Nightmare Host 2009

We had our annual Halloween party this Saturday, at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, famous from such movies as Pretty Woman, Beverly Hills Ninja, and Upscale Bangers 38.

Clearly, there were a lot of great costumes, none more betterer than the classic “Sunburned Surf Vampire”.

Well, there was one more betterer. We had a costume contest, and Javier’s ended up getting second place:

And first.

NOBODY else got a single vote!

(Please turn head to left to watch video.)

It had a cup holder!

Update Your Wordpress!

We’re big fans of Wordpress here at DreamHost.  It powers this website and many of our own personal websites.  It’s also probably the number one most popular web application running on our servers.

It’s so popular in fact that it’s increasingly become the target of security exploits.  Fortunately for all of us, the Wordpress coders have done a good job patching up security holes quickly once they’ve been discovered.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter one bit if you don’t update the copy of Wordpress running your website.

If you are a lucky DreamHost customer, installing and updating Wordpress is very easy.  You really have no excuse for not updating.

We provide a one-click installer and upgrader for Wordpress (and several other popular web applications) making it as simple as clicking a button in our web panel.  We even let you request that we email you whenever a new release is available so you don’t have to keep track of it yourself.

If that is still too much effort and you are willing to give up some flexibility, we also provide what we call an easy one-click installer, which is really just a fully managed and hosted version of Wordpress that we update and maintain for you.  Even better, you can get this service from us absolutely free from DreamHost Apps (which also includes a bunch of other popular web apps for the same $0 price tag).

Why Not?

The only reason I can think of to not upgrade Wordpress as soon as it is released is the worry that it will break some plugin you’re using.  While that is a very valid concern, you should really consider how much those pesky plugins are worth to your website.  Are they worth the days of time it might take you to clean up a hacked website?  Are they worth the shame you would feel if your hacked website is used as a base to infect hundreds or thousands of other websites?  These are very real risks.  If you are using a plugin that prevents you from easily upgrading your Wordpress install, please consider abandoning it or finding a replacement that’s more robust and compatible.

Do It!

So, long story short:  UPDATE YOUR WORDPRESS RIGHT NOW. There is a major Wordpress hack going around targeting older versions of Wordpress.  The latest version is unaffected so if you have been a good upgrader you are safe!  A couple of big name bloggers (here and here) got hit recently, and it can also happen to you.  In fact, it might have happened already!  Check this post from Lorelle on Wordpress with lots of gorey details about the hack and to find out if you may be a victim.

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!

Tuz Tatz

Way back in March, one of our sysadmins Terri attended the Australian linux conference to give a talk about sysadminning at DreamHost as well as the open source distributed file system Sage’s been working on called Ceph!

Blah blah blah, on to the IMPORTANT stuff.

Apparently there’s some country or island or state or something next to Australia called “Tasmania”. And just like Australia, they’ve got totally fake animals and plants growing all over. The place is just lousy with them.

ALSO apparently, one of those crazy fauna known as the “Tasmanian Devil” has started getting FACE CANCER and is now totally endangered!

When Linus Torvlads heard about this, he was so ENRAGED he decided to do something about it. In linux-speak, that means he shaved the beard off some nerd.

He also irrationally and temporarily changed the linux logo from tux to “tuz” for kernel release

This had the unintended and unfortunate side-effect of raising awareness for the SAVE THE TASMANIAN DEVIL fund.

Not to be outdone, Terri and another one of our resident nerds, Jeremy, decided to show their RAGE as well; by getting “tuz” tattoos.

They also forced me to make this blog post about it as well as change the charity that we match donations to to be that same SAVE THE TASMANIAN DEVIL fund.

I said fine, but I’m waiting a couple months so it’s not so topical. And to see if those tattoos really are permanent.

They were. So far. So, they also made me make a special sale where anybody who signs up with the promo code SAVETHEDEVIL gets $50 off PLUS we donate another $50 to save these disgusting little beasties!

I’m enraged.

The saddest voicemail you’ll ever hear

While we do offer telephone-based technical support in the form of callbacks, we don’t have a public phone number that customers can dial for technical support.

We do have a phone number, but it’s reserved for vendors and other specific applications – not technical support.

