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.

I don’t know if you’d consider DreamHost as one of the BIG BOYS of the Internet… you know, the Googles, the Amazons, the eBays, the Facebooks, the Twitters.

Well, I sure wouldn’t. At least not based on media coverage. Or coolness. Or revenues. (Except maybe Twitter, where I assume we’re blowing their $null/year OUT OF THE RIVER!)

But, all that may be about to change. Because, as you think about each of those afore-mentioned BIG BOYS, what do they all have that we don’t have?

Crazy names? What’s wackier than… “Dream”Host?!

Legions of users? Well, counting the visitors to sites we host, we’ve got a TON.

The adoring media? Does the DreamHost Blog report on ANYTHING else?

Well then, what could it be? What is that missing component? What else do they all have that we ain’t got?

I Know

An API!

Yep, that’s really the ONLY other thing different between us all… the only thing that I can think of!

And, as you may have read in the February newsletter (just a week or so ago), WE now have that too! And how.

Well, so far it’s not much to speak of. It only offers three main functions… but that’s one more than just a few weeks ago!

1. You can get a list of all subscribers to any of your announcement lists.
2. You can do anything you can do on our panel to a DreamHost PS private server.
3. You can now get a list of all your ftp/shell/backup/email/vpn/anonftp users!
4. UPDATE: You can add and remove announcement list subscribers!

To top it off, we’ve also now changed the authentication method to our API. No longer does it use your actual web panel password: IDIOTIC.

Instead, there’s now a special API section to our panel where you can create (multiple) API “keys”… you now use (one of) THOSE to authenticate.

This is “cool” because now you don’t have to give out your main password to some random application that uses our API. This is also “cool” because you can at any time delete API keys for applications you no longer want to have access to your account.

(UPDATE: Now when you create a new API key you also can choose which specific API functions you’d like it to have access to.. so that way you don’t have to give like an announcement list management app full access to everything else on your account!)

We recommend you create a new API key for each different need, so if you decide to revoke access to one for some reason in the future, you don’t revoke access to everything else!

Everything Else Like What?

Of course, that begs the question.. what ACTUALLY has been created with this API? Well, uh, it’s kind of new, okay? Not much.

There has been one kind of cool thing already though: the developers of SmartFTP have now added the ability for it to automatically load in all your DreamHost FTP accounts!

Give it a shot… could this mean the end of FTP login problems?! FOREVER? What will our Happy DreamHost Customer Service Team do?

Sadly, SmartFTP is not free. But, happily, this is just the beginning of what I’m sure will be a “thriving ecosystem” of DreamHost-y applications using the API… catapulting us instantly into the BIG BOY ZONE.

ANNNNNNNNNNNNND…. just to give the catapult a little extra thrust, we’re going to throw a little kerosene on the nascent developer flame. With a CRAZY $10,000 giveaway contest!

Here’s the deal:

Develop any application (Windows, Mac, Linux, Web, iPhone, Facebook, Boxee, Firefox Plugin, whatever…) that uses the DreamHost API by April 30th May 31st 2009, and submit a link to it in the comments to this post.

We (I) will personally review all entries, and CASH prizes will be awarded to the best apps to the tune of:

Grand Prize: $5,000
1st Place: $2,500
2nd Place: $1,250
3rd Place: $500
4th Place: $750

(I told you it was crazy!)

Now, it may seem like there’s not a lot of flexibility right now with our API.. however, that can change! Just request a feature you’d like us to expose via the API in the comments and we’ll try and add it ASAP!

(In fact, the users listing thing was requested by SmartFTP directly, so you know this ain’t just small talk.)

It’s big boy talk!

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’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!”

A couple of weeks ago, I got this email which was addressed to me as well as some totally random other email addresses at the same domain:

Dear President/CEO,
Hello!Sorry to trouble you!
We are a domain name registration service company in HongKong, which mainly deal with international company’s domain name registration and disputing
in Asia.On the Nov 10,2008, Our auditing dept received an application formally from “Dedrria international ltd”,they claimed as your agent in Asia and consigned
by you to register following
Domain Names:
newdream.cc
newdream.tw
newdream.org.cn
newdream.co.uk
newdream.in
newdream.co.in
Internet Trademark:
Newdream
Through our company.
According to our procedures and in order to protect your intellectual property rights, we need to send this email to the original company for confirming the
actual relationship with this company.If you do not know this company, we doubt that they have other motivation to register these domain names and probably
want to do some cybersquatting. Now we have postponed this issue and have not proceeded their registration,In order not to confuse registering these domain
names,Please contact us Asap.

