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!

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!

Welcome back to this week’s (and the final) edition of Friday illiterative lists!

Two business practices of pretty big-name companies came to my attention this week that I thought were too underhanded/sleazy not to be shared/copied.

#1. Sending something via FedEx Express Saver:

On Tuesday I had to FedEx some stuff from downtown Los Angeles to Chino. It’s only 36.5 miles so I figured, why not save a buck (or twenty?) and choose “Express Saver” .. it must be cheaper and it must get there in the same amount of time when we’re this close!

Wrongo! I guess FedEx really doesn’t want to cannibalize their overnight delivery sales for packages that aren’t going so far. So much so that they will actually ship an envelope from LA to MEMPHIS on its way back to Chino!

#2. Checking a domain’s availability via Network Solutions:

Now I didn’t do this. But a fair number of our customers must still remember way back when Network Solutions was the only registrar, and for some reason go to their site to check the availability of domains before attempting to register them with us.

BIG MISTAKE!

Since at least January 8th, any (non-gibberish) domain you decide to just CHECK availability for via their site, Network Solutions GOES AHEAD AND REGISTERS!

Although undoubtably sleazy, this maybe wouldn’t be sooo terrible if NetSol wasn’t still charging $35/year!

I’d actually thought about this a while ago. I thought, “If *I* were a good-for-nothing cyber-squatter, I’d set up a registrar, advertise insanely cheap rates, and then whenever anybody went to check or register a domain with me, I’d just register it for myself and then offer it to them for much more!”

But then I thought, “What about when people caught on? They’d come and check completely fake domains they never wanted, and then I’d be out the $7 a year for all these worthless domains!”

Of course, all this was way before ICANN’s Add Drop Grace Period (AGP) came into effect. The AGP provides registrars with a five-day grace period to delete a domain they’ve “mistakenly” registered and to get all their money back. The original purpose was to help people out when they make typos or when a registrar is the victim of fraud; noble enough goals.

In practice, the AGP has resulted in “Domain Tasting,” the numerous ill side-effects including:

Allowing Net S.O.L. to actually implement this practice at no financial risk.

Allowing the “Drop-Catching” business to thrive… currently 100% of expired .com/net domains are re-registered immediately by cyber-squaters and AdSense fiends.

Allowing these skuz-buckets to register hundreds of thousands of domains a day, testing their typo-traffic-potential, and then deleting hundreds of thousands that don’t make at least $7 a year.

Allowing these skuz-buckets to actually only require a domain to make 42 cents a year to be profitable… even the domains they intend to keep, they go ahead and delete every five days. And then immediately re-register. That way, they’re never out the $7/year.. they’re only out the interest they could be earning on the money they have to keep with Verisign in order to keep their zillions of domains in perpetual register/delete/re-register limbo!

In practice, the noble goals that the AGP hoped to solve are just not very big problems. If you’re a “legit” domain-registering entity and you typo a domain: you’re out a few bucks. It’s your fault, c’est la vie. If you’re a registrar and you’re being massively frauded every day (as we are), you quickly develop techniques to find and fight fraud and you prevent suspicious domains from even getting registered in the first place.

The AGP as it is now hardly ever saves us any money from fraud, because the vast majority of bunk registrations we catch before we even submit them, and the rest we don’t catch until long after the five days have already passed!

There is a bright side to all of this! Thanks primarily to Network Solutions’ ballsy new policy, ICANN decided last week to finally end Domain Tasting!

Hooray! This is good news for the Internet, bad news for Google!

Good thing I sold all my Google yesterday and bought Yahoo!

Good thing I wish I sold all my Google yesterday and bought Yahoo!

I, like a lot of you I’m guessing, have a complicated relationship with chocolate. I mean credit cards.

On the one hand, I love them. These days, cash is about as necessary as fax machines and rotary jukeboxes. And hey, giving me 1% rewards plus 30 interest-free days to pay just sweetens the pot.

On the other hand, I hate them. I’ve always paid off my balance in full each month, but the amount of money they squeeze out of people who don’t is stupendous! Not to mention annual fees, late fees, cash-advance fees, and of course merchant fees!

I’m sure most everybody already knows this, but no credit card provider could ever survive on the billions they make from consumers.. they are inclined, nay, forced to also charge the merchant a percentage of every single transaction. (Usually around 2% + 30 cents.)

Of course, it’s still way worth it for most merchants to accept credit cards. The savings over not having to deal with (as much) physical cash are pretty huge, as well as the benefit that on average people paying with credit cards spend 30% or maybe 112% more than those paying with cash.. even at McDonalds! Credit cards are generally faster than cash too, and the whole world of eCommerce which would be pretty screwed if not for electronic payments.

But hey, it’s not ALL milk and honey for the credit card companies, right? They have a lot of expenses too… all those consumers that never end up paying their bills, all that fraud and theft, and all those frequent flier miles ain’t FREE you know?!

But hey, actually, they ARE free. And it IS all milk and honey.

Because, you know who pays for all that fraud and theft? Not the credit card companies. The merchants. If a customer disputes a charge that you received the funds for, the credit card processor just takes the money back from the merchant… plus a $25 fee!

And you know who pays for all those points and cash back rewards? NOT the credit card companies! The merchants. Yep, I didn’t even realize this myself until recently, but there’s a higher rate charged to the merchant for any cards that offer any sort of benefits back to the card holder (in fact, it’s even MORE than 1%)! And as a merchant you have no choice but to accept that higher rate for those cards… even though it wasn’t your idea to offer such crazy incentives. It was Discover’s.

And you know who pays for all those deadbeat consumers? I’ll give you a hint this time. NOT THE CREDIT CARD COMPANIES! Well, they actuallllly do, a teeny little. But in the end, it’s the individual themself who pays, by having their credit report ruined for a long, long time. And, worst case, the processor at least gets to sell the debt to collections, and make a note to never offer you credit again!

All and all, it’s a pretty sweet scam. It explains why MasterCard has more than quadrupled since its IPO a little over a year ago, and why VISA’s upcoming IPO has got people pretty hot and sticky (myself included?).

Yep, pretty sweet indeed. Owning a credit-card company is the closest you can get to printing money without overthrowing a small island nation (or counterfeiting). But it’s weird… generally when you have a scam this sweet the government steps in and makes it illegal so they can start doing it… strangely in this case, the US Treasury is still happily printing trillions of dollars of paper money like they have been every year since 1789.

