Happy Thanksgiving!

Since the holiday season is upon us, all of us at DreamHost would like to wish everyone on the internets a very happy Thanksgiving.

Well, you know, so long as you live in a country that gets to celebrate it. Otherwise, we hope your Thursday is really nice.

Oh, and go easy on our Support Team, alright? Because while we’ll have people here, they’ll be a bit slower on account of the assorted foodstuffs in their belly.

Democracy at DreamHost

As you may know, DreamHost was selected for the WorldBlu Most Democractic Workplaces 2008 list.  We’ve talked about it a little in previous blog posts, but have never really said much about the specifics of democracy at DreamHost.  I’ll start things off with a bit of an overview of the concepts of democracy that apply to how we run things.

Democracy?

When I first heard about WorldBlu and their list of the most democratic workplaces, the concept was new to me.  At first I was even a bit unsure how what I knew about democracy as a concept even fit in with what I knew about workplaces.  I knew DreamHost had been doing things in a unique way all along, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be part of a larger trend.  To figure out how it all fit together I did a bit of my own research, and here’s what I found.  Democracy as a concept has a few key ideas that I think are the most interesting to us here.

Access to Information 

Crucial to democracy is easy access to information.  For a workplace that means information about things like what the business does and how they do it, and how it was done in the past.  It also includes information about policies and past decisions, and anything else that might provide insight about the business.  This goes beyond the scope of what a person needs to get their day to day job accomplished.

Free Exchange of Ideas and an Open Dialog

A free flow of ideas and information is what democracy is really all about.  The theory is that flow of ideas will lead to decisions that will be in the best interests of the majority of the people while also not infringing on the rights of the minority.  In a business the best interests of the majority are sometimes difficult to define, but with an open dialog the interests of the business itself will be more in line with the individual interests of the workers.

Opportunities for Meaningful Participation

That open dialog and exchange of ideas can’t be just a dialog with no real weight, though.  It has to have the potential to have an impact on the decision making process, and the functioning of the company itself.  It has to be meaningful or it won’t be successful.  

Democracy is Not Just Voting

This is a key idea.  I think a lot of people here in the US might say “Democracy is Voting”, but voting is really just an implementation detail of the representational democracy we have here.  In the workplace democracy model voting may be useful as a participation tool, but it’s definitely not necessary.  In the case of DreamHost voting is not widely done, though we do have a polling system built into our own internal employee tools and it does get used to gather votes on specific issues.

One-Click Mystery

I was recently digging into our database collecting some information on PHP usage by looking at how many people were using our One-Click Web App Installs.  Nearly all of our One-Clicks are PHP so it was a quick way to estimate total PHP usage by our customers.  While looking at the data I noticed something strange, though.  Our users are using our One-Clicks less and less!  ”Weird”, I thought.

I collected this data by looking at every currently active account of ours and counting up the ones that have installed at least one One-Click (not the total number of One-Clicks in use!).  I also tracked the year each account was first made active in our system.  It doesn’t count people using PHP apps they installed themselves, and it does count people who may have set up a One-Click and then abandoned it. This is not a scientific analysis by any means, but any clear trends should still be pretty reliable.

The clear trend we see is a mostly upward trend with a spike in usage by accounts signed up in 2006, and then a pretty quick drop-off over the last couple of years.  I was expecting to see a continuous upward trend over the entire time and was surprised to see that drop-off there.  The graph shows percentages so the number of actual accounts isn’t a major factor.

I have a few theories about the slowing of One-Click Install Usage…

• Our users signing up over the last two years are more tech-savvy than those in earlier years and more of them are choosing software other than what we provide and installing it themselves.
• More people are going back to the days of static HTML.  (Seems unlikely.)
• Increased interest and awareness in more ‘hot’ tech like Ruby on Rails has resulted in users moving away from PHP itself, and our One-Click Installs along with it.
• More people are finding their Web App needs met by ‘Web 2.0′ websites like Flickr and Facebook.  (But then, what are they doing with their websites instead?)

The number of new users coming on board has not slowed at all so people are definitely still finding a need for tried and true, full power web hosting.

So… Tell us why you do or do not use DreamHost One-Click Installs for your website, and WHY!

Nightmare Host

Ha, now that’d be a hilarious thing to call DreamHost whenever we had some downtime!

But this time, I’m talking about the DreamHost Halloween party we had Friday night at Marvimon in Los Angeles!

And that’s really all I have to say.