PS:If you are not in charge of this matter,please transfer this email to appropriate dept.
Best Regards
Sophia
Auditing Director

Hong Kong Head Office:

Tel:00852 9566 0253(Direct)

00852 8122 6293(Office)

Fax: 00852-8125 7328

00852 9566 0302
Email:Sophia@sk-network.org

Web: http://www.sk-holdings.net

The whole thing seemed a little off, but I figured what the heck and replied anyway:

Nope, not us!

And promptly forgot about it.

Until a week later when I got:

Dear Josh ‘Fat,
I am Sophia.
We had discussed the case about your company’s domain names. We did not receive your reply until now. If so, we will think you have given up
thesedomain names. So we will help Dedrria international ltd register these domain names after 3 workdays. Dedrria international ltd will become
the legal owner of these domain names in the world. We had notified you, so we are not responsible for any dispute questions about intellectual
property right and trade mark after they succeed in registration.
Whether you register or give up, please let me know,so that we can move on next step.
Thanks.
Best Regards,
Sophia

Now, this reply is what convinced me that this whole thing was just an automated scam!

Notice the “to” line:

Dear Josh ‘Fat,

How would SHE know how FAT I am?

She didn’t! What she DID know, was that my reply “From:” name was “Josh ‘Fat Finger’ Jones” .. and I guess their automatic email scraper/parser script wasn’t quite sure what do with with a name of the form A ‘B C’ D.

(Also, none of those domains mentioned above have yet to be registered, and Googling “Dedrria international ltd” turns up nothing.)

Anyway, this whole thing is kind of an interesting twist on the tons of various domain-squatting scams and schemes there are out there.

Here, a legitimate(-ish) registration company tries to scare you into registering random junk TLD variations of your domain you don’t really need … and into registering them with them (presumably at insane markups). It’s in a similar vein to the old Domain Registry of America scam, but I figured different enough to warrant a short blog post!

Especially when I’ve got a way-overdue newsletter to write.

I know what you’re thinking, “Finally, a DreamHost Blog post I can USE!“

HA, you wish! Here we go…

Apart from being a mint, it seems to me there’s really only one way to make money.

Banking.

And I don’t just mean get money, like from people depositing it with you. Nor do I mean earn money that already exists, like you would from say, working or investing.

No, I actually mean it: MAKE NEW MONEY!

The fact that banks can actually create money is why they’re such a great business.. and also why the recent crash has been so hard.

How It Works, As I Understand It.

(Correct me if I’m wrong.)

For the purpose of this explanation, imagine there was only one bank in the world (which is actually a pretty good approximation, thanks to all those overnight intra-bank loans we’ve been hearing so much about in the news).

Let’s say their first customer ever, Joe the Plumber (yes, THE Joe the Plumber) comes in to Bank of the Universe, and deposits his meager savings of $250,000 (now FDIC insured!).

Great! Bank of the Universe (BofU) now has $250,000! Enough to run things for .004 femto seconds.

But, it hasn’t earned $250,000 .. it still owes that to JTP. And it definitely hasn’t created $250,000.. it just received it as a deposit. In fact, things aren’t too great for BofU at all … it probably has a deal to pay Joe some interest on that deposit. It’s also got to hold that cash / gold / pvc piping for Joe, pay rent on some buildings, employ some customer service people, manage a network of ATMs, and weave dozens of golden parachutes.

Not Great!

Which is why BofU has to make loans! Let’s say average guy John McCain comes in and needs a quick $250,000 for some campaign he’s running. “Sure,” says BofU, “you seem like a stand-up guy and this isn’t Fall 2008, take the $250,000 at only 5% interest!”

Well, now BofU is at least going to earn $12,500 a year! But.. they’re also kind of screwed when Joe Wurzelbacher comes in to get $20 for a back-siphon for the s-trap he’s funnelating.

But They’re Not

Because remember, BofU is not only the Bank of the Universe, they’re the only Bank of the Universe.. and so John just kept that loan in his account with them! And when he does spend that money, whomever he spends it with is just going to deposit it right back in their account with BofU!

In fact, just by making a little “John McCain owes us $250,000 at 5% interest” data base entry, BofU has now not only earned themselves $12,500 a year, they’ve also added $250,000 to the universe’s money supply!

Right now, BofU would be leveraged 2-1 (they owe Joe and John $250,000 each, but they only have the $250,000 Joe deposited in the bank). But, everything is fine. In fact, everything is so fine, they can go ahead and loan out that $250,000 AGAIN (maybe to Barack)!

And again!

And again!

And one more time!

And then?

And then?