What If The US Treasury Switched to E-Cash?

I don’t know, call me new-fashioned, but I think it’s about time for that to change. The US Treasury has an annual budget of over $11 billion in 2004. Mastercard’s expenses for running their world-wide transaction system came to just $1.5 billion in 2006.

It seems at least somewhat possible that the US government could set up a nation-wide electronic cash system for about $10 billion less per year than they spend on the current paper one.

And that $10 billion of savings would be the least of the benefits. This new system would be instantly ubiquitous, not based on credit, electronic, and have no transaction fees! We would drop credit cards quicker than you can say “Sweet sassy molassy!” if there were any free electronic payment system that was wide-spread!

With the elimination of paper cash, I wouldn’t be surprised if tax revenues went up as well.. a happy accidental side-effect of the elimination of anonymous transactions!

And I don’t want to hear any “Waa waa waa, I don’t want the government to be able to track my purchases!” Don’t fret: for you we will always save the option of living in a cave in Montana and trading rabbit pelts for your WiMax.

But for the rest of us, it’s fortunate we live in a modern, stable, free, democracy! Get your head out of your tin foil hat and pay your damn taxes like the rest of us! If the government does illegally pry through your transactions one day, tell the media, take them to court, and elect some new congressmen like an AMERICAN!

I don’t know, call me old-fashioned, but it irks me off to no end when somebody, no matter how much or how little they make, tries to under-report income to the IRS…

For example, just this past October, New York City started requiring all taxis to accept credit cards via this new touch screen with news, gps maps, ads, and even rfid! I was pretty excited… it seemed very future-oriented of New York, and I knew having all taxis uniformly accept credit cards would mean bigger tips, quicker transactions, more customers, and just more ultimate overall sweetness.

Well, the taxi drivers disagreed! They even had a STRIKE! They said they didn’t like the “GPS tracking” or the “5% credit card fee”.

Well, the GPS tracking concern is silly… I think they said they were worried about getting caught if they went places that were illegal for them to go anyway?

The credit card fee concern was silly too. First of all, I’m sure it’s more like 2%, and second of all, I wouldn’t be surprised if the average credit card patron tipped a full dollar more than the average cash patron, way making up for that 2% fee easily.

No, the REAL reason they are against credit card fares is because it is impossible for them to not report them on their taxes.

Anyway, it’s soooooo frustrating now… virtually every time you go to pay with a credit card, the cabbie is either like “Oh.. don’t you have any cash? I really prefer cash!” or “Oh, the credit card is ‘broken,’ sorry!” or “Too late, I already ‘cut the meter’… you have to tell me earlier if you want to pay with credit card.”

Which (the last two at least) are just blatant lies! They make it such a hassle that I’ve pretty much given up on even trying my (awesome) MasterCard PayPass anymore for fear of getting verbally (or physically, like actually happened to my friend!) assaulted!

So please, Uncle Sam… do yourself, and us, the cab-riding, chinese-restaurant eating, laundramat-using, public a favor and give up on the greenback! Make inefficiency and tax-evasion a thing of the pass, and only those who are inefficient and who tax-evade will miss it…

…it will be sweet revenge indeed.

The writers strike continues, and so do I. This is my third strike in a row, a turkey in the parlance of our times, which I now offer to you in the belated spirit of Thanksgiving.

The real turkey however, is the target of my now hardly-notorious STIKES.. the one laptop per child project.

For those less charitably-minded, let me explain the project a little. A few years ago Nicholas Negroponte, already hardly-notorious for his crazy Wired columns and being director of the the MIT Media Lab, decided that what would most benefit the poorest children of the world is not basic necessities and safe living conditions (like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet believe), but consumer electronics!

A Great Idea!

I believe this all started back in 2005, and I guess the main idea was to make a sub-$100 “laptop” that used very little power (so little as to be able to be hand-cranked back to life), but would at the same time catapult poverty-ravaged children into the 21st century! The laptop would have to be durable, easy-to-use, keep kids interested, and include learning software that could replace expensive books.

The lucky millions of children who got to use these laptops would get all this great “computer experience” and so be more ready to compete in the REAL WORLD when they happened to not die of starvation first.

A Great Idea?

Unfortunately, there are only two practical advantages to giving third-world children laptops:

There could possibly be savings compared to current textbooks and learning materials.

The children could gain familiarity with the most important tool in the modern world: the computer.

Well, it’s almost three years later, and what’s finally come out of the project is a $200 laptop, that runs some custom learning software on a custom operating system with custom hardware.

And frankly, the third-world is no longer interested! Despite being promised orders of several million from such reputable countries as Libya and Nigeria, so far Negroponte has only delivered 2,000 laptops so far, and has total orders for less than 200,000… many of those to rich westerners!

On top of that, Microsoft and Intel have teamed up to offer the ClassMate, a real-deal laptop running actual Windows for just a bit more than the crazy, custom, non-standard OLPC is turning out to actually cost. Negroponte is crying foul and saying, “They don’t care about the children … they’re just selling these things at a loss to protect their market share!”

Well Duh

Duh, Nicholas. If they cared about the children they wouldn’t be making cheap laptops for them at all.. they’d be starting foundations to train teachers and start schools and buy books and provide water and medicine and all that other boring stuff. But that’s not what Intel and Microsoft are for. That’s what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is for.

Intel and Microsoft are for making computer hardware and software (and dominating while they do it).

How in the world did you think you could start a company with 20 people and beat the entire computer industry that’s been doing this for decades and decades? And how in the world did you think you could beat them on price?

What To Do

Don’t worry Nicholas, it’s not your fault. You’re a bold thinker, and bold thinkers don’t get that way by worrying about details.

I, however, am an italics thinker! And italics thinkers get that way by being practical and worrying about details. Fortunately for you, I am now going to give you some italics advice for free.. as long as you promise to follow it.

One Nintendo DS Per Child!

Give up on selling the hardware! You’ve said so yourself, “I’m not good at selling laptops, I’m good at selling ideas!”

You’ve already done the hard part and convinced at least some people that what the poorest children in the world need are home electronics.. now it’s time to let somebody with some experience fulfill the manufacturing.

The Nintendo DS is literally perfect for your needs:

It’s cheap. ($129… and I’m sure if you order 150 million Nintendo will cut you a deal.)

