The Traveler

Oh, I’ve been around.

And not just the block, and not just the bend.

I’ve been to like, 49 U.S. states. And like, 38 countries. And I know cause like, I’ve got a spreadsheet.

And I’ve seen some crazy crapola on those travels.

I’ve seen it rain for three days straight in Riyadh and sunny for three minutes straight on Mount Wai’ale’ale. I’ve seen an entire baseball stadium of Japanese people pack out their trash, and I’ve had my balls grabbed by a Chinese guy in a panda suit.

But there’s one thing I’ve never seen, not once in this whole wide, wild world.

An International Domain Name (IDN)

Not once.

Apparently, at some registrars you can register things like お元気ですか.com … and they’ll actually work in web browsers! Maybe even some email clients?

Silly-ly, the way it works is kind of silly… it actually just translates お元気ですか.com into a regular ascii domain like xn--t8jc5b1c114xnw7a.com … and that is what actually shows up in the browser bar (at least in most browsers)!

Anyway, we always thought that was so silly that we never bothered offering IDN registration at DreamHost. We do of course allow hosting IDN domains with us (you just enter the domain into our panel as xn--t8jc5b1c114xnw7a.com or whatever), and currently host over 4,000 of them.

We just thought actually registering them was a lot of work for not a lot of gain.

A lot of work?

What’s so hard about it? Shouldn’t we be able to register xn--t8jc5b1c114xnw7a.com just like any other .com domain? What extra set up is there?

You’d think that! In fact, I’d think that too!

But no, the registries all require us registrars to specifically activate the ability to register IDNs … and when submitting them we also have to submit what language they’re in!

Why this matters is beyond me. In fact, when you register .com and .net domains, you have a choice of over 100 languages, and they don’t seem to really care what you pick most of the time. However, when you register .org and .info domains you have a choice of only 10 languages, and they’re an odd selection, and they do care.

Those ten languages are: Danish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish.

Notice any missing? Let’s see, here are the world’s ten most “popular” languages, by native-speaking population:

1. Mandarin Chinese – 882 million (nope)
2. Spanish – 325 million
3. English – 312-380 million (N/A)
4. Arabic – 206-422 million (nope)
5. Hindi – 181 million (nope)
6. Portuguese – 178 million (nope)
7. Bengali – 173 million (nope)
8. Russian – 146 million (nope)
9. Japanese – 128 million (nope)
10. German – 96 million

For crying out loud, they don’t even have FRENCH! Not that I blame them, nyuk nyuk!!

What The Heck

Despite all these short-comings and dubious benefits, we’ve decided to bite the bullet and go ahead and start registering IDNs anyway!

So go crazy… simply visit our registrations area and enter whatever crazy (utf-8 encoded) characters you want … followed by .com (or .net/.org/.info)!

Of course, you still can’t register domains with spaces in them, REALLY weird utf-8 characters, or mix between left-to-right languages and right-to-left languages. And as I mentioned before, .org and .info are practically useless.

So what I mean to say is, taking into consideration those caveats, go crazy!!

And watch out for Chinese guys in panda suits.

Big Boy Time is Up!

A couple of months ago I announced our new API, as well as a crrrrrazy contest to go with it.

Well, the contest has been over for three weeks now… which, even I grudgingly agree, is more than enough time for my trusty band of interns (no offense Greg) to review the dozens of submissions we got and decide which ones get to share in the $10,000,000 $10,000 of fabulous cash prizes!

One Ado

Before we get to the winners, I thought I’d first reminisce on how far the API has come in just two short months.

Since we started, we’ve added a test API account (use it to test out the contest winners if you want; username: apitest@dreamhost.com key: 6SHU5P2HLDAYECUM), the ability to get your results in xml, json, and “perl”, and of course tons of new functionality (included just-added mysql and mail filter-related).

Without further ado, the winners in the first official DreamHost API Crazy Contest are:

One Further Ado

Oh yeah, one last thing I wanted to say.. we had a real hard time deciding on the winners, there were so many entries of similar quality and essentially identical utility!

