Josh Jones - Talk to the Hand!!

Cameras are a wonderful thing, in a microsecond, smiles, frowns and goofy hair-styles are recorded in megapixel glory FOREVER.  Some people HATE having their pictures taken. Maybe it brings back childhood memories of them pooping in their pants while sitting on Santa Claus’ lap or perhaps being frozen with fear, mouth agape, in front of a six-foot tall mute Mickey Mouse.

NOOOO !!!!!!

Thankfully, we most of us at DreamHost LOVE having our pictures taken and during a recent company-wide photo session our employees went NUTS with costumes and props. Being the open company that we are (heck our webpage shows our cherished childhood portraits), you get to see some of the craziness here.

We're CRAZY !

DreamHost has been hiring like mad and it can be a real challenge to put a name to a face when there is a new employee every few days.  So to fix all that, we updated our internal photo gallery by embarking on an epic six-day photo shoot spanning the Brea and downtown Los Angeles offices.  Over 1650 pictures totaling 22.47 Gigabytes were taken with our “vainest” employee cataloging an astronomical 67 snapshots.

Graveyard Shift - BREA

Graveyard Shift - Downtown LA

Most employees were happy to take a very serious “corporate” picture along with a few goofy snapshots, but the graveyard tech support shifts stepped up to the plate by posing as a group – now that’s teamwork!  As pictures slowly “leaked” to our Facebook page, our employees became wilder trying to outdo each other … words were exchanged, punches were thrown and Tron disc battles erupted.

Brett shows the Canadian who's boss

Too much caffeine ...

Formal Fridays has gone too far

Best costume award goes to ...

Photobomb successful

So angry !

No users were harmed during this photoshoot

Are you photogenic and looking for a job?  We’re still hiring and we offer costume-rich work environment, great benefits and free professional pictures.  Go to our jobs page for a listing of available positions.

Attention Silicon Valley!  Hide your women, children and Strawberry Pop-Tarts because DreamHost is coming to town next week for the OpenStack Summit.  Seven of our developers, system administrators, and co-founders will take advantage of Southwest’s brand-new open canopy planes to parachute drop, 101st Airborne style, onto the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara.

After falling 37,500 feet and dodging BAE Systems’ anti-aircraft guns and Predator drones, we’ll be EXTREMELY thirsty and hungry, so if you want to buy us a drink and/or a prime-rib dinner, we’ll happily accept!  Want to just meet and chat?  We can do that too!  Just email us at events@dreamhost.com to set up an appointment.

Our employees have been testing colorful polyethylene nano-weave parachutes that can double as a flamenco dress

OpenStack represents an open-source collaboration of more than 50 companies and as a software project it intrigues us.

Chances are only half of our team will survive the air drop and land on the Hyatt. The other half will get blown off course onto the Oracle campus to be captured by Larry Ellison’s squad of robotic bipedal alligators, so we’re always looking for replacements.  If you’re aerodynamic and looking for a challenging, fun career, click on our jobs page here.

All employees receive this tattoo after five successful air drops (whether they want it or not)

Setting up an online storefront has always been a bit of a confusing mess.

If you didn’t know exactly what you were doing going into the process you could easily spend weeks learning how to manage inventory, accept credit cards, and even do something as simple as change your store’s color scheme.

Our customers have approached us regularly for ECommerce assistance, and we’ve never really been able to point them toward an all-in-one ECommerce solution that was easy-to-use, feature-filled, and affordable.

Today we’re happy to pull the curtain off of CafeCommerce, an extremely comprehensive ECommerce system developed by our friends at WebAssist.

CafeCommerce launches today and we’re happy to have been chosen as their exclusive launch partner. Our two development teams have been working closely for months to ensure that CafeCommerce provides the absolute best ECommerce experience for DreamHost customers.

CafeCommerce includes more than a dozen different themes (with more on the way) created by professional designers to give your online storefront that “lived in” look, and each theme can be customized using CafeCommerce’s built-in graphical editor. Color, layout, and fonts can all be changed site-wide – immediately – with nothing more than just a few mouse clicks.

You can sell physical products, digital goods, and even services with Cafe Commerce. You can easily accept credit cards, manage products, view orders, and connect with your customers – all by using CafeCommerce’s built-in management tools.

In addition to its own reporting tools, CafeCommerce was designed to easily integrate with other tracking systems like Google Analytics or Crazy Egg.

And because CafeCommerce stores run on the DreamHost infrastructure, there are of course no limits at all on disk space or bandwidth, so you can comfortably grow your business without worrying about unexpected charges later on down the line.

All this functionality comes in at a flat rate of just $30 per month.

Oh sure, there are some ECommerce competitors that may appear to come close to that $30 price point, but they’ll snag you down the line with inconceivable limitations and heinous fees that are structured to essentially bleed you dry the second you start actually making money.

They’ll take a percentage of every transaction!
They’ll limit the number of items you can stock in your inventory!
They’ll even limit the amount of disk space your stores can take up! How are you supposed to store hundreds of high-resolution product images with only 100 megs?

