In the hosting industry customers do switch hosts from time to time.

It happens.

Customers leave DreamHost and old customers come back to DreamHost. Every day.

It happens to us, and it happens to other hosts.

It’s an endless cycle of creation, destruction, and rebirth.

It keeps things interesting and it keeps us on our toes.

There are many reasons for customer churn. Pricing, features, service levels, and positions on hot political issues are just some of the many criteria that a discriminating hosting customer might look for when selecting a home for their website.

“SOPA” has been in the news a lot lately. It’s a piece of legislation that threatens the very nature of the Internet. DreamHost opposes SOPA. Many web hosts do. But not all.

The Save Hosting Coalition explains why SOPA is bad for web hosts. And americancensorship.org explains what’s wrong with SOPA in a great infographic.

If your host has rubbed you the wrong way about SOPA or any other issue, allow us to lather you up with this special offer…

It’s a great way to get yourself up and out of a bad hosting situation, and in to the loving arms of DreamHost – lovers of open-source software, WordPress, free speech, freedom on the Internet, puppies, kittens, and candy.

We’re down to our last JackBack. It could be yours…

Just follow these simple steps!

• Take the last four digits of our FAX number.
• Subtract the year in which dreamhost.com was registered.
• Add in the amount of money we would pay affiliates for sending us three direct referrals using the “one-time payment” option.
• Add the year that Dan Johnson was deploying crickets in the government sector.
• Subtract the date in the month of July when Simon Anderson became DreamHost’s CEO.
• Multiply by the first two digits of our “Community Manager” job posting’s tracking code.
• Subtract the monthly cost of configuring 2800 MB of RAM on a DreamHost VPS.
• Subtract the year we became an ICANN-accredited domain registrar.
• Divide by the number of requests per second DreamHost.com received while we were hosting the “Draw Mohammad Day” website.
• Make yourself a stiff drink.
• Call your mother. Tell her you love her.
• Bathe. Please.
• Post your final number in the comments below.

We’ll ship this lovely piece of phone augmentation to the first correct answer we see.

Be sure to list a valid email address so we can contact you if you’ve won!

UPDATE 9/1/2011
You guys solved this one in no time!

The JackBack goes to “Joe” who posted the correct answer first: 21.0204

Joe, keep an eye on your email!

Because my math teachers always taught me to show my work, here are the answers:

9098
-1997
+97+97+97
+2009
-11
*45
-140
-2002
/20000
=
21.0204

Every morning we drag ourselves out of bed and take a good, long look at ourselves in the mirror. For the last few months…we haven’t liked what we’ve seen.

Some days we felt downright ugly. The truth of the matter is we were just old. Stale. Aspercremey. Prone to hip breakage.

Five years ago we were smokin’ hot! But, let’s face it, time marches on and things can’t always look as good as we used to think they did. Everything that once dangled or bobbed sags southward eventually, and all we could do was sit there feeling sorry for ourselves and watch as the months ticked by.

One day something clicked and we decided we’d had enough! So we did what everyone in Southern California does.

We paid someone to just start cutting.

And sculpting. And suturing. Cutting some more. And sculpting some more. And suturing some more.

For a while there we were a bloody mess and couldn’t even recognize ourselves! But the wounds have healed, we’ve got a spring in our step, and our face has never been more handsome.

We’d like to thank our friends over at Bolton Design for their hard work in deciphering the ramblings and stream-of-consciousness fallout from our many brainstorm meetings.

They took all of that insanity and transformed it all into a functional, helpful, easy-on-the-eyes website that we’re proud to have in place at dreamhost.com.

Like so many who have gone under the knife, we were empty inside. Our souls were dead. Our self-esteem was at an all-time-low. No matter how many times people told us we were pretty, we could never believe it because we lacked the emotional capacity to take pride in ourselves or our accomplishments.

Our cosmetic makeover was really just a way for us to mask a much deeper problem. For years our website was served up by static HTML pages – boring, lifeless HTML pages. It was bit of a maintenance nightmare but we always told ourselves that it was “good enough.”

No longer.

DreamHost.com is now powered by WordPress.

You heard me. We’re all-WordPress, all-the-time over here.

WordPress may have started out as a blogging platform, but it has since grown into something much larger. We happen to find that it’s pretty great as a content management system, too!

We hope you like the changes. We sure do!

If you were in or around the San Diego convention center last week, these were hard to miss:

We commissioned a small fleet of these pedal-powered taxis to get people around the city during HostingCon 2011, helping to reduce the city’s carbon footprint if only for a small time.

It also meant that the DreamHost logo was never more than a head-turn away during HostingCon. That was nice, too.

People-powered transportation fits in nicely with our green sensibilities, so these were kind of a no-brainer for us.

Here’s DreamHost CEO, Simon Anderson, showing us how it’s done!

Thanks to Yellow Bike Cab of San Diego for coming through on these. We couldn’t have been happier with the final result.

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.

Josh Jones - Talk to the Hand!!

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

NOOOO !!!!!!

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

We're CRAZY !

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

Graveyard Shift - BREA

Graveyard Shift - Downtown LA

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

Brett shows the Canadian who's boss

Too much caffeine ...

Formal Fridays has gone too far

Best costume award goes to ...

Photobomb successful

So angry !

No users were harmed during this photoshoot

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

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

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

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

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

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

He came by to do some stretches…

…and throw gang signs.

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

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

And he smelled fantastic.

You may or may not have noticed that yesterday, www.dreamhost.com was offline and unreachable for the better part of 6 hours. We can’t let something like that go without an explanation.

I should note that during this time no customer sites were affected (other than one – which I’ll get to) and the main “www.dreamhost.com” domain. Customer sites were up, our web panel was up, everything was up…including the ire of some tech-savvy Muslims!