It’s power-efficient. (Easily lasts 14 hours on a single charge, even with the screen bright enough to be seen in direct sunlight.. there’s even a hand-crank charger!)

It’s a computer. (All advantages to be gained by giving a young child a laptop are also gained by giving a child a DS. Just by using a DS they’ll become confident and “fluent” in the use of technology, and future “real” computer use will come much much easier. Worked for me!)

It’s got wi-fi. (In fact, it even does ad-hoc networking, and allows downloading content from one host DS to all the others.. just the teacher could have the lesson plan on their DS and wirelessly beam it to all the students at the start of each class!)

It’s rugged. (Nintendo’s been making toys for actual children for over 100 years and Game Boys have survived actual wars.)

It’s powerful enough. (If it can handle Mario Kart tournaments, it can handle Multipli Kation tables.)

It’s small and has a touch screen. (Like the iPhone. Just like laptops have replaced the desktop, in the future ever smaller portable electronics will replace the laptop. Why teach on antiquated technology?)

It’s forward-compatible. (Nintendo’s portable systems have very long life cycles. Any software you write for the DS will very likely still be runable on the hardware they’re selling in a decade.)

Children love it. (You want a teaching tool that’s “fun to use?” You want a teaching tool that’s “collaborative” You’ve hit “the jackpot.”)

It’s a world-wide standard. (Over 53 MILLION have been sold already. The platform has thousands of developers. The future leaders of the developed world are growing up playing Nintendo DS.. why give the future leaders of the developing world anything less?)

It’s already used for education. (Millions use their DS to learn a language, develop logic skills, practice cooking, learn math, read books, research, and browse the web every day!)

It worked for Japan. (Since the original Game Boy was released in 1989, Japanese GDP has grown over half a trillion dollars, which is clearly 100% attributable to the device.)

For Reals

So please, Mr. Negroponte, hear my plea! Give up on the laptop, and just make a Nintendo DS cartridge with your educational software on it!

If only you’d done this from the start, you would have had your hardware already and maybe a couple million African kids would be on their way to a digital future years ago.

It’s not too late though.. switch your “buy one get one” promotion to be DSes now, and you could have that couple million yet! You could even partner with Nintendo and make a “special edition” DS you can only get through your program.

I suggest it have this picture on it, in honor of the italic thinker who made it all possible:

Josh Jones

Just five and a half months after hitting 500,000 and here we are.

That makes us the 14th largest web host in the world…we’d rank even higher if you don’t count domain registrars that don’t offer real hosting.

As you can see, Godaddy/WildWestDomains has been allowed to become far too powerful. We’ll need to take them down a notch.

Thank you to all our customers - old and new - who helped us get here. We couldn’t have done it without you! And we hope we continue to live up to your expectations. We know you’ll let us know if we don’t. :D

Now get out there and party tonight, but be careful. You don’t want to end up like this guy.

It’s not just what you do to a door.

Nor is it only a type of case.

And I’m not thinking of following it with the word up, either.

Honestly, I should have probably titled this post “Open and Closed,” but isn’t it way more intriguing since I went with shut.

I’m talking about standards.

I think it’s been over two years since I last thought about this, and I think that’s long enough. After that long it’s okay if I repeat myself.

The Joy of Open

As I said back then: In the end, the best standards, protocols, and Beard Papa’s are the open ones.

Nobody likes to design a product based around a standard that some other company has control over. And nobody likes to buy a product that doesn’t interoperate with the different product all their idiot friends bought. Or a product that doesn’t even work with other products their idiot self bought. Like Guitar Hero controllers.

Eventually, natural market pressures force the most ubiquitous standard to win out, and all the other ones dry up and wither away, like dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind. Of course, the most ubiquitous standard is not always the most open standard. Like in the case of Word Docs, PDF, Flash, Gif, MP3.. and I bet even another one I’m forgetting!

The way these formats got to be the de facto standard without being truly open is simple:

They started with the best implementation.

A standard is zilcho without an implementation. You might have the most GPLed, flexible, extensible, well-documented, feature-complete standard on the face of the universe, and if your standard is a beee-yotch to implement (or has a stupid Ogg-something name) it will be born still.

Of course, to become de facto, a non-open standard needs to be open enough. As in, even though some evil corporation “owns” the standard, they allow anybody to use it for free, and for any purpose, without permission… and probably also give away some good tools that actually implement their “standard.”

The Case for Shut

The number one thing a new open standard needs is users. There’s that old chicken and the egg thing again.. nobody wants to go to the trouble of using a standard until it’s been proved good, and you can’t prove a standard is good until people are actually using it.

Generally, the way to beat any chicken and egg problem is by throwing a lot of money at it. Skype had a big C&E problem, PayPal had a huge C&E problem, and eBay had the gigantorous C&E problem of all time! (Hmm, all three are now owned by eBay. Weird.) It just takes a company willing to burn through cash sometimes to beat a chicken and an egg. And, as they’re taking all the risk to develop this new platform, they want the reward… which is easier to keep to themselves by keeping their platform shut.

Not to mention, it’s a lot easier to make a hidden system than a public one. You don’t have to worry about publishing an API, or even documentation, or having months of tedious peer-review everytime you realize something needs to change. You can control the entire environment the system is running on, you can make sneaky like optimizing hacks that just wouldn’t work in the general case, and sometimes you can even add an awesome new feature in a single bound.

I remember wayyyyyyyy back in 1998, I was telling Sage there needs to be a way to email money to people. I was thinking it should be some sort of open standard tied to bank accounts, and some sort of encrypted file that was somehow tied to the government, and you could just attach a “cash file” to an email and it’d automatically transfer the money out of your bank account and into theirs. Or something. The details were a little tricky, but I just thought, “You should be able to email money.”

Of course, less than a year later, PayPal (and X.com) came around and just CHEATED. They just made their own centralized system and had everybody sign up with them! And it worked, and was simple, and nobody cared that they had to sign up for PayPal to do it instead of running their own “encrypted cash server” at their own domain like I was sort of envisioning.

Gah, if I’d have only thought of that kludgey hack, I’d be building rockets and video sharing sites, and DreamHost would have never grown bigger than a few dozen hentai sites.

Just Do It

I guess the moral of the story is, if you’ve got some great new idea, just do it yourself. Any way you can. Even if it is the kind of thing that needs “network effects” and really lends itself to an open protocol or standard, don’t worry about that!

