And the winners are…

We held a t-shirt design contest not too long ago and the response was overwhelming.

After wading through hundreds of entries we’ve finally narrowed down the winners. We assigned each entry a year representative of its style – one for each year we’ve been in business. Every DreamHost employee was then given a chance to vote for their favorites and the top performers for each decade are as follows:

1940s, Andrea:

1950s, Ken Grett:

1960s, Gabriel Mello:

1970s, Brian:

1980s, CSEID:

1990s, Jeffrey Dates:

2000s, Pushka Ben:

Every one of these entries has won their creators a lifetime of free hosting from DreamHost!

You can purchase any of these printed on a shirt (or mug…or apron…or mousepad) right now in our online store!

You can also purchase some of our other favorite entries from the contest that didn’t quite make the cut – and there are nearly 60 of them!

Because we were so impressed with all the entries we received, all of the runners-up (designs in the store that aren’t listed above) will be getting a free year of hosting!

We would have liked to announce the winners much sooner, but a lot of them aren’t big on the whole “answer important emails” thing, and it took some time to get everyone’s artwork and legal paperwork collected.

We’re still waiting to hear back from several of the winners, so you won’t be able to purchase everything you see in the store just yet. If YOUR artwork appears in the store with a “NOT FOR SALE” icon, now might be a good time to check your spam filters for the several messages I’ve sent you!

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest! Now…

The Happy DreamHost 62nd Birthday Contest!

Today DreamHost turns 62 years old*! It’s hard to believe, but we’ve watched the hosting industry blossom and grow over the course of 62 grand years – that’s longer than any other web host in the industry. Some would say that’s older than the Internet itself, but they are MISINFORMED.

I was doing some digging in the DreamHost Archives and came across an old steamer trunk full of promotional materials dating back to the late 40s. There was a fair amount of water damage to the contents of the trunk, so much of what was in there has been lost to the elements. The good news is that I was able to salvage a few old photographs that hearken back to a simpler time.

The man with the glasses is one of my predecessors – the great James P. Abernathy III – DreamHost’s first marketing manager. He popularized the use of bumper stickers as promotional materials and is credited with making DreamHost the household name that it is today.

He died of venereal disease in 1953.

Early in our company’s history we realized the importance of buddying-up with famous people. Decades before the T-Mobile tent made its first appearance on the Academy Awards red carpet, the DreamHost milk truck was out in force delivering ice cold milk and promotional t-shirts to Hollywood’s elite.

It occurred to me that our company’s rich history need not spend an eternity buried in a steamer trunk, forever hidden from the prying eyes of the world. So we’re throwing a little contest to bring back the glory days of DreamHost.

Create your own retro-styled DreamHost t-shirt design to recapture the early days of web hosting as we know it. If we like yours enough we’ll turn it into actual t-shirts. Our employees will get them, people on the Internet will be able to buy them, and YOU’LL get a yearlifetime of free hosting! And mayyyyyybe even some copies of your own shirt! What the heck!

You don’t need to be a current customer to win. Just post a link to your entry (or entries) in the comments of this post. If you’re a winner you’ll need to be able to provide your artwork to us as a 200-300 dpi PNG file at a maximum size of 13.5″ x 16.5″. (Don’t forget the alpha channel data for any transparent areas.) File sizes must be no larger than 10 megs. Post an email address with your submission so that we can contact you if you’ve won and award you your prize!

Remember, this isn’t just a t-shirt design contest – this is a retro t-shirt design contest. Walk through a thrift store if you need inspiration. Ask anyone wearing a polo shirt what they think of your design – If they hate it, you’re probably on the right track!

The submission deadline is 11:59PM PST, Sunday October 11th. We’ll announce winners the following week – probably one from each “decade” (the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s). Feel free to take large liberties with the logo, taglines, etc. Good luck!

* Just kidding. We’re 12 today.

UPDATE: The winners have been announced!

The New Dream Machine

You may remember Dream Machine from such sports as basketball, basketball, softball, and basketball.

But what you may NOT remember is that we got in trouble with our building when they saw our elevator lobby table tennis shenanigans.

