on the coffee table in the living room, just the one iPhone I already have in my pocket!

The system would have a single wi-fi/IR receiver/transmitter that hooks up to all your entertainment components. You would program that with all your current remotes, then throw them in the attic until their day on eBay comes. That base station thing would then serve a web page at some IP (which it’d show on an lcd screen) where you’d go to customize the interface and commands for your particular system.

(Personally, I’d just need a power button, volume up/down/mute, and an Xbox 360/Wii/cable toggle. If it was on cable tv, then there’d also be guide button, as well as fast-forward/rewind/pause, and a d-pad with a select button…)

I guess then your iPhone could just visit that web page to control the system, but it’d probably be a much slicker experience if there was an actual app that did it. Then you could do stuff like use the physical volume and mute buttons on the iPhone to control the TV! And change channels / navigate menus using motion gestures!

In Conclusion

If the iPhone could just do these four things, I would buy a mac. Well no not really, but I would control my TV, music, printer, as well as make free unlimited phone calls (with good reception) all from the same stupid device from the same stupid company that makes stupid macs.

Convergence, baby!

It’s what $200 stock prices are built on.

What Web Hosting is For

Some people might say Web Hosting is for websites.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for online file storage.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for development.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for bandwidth.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for databases.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for jabber.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for IRC.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for hacking.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for warez.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for late night orgies in the data center.

Well, I say, NO Web Hosting is not for those things!

No, not at all! Well okay, maybe a little for some of them. But, all of those things combined don’t add up to the one thing Web Hosting is really FOR.

Web Hosting is for email.

Stupid, boring, old, annoying, dumb, repetitive, stupid, boring, old, annoying, dumb, EMAIL.

Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into “simple” old email.

And that’s kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features. Everybody’s just looking at how much disk/bandwidth they get, what version of PHP they run, how good their support is, do they have a funny blog, is their CEO really studly, do the data centers have water beds, and so on…

They’ve been conditioned by Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail to give email no value. I mean, everybody gives it away for free… nobody gives (real) web hosting away for free.

And yet, in the end, the only thing (sadly?) that actually ends up getting used, is that “no-value” email! If a web server with maybe 750 customer sites on it were to go down for even as long as five hours, we’d probably get two angry messages about it. But if email goes down for the same number of customers for just five minutes we’ll have already received 50!

At least it makes some sense.. when was the last time you visited your web site to check if everything was up? Honestly, when was the last time anybody visited your web site?

Now… when was the last time you checked your email? When was the last time you sent an email? If you’ve got an email client on your dekstop set to check new messages, you’re probably notified if that client can’t connect to the mail server even once.

People say nobody under 30 uses email anymore. It’s all IM, SMS, writing on facebook walls, twittering, phone, fax, paper mail, pheromones, pony expess, and smoke signals.

Well, I really hope that’s the case, and that as time goes on we’ll have less and less damn email to deal with!

Sending email. Checking Email. Delays. Spam. Filtering. Email forwarding. Mailing lists. Announcement lists. Archiving email. Automatic Emails. Form-to-email. Catch-alls. URGH!

It’s enough to make a poor host want to give up on providing it at all!

Speaking of which… we have recently made some steps in that general direction. (More on that later.)

You may have remembered from the March Newsletter that we recently stopped allowing email addresses to be associated with ftp/shell users.

The reason for this is so we can decouple super-frequently-accessed email files from the not-so-frequently-accessed rest of your files. By doing that, we can then use higher performance file servers for email and “tune” them better for the one task we know they’re doing!

It also means we can start completely separating our email system from our web servers, which will make managing everything one heckuva lot easier.

And, don’t worry… you can still do everything you used to be able to like use a .procmail filter or process email with a script. Just set your public email address to forward to:

username@machine.dreamhost.com
(or username@psname.dreamhostps.com if you’re on DreamHost PS)

And then email will get delivered directly to your web server, and you’ll be able to run your script or filtering just fine! The only difference really is that we don’t run pop/imap/smtp on those web servers (so, if you’re just filtering, you’ll have to set up a recipe to forward it on to another mail account you can actually check).

Hooray, user scripts and procmail filters won’t be running on our mail servers… making everything a little better isolated.