The first thing you need to do is make it work, and make it popular. Then the rest of the Internerd community will take notice and start working on their open standard implementation. But until you prove it’s something worth working on, nobody will.

And eventually, that open protocol will take over, and get included for free in everybody’s DreamHost account… emphasis on eventually.

In the meantime, you’ve probably been bought out for enough money to start working on that space harem I dreamt about last night.

And I’m off to continue rocking the Guitar Hero III demo!

It’s something we like to do every day!

Yep, the secret to our crazy low prices and amazing ferraris, finally revealed:

We take your billing address and go to your homes at night to steal your jewelry, plasma TVs, and all valuable toiletries!

Not to mention all the credit card numbers we get fund our wild vegas benders (roulette is a great way to launder money) and illicit basketball leagues!

(Damn PayPal and Google Checkout, not sharing the credit card info with us!)

Yeah, overall it’s a pretty sweet scheme we’ve had these past 10 years; and now that we’ve gone into hiding you’ll never catch us, coppers!

Okay Okay Okay

Although I admit what we’ve been doing has been pretty bad, it pales in comparison to what I just found out one of our favorite competitors Lunarpages just did to rob their customers.

According to this thread at Web Hosting Talk, Lunarpages a few days ago turned the default 404 pages for all sites they host (who haven’t specifically customized them already) to one of those ultra-sleazy “domain parking”-style setups. It still happening right now… and here’s an example of a 404 page on a site some poor shmoe has hosted by them, aeroeco.net!

I’m impressed! So roundabout, so complex, so sneaky! We only ever do the simple stuff like read our customers email for blackmail material, or kidnap their pets and their kids.

Maybe Lunarpages doesn’t agree, and maybe it doesn’t seem sooo bad to you, but what they’re doing is outright theft. It’s the Internet equivalent of shoplifting.

For websites, traffic is everything. Stealing a site’s traffic is nothing less than web homicide!

You see, anybody who got a default 404 error before this change, probably just backed up to the site they were on and continued. But now, it seems probable they’ll end up clicking one of the links they see there, or possibly use the “search this site” form, which does nothing of the sort! It searches “http://searchportal.information.com/” instead and Lunarpages gets a kickback!

Of course, Go Daddy has been doing stuff like this for ages.. if you register a domain with them and don’t set anything up on it you’re going to get a lame page filled with lame affiliate links. But at least with parked domains, it’s not like there’s an actual site up that you’re injecting content into! Not to mention, they’re Go Daddy. We’d expect nothing less from them!

And, remember the time four years ago where VeriSign tried exactly this with every non-registered domain? ICANN made them stop less than a week later, after a huge (by Internet nerd standards) public outcry.

These sorts of scams (and the entire domain parking industry) are just a server variant to good old desktop spyware that changes your default search engine or dns error pages on your browser. But just because they’re not surreptitiously installing anything on end users computers doesn’t mean it’s not crooked.

(Oh, speaking of crooked.. yesterday our cool anti-spam site spam.la stopped working, as though the domain had expired. Looking it up, it was paid through July 2008 though! Upon contacting the registry, it turns out that although we had paid Domain Discover to renew the domain in July, they had never paid the registry! Yet another creative way to rob your customers that we should try sometime!)

Why, Lunarpages, Why?

I’m guessing it’s the money?

But come on guys, is it really worth it? How much money are we talking about?

I remember one time when this skeezy SEO guy was asking me “How many domains do you guys host?” I told him “zillions”. He said, “How many are parked?” I said, “I dunno, some fraction of a zillion?” He said: “Do you like to make money?” And I said, “I dunno, it depends…” To which he said, “Do you like to make money?” To which I said, “It depends, is the money one dollar and how much **** do I have to suck to get it?”

Okay, I didn’t really say that, but it was what I was thinking. And in a real tough, bad-ass voice too.

It’s obviously a stupid question, “Do you like to make money?” The question is, “Would you do X if I paid you $Y?“

Lunarpages must be hurting pretty bad right now to sink this low. I also noticed they dropped their 1-800 number and only have a 1-714 now! Shoulda been like us, and not offered phone support in the first place, eh?!

But, I gotta give them a break. It’s easy to be all high and mighty and to “Don’t be evil” when you’re rolling in the dough like Google. But the ethics get a lot murkier when the choice is between stealing a tiny bit of traffic from your customers and selling your first born.

(Take Yahoo! for example. Back in 2000 (stock price $100) we tried to advertise with them, and they were all high and mighty about “no animation, no hard sell, no general trashiness.” Now (stock price $28), their site is covered in expanding flash ads, including some for… gasp… Lunarpages!)

Who are your customers?

It’s a good question!

And I don’t mean, are they small businesses, web designers, women, dwarfs, fifth graders, deaf, or asian? I mean, are your customers “People who need a website host” or are your customers “People who pay for traffic”? It seems Lunarpages is trying to get both.

But, you can’t have both. You really have to choose just one and stick with it!

It’s pretty simple in the beginning… your customers are the people (or businesses) who pay for your product (or service). But then later, as you grow, you start to realize that entire “customer base”… that “audience”… is a potential “product” in and of itself. And there are plenty of other types of “customers” who will pay handsomly for it.

Don’t fall for it!

Because your customers don’t like being a product! And, when they finally catch on that they’re PAYING to be SOLD, they’ll vamoose! And you’ll be done… stuck without customers or product!

Just yesteday there was some talk of eBay pissing off its sellers by putting targeted Google ads on their listings… effectively trying to steal their customers’ customers.

This is actually an interesting case.. because who are eBay’s customers, really? Is it the sellers, who directly pay Ebay? Or is it the shoppers, who are the originators of that money the sellers then use to pay eBay?

I’d say, it’s the shoppers. Because even though auction sites are sort of a weird “chicken and the egg” problem, in actuality, it’s just an “egg” problem, and the egg is shoppers.

Because, one thing I’ve learned in this world, is that if you’ve got people trying to spend money, you’ll have no problem finding people trying to take it!

So actually, I’d say eBay is probably fine putting those ads in. If they can help the shoppers find what they’re looking for, even if it’s not through an auction on eBay itself, they’ll be satisfied and come back. The “power sellers” can go suck an egg.. if they leave there’ll be plenty of other sellers who aren’t quite as proud to fill the void.

What to do?

Well, being completely unbiased in the matter, I say vote with your feet!