And what you couldn’t possibly remember, is that Micah and I have been working on our game since then and now are officially USATT rated (771 and 720 respectively).

Which is why I’m pleased to introduce for the first time… Dream Machine Table Tennis!

What’s it to you?

Well, we’re headed to the $100,000 Hard Bat Classic this weekend in Vegas, and anybody who shows up to cheer (either of) us on will get $1 in DreamHost credit for every point each of us score.. THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE TOURNAMENT!

That could very well end up being THOUSANDS of dollars of DreamHost credit .. or very well end up being TENS of dollars of DreamHost credit!

To illustrate, I will now relay to you a little story of the LAST tournament we went to, less than a month ago…

The California State Open

The way USATT tournaments generally work is that everybody is grouped into four person round-robin contests, where everybody plays everybody else, and only the one winner advances to the “playoff” bracket.

When I showed up for my under-1100-rating tournament, I found my bracket on the board… and things didn’t look too good:

Jones, Josh 725

Lee, Kenneth 927

Liao, Hung Ju (Andrew) 844

Lu, David 958

Hmm, Jones vs. Lee, Liao, and Lu. Not to be prejudiced, but I was nervous.

And in fact, it wasn’t good… I ended up losing all three matches, although I did win one game at least vs. Ken.

Overall, it was still a lot of fun and afterwards I got everybody from our round robin together to take a picture to commemorate their victories:

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See you tomorrow at the Venetian!

The Benefit of Being Me

They say you learn something every day, and although I’m pretty sure I didn’t learn anything on June 24th, 2003, I totally made up for it on March 13th, 2009 by learning TWO.

Maybe “they” just mean you learn something every day, on average.

The number one thing I learned yesterday was that if you don’t show up for the first leg of a round-trip ticket, airlines (at least AA, but I’m sure they all do) cancel your ENTIRE itinerary, with no money back!

Yeppo. I got my round-trip ticket on American (in-flight wifi!) two weeks ago to fly to New York for our second and final open house, and shortly after I booked it I realized my 9:30pm red-eye Wednesday night wouldn’t mesh too well with our 9pm Dream Machine season opener (a 40-62 loss).

It turned out it’d cost as much to change my ticket as booking a new one-way flight on Delta ($129) leaving at 11pm, so I just did that and didn’t bother to notify American at all.

Well, upon my attempt to check in online for my return flight, I found out that wasn’t necessarily the 100% correct course of action. Fortunately the friendly Indian call center guy was very clear; it would now cost me $449 to get on the return portion of my flight that I’d already paid $309 (round-trip) for!

Lucky you, you’ve already hit your learning quota for today!

So. I checked around and found out I could get a flight (through Atlanta) on AirTran for $159, and I booked that.

(Oh, a bonus thing I learned yesterday! On AirTran, they charge an additional $20 to get an emergency-row seat… okay, no big deal, lots of airlines do that now… BUT, they also charge an additional $6 JUST to pick your own seat AT ALL! If you opt out, they will just assign you a middle seat until the day you check in, at which time you can change it for free if there are any windows or aisles left! What’s next, charging to use the bathroom? Fortunately for me, I could immediately check in, saving myself $12 of uncertainty. And I didn’t have to go to the bathroom.)

When I got to Laguardia, I saw that my flight to Atlanta had been delayed 40 minutes. That made me a little nervous because my layover was only about an hour. However, another flight to Atlanta (it’s their hub) was almost done boarding … so I went to the customer service line and was going to see if I could get on that flight, when right as I was walking up the customer service guy announced on the pa, “Could the following customers on flight 339 come see me at gate B8, blah, blah, blah, Josh Jones, blah, blah!”

“I’m Josh Jones!” I shrieked!

Excellent. The guy, who had an African accent, took my boarding pass for 339 and handed me a new one for the flight about to depart; a first class one no less!

I was impressed that AirTran had gone to the trouble of figuring out who had a tight layover in Atlanta and automatically given them priority! I hadn’t even asked! Amazing.

Amazing indeed, I thought. Right up until I was about to hand my ticket to the lady at the gate, when I noticed it read “Josh JOHNS.”

I paused for a second, and considered just getting on as “Mr. Johns.” If was found out, I could always just play dumb! It wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch.