If all this is over your head, that’s fine, just ignore it like I do! All I’m trying to say is it technically shouldn’t be impossible to do anything you used to be able to do, and it’s going to make things way way way easier for us going forward, and hopefully therefore better for you!

The Later More

Yeah, in a way we are taking some steps to stop providing email. It’s just not something people are looking for from us, and it’s something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better.

Did somebody say.. Google? In fact, as you’ve maybe already seen, we recently made it very easy to use Gmail for all your email hosting with us, still at your own domain!

Now in our panel when you go to add (or manage) a domain, or visit our MX section, there’s a checkbox option for you to use Gmail!

Of course, this was something you could do before yourself, but now we automatically handle setting up the right DNS records, AND we’re even tied into them with an API to automatically add an account for you on their end! There’s just one final step you have to do on their side to create a management account, but I promise you, THAT IS IT!

But why would you use Gmail? Well, they do have a pretty cool web interface, which you can add your own logo to and access at your own domain; but besides that they also have regular POP/IMAP/SMTP access, plus awesome archiving, searching, filtering, reliability, accessibility, and they’re hotter than the Firefox girls.

Along with Gmail, you can also get the full suite of “Google Apps for your Domain”, which gives you their “Office” apps (web-based word/excel/powerpoint replacements), jabber-based chat (like we already do), and a start page for your users a la igoogle.com.

So right now you’re probably thinking, “When was it exactly that DreamHost sold out?”

To which I say, “I guess right about now!“

Well, not really.

Here’s how I figure. Honestly, Google does do a great job at email. And, we’re still offering everything we used to. And, offering easier integration with Google Apps / Gmail was one of our top 5 most popular suggestions. And, we’re still not worried about Google getting into web hosting, as I explained two years ago!

So far, I’ve been right… and even if Google does get into it, we’re still not worried, because we’re the top web host in LA! And seriously, we would be better than them at it. Google may have a googol of computer science PhDs, but (no offense Maureen) based on my experiences so far working with the Google Apps team, they’re all working on search.

So in the end, I guess some people might say Web Hosting is for DreamHost!

The Top Webhost in LA!

Or at least the highest.

A few Saturdays ago, five of us did some sort of Lung Cancer thingy where you climb (the stairs) to the top of our 62-story office building!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, another boring “insider view” post.

It was very convenient that it also counted towards all of our fire-fighter application.

I wore my old DreamHost shirt so everybody would recognize me.

I took a while to post the pics because I just got the URL for the place that posts them online in low res and charging you one zillion EUROS to buy prints.

Fortunately my computer features modern HYPER SCREEN CAPTURE technology! Thank

Thanks to an error with the rfid chips, Dan’s split time was recorded as his final time, and he won!

There was a $1MM prize.

Introducing Passenger for Ruby on Rails

As of right now all DreamHost customers have a new option for hosting Ruby on Rails applications.

Awhile back I asked for a better way to host Rails applications on a shared server, and the answer has come in the form of Passenger (also known as mod_rails)! From now on, deploying a Rails application may very well be as simple as ‘Upload’.  Passenger automatically detects the presence of a Ruby on Rails application and launches it for you in the background, leaving it running for the subsequent requests.  It provides the dynamic process management that FastCGI provides but it’s ‘Rails-smart’ and (gasp!) actually works.

After I wrote my Ruby on Rails rants back in January, stirring up the pot and getting people talking about the deployment issues involved with Ruby on Rails applications, I was contacted by a few smart people who were all interested in helping work on the problem.  The guys behind Passenger were among those people (the guy who came up with the also excellent Switchpipe was another), and they described their software concept to me via email.  On ‘paper’ it sounded excellent but honestly I expected to never hear from them again.  I didn’t think these random people with a graffiti logo would manage to get it finished and working.

I’m so glad to have been proven wrong!

The Phusion team contacted me with a working test version of Passenger a couple of months ago and since then DreamHost has been helping out with testing and ironing out lingering deployment issues.  The Phusion team has been very helpful and responsive throughout the process and I think we will see a lot more great things from them in the future. 

Now to the important part… how do you use Passenger on DreamHost?

Briefly, all you do is enable the Ruby on Rails Passenger (mod_rails) option for any existing or new web domain in the DreamHost web control panel. When you then point that domain’s web directory to the public directory of an existing Ruby on Rails application it will work automatically.  For more detailed information, check out our Passenger wiki page.  