So, as a cop out, there are a lot of ties among the winners, and… we decided to give EVERYBODY who didn’t win a $100 DreamHost account credit as a consolation! It’s already been applied to your account.

Without further further ado, the winners:

The Early Bird Prize: $2,000

For the best application completed before May, we had an early-bird prize.. and the winner (as previously announced) was ChirpBot, a twitter interface to the DreamHost API.

Re-mentioned here for completenesses-sake.

Fourth Place: $750

A three-way tie between all the iPhone Apps created to manage your DreamHost account:

Broken Browsers Part One

Web browsers have been around for a pretty long time now.

Web browsers have been broken for a pretty long time now.

Bring on the rotten tomatoes, but I still predominantly use Internet Explorer because it is still the least broken browser when it comes to one of the most important features for me:

The Back Button!

(and forward too!)

I cannot understand why, after zillions of versions and dozens of years, no browser implements forward and back correctly.

It’s like the FIRST feature web browsers even had!

What’s Broken About It?

It’s simple really… what do you expect to happen when you click back (or forward)?

You expect the web browser to immediately display what you were looking at before your last click.

What actually happens?

Sometimes you get a “cache expired” message.

Sometimes you get a dialog window asking if you want to re-post to display the results again (ahem, Firefox).

Sometimes you get sort of what you last saw, but it takes a second while it connects to the Internet and gets updated with new content.

Sometimes everything is the same except that the big text field you had typed your blog post into is now EMPTY!

And sometimes, yes sometimes, it works exactly as it should.

Google Too

I kinda like Google’s new browser Chrome. It’s fast and lightweight. But, I also can’t stand it because it doesn’t seem to cache our web panel or intranet pages at all!

Believe it or not, every once in a while our panel is just a weeee bit slow.. and if I use my back or forward buttons as I navigate around, those teeeeeeeeeeensy delays can add up! All the unnecessary page loads probably aren’t doing us any favors on the server-side either!

Google’s apparently making a big push for Chrome soon, including TV ads etc… but before they push too hard, I wish they’d fix their back buttons!

And Here’s How

The craziest thing about all this is, fixing it would be incredibly simple! In fact, I’ve already worked it all out!

Let me demonstrate how the back and forward buttons should work. You can do this at home.

Click this link.

That should have opened in a new window (or tab) for you. And if you’re back here now, you’ve switched windows or tabs, correct?

Ta da!

That’s it! That’s exactly how the back/forward buttons should work! See how FAST it was to get back to this page? See how you were scrolled to EXACTLY the same place you were before? See how you didn’t even have to be on the NETWORK to continue reading this post? See how you didn’t get any pop up warnings or expired CACHE messages? See how you could switch back to that other window (like going FORWARD) just as easily?

Internally, every time you click a link, the browser should handle it exactly the same no matter if you are opening a new tab, a new window, or staying in the same window.

The only difference when you click a link “normally” is it shouldn’t add a “new tab” to the interface … it should put that “new tab” in your back history!

I’d even say the reason tabbed browsing is so popular nowadays is actually because back and forward are broken!

Internet Explorer has always done the best (though not perfect) job with this; it’s probably why they were the last to add tabs.

It’s the main reason why I still use it… honestly, I’d switch away if there were a single browser (or a browser plugin?) that handled it right.

In fact, if somebody can either fix an open source browser to behave like this (or make a working plugin), DreamHost will pay them $1000!

More formally:

The first person to release a plugin for firefox or chrome that does this should post their submission in the comments.

The plugin should make it so that when you click “back” or “forward”, it behaves EXACTLY as though you just switched to an open tab/window with that content in it (though of course visually you stay in the same tab/window).

As for how many pages to keep “open” in the back/forward history, it should be as many as it can, dropping them out in order of oldest to newest as it needs to due to memory constraints.