But then I glanced back over at the other gate and saw the guy that must have been the actual Josh Johns waiting patiently to tell the African-accented man that his name been called.

Dammit, I thought. There goes my connection to LA. I went over and handed the guy his ticket.

He was very appreciative! And, after explaining to the gate agent what had happened (and honestly the guy did pronounce JOHNS exactly like JONES), he was able to get me on that flight after all, with another first class ticket, seated directly next to my 20 year-old Georgian doppleganger, Josh Johns.

Which is why the number two thing I learned yesterday was: it pays to be (named) Josh Jones.

Happy DreamHolidays

Happy New Year and all that Jazz!

Please try not to end up like Santa did at our holiday party last week!

Fortunately, Rudolph was there to guide his sleigh home.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Since the holiday season is upon us, all of us at DreamHost would like to wish everyone on the internets a very happy Thanksgiving.

Well, you know, so long as you live in a country that gets to celebrate it. Otherwise, we hope your Thursday is really nice.

Oh, and go easy on our Support Team, alright? Because while we’ll have people here, they’ll be a bit slower on account of the assorted foodstuffs in their belly.

ANOTHER Happy DreamHost Customer

A strange thing happened today.

Shortly after our typical free Fridays lunch was finished, another free Friday lunch appeared… delivered courtesy of Pizza Hut!?

What the?

Well, it turned out, Dan had helped a customer with a .htaccess problem with their site (and it’s not even completely working it looks like?) and the Happy DreamHost Customer wrote back:

I hope you guys are hungry!

Tell everybody to expect lunch on me.

Pizza Hut will be delivering a BUNCH of food and drinks in about an
hour.

And he wasn’t kidding!

That probably cost at least six months of hosting too.. thanks dude! I’d like to state that this is the kind of behavior we’d like to strongly encourage!

Way better than some of those other customers.

It’s just too bad it was on a Friday.

Bicentennial!

According to the WordPress admin area, this is the DreamHost Blog’s 200th post!

What an amazing milestone!

Too bad it didn’t fall on a more interesting post.

Arguing on the Internet

There seem to be quite a few things that everybody knows are good for you, and yet nobody likes doing.

You know, things like: Exercising daily. Staying away from fried foods. Being nice. Taking your medicine. Sleeping until noon.

Ooooh, here’s another thing that NOBODY likes to do that I’ve been doing a lot of lately:

Trying new things.

Whoa man, trying new things really SUCKS.

Anytime you try something new, your poor, flabby, brain is catapulted out of the la-z boy chair of “routine” only to land directly on the nordic track of “growing more synaptic pathways for my neurons to communicate better.”

And, based on my experience, that process can very easily be PHYSICALLY painful!

Yep, it actually hurts my brain to learn. Not only that, I’ve also noticed it hurts a lot more to grow pathways that conflict with old pathways I’ve already got!

I can only imagine (fortunately!) how terrible it would be to get in some kind of gruesome camel crash that squishes my brain in such a way that a vast swath of those comfortable brain pathways are completely WIPED OUT.

Assuming it was even possible, I bet it’d take years of painful and frustrating rehabilitation, like, just to learn how to walk again. Do you remember how frustrating and painful it was the first time you learned? I don’t, but based on my mom’s stories of my tantrums, I doubt I’d want to go through it again!

Well, every time you try something new, your brain has to go through at least a little bit of that uncomfortable process, and I know I at least subconsciously avoid it like some kind of (subconscious) diarrhea!

Nonetheless, I’ve recently started taking surfing and ping-pong classes (two separate classes, sadly), and man, it’s annoying being that bad at things. I should have just taken it easy and signed up for Dr. Mario classes. Or maybe a class at something I’m really awesome at… aw yeah, the ladies know what I’m talking about!

Not the Point

Okay, the point of this post was NOT (just) that I’m taking surfing and ping-pong classes.

Let me ’splain.

I’m kind of a developer. I pretty much just develop for DreamHost, in Perl, with Emacs, on Windows (XP). I’ve been doing it like that for over a decade, and to be modest, I’m pretty awesome at it… aw yeah, the ladies already knew that!