And then?

Again!

It took thousands of years for banks to realize this, but when they’re big enough, they not only don’t need to back up their deposits with gold, they can actually pretty safely leverage their deposits at ratios of like 30 to 1, 50 to 1, or even 100 to 1.

And, the banks can earn a ton of moololah from this too. Not 100 to 1 (just because they’ve created this new money, doesn’t make it theirs), but at least 5% on that 100… instead of just 5% on that 1.

It just works out that very little of that actual money needs to be withdrawn by people on an average day.. and when they do there’s always those short-term inter-bank loans to fall back on!

(Except for in Fall 2008.)

But, despite the infrequent aberrations, overall I’d say it’s a pretty good system that works. It results in a much more efficient use of assets, which allows for faster growth and more “economic development”, than if everybody just did like the Russians and just hid their money in their sombreros.

And I should know, because we CREATE disk and bandwidth the same way!

As I may have mentioned before, we offer a lot more disk and bandwidth than we actually have on hand. We’re sort of like a “bank for computing resources.”

Of course, nobody deposits disk with us, but we go out and buy a little, and then sell a lot, and then nobody uses it. And in the end, for all intents and purposes, we’ve really turned that little disk space into a lot!

And, it’s a useful service because if everybody had actually gone out and bought that lot of disk space themselves, they wouldn’t have used 99% of it, and it would have been a waste! A big waste! A universal waste!

And so, we’re “leveraged” in disk. And we’re “leveraged” in bandwidth. And we’re “leveraged” in CPU. And the ratios are a lot more than 100 to 1.

And it works.

But.. when does our Fall 2008 arrive?

Should Be.. Never.

As similar as our businesses are, there are a few key differences between Banking and Hosting.

For one, we don’t owe our computer resources to our customers like banks do their money. We bought them. So there can’t really be a “run on the host” with everybody saying “give us back our disk and bandwidth we bought!”

For two, there can’t even be a “run on the host” .. what, is there going to be some awesome Internet news and suddenly everybody’s website gets 100 times the traffic and uses 100 times the disk?

For three computer resources are not money. Although it may be nice for us if they were… even if we were to somehow (remember, 100% hypothetical!) run out of disk or bandwidth or CPU, we’ll still have our money. And that means our people can still get paid, and we can buy more resources, or we can rejigger something, or whatever… but when a bank runs out of its leveraged resource, bam.

That’s It.

And I don’t just mean that’s it for the bank, I mean that’s it.

For this blog post.

Period.

(P.S. I hope all that stuff I said about banks is right.)

Gutenberg was a German goldsmith who pioneered mechanical printing in the 1400’s. His inventiveness took the power of the pen – for good or for bad – and amplified it, fostering a spread of knowledge that, ultimately, resulted in a burgeoning Renaissance.

The impact this had on science, business, technology and the overall democratization of knowledge that come with it cannot be overstated, even though Gutenberg himself would benefit little from it personally in his lifetime.

This is, of course, not to compare DreamHost itself to Mr. Gutenberg – we’re just a web hosting company with a penchant for free pizza and off-the-wall jokes that people sporadically find amusing.

And, when you get down to it, the reality of the situation is that most of our customers opt to use the power of the ‘printing press’ that we offer to publish pictures of their cats, indulge in navel gazing or publish rants embued with varying degrees of coherence. Among, well, other things.

The beauty of this, though, is that each and every one of these things is important to somebody, somewhere, for some reason. Even if it’s just the author and a select handful of readers.

Taken at their face, this may not seem like much – but I believe it is actually pretty important.

• While most people couldn’t care less about someone else’s cat, forever will there exist a memory of a beloved pet that can be looked at years later. Self-publishing has caused people to treasure the little things that enrich their lives – and, from time to time, enrich others as well (the rise of digital photography owes a lot to the fact that people can now so easily share their creations with others, for instance).
• While the web’s penchant for facilitating so-called navel gazing garners criticism at times, I believe that this, too, serves a purpose. The more we explore our own thoughts and ideas and allow others to peek into our world, the better our relationships with those people will be. I, for one, am happy to see the web evolve into a tool to connect people. It has become a humanizing technology.
• Those rants that annoy so many also serve as an outlet of sorts. For many, writing is in itself a way to explore ideas. It links people with similar ideas and – yet – exposes people to a vast marketplace of ideas. If nothing else, we could always use more ideas.
• As for those “other things”, well, I’ll leave those to someone else. We’ve hosted some pretty weird stuff over the years.