There are no such limitations with CafeCommerce. From the get-go you’ll be able to establish a web store with an unlimited number of
- Products & Images
- Customers (kind of important!)
- Store Administrators
- Pages
- Categories and Sub-Categories
- Transactions
…all for a flat rate of just $30 per month.

You’ll also get access to chat-based support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

It just makes no sense to look elsewhere! CafeCommerce’s flat-rate pricing is a bargain! And we’re not just saying that because we went in on this together! It’s truly the most affordable, feature-filled commercial ECommerce software we’ve found.

Both current and new DreamHost customers can sign up today for a fully-featured two-week free trial!

CafeCommerce is incredibly powerful, extremely customizable, and absolutely affordable – we don’t think you’ll need two weeks to figure that out, but go give it a try and see for yourself.

If the free trial doesn’t convince you that CafeCommerce is the solution to all of your ECommerce problems, I’ve got good news and bad news.
The bad news is that you’re wrong.
The good news is that you can safely cancel your CafeCommerce account within the trial period and owe nothing.

Check it out!

We’re happy to announce today that DreamHost has been named to the WorldBlu List for the fourth year in a row! WorldBlu compiles a listing (not a ranking) of organizations worldwide to recognize democratic, employee-empowered workplaces.

We’ll be attending WorldBlu Live in San Francisco next month to mix, mingle, and learn more techniques to improve our culture of fun and openness. It’s something that we like to call “Funopenness!” After a few drinks, usually.

We’re always looking for more ways to kaizen things up around here, and we look forward to WorldBlu Live every year.

Drop a line to events@dreamhost.com if you’d like to meet up with us during WorldBlu Live.

We were first named to the WorldBlu list in 2008 and have appeared on it for the past four years consecutively. For more information about organizational democracy, be sure to visit WorldBlu.com.

When we started DreamHost in 1997 we had two goals in mind.

1. Get chicks.

2. Get rich.

Most of us have taken care of number one.

Number two has proven to be slightly more elusive.

It’s been a little harder to push out, you might say.

For the past decade or so a little-known entity called the Endurance International Group, Inc. has been quietly buying up web hosts worldwide and building a portfolio of hosting brands.

Indeed, we’ve seen many of our competitors get gobbled up by “EIG” over the years. The acquired companies usually retain their branding and avoid making any mention of EIG on their websites.

So exactly what does EIG own? As far as we could tell (from this list and in chats with various sales teams), 37 web host brands. Maybe more.

Collectively they represent an enormous customer base and may even make EIG the largest “hosting company” in the world.

AccountSupport
ApolloHosting
BizLand
BlueDomino
BlueHost
DomainHost
Dot5Hosting
Easy CGI
eHost
EntryHost
FastDomain
FatCow
FreeYellow
Globat
HostCentric
HostMonster
HostYourSite
HyperMart
IMOutdoorsHosting
iPage
Ipower
IPowerWeb
Justhost
Netfirms
Networkshosting
PowWeb
PureHost
ReadyHosting
Spry
StartLogic
USANetHosting
VirtualAvenue
VPSLink
WebHost4Life
Webstrikesolutions
Xeran
YourWebHosting

Some you’ve never heard of. Some you definitely have. Some were large. Some were tiny. It makes no difference to the insatiable maw of the Endurance International Group! They’re like a scrap metal magnet for web hosts! (Or wrecking ball, depending on who you ask…)

And while EIG and others have certainly approached us regarding a buyout in the past, the money has never really been good enough for us to pull the trigger.

Until now.

I’m happy to report that our key stakeholders flew out to Massachusetts last night, signed the paperwork, and it is DONE! DreamHost is now officially owned and soon-to-be operated by EIG.

They bought us for 10 times our annual revenue.
Two of our four founders will also serve on the EIG board.
Many of our employees were made into millionaires overnight.

DreamHost is the latest web host in a long line of hosts to join the EIG family.

We couldn’t be more thrilled!

DreamHost customers can expect some emails from EIG shortly that will lay out the transition process and explain how they intend to migrate our customer data over to their own unified hosting system.

This is all happening just in time, too. Do you have any idea how sick we are of doing all this? The hardware failures, the endless stream of incoming tech support, writing these insufferable blog posts…UGH.

Our web panel will unfortunately not be making the journey to EIG, so I hope you guys like cPanel!

I was sad to see it go too, but I’m staring at FIVE POINT THREE MILLION DOLLARS in my bank account right now.

Five. Point. Three. Million.

I keep refreshing my online banking just to make sure it’s still there.

So shit, cPanel for everybody!

Yeah, I said shit. What’re they going to do – fire me? Well they can’t fire me because I QUIT. I’m buying a yacht and moving to Laguna Beach.

So shit.

Shitty shit.

Also, balls.

As a DreamHost old timer I’d like to thank you for sticking with us up to this point, but I have five point three million reasons not to care what you do with your hosting anymore. HASTA LA VISTA!

We’ll be updating this post tomorrow with some additional details for DreamHost – I mean EIG – customers that should help to ensure the transition goes as seamlessly as possible.

Update 4/2: April Fool’s. :)