It’s a widely-held belief that being an awesome programmer is exactly like being an awesome athlete. Not just in that you can get any cheerleader you want, but that even if your specialty is Perl (or basketball), you’re not going to have too hard a time if you decide to take up C++ (or other important sports).

Which is why I decided five weeks ago to go ahead and just churn out all the fantastic iPhone applications I’d been dreaming of!

Straightforward Enough

I really knew nothing about iPhone development. In fact, it took me an hour or so to realize that you need OS X to develop iPhone apps.

Well, no way was I going to go buy a mac, especially after I’d just picked up a $450 EEE 1000H, which can be HACKINTOSHED!

So, my first day was spent “hackintoshing”, and it was relatively easy, and everything worked how the people on the nice Internet had said, and the only thing broken was sound didn’t work (like they said it wouldn’t).

Major Pain

At that point, it’d been kind of a fun project. It was somewhat new stuff, but I’ve installed operating systems by following instructions on a forum before, so my brain really wasn’t growing too many new pathways.

To make a long story short, I soon thereafter realized in order for me to program iPhone apps, I had to switch to developing for the iPhone, in Objective C, with XCode, on OS X.

And. Every. Single. One. Of. Those. Changes. HURT.

Just trying to use OS X, and having to re-learn keyboard shortcuts, how to open programs, how to open folders, how windows work, how to page down, where system settings are, and so on and so on was enough to almost make me run crawling back to the warm bosom of panel.dreamhost.com.

But, I persevered. And then I spent a lot of time reading documentation. And searching for tutorials. And slowly taking apart the example applications.

And finally, after about a week, I had actually finished my first app! It was called Ponger and it was well under 100K. All it did was show an image of a ping pong paddle on your iPhone that when you swung it, made ping pong noises!

Pretty fricking sweet. The inspiration was whilst lobby ponging we noticed that iPhones themselves actually make pretty good paddles (go ahead, try it at home). In fact, I was this close to making Ponger a more authentic “paddle simulator” by not even making it play noises (the noises were a lot harder than you think… and not just because my sound didn’t work)!

Well, I (triumphantly) submitted my app to App-le for inclusion in the App Store (but free) on August 12th, just getting it in in time to catch the ping-pong panedemonium that was sure to be incited by the Beijing Olympics (remember those?)!

In fact, I also started writing this blog post way back then, but I wanted to hold off on publishing it until Ponger was approved so everybody could enjoy it for themselves!

From: devprograms@apple.com
Date: Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 4:40 PM
Subject: Ponger: Application Submission Feedback

Hello Josh,

We’ve reviewed your application Ponger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store.

If you choose to provide additional features that utilize iPhone functionality, your application can be reconsidered for the App Store after you resubmit a new binary to iTunes Connect.

The current version of Ponger may be very appropriate to share with friends and family, and we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing.

Best Regards,

Allison
Worldwide Developer Relations
(Cr)Apple, Inc

SON OF A!

I would have posted this earlier, but I’ve spent the entire last week throwing my HACKINTOSH.

Don’t Bother

Anyway, the moral of the blog post is, “Trying new things hurts your brain, so don’t.”

Or wait, maybe the moral is, “It’s not too late for Josh to relate this to DreamHost a tiny bit if he just says,

Hey, we’ve now made a “live demo” of our panel at https://demo.dreamhost.com/ so all you potential Happy DreamHost Customers can now try one more new thing without it hurting quite so much, and we now make the first week of DreamHost PS FREE so you don’t have to worry about money while you deal with all that brain hurt as you find your appropriate resource level!

“?

Lobby Pong

Here at DreamHost, we’re as serious about web hosting as we are about ping pong. And if we need more room for servers — or a quick doubles game — we’re totally in favor of expansion.

So when the situation calls for it, we move our table into the elevator lobby on our floor…

It doesn’t have a view like our regular ping pong room does, but we crash into the walls way less this way. And as people who host here can attest, crashing less is always a good thing.

Update: Building management apparently read this entry and just let us know that we can’t play ping pong in the lobby anymore. *sigh* I’d say that was the end of an era — but it only lasted a few weeks at best.