Did You Guys Coordinate That?

Yesterday I noticed Jason and Jeremy were both wearing the same shirt!

I’d call it a coincidence, except… they’re roommates!

Awwwwwww..

May de Mayo

Hey, you know what’d be fun on a boring Monday in May? A little role play!

And I’m not talking about 12-sided dice and renaissance faires either, I’m just talking about some simple role reversal.

More specifically, I’m going to complain to you about a web host!

So, about three years ago I was trying out some competitors to, you know, test the waters in case I ever decided I wanted to switch hosts.

I used three places, and they all absolutely stank. I mean, they were horrible. I’m talking worse than us!

Every server I tried with these places was pretty much just not working. Besides that, their support was all universally useless, and their panels were a weird hodge-podge of different systems they’d cobbled together I guess. You also either couldn’t get shell access or had to fax them your driver’s license to enable it?!

The worst thing was, they were all difficult to cancel, and a few even tried to get out of giving me my money back (I was in their “unconditional” guarantee!)

Finally, I decided to splurge (I’d been spending like $7.95/month) and tried a VPS place for a whopping $49 a month!

Well, they were great! I mean, they still had a weird hodge-podge of different panels, and they sure laid stuff out differently than I was used to, but my VPS at least stayed up and I could do anything I wanted.

I never needed to contact support, which was fine with me, and luckily for them, I never really did too much with the account but kept paying them anyway for the last three years (I’m willing to bet a few of you are in this boat as well… thanks!)

Finally

Last month, I finally decided to transfer my little bit of crap I had with them over to a DreamHost PS! When I went to cancel, I decided to check my credit card statement and noticed that for February and March I’d been charged $89 instead of $49?!!

Eh? I searched through all the emails I received from them and the only thing I could find that seemed possibly related was one that mentioned they were upgrading all the features on their VPS, but don’t worry existing users would get them all at the same price!

So, I wrote them a nice email:

Helllooooo….

I just noticed this and that somehow you guys upgraded me without my permission from $49/month to $89/month!

Uh, what happened? It wasn’t my choice.. I did get one email saying resources were going up .. for FREE.

Please refund the extra $80 you’ve charged to my credit card asap.

Also, I’d like to cancel my service as of April 30th, I believe what I’ve already been charged for.

Thanks,
josh!

To which they replied:

Sir,

On 02/17/08 our support team notified you to tell you that your server had run out of resources, and that the only way they could keep your server from staying offline was to upgrade you. They did so for free for one week, and asked you to get back to them to work with them to resolve the issue. They stated that if they didn’t hear from you they would leave you on the higher package level instead of leaving you down completely.

After a week, and a followup reminder sent to this address that the account was being left at Signature level so that you could remain operational, your package was upgraded.

Admittedly this was an atypical situation, but most would probably agree that after not hearing from you the decision to leave you up and operational was preferrable to the decision to simply let your server fail.

As per the contract you agreed to at signup, we do require a 30 day written cancellation notice to close down your account. I can accept this as that notification and close your account 30 days from today, on May 18th. I hope that this helps.

All the best,
Christian

Ha, ha, ha… what?

So, because I was (somehow) crashing my own (private) server, they, without permission from me, started charging me an extra $40 a month, so it wouldn’t crash!

Gee, thanks guys!

I also appreciate it when my cable company notices that I haven’t been enjoying HBO and Showtime and most would probably agree that after not hearing from you the decision to give you all these great movies and original tv series was preferrable to the decision to simply let you suffer with Oxygen and TBS!

But actually, that never happened becuase that would be CRAZY!

I went back to look for this alleged email, and I found it:

Subject: 7 Day Trial upgrade to the Signature package for yourserver.com.

Hi,

This server has reached it’s limit on i-nodes which is number of files on the system.

Below is an output of where most of these I-nodes are being used:

357219 -> /vz/private/1753/root/var/qmail/mailnames/yourserver.com/user/Maildir/cur
457677 -> /vz/private/1753/root/var/qmail/mailnames/yourserver.com/user/Maildir/new

That is roughly 700,000 i-nodes for this mail account. Please clear this mail out and notify us within 7 days so that we can downgrade your account back to the Essential. Otherwise, you will be billed for the Signature package.

Thank you,
Tommy

First off, nice subject! No wonder I didn’t read that email!

