DreamHost’s web hosting is world-famous, but did you know that we run a side business throwing INSANE parties?  From our employee Halloween and Holiday parties, we know how to have a good time and we’re taking that experience to the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference & Festival in Austin next week.  We’re throwing our own SXSW party in partnership with our friends at Substantial and thought it’d be nice to invite any and all DreamHost customers to come chat with us and have some drinks on our dime!

If you plan to be in the area and would like to hang out, just email us and let us know why you should be allowed into the party!  Since we have a limited number of invites only those with the most outrageous reasons will be considered.  Please email us by 6 PM Pacific Time Friday March 4th.  Winners will be notified Monday March 7th and will be allowed to bring one guest.

• Party Location – Downtown Austin (exact location revealed to winners)
• Date/Time – Friday March 11th 6pm to 10pm
• In attendance – DreamHost co-founders, employees, movie stars (maybe), rappers (possibly!) and YOU!

If you weren’t at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) this past weekend, you missed a geekfest of epic proportions.  For three days over 1800 attendees crammed into the LAX Hilton Hotel for an avalanche of open-source goodness which included our co-founder, Sage Weil, speaking about the Ceph distributed file-system.  DreamHost’s Robert Rowley gave another presentation explaining common web application attacks and defenses. We’ve included the presentation slides below.

• Sage Weil – CEPH: Petabyte Scale Storage for Large- and Small-scale Deployments
• Robert Rowley – Securing web applications for system administrators

It’s common knowledge that geeks can digest almost anything for sustenance.  Mountain Dew, ice cream bars and an occasional Fedex cardboard box is enough to keep us coding for hours, but we do have our limits.  SCALE has always been known for its “interesting” culinary options … you can pay $27 for penne pasta at the hotel restaurant or take a short stroll to Carl’s Jr or Denny’s for down-to-earth, artery-clogging grub, but on Friday night we slogged through freezing rain on an epic food journey that resembled the Oregon Trail, rather than Gilligan’s Island.  Three geeks, armed with Android phones, GPS maps and online restaurant reviews utterly failed in finding a decent place to eat because of our blind devotion to technology and lack of common sense.

It all started while waiting in line Friday night for the RackSpace party.  The promise of free booze and food filled the Hilton hallways with hundreds of pungent PHP devs, out-of-work Solaris admins and Linux devotees.  Our growling stomachs, combined with the rapidly falling oxygen levels, compelled us to make a run for it.  No, not to the front of the line, but out of the hotel for…Greek food.

Bill Pollock, founder of No Starch Press, had the same idea and joined us.  The nearest Greek restaurant had dozens of five-star online reviews and was a mere 20 minute walk away…not a big deal especially with Google Maps.

“Just follow the blue arrow,” we kept repeating to ourselves as we sloshed and splashed through the light, but steady rain.   Like a Harpoon cruise missile, we would knew we would eventually hit our destination – West on Century, North on Airport, East on Arbor Vitae.. our 20 minute journey turned into 25 and then 30 minutes, our directions were precise,  our destination was clear. but the restaurant was precisely and clearly…closed.

In our mad rush to fill our tummies, no one had the common sense to call the restaurant to see if it was open.  Given the circumstances explained in their sign, we’ll give them a pass on this one.  In a full downpour, we ran to Burger King (thank you Bill for paying for our meal!) and finally back to the Hilton.

Thankfully SCALE isn’t about food failures and our Robert Rowley survived to give his speech about web application attacks and defenses on Saturday.

On Sunday, Sage Weil was in an interesting open-source file system panel with representatives for Gluster, ZFS and NetApp.  Sporting a very spiffy suit, the NetApp rep was visibly out of place and was under attack from all sides.  The poor guy.

Sage then closed out SCALE with his CEPH: Petabyte Scale Storage for Large- and Small-scale Deployments talk.  Sage gracefully answered the barrage of questions from the audience during and after his presentation.  For nearly half-an-hour after the talk ended, he continued fielding questions from the crowd.

If SCALE is held at the LAX Hilton next year, we vow to eat at Aliki’s Greek Tavern.  And we’ll remember to call ahead!

Hard drive failures suck and the IT world has created an incredible number of systems, protocols and products to minimize, mask, and recover from storage failures.  Many of these solutions are EXPEN$IVE, complex and proprietary, but we at DreamHost are developing a much cheaper (as in FREE) alternative.  The Ceph open-source file system will store and protect petabytes of data at a fraction of the cost of the behemoth systems from the likes of EMC, NetApp and HP, and as a bonus, you can tinker with Ceph now.

It’s easy to manage a few hard drives on your average desktop computer, but it’s much tougher to manage petabyte-scale deployments.  So just how big is a petabyte?  It’s one thousand terabytes, 1 followed by 15 zeros, or approximately the number of times people have wished death upon Justin Bieber.  An average home computer might have one hard drive failure every few years and just a few dozen file requests at a time, but at the petabyte-level hard drives fail almost daily and there will be hundreds of thousands of file operations per second or more.