From time to time customers may find this number and they often leave irate/angry/pleading messages for assistance. We haven’t had one in a while, but this morning we received a voicemail that melted our hearts and moistened our eyeballs.

(We’ve obscured his domain name to protect his identity.)

903k, .wav file
– removed –

This customer of ours had their domain registration transferred away from DreamHost to another registrar (in this case, GoDaddy.com) without their consent. This can only happen if an unauthorized party gains access to our customer’s account control panel to authorize the transfer, and we’ve indeed logged the actions and IP address of this individual.

The customer may have used an insecure password, been infected with a password-stealing keylogger, or may have simply fallen prey to a phishing scheme.

We’ve done all that we can do in situations like these – we’ve advised our customer to begin the dispute resolution process with the domain’s current registrar.

In the end, he should be able to get his domain back. Unfortunately it’ll take time and a fair amount of money, depending on how receptive the current registrar is to his situation.

To help soften the blow we’ve sent him a huge bouquet of flowers to help get him through this difficult time.

Update 5/4: We didn’t realize this would strike such a chord with so many people and have removed the anonymized voicemail from this blog post. We’ve been working with this customer to proceed through the UDRP and are confident a resolution is near. This should serve as a good reminder that you should always be very careful about disclosing your passwords to anyone on the Internet.

They’re Internet History

Well, that’s it. Yahoo! is finally shutting down GeoCities.

This is a sad moment for the Internet in general, and it’s especially sad for us. I’ve always felt a sort of special connection with GeoCities.. lemme ’splain you.

GeoCities was one of the first web hosts on the Internet, being started as “Beverly Hills Internet” in 1994. About four months before we started New Dream Network, in December of 1995, they became “GeoCities” and started offering FREE hosting.

By the time I had heard of them, we were already offering some PAID hosting, and I remember thinking something along the lines of “Damn it! They’re cheating!”

How could a bunch of (completely) broke college kids afford to compete with somebody just giving away hosting? At the time, I figured it could never last.

I was right.

15 years and $3.57 BILLION later.

But that’s not the only reason GeoCities has a special place in our heart.

The main reason is WebRing!

WebRing was a free service for people with related sites to automatically trade links, written by co-founder Sage (it’s not just me and Dallas around here!) back in 1994, while he was still in high school!

A couple of years later when he ended up at our college and we conned him into our play-company, we helped him run WebRing on our server(s).

WebRing itself never officially became a part of New Dream Network, since Sage had started it on his own years before. What we got out of it was Sage wrote DreamBook for NDN and put links to it all over WebRing!

In 1997, WebRing was starting to grow too big for us full-time college students to handle, especially with our newest little project taking off.

So, Sage got Starseed, Inc. to take it over for him. A friend of his from high school worked there and they made a deal where Sage got a percentage of Starseed, an annual “consulting” stipend, and certain creative controls, and they took over everything to do with WebRing.

It didn’t take long for Charley, the head of Starseed, to figure out that the best chance to make the most money off of WebRing was to sell it and sell it fast!

Greetings Geocities

And, sell it he did… to GeoCities!

I believe originally the offer they were going to accept was around $1 million.

However, irrational exuberance was on Charley’s side, and the timing couldn’t have been better for everything that happened next.

At the last minute, another bidder came to the table.. GeoCities however, decided they simply must have WebRing, and closed the deal at around $3.5 million!

Of course, this was all for GCTY stock options, and I’m sure they (rightly) figured that it wasn’t real money anyway.

Now the Starseed team (plus Sage) just had to wait and see which came first, the vesting of their options or the popping of the bubble…

The Vesting

Well, while everybody was nervously holding onto their approximately 1% ownership of GCTY, a funny thing happened. In January 1999, Yahoo! bought GeoCities for $3.57 billion, putting GCTY at more than ten times what it was when they did their deal!

And so, Sage’s options in GCTY were now converted over to YHOO. He still had another year before he could cash them all in though. And things were already a teeeeeensy bit over-valued.

Luckily, by the time Sage was able to cash out (and he did) in early 2000, Yahoo! had tripled yet again… meaning that Yahoo! had effectively purchased little old WebRing for about $100,000,000!