(Oh yeah, you know what browser would benefit the most from this? Safari on the iPhone! It seemingly does NO caching, even though because of its slow connection/processor it needs it the most! You can’t even fake it with tabs because there’s no way (that I know of?) to “open link in new tab”. It supports tabs though (up to eight), so it should be able to keep at least eight back/forward history pages in memory too!)

Speaking of Prizes

Just a quick reminder that our API contest is still going strong with a due date for contest entries of May 31st!

The prizes are as follows:

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

All the entries so far are up on the wiki, and the winner of the April 30th “early-bird” contest ($2000 to the best app done by April 30th) is…

ChirpBot!

It’s a Twitter interface to the DreamHost API!

It’s simple, it works, it looks nice, and it has the whole CRAZY INSANE SUPER HYPE BANDWAGON going for it to boot!

But don’t worry everybody else, there’s a lot more prizes to be won, and it’s still not too late to enter now!

We’ve recently added a test account and lots of new functions, so check out our API documentation and submit your entries over here!

Big Boy Time

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!

CGN vs. CDN

After my freshman year in college I went back home for the summer and had a strange job at a little two-man pre-press graphics shop in Vienna, Virginia called “Color Graphics Network” (not the inspiration for New Dream Network – parent company of DreamHost).

The guy who owned it was named Ricky Dee (awesome name), and I vaguely knew his son Howie Dee (awesome name) from high school. It was a pretty cushy job compared to my previous one.

What CGN did was take large (dozens of MB!) graphic files from publishers, and turn them into high-resolution negatives suitable for printing presses. This was in 1995, and the files would come on SyQuest drives via courier. By the end of the summer, some people were starting to send zip disks!

After a few weeks, I was sort of thinking everybody could probably distribute this content a little better, maybe via a series of tubes or something. But really, with the slowness of dial-up, the size of these files, and the publication deadlines they needed to meet, this was the only way to go at the time.

Not that I’ve kept in touch, but I imagine that these days there’s a lot less padded envelope use over at CGN. I’m sure Mr. Sneakernet has finally been usurped by Mr. Internet!

Yep, Mr. Internet has gotten a bit faster in the last 14 years. Way fast. More than fast enough for whatever kind of multi-GB files Ricky Dee (or maybe it’s Howie now!) must be dealing with today.

And yet, still not fast enough for everybody.

Hence the rise of the CDN (“Content Delivery Network”). Although you can pretty much get between any two points on the Internet in under .3 seconds, sometimes that’s a little too slow. After 14 years of the web, people are really sick of waiting. Even a second. Even a third of a second.

In fact, there are a bunch of studies that show things like “There’s a 10% drop in conversions for each 1 second increase in load time.” and “Google lost 20% of their ad clicks when their page results took .9 seconds to load as opposed to .4.”

Fortunately, a decade ago Akamai discovered (I think it was them!) that putting multiple copies of the same content all over the Internet could cut that .3 second access time down to .03 seconds… and that some people would pay for it!

Today there are dozens of companies offering CDNs, not the least of whom is Amazon, who four months ago launched “CloudFront” as part of their Amazon Web Services.

The cool thing about CloudFront (besides, like DreamHost, it being in CamelCaps), is like all of the Amazon Web Services, it’s completely pay-as-you-go, and completely accessible via an API.

The downside of CloudFront is, just like with all APIs… you have to be a programmer to be able to use it!

Until now!!?!

We just added a new Amazon CloudFront area to our panel (under “Goodies”)!

Now all you have to do to take advantage of a world-wide pay-as-you-go content delivery network run by Amazon is click a few buttons!

Or, more specifically:

1. Sign up with AWS.
2. Go to our panel and let us know what domain (maybe something like “static.domain.com”) you’d like to use and what path we should upload the content to Amazon from!

And for this amazing convenience, what do we want from you?

I would say nothing, but the truth is just $3.95/month on top of whatever Amazon bills you! No matter how many CDNs you set up!

How does it work?

I was always a little confused, technically, about how CDNs worked. After all, there must be at least one centralized service that figures out where to send people, right?!

