This won’t come as much of a surprise to DreamHost users, but e-commerce sales are on the rise. (Hey, that’s why you have a website, isn’t it?). DreamHost recently polled their customers to ask about the e-commerce activities taking place on their sites, and the data was interesting to say the least.

Overall in 2011, 26% of DreamHost customers say they have e-commerce systems in place on their websites (up from 20% of customers in 2010). The number of websites accepting popular payment methods is also up. PayPal remains king, with nearly 78% of websites accepting PayPal (an increase from 72% last year). Credit card transactions are decidedly less popular, but also increasing from year to year. Today 37.9% of websites are processing credit cards online (compared to 24.7% in 2010). The percentage of websites with manual processing for credit cards increased from 8.7% in 2010 to 12.3% in 2011.

Some other interesting results from DreamHost’s survey:

What do you sell online?
Of those with e-commerce systems, 74.2% are selling physical goods like clothing, art, and cars. Digital goods (like music, ebooks, and video) are offered by 36.2% of websites. Services are being sold by 37.1% of websites.

Secure certificates
In 2010, 22% of DreamHost customers said they had a secure certificate on their website. Today, that percentage has increased to 25.1%. Of those, 61% got their secure certificates from DreamHost.

The 3 biggest complaints about e-commerce software
2010                                      2011
1. Ability to use plug-ins       1. Technical support
2. Technical support              2. Ability to use plug-ins
3. Documentation                  3. Documentation

While many e-commerce solutions will work on DreamHost accounts, DreamHost has partnered with CafeCommerce to offer an exclusive e-commerce software offering.

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS, not to be confused with the easter egg people, PAAS), what distinguishes them from each other, and how they all fit into the more general concept of Cloud Computing.  Software as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service are generally well understood, but Platform as a Service still remains a bit of a mystery to many people.  In this short series of posts we’ll take a stab at explaining it a bit, starting with an introduction to the concept of platforms as they apply to software and dipping into the basics of Platform as a Service.  In future posts we’ll get into more of the nitty gritty.

What is a Platform?

A platform is anything you can leverage to accomplish something in a simpler, faster, or otherwise better way than you could without.  A platform may even provide a way to accomplish things that would otherwise not be possible at all.  In the most basic sense a platform is something physical that you can stand on to reach up higher.  In the software world it’s essentially the same idea.  As a programmer, you leverage pre-exisitng code rather than starting from scratch and writing everything.  The most well-known software platforms for desktop software are Windows and Mac OS and it’s generally very clear where those platforms end and the applications begin.

Web Platforms

In the world of web-based software, the infrastructure or hosting layer is analogous to desktop computer hardware and the platform layer is analogous to a desktop operating system.  In the very early days of web hosting, companies like us provided a service that was not much more than some disk space on a pre-configured Linux server with web server software running on it and a smattering of common scripting languages such as perl and python.  Those early hosting platforms were really only a thin layer on top of Linux itself.  It saved you from having to know how to configure the underlying software but didn’t really help you develop your own websites faster.

A lot has changed since then and web platforms have changed along the way, too.  Hosting services have automated the management of the underlying operating system and have exposed that to users in the form of increased control.  Additional features such as email distribution lists, contact form handlers, e-commerce options and other tools that make it easier to build and run a website are part of almost every hosting service, and even the installation of third-party web software platforms and frameworks is almost completely automated.  More advanced services, such as the one offered by DreamHost, also provide managed security, scaling options via automated migration between service levels, integration with external services such as content delivery networks, and an API providing on-demand launching of private servers and fine-grained control over DNS records.  Web platforms today provide a significant level of automation, control, and tools to help you build and manage your websites and that works great for almost all websites, but successfully scaling a very busy website can still take more work than it should.  That’s where Platform as a Service comes in.

Platform as a Service

The ultimate goal of a PaaS is to make it easier for you to run your website or web application no matter how much traffic it gets.  It should “just work”.  Where traditional managed hosting services have been pushing towards providing you with more control over the managed environment, platform services remove you from that aspect of the system altogether and manage it completely for you.  You just deploy your application and the service figures out what to do with it.  A platform as a service should handle scaling seamlessly for you so you can just focus on your website and the code running it.  That’s what I think is the holy grail of Platform as a Service and not necessarily the reality, though.  Platform services that exist today typically provide parts of this with some set of limitations appropriate to the type of user or application they are targeting.  In the next post in this series we’ll discuss some of the different kinds of platform services.

And if none of this is remotely interesting to you, you may still appreciate the more fun kind of platform.

Psst.

Hey, Mac. Have I got a deal for you.