Any Lunarpages customers who want to switch to DreamHost, we’ll be happy to have you… and we promise to never, never, ever, ever, do anything of this sort, ever! You’re already paying us for hosting.. that should really be enough! (And Lunarpages, if you’re hurting so bad.. just raise prices!)

P.S. Use the promo code LOONEYPAGES when you sign up and get your first year completely free.. it works for current Lunarpages customers only!

We are!

Well, maybe not ALL fifth graders, but I’m sure at least A fifth grader.

Like, one who skipped first grade or something.

Like me! (I was too tall smart.)

Anyway, DreamHost is TEN YEARS OLD!!!

   Domain Name: DREAMHOST.COM
   Registrar: NEW DREAM NETWORK, LLC
   Whois Server: whois.dreamhost.com
   Referral URL: http://www.dreamhost.com
   Name Server: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM
   Name Server: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM
   Name Server: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM
   Status: ok
   Updated Date: 21-sep-2006
   Creation Date: 23-sep-1997
   Expiration Date: 22-sep-2013

In dog years, that’s SEVENTY!

In Internet years, that’s ONE THOUSAND!

In waiting-for-tech-support-to-get-back-to-you years, that’s INFINITY!

To celebrate, I’m doing this super-long blog post retrospective… and if you read the whole thing, you might feel a little less let down about the announcement I mentioned last post just being a freaking birthday announcement.

Stupid Beginnings: Pre-DreamHost

Man, I was just looking through some old emails from 1997, and one thing I can say is, boy, were we dumb!

It’s nice to know some things never change.

Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 15:06:32 -0800 (PST)
From: Josh “Evening Optimist” Jones
To: Honchos
Subject: Plan?

Maybe we should piece together a mission statement or guidelines for
business or goals or something. Maybe we should also come up with some
different plans for pricing web hosting. Like some amount for a small
business site (at most 500 hits a day or so) and some amount for a large
site, with a discount if we were the ones who made the site. All should
probably have 20megs of space, with $5 per 10 more or so (I’m of course
wide open to specific price suggestions, these are just round numbers).
Maybe $30 for a small, $45 for a large, plus maybe $5 more per some number
of hits. Also more if they have a domain name. If we made their site
though, how about $15 off the base price?

Anyway, I was thinking we need some reason that people would want
to use us instead of our competitors. Why would they now? We are good at
design and graphics and programming, but honestly there are plenty of
places that are good at that. We have to be something others aren’t. Like:
quicker at getting the job done, better sites, cheaper sites, or maybe
even something like better customer service or even more advertising. The
reason I thought that low price would be a good way to go is because we
have an advantage over most other places in that. We aren’t actualy
dependent on this (at least not _yet_) whereas others are. I don’t think
we have an advantage in speed, especially since we are all full time
students. We are good at design but it’s hard to sell people on our sites
being the highest quality I think. I can imagine some people really liking
our work and other people not so much, there is a lot of personal taste
involved. Another thing which I guess is sort of obvious is that it would
be good to get some large sites that we need to change a lot and sort of
constantly maintain and add things to, because we can keep charging for
that. Like when we get a job, we should outline clearly what is included
in the setup, and additional things (like more pictures, etc..) are
clearly going to cost more later. Okay thats it. I would have written this
earlier, but my connection was flakey yesterday.

Josh

But wait, isn’t that email dated January 1997?! We didn’t register dreamhost.com until September! What oh what were we doing in the meantime?

The thing is, the actual company over here is really called “New Dream Network” .. and the goal was never (and still isn’t!) to be a web host. We did some web hosting on the side to try and cover the network we were stealing from a friend, but we generally didn’t want it to ever get too big.

Buuuuuut, once we started actually raking in the dough, that mentality changed quick. Let me give you an idea of how much dough there was to be raked back when we decided to get serious and get an actual domain name..

07.29.97 pillar Pillar Communications $20.00
07.31.97 pinzler Andrew Pinzler $48.00
07.31.97 jbark Joseph Bark $46.00
08.06.97 tim Timnet $126.00
08.12.97 threnody Cheryl Dowling $136.00 VOID
08.12.97 jhb5 Vickee Sepich $46.00

Here’s an interesting little exchange I found too… the origins of the DreamHost name:

Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 14:06:21 -0800 (PST)
From: Dallas Bethune
To: Honchos
Subject: Re: everyhost.com

Hey,

I just discovered that dreamhost.com is not taken!

We could snatch it up! What do you think?

I’m making an ad for hosting right now, BTW…

->Dallas

> > Hey what do you guys think of everyhost.com? We could make it our mission
> > to make having a website with a domain name easy and affordable for
> > everyone from private citizens to small to large businesses. Therefore..
> > everyhost.com (it’s not taken). Also Dallas, are front page extensions
> > still installed somewhere? I’m going to take advantage of the beta status
> > of FP98 to download it and see if we can get our server to work with their
> > extensions. It would be good to put at least on our hosting server once we
> > get it.
> >Josh
>
> I’m not that taken by everyhost.com. I don’t think I would personally want
> to have my site there. It would be fine if we were trying to focus on
> sites with their own domains, though.
>
> I believe I deleted the FrontPage stuff. We never got it working right,
> and were low on space at some point.
>
> I’d almost rather not have FrontPage going on our servers. It seems kinda
> neat, but I’m still worried about what access to our server that it seems
> to require…
>
> ->Dallas

Ha, EveryHost! Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

I do feel somewhat vindicated that everyhost.com was snatched up less than two years later!

(One thing sort of funny is… we were assuming most people would be getting sub-domains of our main domain. Dallas was saying that he wouldn’t want dallas.everyhost.com as much as dallas.dreamhost.com! Of course “It would be fine if we were trying to focus on sites with their own domains, though.”)

A Nightmare is Born

Woooooheeee! Thanks the Wayback Machine I’ve been able to find and recreate the entire history of DreamHost.com and lay it out for you here, complete with what I think are the most interesting points in each design! Unending boredom awaits..

This was our first design!

Designed by Dustin Vannatter, New Dream Member extraordinaire, I’ll always hold a special place in my heart for this one!

Back then, we actually had specifically an “adult site hosting” plan.. it was $99.95/month and, like all our plans, included unlimited bandwidth! As unlimited as half a T1 can be! It came with 100MB per 5GB of transfer you used, which was really weird in retrospect.