Well, while testing out CloudFront, I figured it out… that one centralized service is DNS!

The DNS servers for a CDN are dynamic and tricky… and it’s they who figure out which “edge” of the CDN is closest to you, based on your IP.

So for example, if I (in Los Angeles) do a ping on images.groo.com, my results are:

ping images.groo.com

PING d2onuwnge3cit8.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from server-216-137-45-27.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27): icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=1.29 ms
64 bytes from server-216-137-45-27.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27): icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=1.21 ms
64 bytes from server-216-137-45-27.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27): icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=1.31 ms
64 bytes from server-216-137-45-27.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27): icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=1.18 ms
64 bytes from server-216-137-45-27.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27): icmp_seq=5 ttl=56 time=1.32 ms

Now you give it a shot and check out what cloudfront.net server you get for “images.groo.com” .. and how the ping time it is! Maybe even post your results in the comments?

I’m not sure how old Ricky Dee is going to compete.

DreamHost Apps Invitation Codes

Thanks for helping us put DreamHost Apps through its paces. We appreciate all the feedback we’ve gotten so far.

Remember, by signing up during this beta period you’ll have access to DreamHost Apps free forever.

If you’ve not yet signed up, or if you’ve got some friends that would like to sign up, we’ve got some more invitation codes for you at the end of this post.

First, however, we’ve got some exciting news to share – you can now generate your OWN invitation codes that you can distribute to your friends, family, and “other”. Just look at the top of your DreamHost Apps management panel and click to generate your codes – bingo bango!

Right now you’re limited to creating just two codes, so choose your recipients wisely!

Continue reading DreamHost Apps Invitation Codes…

Free Hosting from DreamHost is Here

When we started DreamHost back in 1997, we were in it to make money. Throw up a server, get some customers, collect fat checks, retire at 35. Simple!

Somewhere along the way (I think it was shortly after the fat checks showed up) we developed a conscience and decided – No fat checks!

For us it wasn’t enough to just not be evil – we realized that the only way to really feel good about ourselves was to lose money hand over fist, and just hope that we broke even somewhere along the way…kind of like a non-profit!

We took a multi-pronged approach to Operation Money Loss! We resolved to:

• Provide our employees the most comprehensive health insurance package we could find, free.
• Give away free hosting to non-profit organizations.
• Match customer donations to selected charitable organizations.
• Offset our carbon footprint through the purchase of renewable energy credits and carbon offsets.
• Provide financial support to open-source projects that we use ourselves – Jabber, MySQL, Linux-VServer, and grsecurity to name a few!
• Consistently offer ridiculous coupons that, even now, seem like a bad idea.
• Keep all our company cash in the stock market.

I’d call that a good start, but it’s just not enough.

Today we’re announcing DreamHost Apps, a completely free hosting service for web-based applications.

Well, it’s free for now anyway. We’re flirting with the idea of a $50 yearly fee once it’s out of beta…but if you sign up RIGHT NOW to help us test things out we’ll let you use DreamHost Apps for free for ever!

But wait! If you’re reading this and you’re already a DreamHost customer (and why else would you be reading this), you don’t need to worry.. you can already log in to DreamHost Apps with your same DreamHost Web Panel login!

For you, it’s really just an Ajax-ified way to manage your easy one-clicks and any domain registrations. But, for the hundred or so people out there who’ve read this blog and aren’t DreamHost customers… but do want some free hosting of a WordPress Blog, Drupal Site, Zenphoto Gallery, Mediawiki Wiki, and/or PhpBB Forum (plus Google Apps and Gmail) and aren’t afraid to do a little “beta testing” (and unlike some other web shops, when we say beta, we mean it), today must be your BIRTHDAY!

Right now usage of DreamHost Apps is by invitation only. Lucky for you I like your face and I’ve posted about 100 invitation codes in the comments of this post. If a code doesn’t work, it’s already been redeemed – try another one! When the codes run out, I may even post more!