The Downfall

So, Yahoo set a team onto merging WebRing into their system.

By 2001 they were done, and everybody hated it.

Users were dropping faster than YHOO stock, and in 2002 an engineer from GeoCities bought WebRing back from Yahoo for an undisclosed sum (rumored to be around $10,000!)

Since then, I don’t really have any inside information on what’s gone on with WebRing. Just from the Internet Archive history, it looks like he more or less kept the Yahoo look and ran it “respectably” until around 2005:

… when they started to really pimp it out for ads!

Then in 2007.. Social Networking!

And today… Web 2.0!

Reminiscing

WebRing’s been around just about as long as the Web, and now that I ponder it, has been a sort of microcosm of the Web the whole time.

It went from a tiny ad-free community service, to hyper-growth, to showing ads, to being acquired for an INSANE price, to being forsaken, to doing anything to survive, to “social networking”, to “web 2.0″, to today!

Back in 1998, who would have thought WebRing would outlast GeoCities? Who would have thought DreamHost would outlast GeoCities?

DreamHost acquires Geocities

Well, not really. The thought sort of crossed my mind, “If they sold WebRing to that one guy, maybe they’d sell GeoCities to us!”

But then I realized.. Yahoo understands the only real value in GeoCities left is those millions of potential upgrades to PAID hosting.

If you go to GeoCities right now, Yahoo! has a big ad for their ($12/month) hosting.. with the first three months half off!

Whoop dee do.

“In honor of WebRing” or something, we are now offering to the first 1000 GeoCities users who sign up TWO YEARS of a completely free DreamHost account (including domain registration)!

No strings attached.

All you have to do is verify you are an existing GeoCities customer by creating a page on your GeoCities account (or editing an existing page) to have the phrase “I’m off to DreamHost!” on it!

Then when you signup for us, simply put the full url to that page as your “promotional code” and you’ll get a 2 year plan (normally $214.80) free!

And we promise to never shut down.

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.

Greetings New Yorkers

Just a reminder, the first open house is this Sunday, March 1st, from 1 to 3 pm at 718 Broadway, #6B!

FREE WEB HOSTING FOR LIFE could be yours!

Free Web Hosting For Life!

I’ve kind of dropped out of it, but years ago I used to be somewhat of a frequent eBayer.

Back then I would even get requests from friends to sell their stuff on eBay.

In fact, I think it was in ‘96 that I had an idea to make a business like those “I Sold it on eBay” franchises (they didn’t exist yet). But, I decided to focus on web hosting, it being essentially zero work!

Would you like to know my secret to successful selling on eBay?

WOULD YOU?

Here it is: Start your auction at 99c.

That was it really. No matter what you were selling, even if it was a laptop or a plasma TV, there is no reason to start your auction at anything higher.

In fact, there’s even a reason not to .. eBay charges a higher listing fee the higher your start price! And, because eBay is about the closest thing to an efficient market we have on this planet, there is essentially a 0% chance that a 7-day auction will end at anything less than the market price for the item being sold.

(If you’re worried about the market price being less than you’re willing to sell for, you can always set a reserve price.)

In fact, if you start your auction low, I found the chances were actually better that you’d get a price higher than average.

Personally, I attributed this to the fact that you’d get more people actually making bids (and more bids) along the way, which meant near the end your auction would have like 35 bids compared to the 0-2 bids on the similar ones. People, being the herd animals that they are, seeing that there have already been lots of bids, are actually more likely to bid… despite the fact that it means they’ll probably end up paying more!

The Opposite of eBay

Well, I sorta stopped doing eBay a while ago (there’s no point in buying anything normal there, and things I would have sold before I just donate to goodwill now.).

The only major buying and selling I’ve done in the last five years has been real estate, and despite it theoretically being very similar to eBay, it seems to me that real estate agents have done their darndest to make sure it is anything but.

For some reason, the way real estate transactions universally work, is the seller puts a price on their house that’s generally way over the market price, and then they wait and see which is more, their motivation to sell or the number of suckers.

I suppose people do this because of a combination of greed and the illiquidity of real estate. No two houses are exactly the same, so it’s more difficult to know their current actual value than say, a green iPod nano.