Ah, I see.. I had a catch-all at the domain hosted there and it was filled with three years of spam!

It’s besides the point that there’s no mention of inode limits anywhere on their site or tos (I’m not saying who they are because there’s no such thing as bad publicity!), or that I guess their VPS solution has problems with some instances affecting others in certain inode-related areas.

The point is that it is crazy to assume that you may just UPGRADE your customer without hearing back from them, as opposed to say, just DISABLING their account.

I wrote back:

Hi Christian,

Um, actually no, I would have preffered to have the server fail.. I’m sorry I didn’t see those emails, but I did not agree to the upgrade!

Please refund the $80 extra dollars and set my service to cancel on May 18th, after downgrading back to the $49 plan for the rest of the time.

Thanks,
josh!

To which Christian replied:

Josh,

I understand that some people may feel this way. That’s why we gave you free time at Signature level before keeping you there, and the opportunity in successive messages to go ahead and downgrade. We made multiple contact attempts and then provided the service, which you used for two months.
I’ll need to look into the possibility of refund. I’m not sure what the protocol is offhand, so I’ll need to do some digging.

I’ll downgrade your account immediately but if the same problem exists I expect your server to start failing again shortly. If it does, you’ll need to upgrade an I won’t be able to authorize a free upgrade - not with a dispute pending. So make sure that if the server fails and you’re comfortable with that, that if you change your mind you will need to explicitly agree to the new $89 per month rate.

-Christian

HA! Man, at this point I was starting to get bemused and maybe even a little bit angry. Here I am, a guy who totally loved this host, had paid them about $1800 over three years while using virtually no resources, and they’re going to make me fight over $80 at the end?!

Especially when they have no chance in actually keeping it. I happen to know as something of a dabbler in the web host arts myself that it is very very hard for an Internet merchant to win a chargeback dispute with a consumer! My next email brought this up:

Hi Christian,

Please refund the $80 or I’ll have to take it up with my credit card company directly! Yuck!

Thanks,
josh!

Oooh, but he was not intimidated!

Josh,

I will need to take this up with our Controller. My personal opinion is that you were given clear and fair warning of the charges which were not put in place until after a lengthy period in which we provided that upgraded service for you free of charge. We made multiple efforts to contact you and it was your responsibility to keep your contact information updated with us, or in this case keep messages from your provider whitelisted so that we could communicate with you. As you were given plentiful and frequent notice of the upgrade and the consequences for not responding, as you utilized the resources and received benefit from them through multiple billing cycles, and as all of this can be documented, I am certain that we could be victorious contesting a chargeback request. However, as I stated previously this is not my call. What I will do is send this along to our Controller for review, and set your cancellation date to May 18th as promised. Though normally it is not allowed to downgrade and provide cancellation notice at the same time, given the odd circumstances I WILL allow that request to stand, which will save you some funds.

I hope this helps,
Christian

Oooohohhohoohoooo! Well! I hope it helps too! I am so grateful you are now allowing me to “downgrade” to the only plan I ever signed up for!

Anyway, long story short, they said it’d take two weeks to decide, so I contacted American Express and disputed the charges, and then a few days later they credited my $80.

And the moral is, billing issues are the biggest issues for consumers! Why burn up three years of good will at $49/month over $80? Before this, I honestly would have recommended them to people if I hadn’t been their direct competitor! I swear!

People can forgive a lot of bad service/bad product/headaches/incompetence/gross negligence if you just give them back their money. It’s kind of like saying, “the deal is off,” no hard feelings?

It is 100% worth it. Now, when they talk to their friends, they’ll be like “Well, I had a bunch of problems, but in the end they gave me my money back.”

As opposed to me who’ll be like, “They were fine until the end when they stole $80 and refused to return it! I PLEDGE ON MY UNBORN CHILDREN THAT DREAMHOST SHALL CRUSH THEM!”

That’s something that translates across all businesses too, because it’s just a universal way of doing business. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, nor what product or service you have, there are good ways of doing business, and there are not so good ways.

And I feel like although we don’t always succeed 100% at the specific details of trying to offer awesome web hosting for super cheap, we are generally successful at running a business that doesn’t lie, cheat, or steal, and always tries its best.

Now, you guys be me and please go write a ton of blog posts I can use the rest of my life.

Thanks!