Traditional file systems rely on some sort of allocation table or central server that is responsible for recording which disk data was stored on, and answering any requests to find data.  As a real-life corollary, imagine a library with a single librarian who is in charge of not only organizing the books, but also answering any questions about where the books are stored.  This situation works wonderfully if there aren’t any customers and if the books don’t move around too much, but our hapless worker would be completely overloaded if thousands of customers showed up or if the bookshelves kept collapsing and books had to be shuffled around.

Ceph avoids this bottleneck by replacing the allocation table with the awesomely named CRUSH algorithm that uniformly distributes data across your disks (we call the storage servers OSDs).  CRUSH is a pseudo-random algorithm that calculates the location of data based instead of storing it.  Going back to our library example, this would resemble a simple set of rules that any customer could follow that would lead them to the right room, row, and bookshelf, provided they know the book’s title.  No overworked librarian necessary.  A shared CRUSH map describes only the rough layout of the library (which bookshelves/servers are where), allowing any computer to calculate where to find a given book/file.

Ceph is still under heavy development and we have a small army of developers at work on the vital pieces, but you can help in two ways. First, you can test the file system by either compiling the source code or by downloading the Debian/Ubuntu packages.  With a few configuration tweaks and a few servers, you’ll be off and running in Ceph La La Land.  For additional help or to report bugs, you can subscribe to the Ceph mailing list or visit the IRC channel.

If you REALLY want to get your hands dirty, we are hiring several developers to help with Linux Kernel hacking, C++ programming, and QA/Performance Testing. Please apply for those positions on the DreamHost jobs page.

Want to learn more about Ceph?  Nothing could be more informative than hearing from the file system’s creator and DreamHost co-founder Sage Weil at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) this weekend February 25th to 27th at the LAX Hilton.  Sage will be speaking at his ‘Ceph: Petabyte Scale Storage for Large- and Small-scale Deployments’ talk 4:30 PM on Sunday February 27th in the Century AB room and at the Open Source File Systems Panel at 1:30 PM in the La Jolla room, also on Sunday.

But Ceph isn’t the only thing DreamHost will be talking about at SCALE… our Robert Rowley, Abuse-meister extraordinaire, will spill the beans about the most common attacks against our web customers.  He’ll also tell you how to protect against those attacks and if you’re good there might be a top-secret DreamHost Perl script or two thrown in.  Robert’s ‘Securing Web Applications for System Administrators’ talk will be on Saturday February 26th at 4:30 PM in the La Jolla room.

SCALE registration is $70, but you will receive a 50% discount if you use the ‘DREAM’ promotion code to sign up.

A few of DreamHost’s “big thinkers” will be at Parallels Summit 2011 later this month in Orlando, Florida. We’ll be flying out from sunny Orange County, California all the way to…sunny Orange County, Florida!

If any of you business-types would like to mix and mingle with some of our business-types, this would be a great time to reach out. Drop a line to events@dreamhost.com soon if you plan to attend and we’ll do our best to set something up.

We’ll be renewing some old acquaintances, but what really excites us is the prospect of making new friends.

Maybe, say…over a glass of wine back at our hotel room?

No? Oh, okay.

YOUR hotel room then. Got it.

What? Well, the details aren’t important. We can talk logistics in Orlando.

One way or another, you’ll have a chance to get into bed with us. Figuratively.

And while I’m personally not making the trip to Parallels Summit 2011 I’d be happy to compare and contrast the differences, both obvious and subtle, between Orange County‘s Walt Disney World and Orange County‘s far superior Disneyland to anyone who will listen.

Look at us! Goin’ to hosting conferences. Talkin’ business. Wearin’ underpants. Doin’ things we said we’d never do. Yes-sir-ee, it’s a whole new era around here.

It’s no secret that all of us at DreamHost are HUGE fans of Linux.  From our desktops to more than 3000 Debian-powered servers, Linux powers our global domination machine.  But while most users are OK with merely using the operating system, we like to give back to the open-source community by donating time, money and occasionally a real-life employee for speaking engagements.

We’ll have not one, but two employees speaking at the upcoming Southern California Linux Expo, or SCALE for short.

Want to learn about Ceph, the latest and greatest scalable Linux file system?  Attend DreamHost co-founder Sage Weil’s talk titled, “CEPH: Petabyte Scale Storage for Large- and Small-scale Deployments” on Sunday, February 27, 2011.  There you’ll get a dose of redundant file system rapture as you learn how to configure your own storage cloud.

If securing web applications is more up your alley, security guru Robert Rowley will be giving his talk, “Securing Web Applications for System Administrators,” on Saturday February 26th at 4:30 PM.  There you’ll learn the most common attack vectors against web apps and the best defenses – in no time, you’ll have your applications locked up tighter than Shawshank… err Alcatraz.

The Southern California Linux Expo will be held at the LAX Hilton from February 25th to February 27th and organizers expect more than 1500 people to attend.  Mingling with thousands of Linux geeks, blowing out your eardrums listening to landing jumbo jets and eating tasty burgers at In-and-Out on Sepulveda Blvd, what more could you really ask for in a weekend?