We’ve got a fairly liberal free-speech policy here which we’re quite proud of. Speech that is protected by the United States Constitution’s First Amendment is protected by DreamHost. While we don’t always agree with the content of the sites we host, we do support their right to host it in America!

Yesterday was Draw Mohammad Day.

This did not sit well with roughly 21% of the world’s population.

We happened to be hosting drawmuhammadday.com, a site that encouraged people to draw images of Mohammed. That’s kind of a no-no in the Muslim world.

Incidentally, did you know there’s like a million different ways to spell Mohammed?

In the spirit of yesterday’s event, but without the offensive parts, I’ve drawn some pictures to show you what you might have missed!

Some people weren’t too keen on the idea of the Draw Mohammad Day website and suddenly we were the target of the largest Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) we’ve ever seen. drawmuhammadday.com was the first to fall. It was the main target and it didn’t take long…based on our stats it looked like almost the entire country of Pakistan was attacking us! Well not really. But nobody in Pakistan could reach YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter yesterday, so what else were they gonna do?

These weren’t just random attacks from here and there. We saw several Pakistani groups targeting us on their blogs, often providing step-by-step directions and automated tools for launching e-assaults on dreamhost.com and drawmuhammadday.com.

They did not let up once the site was down. At one point dreamhost.com (the site itself) was handling around 20,000 requests per second. To put that number in perspective, when our customers’ sites have traffic surges a busy day might see that number get up to ten or even twenty.

Our load balancers, as great as they are, typically handle about 4,000 connections at any given moment. During the attack they made it up to 400,000 before they seized up and crapped out. We believe that even the most top-shelf battle-hardened load balancing options would not have been able to withstand an attack of this scale – a quick jump in traffic about 100x larger than normal traffic patterns we see on any given day.

Our fault-tolerant setup relied on those load balancers and they proved to be our undoing. Luckily only some services were affected by this for a very short time (webmail being one of them) before we got them going again a few minutes later.

To restore services we had to take the site down altogether while we moved it to newer, stronger hardware, beyond the reach of our load balancers. We tuned the Linux kernel on this new machine aggressively to use less memory for TCP connections. We also abandoned Apache, favoring a specialized nginx installation.

When we flipped the switch to get dreamhost.com up and running again at around 2PM PDT, the attack load had dropped to 130,000 simultaneous connections with over 20,000 requests per second. The new setup took it like a champ and continues to perform well today – even while we’re still seeing elevated traffic as a result of lingering attacks.

We’re proud to say (and repeat!) that customer sites were not affected and our control panel was still reachable during this entire debacle. And of course if you ever suspect server problems with your DreamHost account be sure to check dreamhoststatus.com!

We learned some lessons yesterday and, moving forward, we’re going to put them into practice. Thanks for hangin’ in there.

(not Mohammed)

…but not for long!

We’re giving them all away to twenty lucky entrants in our Apple-A-Day Twitter contest!

We had hoped to have these in our hands on the 3rd when everybody else did. Unfortunately Apple cancelled our first order, probably as a result of us ordering twenty when the stated limit was TWO. The credit card we originally used had also been cancelled thanks to the recent Monoprice fiasco by the time Apple was ready to charge it, so that probably didn’t go over very well either…

The good news is we were able to sneak in another order – and that one went through without a problem – and arrived today!

Bingo!

We unpacked 15 iPads, but the fourth box had a note…

Just kidding. I put that there. But it got your heart rate up a little, right?

So what can you actually do with 20 iPads? Quite a lot, actually!

There’s the obligatory doorstop.

Dominoes came to mind as well…

Playing chess on a touchscreen is like nothing you’ve ever experienced.

20 iPads have no problem giving someone bad news.

iPad/crowbar batting practice was a hit!

I’ve played a lot of bowling apps on my iPhone.

This one makes you feel like you’re really there!

The iPad talks a good game, but when it comes time to play a little Call of Duty, he falls flat.

Trash talking only works when you’re good at something. PUNK.

I’ll be honest – the iPad was much better at playing drums in Rock Band than I was. Had some problems hitting the pedal though.

With the day wearing on I decided that maybe nobody would realize if a few iPads went missing. So I thought it might be a good idea to swallow a few and sneak them out that way.

It wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t successful.

The following Twitter users have won a 16GB Wifi iPad:
mrwickedd
enotsola
rafaldyrda
mike_Henderson
raimon49
feltpad
caoanroad4800
daniloeu
omtc
jbchan
twEapen
Onlera
emberna
mattmaher
MinaNJ
lisadrowe
LauraRogner
pkimbrel
benrwoodard
eminsker

If you’re listed above, CONGRATULATIONS! – and be on the lookout for a message from @dreamhost. We’re going to need some shipping information from you!

Winners must reply to @dreamhost on Twitter no later than May 14th at 11:59PM, PDT (one month from today) or they will forfeit their prize. At that time we will pick from the other entries received to select alternate winners. We don’t want to hold on to these things forever!

No iPads were harmed or removed from shrink wrap in the making of this blog post.

UPDATE 5/17/2010: We made several attempts to contact all winners and did not receive replies from four of them. The following Twitter users had not claimed their iPads by the deadline and have forfeited their prizes:
raimon49, Onlera, mattmaher, LauraRogner
So we’ve had to select four alternates. They are:
moonlettuce, JustCallMeJenni, samanatrix, john_blanton

Congratulations! The four alternate winners have until May 31st at 11:59PM, PDT to claim their prizes, after which point we’ll select MORE alternates if need be.

UPDATE 5/28/2010: All iPads have now been claimed. Thanks everyone for entering!