It’s also such a large transaction that the fear of losing out on even 1% of the max possible value of a sale weighs heavily on the sellers mind. “What if I list it too low and we sell it for $5,000 less than we could have made?!

I guess I can’t really blame real estate agents for existing. They exist primarily to introduce sellers to reality, with a teensy dash of marketing your house to buyers mixed in.

Of course, there’s just the Multiple Listing Service for that now, so really all a seller’s agent does is take 3% of the sales price for convincing you to lower your price.

And that’s exactly what they do. And fast. Although it may seem like your and your agent’s interests are aligned (to maximize your sale price, right? After all, they get more if you do!), in fact, they are not. Your agent knows that a difference of $50K in an asking price can be the difference between selling your house in 6 months and 6 days.

And if you were an agent, would you rather get 3% of $300,000 ($9,000) in 6 months, or 3% of $250,000 ($7,500) in 6 days?

But as a seller, it’s likely worth your time to wait 6 months for an extra $48,500.

In fact (and agents will tell you the opposite), real estate for sale by owner on average sells for more (and that’s not even counting the 3% commission saved!) than real estate sold with an agent. It just takes longer.

Why wait?

But, what if for some reason the seller doesn’t care about the money as much as selling their house quickly, then they should just use an agent, right?

If that’s the case, I would still recommend selling your property yourself (unless you really just can’t be bothered)… just list it WAY below market price!

It’s just like starting an eBay auction at 99c.

Although it’s not exactly an “auction,” by setting the price insanely low you will get a lot of offers that will result in a bidding war… as long as you get the word out about your property for sale.

Fortunately, the only thing you have to do that is get it on the MLS… and there are plenty of services that will do that for a flat fee.

Now that you’ve created interest, and shown buyers you’re serious about selling, you just have to hold a few open houses and let people know offers are due by a certain date. (Just like a 7-day auction, you need to give a little time for people to find your amazing deal.)

Et voilà, just like eBay, there is now effectively a 0% chance for your place to sell for less than the current market price. Whether that is an amount you’re willing to sell it for is a different matter, but now at least you know and you can stop wasting everybody’s time.

Free Web Hosting for Life?

Oh ha, that was just a trick to get you to read this totally off-topic blog post!

No, no, no, not really. Believe it or not, for once I’m actually practicing what I preach!

My wife and I are selling our Manhattan loft ourselves! And if you buy it (or even just refer somebody who buys it, or even just make a serious offer), you’ll get a free Happy Hosting plan forever!

The place is #6B at 718 Broadway and we’re having just two open houses: Sunday, March 1st 2009, 2 – 5 pm and Wednesday, March 11th 2009, 6 – 9 pm. Offers will be due by 5pm (eastern time) on Sunday, March 15th 2009.

We’re putting the asking price at $850,000, despite all comparables on the market being around $1,300,000. And of course, theirs don’t even include free web hosting for life! :)

Stop by to check it out, pick up an offer sheet, and complain to me in person about your site being down!

Here’s the site with full details, and lots of pics!

I Can’t Complain

I’m on a plane.

And yeah, I know you’ve been able to write on a plane for a while now, but I’m also going to POST on a plane.

Thanks to Go Go In Flight on American, I will forever more be really red-eye on my red-eyes from LAX to JFK!

Now, the tests.

Porn? check.
VPN? check.
Skype/VOIP? check (even video was fine).
Bandwidth test: 1758kbs down, 215 kbps up, 178 ping.
Price: $12.95 for the 4 hour 43 minute flight.

I also tried running a long ping to Google, and so far, it’s been pretty impressive:

Ping statistics for 72.14.205.100:
Packets: Sent = 1167, Received = 1167, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 128ms, Maximum = 3789ms, Average = 201ms

The wifi doesn’t turn on (well, it turns on, but you can’t connect to the Internet) until they announce you may use electronic devices, but that’s only about 5 minutes into the flight.

You can access aa.com and a few other sites (wsj.com?) without paying anything.

I love farting on airplanes.

I’m really not sure what else to say.

Except maybe, “Hello future, nice to meet you… FROM THE INSIDE!”