We also had our Crazy Domain Insane plan for $9.95/month with 20MB of storage, Archive Boy for $17.95/month with 40MB, Code Warrior (we hadn’t gotten that Cease and Desist from Metrowerks yet!) for $23.95/month with 50MB and a telnet user and CGI access, and Strictly Business for $44.95/month with 100MB of storage along with 20 email addresses and anonymous FTP!

It turned out, that Adult Site hosting plan with unlimited bandwidth was the only thing that kept us solvent those early months. As soon as we put that “too good to be true” offer up there, we started getting deluged (as in, multiple PER WEEK!) with signups for it! And these were big customers too.. $100/month!

It took about a week before we realized that unlimited bandwidth plus adult content equals not good. Some of these people were using over a GB a day of transfer.. and according to an early email from michael, we needed to be making $200/GB to stay afloat! We immediately had to re-negotiate with some of those early adopters.. one guy began paying $700/month, and others left.

We did learn an important lesson though, and that was that some of those $100/month adult sites used hardly ANY bandwidth at all! And thus, the truth about overselling was realized!

(Ha, if you thought having a dedicated adult hosting plan was crazy, before dreamhost.com launched we had a dedicated warez hosting plan!)

We also had “colocation” options back then:

For $995/month you got 50GB bandwidth, 64MB RAM, a 3GB SCSI drive, on a Pentium 200Mhz!

For $3000/month you got a PII 400Mhz, 256MB RAM, two 9GB SCSIs and 300GB of bandwidth!

The deals would have been a little sweeter if I’d had my way though…

Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 11:35:29 -0800 (PST)
From: Dallas Bethune
To: Honchos
Subject: dreamhost.com site

I looked at it…

I’m alarmed by the colocate page.

How do you think we’re going to offer

200MHZ Pentium II
64 MB RAM
4.2 GB drive
Full Debian Linux Distribution

Only $300 setup
$300 a month.

At this ridiculously low prices?

We’re trying to make money…!

The offer I was talking about would be a 100 MHz Pentium with 16MB Ram and
2 gig drive for $1500 setup and $500/mnth

That price is even low…

Also, I’d rather not give everybody full CGI access that is a client of a
reseller. That would be a good way to open ourselves up for a lot of
attacks from people we don’t even really know at all. I think we should
develop a set of cgi scripts that most people would want to cover people’s
want or need for CGI without opening the server up. We can’t afford to
get new hardware too often…

I also feel especially unsure about granting full CGI to people with warez
pages. They would be the ones most likely to try to cause trouble,
right? (maybe I’m just getting old)

Most people don’t need cgi except for little things. If we can provide
those things, we can secure ourselves from big programs that use up the
processor or what not. I’m paranoid.

I think we may have to discuss our prices overall, as well. We are way
lower than a lot of places. This helps us get business, but we may need
to reassess our costs, and our income, and all that.

->Dallas

Yeah, early on you got ONE mailbox, ONE hosted domain, ONE ftp user, and NO cgi access unless you were at least on Code Warrior.. and you liked it! Not to mention domain registrations were $70/year from Network Solutions (and only Network Solutions!)

From the very beginning we had a “reseller program” (you’d get 20% off) and in November 1998 I started the monthly newsletter. Oh yay.

So yep, that was it, one server, four honchos, and $200 in the bank.

Two Years Pass: September 1999

First thing I noticed on this redesign.. our 1-888-261-4484 is nowhere to be found! I must have gotten tired of all those voicemails setting off my pager. Good riddance to phone support! It wouldn’t return (in the form of callbacks) for three years.

By our two year birthday, DreamHost has grown from the four honchos to 19 people.. and gone from no profit to profit to no profit again, thanks in large part to Sage’s WebRing millions!

We’d dropped the unlimited bandwidth, but added some “extra options” at this point: get an extra ftp username for $5/month, and extra mailbox for $2/month, and extra storage for $5 per 10MB!

We’ve dropped the adult plan, added a domain parking plan for $30/year .. NOT including registration (but refunded if you upgraded to full hosting!), renamed “colocation” to “dedicated” (after all, we still don’t have our very own data center!), started offering squirrel mail webmail, and were giving away a free iBook! This was back when people used to read books!

We later had a lot of other giveaway contests.. DreamCasts, Handspring Visors, Game Boy Advances, and even, on the launch of “DH2″, a PS2!

DreamHost 2: September 2000

Pretty much since I graduated from college in May of 1998, we’d been working on “the future of webhosting.” We were going to call it “DreamHost 2000″ in the theme of “Windows 2000″, but by the time we actually got it out and done, the year 2000 didn’t really seem like the future anymore, so it was just “DreamHost 2.0.”

What did DH 2 bring?

Well, mostly the panel as you more-or-less know it today. We also had a system that should have pretty much seamlessly scaled from 3 or 4 servers to 3 or 4 thousand. And I guess it more-or-less did.

We also started doing our “own” domain registrations (through register.com, then joker, then tucows, and finally, many years later, our own ICANN account!) for $30/year.

We dropped the “Archive Boy” plan and created “Sweet Dreams” and upped our storage offerings to 30/75/150/250MB, our bandwidth to 2/4/7/12GB a month, and our mailboxes included to 3/10/20/40!

We also raised our prices to $10/$20/$35/$60 per month and added more extras: discussion lists for $10/month each, SSL access (not including a cert) for $20/month, extra MySQL DBs for $7/month each, and extra bandwidth for the rock-bottom-remainder price of $15/GB!

We also didn’t include any sub-domains on Crazy Domain Insane back then.. or even CGI access! We did however have an official logo! And 31 employees though.

Promo Codes, DreamServers, and Disaster: September 2001

September 2001: did you forget that American flags weren’t just in meatspace? We got on the bandwagon ourselves.

Witness, the humble beginning of promo codes… originally a way for us to give college students a discount! We also started giving away a free registration with hosting, and had a domain checker right on the front page. We created the KBase and launched DreamServers; starting at only $395/month now.. for 40GB of bandwidth, a 10GB disk, and a 600Mhz Celeron with 128MB RAM!

We were now hosting 29,380 domains! And.. we went crazy and way upped disk to 60/300/600/1000MB, and bandwidth a smidge to 2/5/10/30GB, and dropped pricing for overage to $15/$10/$10/$5 per GB.

Even crazier… on the front page, a huge form where you could specify how much of each feature you wanted and how much you were willing to pay, and we would “recommend” a plan for you! The actual point of this feature was market research though.. after months of data collection I would go back through and decide how to best update our plans to maximize revenues!