Yes, you!

If you’ve not considered signing up for dedicated hosting with us in the past, now might be a good time…to start considering it!

For a limited time we’re offering our Blue Moon 4 dedicated server package (normally $169/mo) for the price of a Half Moon 4 ($139/mo).

We’ll also throw in a free 13th month of service for no reason at all.

Sign up now to get a quad-core, RAID 1-enabled powerhouse for the price of a dual-core, non-RAIDed, not-as-good-(but-still-pretty-good) dedicated server.

New customers only.

We hit 300,000 customers today!

Thanks to each and every one of you for allowing us to do what we do – we wouldn’t have been able to eat this cake without you!

Have a great weekend!

As a company, one of the largest expenses we’ve got is payroll.

And the largest team within the company? Technical support.

Faced with those two facts it’s easy to see why so many hosting companies choose to outsource their support.

Add in something like dial-in telephone-based technical support and most companies would be lucky to break even.

Outsourcing is a four-letter word at DreamHost. It’s also an eleven-letter word.

I know that’s confusing.

Let’s just split the difference and call it seven.

Outsourcing is a seven-letter word at DreamHost. Just awful.

Our technical support staff is not only US-based, but located within our own offices. They are DreamHost employees, and we’re always looking for more.

We see real value in hiring and training our own employees directly. They become intimately familiar with our services, our hosting platform, and are best able to represent the spirit of DreamHost on the front lines.

The end result is a more personalized, higher-level of support provided by people who are empowered to solve problems and not simply “escalate” them.

We’ve been very careful about how we choose to offer phone support. It does add a significant cost to our operating expenses and we’ve never wanted to pass that expense along to our customers.

The only people who pay for phone support at DreamHost are the ones that want to, you know, use it. For $9.95 a month our Premium Support package includes up to three callbacks per month.

Up until very recently we’ve asked our Premium Support customers to specify a three-hour window for their callbacks. It was a handy service, but the whole three-hour window thing was a little off-putting. You can thank cable companies, phone companies, appliance installers, and any number of related service industries for that.

Effective not-so-long-ago, we’ve made a small but significant change to the way we handle callbacks.

That three hour window? It’s now one hour, Monday through Friday.

Weekends are still on the three-hour system. For now!

You’ll get the same high-level of support you’ve come to know and love from our knowledgeable tech support team – faster than ever before.

The next time you need to contact our technical support team just look for the Premium Support checkbox on the contact form to enter into a world of steamy singles waiting to chat with you!*

*Some of them are, anyway. You know techies.

Our love for WordPress and its vibrant community of users, developers, and evangelists knows no bounds.

We’ve watched WordPress grow both in featureset and popularity over the years and have been proud to include it as a staple offering of our one-click software installer.

Which is why we’ve chosen to this year become a “Bling Bling” sponsor of WordCamp San Francisco 2011, going on right now at the Mission Bay Conference Center.

If you’re attending WordCamp this weekend be sure to stop by the DreamHost booth to meet our most WordPress-savvy employees. They may even invite you to a little after-hours get-together that we’re hosting Saturday night.

We’re proud to be associated with WordCamp San Fransisco and can’t wait to meet up with all of you!

DreamHost is coming to San Diego and we’d like to see you there!

http://www.dreamhostparty.com/

HostingCon 2011 will be taking place at the San Diego convention center August 8th-August 11th. We’ll be there too, in large numbers, Tusken Raider-style.

We’re throwing a party Monday night and you are absolutely invited. We’re looking to connect with vendors, partners, potential partners, customers, and even competitors over drinks, music, and games.

Our CEO, Simon Anderson, will be there. More than a dozen key DreamHost employees will be too – getting to know you, fielding your pitches, answering your questions, and taking note of your feedback about all things DreamHost!

Rumor has it that Jim Curry and a small contingent of the OpenStack team will be there as well!

If you’re over 21 and will be in the San Diego area August 8th, we’d love to see you there whether you’re attending HostingCon or not.

Visit http://www.dreamhostparty.com/ today to RSVP!

Once you’ve registered for this free event we’ll email you the secret password to get in the door 24 hours before it begins.

Come out and play with us!

(2 out of 3 physicists approve of the title above)

Ever wonder what makes DreamHost’s datacenters tick?

If you guessed an army of helper monkeys that is all hopped up on Red Bull and grain alcohol, then you sir, are sorely mistaken.  Contrary to popular belief, our primate relatives are not allowed in our datacenters because their fingerprints are incompatible with our biometric security system, and our employees prefer Monster Energy Drink, thank you very much.

