HostingCon wrapped up this week in downtown San Diego and we found it was a great opportunity for us to do some learnin’, networkin’, and party-throwin’.

We invited vendors, partners, potential partners, competitors, and even any customers in the area to come party with us during the first night of the convention.

And it went off without a hitch! We raffled off some iPads, dropped a few hundred glowing ice cubes into drinks, and had a great time getting to better know some really good people in the industry.

At the end of the night the only thing that had been broken were one highball glass, a few social boundaries, and the seals on almost everything in the minibar at the afterparty.

All in all – a great success!

We learned some good lessons about how things are done at the ol’ HostingCon and are already planning to make next year’s event bigger and better.

We can’t wait to do it all again when HostingCon comes to Boston next year.

Many thanks to our excellent photographer for the evening, Sara France. Without her help, we would not have remembered any of this.

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!

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!

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)

Fate smiles upon the inconvenienced! If you weren’t able to make it out to Los Angeles last weekend to see us at SCALE 9x, don’t worry. We’re coming to Santa Clara this week to speak at CloudConnect!

DreamHost cofounder Sage Weil will be presenting Creating a Storage Cloud with Ceph.

He’ll give a primer on Ceph, assess and discuss the large-scale storage solutions landscape, and discuss how best to integrate Ceph as the supporting technology behind your most ambitious storage projects. If the session at SCALE last weekend was any indication, the Q&A session afterward will be long, informative, and exhausting (for Sage). So buy him a drink if you see him after the session, won’t you?

I’m told he also enjoys backrubs.

I’m just kidding. I was not told that. But who doesn’t enjoy backrubs?

You can catch Sage’s talk at 3:45pm, Wednesday March 9th in Grand Ballroom F at the Santa Clara Convention Center. He’ll be wrapping up the “Data and Storage” portion of the conference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No? Oh, okay.

YOUR hotel room then. Got it.

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

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

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

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