Picture of my cats – because I can…

While we at DreamHost are ultimately a commercial entity and benefit in kind, I like to think that we’ve played a small but important role in facilitating the free-flowing transfer of ideas and creative expression across the Internet. Good ideas, bad ideas, those that are well thought out and those that could use a little refinement.

I’m quite proud to have been even just a small part of all this.

It’s for that reason, really, that I’ve had mixed feelings in the weeks since deciding to leave the company for other pursuits. When you’re proud of what you do and you’ve been doing it for nearly a decade, that’s a tough decision to make.

And now, finally, I’ve reached the last few hours of my employment here. While I’ve got some personal projects in the works that I’m excited about (shameless plug: one of which may be of particular interest to Spore players, once it’s ready: PanSporea) – and I’m certainly looking forward to sleeping in – it’s going to take me a while to get used to not being a part of it all.

While I’ve already thanked most of the great people whom I’ve had the pleasure to work with, I would like to again express my gratitude toward the DreamHost Honchos (Dallas, Sage, Josh and Michael) in particular for their support and for building this great company in the first place.

I also want to thank my fellow co-workers, both past and present, who made the experience so much fun. I’ll miss you all.

Finally, I want to thank our customers for filling our servers up with all sorts of interesting and peculiar things and generally making the web as a whole a more entertaining and useful place. I still get a huge kick any time I run across a really cool site only to scroll down and find a link to DreamHost (something that has become increasingly common in recent years). We’d be nothing without you.

Nor, for that matter, the inspiration of a certain Mr. Gutenberg.

PS: For those of you in or around southern California, you can see an original Gutenberg Bible at the Huntington Library in San Marino. It’s definitely worth the trip (the botanical gardens are also pretty impressive).

I’ve been doing my part.

Not only has DreamHost gone green, I’ve been taking little steps in my personal life as well.

For one, I fight global warming every day by making the conscious effort to not recycle. I’m building up a lot of extra landfill to cancel out rising ocean levels.

I’ve even been doing my part to fight our dependence on foreign oil.

Every morning I drive to the farthest gas station I can get to, fill up my tank, then drive home and empty whatever’s left into my local sewer. That way I build up our proven domestic reserves.

Finally, I bought this t-shirt to disguise my true motives from all those real environment-haters out there!

But wait, there is one more thing I recently figured out I could do to help save a lot of environment.

And it has to do with you.

And no, it’s not lame tip like “Only read in the daytime.” or “Ride your dog to work.” Those are obvious.

In fact, it’s something so simple we’ll handle it all for you!

Basically, we’ve come to realize that if we were to upgrade all our old web and file servers onto new hardware (the stuff we’ve been using since May), we could probably cut our data center power usage about 50%.

And, since our data centers currently use about the equivalent of 200 single family homes, that’s a net environment gain equivalent of a small hurricane… but without all the pesky clean-up!

Nitty Gritty

Of course, one thing I do hate about the environment is all the dirt.

And, sadly, it’s not like we can just flip a switch and have all our servers upgraded. Not even if it cost $1,000,000 to flip that switch (which it does), the switch is still SO big and heavy it’ll probably take close to a year before it’s all the way flipped!

Along the way, at times things will inevitably get dirty.

There will be hiccups along the way. In fact, we already did a few test migrations and there were plenty. And they were more like throw-ups. I’d like to apologize right now to everyone who was an unknowing guinea pig and suffered from some down time.

Now, here’s how to make sure the same problems don’t hit you!

• Make sure your email clients are all set to send and receive email using your full email address! You should have already been doing this for years at this point, but some people are apparently still logging in with the old (deprecated) m########-style mailbox usernames. BOOOO!
• Make sure you don’t have a .dataglob in any paths for any configuration files for any software you have! That is, if you see something like “/home/.blahblah/username” in a configuration file for something you’ve installed on your website (even one-clicks from our panel!), change it to “/home/username” immediately! We’re going to try and automatically find and replace those for people as they’re moved, but it’d be best if they weren’t there at all!
• Make sure you ftp/ssh/whatever to your own domain name and not server.dreamhost.com. That’s because your server will probably change at some point in the next year, and if you’d just been connecting to your own domain, everything would be fine!

That’s really it. Other than the fact that it will save energy, the new set up should also:

• Be more stable… we’re phasing out shared file servers (filers) because they were just too big a point of failure.
• Be higher performing… the new servers are on average 4x “beefier”, but we’re putting less than 4x the number of customers on them.
• Save us money… not just on data center costs, but also on our green energy credits, and management costs too (there will be less overall servers to manage).

Then, what do we do with all that extra money? Well, our original plan was to short financial stocks, but now we just don’t know…