At this point we had gone through our own little mini dot-bomb.. our head count was only 28 since we decided to stop borrowing money from Sage! Fortunately, our stock art head count had tripled in the same period.

Rapid Growth: We Turn Five!

Really, we started growing faster a little bit before this completely sweet redesign. It started when I analyzed all those “recommendation” requests and realized we really should just be giving more away on our cheapest plan. Sure, less people are “up-sold” on our more expensive plans, but really, those people were just going to our competitors.

So, we gave CGI on CDI, upped our disk to 100/400/900/1500MB, our bandwidth to 2/10/20/30GB, our mailboxes to 20/60/140/300, and gave away unlimited MySQL databases on all plans… I believe an industry first? Oh ho ho!

Of course, we did put a limit on the database usage you could have… the short lived “conueries” metric! 25 times your connections plus your queries! And you got 10M “conueries” per month on CDI!

But still, the redesign was nice too.. we did it thanks to the prodding of a PR company we hired for the still-ridiculous price of $10,000 a month. The biggest thing we learned from that was how easy PR is.. in fact, they even told us they couldn’t have done our press releases (they made us do) any better.

With the fifth birthday, we renamed Code Warrior to Code Monster, upped disk space another 50MB each (of course, all old customers got it as well!), and jumped bandwidth up to 20/25/30/40GB a month. DreamServers was now just DreamHost Dedicated (too many brands the PR company said!), and for $199/mo you got a 1.6Ghz P4, 256MB of RAM, a 30GB drive, and 75GB of bandwidth!

Another critical thing we started here was the ability to cash out your rewards (10% of all payments for people you referred, plus 5% of people they referred), instead of just applying it towards your hosting bill. That was a pretty big deal for our burgeoning affiliate crowd!

We were down to just 24 employees, and $300,000 in the bank!

The Sale Era: September 2003 and 2004

A lot of you reading this probably trace your history with DreamHost back to this period.

Although 777 on our 7th birthday was the culmination, the beginning was actually back on our sixth birthday, in September 2003, while I was actually in Hawaii at a friend’s wedding.

We decided to try, as a lark almost, giving our Strictly Business plan (1.6GB of storage and 40GB of bandwidth plus every other feature) for the price of Crazy Domain Insane, forever.

At that time, we were peaking at about 30 new customers a day. I thought, optimistically, the sale would give us a 50% bump.

The day I turned it on (from Hawaii), we got 300 new customers. The next day, 600! The third day, at which point everbody was screaming for me to turn it off, 1200! In a period of 3 days, we’d provisioned as many accounts as we usually got in 3 months.

It was a hectic time, fo’ sure. The support team hated it. Fortunately, they’re not in charge!

As a result of the incredible demand we witnessed, I was able to convince everybody to allow me to up our offerings a few months later to 500/1000/1600/2300MB of disk and a bit more bandwidth too. We also dropped the price of Code Monster to Sweet Dreams “temporarily.”

The next year, we did essentially the same thing, except we tried just making our cheapest plan SUPER CHEAP.. the 777 sale allowed you to get a year of CDI for just $9.24! Are we Crazy? Insane? Domain?

At that point we’d also already upped disk to 800/1600/2560/3680MB doubled bandwidth to 40/48/64/88GB (and dropped overage to $4/$3/$2/$1 per GB) as well as tripled the number of included mailboxes. We’d also started giving a 20% discount for pre-paying for two years. Pretty much just so we could say our price was $7.95/month!

We also started offering a 91-day money back guarantee (since 1 and 1 had appeared on the scene offering a 90-day!) and allowed opting for a one-time payment of $65 for referring somebody to DreamHost!

Our dedicated servers had a $99.95/month option with a Pentium 4, 512MB of RAM, a 30GB disk, and 500GB of bandwidth.

We had 23 employees for the entire two year period, had paid Sage off the money we’d borrowed (without much interest, which turned out to still be a pretty good return for 1999-2002), and had a cool mil in the bank!

It Gets a Little Ridiculous: September 2005

So, in January 2005 we decide to triple disk and bandwidth to 2.4/4.8/7.6/11GB and 120/144/192/264GB! We had to, man! It was like all you had to do was up those numbers and you got more money!

In the “Spirit of ‘97″ (not at all because others were offering more, nope!) we upped our rewards payout from $65 to $97, as well as our money back guarantee from 91 days to 97. In March we hit 100,000 domains!

And that’s when our power problems began.

I won’t get into it tooooooooooo much right here, but our main data center essentially ran out of power over two years ago and is still out today. We immediately stopped selling any new Dedicated Servers (at that point we were adding about one a day). I wasn’t too heart-broken because my first love had always been shared!

So never mind all that!

We added Ruby on Rails support shortly thereafter, and this blog got started in July with let’s save our environment, truly one of this generation’s great folk hits.

We double disk again, and added the feature where your bandwidth and disk grows every week you stay a customer with us… we’re still the only host who does this that I know of/care about!

Anyway, the 888 promo code only gave you 80% off, and wasn’t nearly as big a deal as 777 (which we’d actually secretly still left working for most of the year!), but we did also up all our plans to finally include unlimited domains and sub-domains, something customers had been asking for for years, which gave us a pretty big boost.

Domain registrations also dropped to $9.95/year and extra bandwidth was now $1-$0.50/GB. We had 30 employees now.. an unsettling trend in my book!

I Just Like This Fat Kid

That was our website in January 2006, when we went completely insane and finally upped our disk FORTY TIMES and our bandwidth TEN TIMES to 20/40/60/90GB and 1/1.2/1.6/2.2TB.

Around now was when we got sick of just losing all those potential dedicated server customers (still no power) and decided to just start linking them over to hosting.com for some affiliate sugar.

Fan Gets Hit With It: September 2006

That summer there’s more power outages and we have TWO FULL MONTHS of pretty darn bad service. It was pretty sucky all around.

We did about the only thing we could do.. made a new site all based on “community” and doubled bandwidth and 10 timesed disk again!

At this point we’re also giving away 3000/6000/12000/24000 mailboxes and 75/175/375/775 shell accounts. We have a 999 promo code which gives $99.99 off (again, it’s no 777!) and take it a little easy.

We’ve got 300,000 domains, 50 employees and a lot of infrastructure stuff to deal with.