How much would you expect to pay for an event of such magnitude?  A million Dollars? A star in DreamHost’s name?  How about a paltry $70?  Too expensive you say?  For a limited time, we are offering you a super-duper secret, Julian Assange-proof discount code: “DREAM” good for 50% off the registration fee.  Heck at that price, buy two tickets – one for you and one for your imaginary Valentine.

We’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Matt Mullenweg.

We love him because he’s a decent guy. And, oh yeah, he made this thing called WordPress.

We hate him because he’s just so damn good looking.

Today he stopped by our LA office to schmooze a bit.

Look at that facial hair. Professional baseball players can’t even pull off that look, but Matt makes it look easy.

He came by to do some stretches…

…and throw gang signs.

Actually, Matt came by to talk business! Believe it or not, he’s more than just a pretty face – Matt’s the whole package.

DreamHost has great relationship with WordPress and Automattic we’re always looking for ways to work more closely with our partners, so having him around today was a fun way to get inside the brain of one of the web’s most successful entrepreneurs.

And he smelled fantastic.

Any addressable device on the Internet has an IP address. Your home PC, your Xbox, your website…they’re all just a UNIQUE number on the Internet in the grand scheme of things.

To be more accurate, they’re all one LONG number, punctuated with three periods: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. 32-bit, 4 byte addresses. Simple enough. Short enough to memorize. And there are 4,294,967,296 possible addresses.

Four billion. With a B. A few million are reserved for specific uses, and there are some tricks to share IPs among devices, but four billion is the takeaway here.

“Back in the day” not much thought was really given to what might happen if the world ran out of IPs. And certainly not many thought that the Internet would grow to the size it has today.

But it finally happened. Today. The IANA IPv4 address free pool is now depleted.

If you’re looking for someone to blame, blame Vint Cerf. It’s all his fault!

Most people who’ve been given an allotment of IPs use them sparingly and have their own reserves built up. We’re sitting pretty ourselves and have plenty of older IPs that can be reallocated for future use if it ever comes to that.

And that’s a fine solution. For now. But we’re looking forward with the rest of the world to welcome IPv6 into our corner of the Internet.

IPv6 is the future of Internet addressing. It takes the world from 4 billion addresses to a maximum of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. That number is so big that I’m not even sure how to say it with my mouth.

The addresses themselves are far longer, as well. While an IPv4 address today might look like:

It’s going to take quite a while for all network providers and network devices worldwide to get IPv6-savvy (and some never will!) so “old-school” IPs aren’t going away anytime soon. Luckily a device can be assigned IPv4 and IPv6 addresses simultaneously so you can do an “out with the old/in with the new” at the same time!

That’s kind of where we’re at now.

All DreamHost customers can now add IPv6 IPs to their domains.

Just visit the “Manage Domains” section of your control panel and click the “Add IP” link by your domain to make the magic happen. This new address is tied to your hosting machine, but other services like email and MySQL are not yet supported. We also don’t (yet) support IPv6-only domains; you’ll need to have an IPv4 address on there too.

There is NO COST to add an IPv6 IP address to your DreamHost account. Go crazy. Throw one on every domain you host with us with reckless abandon. You’ll be helping to move things forward in your own little way.

In December we announced our Call for Apps contest. We asked you to submit open-source web apps to our One-Click Installer and we then put the best of the best up for evaluation. Our customers then ranked their favorites on a 1 to 5 star scale throughout the month of January.

The votes are in, the dust has settled, and we have our winners!

The grand prize winner of a 17″ MacBook Pro (USA model) is:

concrete5 (avg: 4.611 stars) concrete5 is a CMS that makes running a website easy. Go to any page in your site and an editing toolbar gives you all the controls you need to make changes.

Our three second-place winners of 8GB iPod Touches (USA model) are:

	Textpattern CMS (avg: 4.444 stars) A flexible, elegant and easy-to-use CMS
	Omeka (avg: 4.409 stars) Create complex narratives and share rich collections, adhering to Dublin core standards with Omeka on your server, designed for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and enthusiasts.
	ecoder (avg: 4.069 stars) ecoder is an open-source web-based code editor with real-time colour syntax highlighting. It allows multiple documents to be edited directly online at the same time.

Our five runners-up and winners of 3G Kindles (USA model) are:

	GetSimple CMS (avg: 3.938 stars) GetSimple is an open source CMS that utilizes the speed and convenience of XML, a best-in-class UI and the easiest learning curve of any simple Content Management System out there.
	XODA (avg: 3.882 stars) XODA is a simple Document Management System targeting end-users and also developers.
	Friendika (avg: 3.833 stars) Friendika is a distributed social network application which runs on commodity hosting platforms – PHP/MySQL/Apache.
	ComicCMS (avg: 3.500 stars) ComicCMS runs and manages your webcomic website. Really well. It’s powerful and easy!
	Contao (avg: 3.176 stars) Contao is an open source content management system (CMS) for people who want a professional internet presence that is easy to maintain.

Congratulations to all the winners! Every one of these apps is impressive in its own right.

If you’ve not had a chance to experiment with any of them, please do! We know you’ll like what you see.

If you submitted one of the apps listed above keep an eye on your email box – we’ll be contacting you this week with more information.

And of course, keep an eye on our one-click installer as new apps are added regularly throughout 2011 and beyond!