Give up?  It’s a powerful combination of software code, hardware, a talented crew from Engineering and NOC, and an obsession with automating processes that borders on OCD.

We take automation seriously.   So seriously in fact, that we have a corporate mantra that involves repeating “au-tow-mate” in a robot’s voice.  You see, automation has always been ingrained in our company culture.  Since we have software developers with mad coding skills, we’ve been able to create our own tools that really leverage automation.

For example, we have a homegrown web panel, migration tools, provisioning systems, and databases that all work together in harmony.  At the press of a button, we can migrate a Shared customer to VPS, or provision and configure bare metal Dedicated Servers.  With this level of efficiency, we can better serve our growing customer base of over 300,000 while maintaining competitively low prices.

So what’s next?

As we scale out our infrastructure to accommodate our growing number of customers and services, our crack team of engineers is constantly looking for the best solutions.  The team recently decided that the Dell™ OpenStack™ Cloud Solution meets our future needs for scalability and integration into DreamHost’s existing private cloud.

Permission to geek out!!!

Dell has combined their PowerEdge™ C servers with the OpenStack cloud operating system to produce a cloud solution that can easily be deployed.  As you probably already know from a previous post, we’re big fans of the OpenStack project.  What especially caught our eyes was Dell’s new open source installer framework, Crowbar.

Crowbar automates OpenStack deployment on bare metal servers.  Its software framework uses a modular approach to express every system capability in what they’re calling barclamps.  The benefit of this approach is that other users may write their own barclamps to add functionality and expand the code base.  Our engineers are actively writing a barclamp to integrate Ceph™, the DreamHost-sponsored open source distributed storage system, into Crowbar so that we can automate the instant provisioning of Ceph storage nodes.

We’re excited to have Crowbar hanging from our Batman-style automation utility belt!

Read DreamHost’s quotation in Dell’s press release.

 
Written by: Brent Scotten

Next week we’ll be attending the Open Source convention by which all others are measured: O’Reilly’s OSCON 2011.

The OSCON schedule is extensive and, quite frankly, a little overwhelming!

DreamHost’s own Ben Cherian will be making appearances on stage at two sessions:

Prying Open the Cloud with Dell Crowbar and OpenStack
10:40am Thursday, 07/28/2011
Location: E141

OpenStack + Ceph
1:40pm Thursday, 07/28/2011
Location: E141

Ben will be joined at OSCON by DreamHost’s CEO Simon Anderson and some of our finest system administrators!

Our meeting calendar is filling up fast, but if you’d like to have a sit-down with us in Portland next week, be sure to contact events@dreamhost.com.

No time for meetings? No worries – DreamHost reps will also be in the OpenStack booth on the expo floor Wednesday between 1 and 3pm!

Look out Portland!

Today is a momentous day in DreamHost history.

Today is the day that DreamHost gains its first full-time CEO.

You may want to check out the press release if you missed it last week. There’s some…good stuff in there.

DreamHost was founded by four friends way back in 1997. While there’s never really been any “one” in charge, the four head honchos have been overseeing operations and steering the ship from the get-go. It’s a system that has served us well for many, many years. And luckily business has been good.

However, the hosting landscape is changing and we’re anxious and eager to change with it. We’re smart enough to know that any tech company, particularly one that’s still run like a startup, could benefit from an infusion of outside talent and experience.

So in January of this year we resolved to locate and hire DreamHost’s first full-time CEO – one voice to unite them all!

We started with a big list of candidates and whittled it down through phone interviews, in-person interviews, and even some all-hands interviews. We wrapped up the entire process with an employee vote (hello WorldBlu!) and, in the end, the winner was clear.

Simon Anderson comes to us from Pictage.com where he served as Chief Marketing Officer for many years. Simon’s honed his skills throughout the tech industry, having also held key roles at Affinity Internet, Authenticlick, and BiggerBoat.

Simon signed his employment contract last month and, effective today, is now the CEO of DreamHost.

Simon’s what the Internet calls an “Australian-American,” so we we made some minor changes around the office to welcome him into the company this morning.

Simon’s desk is outfitted with the latest trends in Australian cuisine as well as some training material on VHS – PAL format, of course.

We also spruced up Simon’s office a bit to remind him of home.

(fullscreen)

Our office in Brea even got some love.

Simon approves!

You can follow Simon on Twitter – @DreamHostSimon.

Feel free to follow @DreamHost too while you’re at it – you never know what we’ll be announcing next!

The future of DreamHost has never been brighter! Or more handsome! Or sweet-smelling. Or strong. Or hypnotizing. I should probably stop there.