Everything Is Wonderful: September 2007

In January of this year, we took a step back. A step away from everything that’s made us who we are, our very essense, and we actually started reducing how much disk and bandwidth we included on our plans.

We had (close to) no promo code sales all year, and never upped those quotas a smidge. It’s been very very very painful for me.

Well… sweet release is finally here!

The Payoff

If you’ve read, or at least scrolled, this far… you deserve something!

And here it is.. for the big One - Oh, DreamHost is now offering only one plan! It’s called “Happy Hosting” (though it doesn’t really need a name when it’s the only one) and it comes with 500GB of disk, 5TB of bandwidth per month, and unlimited users and mailboxes, etc, etc, etc…

Current customers immediately get the unlimited users and mailboxes, and their bandwidth doubled. We’re also doubling your existing disk space, but it will be rolled out incrementally. If you want to switch to the new plan, you can today from our panel!

It’s $10.95/month, but if you prepay for 1 year it’s $9.95/month, 2 years it’s $8.95/month, 3 years it’s $7.95/month, 5 years it’s $6.95/month, and 10 years it’s $5.95/month! There may be a crazy 777-ish promo code too (for new customers) if you look around.

TEN YEARS?

Who would pay for ten years in advance?

I dunno, but at least we’ve finally shown we can do ten years!

Happy Hosting!

P.S. And, when you renew in 2017 you’ll (most definitely) be up to 12.5 PB of storage and bandwidth for $1.95/month!

It’s been Tearin’ Up My Heart for a while that I can’t get Verizon’s FiOS service to anywhere I’ve EVER lived.

So… many… times… I check the availability on their site.

When the day finally dawns that Verizon blesses me with their almighty 30mbs beam of light, I predict the deluge of automatic notifications will blot out the sun. And along with it incoming email for everybody on looney.

Or maybe not. Because I hadn’t received one single notification when POP! I saw a new billboard advertising FiOS this weekend while at the Frank Gehry’s first/worst architectural project food court.

Had FiOS finally reared its ugly head to darken the shores of my fair little town? I sure hoped so! I was so excited I couldn’t even waiut to get back online and check their web site one final time.. I had to know immediately!

So I quickly licked the hummus off my fingers (pita is for jerks!) and dialed (888) GET-FIOS I think… already salivating and slightly aroused by how much more dominant my Bomberman Live would be with a 5mbs upload. Not to mention I’d just pre-ordered some Halo 3. (They asked me how much I wanted to prepay! Uh, what’s the minimum? $5. FIVE DOLLARS THEN!)

Anyway, here’s how the conversation went:

Thank you for your interest in Verizon FiOS .. what is your home telephone number so we can qualify your address?
Actually, I don’t use a land line.
Then we can’t check.
Uh, do you have internet?
Uh, what? Sort of.
Then go check at verizon.com!
I’m sorry, we can only check if you have a home telephone number with Verizon, would you like me to give you the number of your local Verizon sales office, who is closed until Monday?
No, thanks. I’m Gone.

URGH!

I had to know though, so I called right back, this time equipped with my neighbor’s Verizon landline number.

Thank you for your interest in Verizon FiOS .. what is your home telephone number so we can qualify your address?
310-hamana mum humuna
Thank you. You qualify for Verizon FiOS!
F*********** yeah!
Indeed. Now, are you the account holder?
No.
Are you an adult over 18 who is authorized to make decisions for the account holder?
No.
…….. oh. ……. uh… …….
Ha, no script for that, EH?! How much is it anyway?
30mbs down and 5mbs up is $54.95/month!
NICE.

Oh man, I was soo stoked that I immediately went back home and watched the Patriots choke the Chargers.

Much later that night, I remembered how stoked I was, and decided to go sign up online.

Well, my stokedidity died quick.

According to the site, my address did not qualify.. and neither did my neighbors! URGHTHT!!!

On top of that, it’s $179.95 a month, not $54.95! I don’t know where that came from.

So, I guess it’s a few more years of blaming it on the lag for me.

What the point of this anecdote was.

It’s hard to get an entire company *N SYNC. All the time, really.. but especially when there’s a new product, promotion, or feature.

Usually in a big company the website is the thing you can trust the most. It’s run by “corporate” and is generally the official company line. Ironically, for small companies the website is often the last thing to be updated, and so is usually the least reliable source of up-to-date availability, pricing, products, and all dat.

Next down the clue-stick tree is the phone sales and support team. If it’s a big company, they’ve got a lot of people working those phones, and generally they’re fairly low paid/respected and not too interested in keeping up to date on the latest and greatest stuff from corporate.

I’m sure there’s some kind of announcement, and maybe even 15 minutes of training for everybody… but until that new thing’s been out a few months, be prepared for some serious asynchronocity between what you read on the web and what you hear on the phone.

Finally, at the furthest orbit of in-the-loop solar system, is actual physical retail employees. If a company’s got retail branches, no matter if they sell cell phones, cable tv, hamburgers, shoes, or dog food, keeping EVERY employee in EVERY physically separated retail branch on the same page is, as they say in the hosting business, “sumn bitch”.

Even DreamHost, without that many employees, who are all in LA, and with no retail branches and no phone support has a very hard time getting the word out about new features internally!

It’s like these people don’t read! Or even listen! Or are never told!

Believe you me, the moment you finish reading that hilarious DreamHost newsletter every month, you know more about the current state of DreamHost than 90% of the people who work here!

But don’t worry, when you write in asking why you still haven’t been invited to DreamHost PS they’ll eventually need to ask somebody “What’s a PS?” … and then they’ll find out, usually even before they respond to your message!

Hopefully you won’t get too mad now if at times it seems as though the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. Or vice versa.

Because they don’t. But hey, it’s still better than only having one hand.

So, rather than getting angry all the times somebody in a company doesn’t know about their own new product, rejoice every time they do!

Be thrilled when you go to an Apple store to ask about the iPod Touch and they know “It’s not out until the end of the month.”

Shout “heckolluyeah” when you go into the T-Mobile store to get a HotSpot@Home phone and you’re lucky enough to find somebody there who just read about it on Gizmodo like you did!

And hug your keyboard and kiss your mouse when a Happy DreamHost Support Teamer actually knows we have a Cron Jobs tab or a place for end users to change their own mailbox password! (Psst… try it at your own domain.)

But This I Promise You

If we announce anything next Monday, September 24th, 2007, everybody at the company will already know about it!

Just this once.

Bye Bye Bye!