If you’re a current DreamHost customer you’ve already had access to DreamHost Apps for months! That’s because the exact same functionality (minus the free part) can be found under “Easy Mode” in the “Goodies / One-Click Installs” section of your account control panel. There’s no need for you to sign up for DreamHost Apps because you’re already living the dream!

DreamHost Apps customers do miss out on a few perks that paying DreamHost customers take for granted, though. Apps users can just forget about FTP access, SSH access, email, and even technical support.

DreamHost Apps is provided ‘as-is’, and unfortunately technical support is not part of the ‘is’!

You try providing tech support for a free service and let us know how that works out.

For all intents and purposes, DreamHost Apps are entirely self-contained.

You can install and delete any number of apps through the DreamHost Apps management interface, and you’ll use each Apps’ own web-based interface to make application-level changes. Upgrading to full-featured hosting is just a click away!

DreamHost Apps was assembled over the course of a few months by a small team of four hardworking DreamHost Employees, Pete V, Mike P, Joshua H, and me, Brett D. In fact, this is the first major DreamHost project that Josh Jones hasn’t been personally involved in writing in a very long time, so rest assured that your data is safe and your credit card won’t be charged more than it should be!

If you find any bugs, please post them over in our DreamHost Apps discussion forum.

We’ve been working on this for a while, and we’re kind of tired. We’re just gonna take a quick little nap if you don’t mind…

Please enjoy DreamHost Apps!

Let’s Save Our Environment Harder

I can’t believe it’s been over three years and the environment STILL isn’t saved!

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…

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!

“?

What Web Hosting is For

Some people might say Web Hosting is for websites.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for online file storage.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for development.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for bandwidth.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for databases.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for jabber.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for IRC.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for hacking.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for warez.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for late night orgies in the data center.

Well, I say, NO Web Hosting is not for those things!

No, not at all! Well okay, maybe a little for some of them. But, all of those things combined don’t add up to the one thing Web Hosting is really FOR.

Web Hosting is for email.

Stupid, boring, old, annoying, dumb, repetitive, stupid, boring, old, annoying, dumb, EMAIL.

Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into “simple” old email.

And that’s kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features. Everybody’s just looking at how much disk/bandwidth they get, what version of PHP they run, how good their support is, do they have a funny blog, is their CEO really studly, do the data centers have water beds, and so on…

They’ve been conditioned by Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail to give email no value. I mean, everybody gives it away for free… nobody gives (real) web hosting away for free.

And yet, in the end, the only thing (sadly?) that actually ends up getting used, is that “no-value” email! If a web server with maybe 750 customer sites on it were to go down for even as long as five hours, we’d probably get two angry messages about it. But if email goes down for the same number of customers for just five minutes we’ll have already received 50!

At least it makes some sense.. when was the last time you visited your web site to check if everything was up? Honestly, when was the last time anybody visited your web site?

Now… when was the last time you checked your email? When was the last time you sent an email? If you’ve got an email client on your dekstop set to check new messages, you’re probably notified if that client can’t connect to the mail server even once.

People say nobody under 30 uses email anymore. It’s all IM, SMS, writing on facebook walls, twittering, phone, fax, paper mail, pheromones, pony expess, and smoke signals.

Well, I really hope that’s the case, and that as time goes on we’ll have less and less damn email to deal with!

Sending email. Checking Email. Delays. Spam. Filtering. Email forwarding. Mailing lists. Announcement lists. Archiving email. Automatic Emails. Form-to-email. Catch-alls. URGH!

It’s enough to make a poor host want to give up on providing it at all!

Speaking of which… we have recently made some steps in that general direction. (More on that later.)

You may have remembered from the March Newsletter that we recently stopped allowing email addresses to be associated with ftp/shell users.

The reason for this is so we can decouple super-frequently-accessed email files from the not-so-frequently-accessed rest of your files. By doing that, we can then use higher performance file servers for email and “tune” them better for the one task we know they’re doing!

It also means we can start completely separating our email system from our web servers, which will make managing everything one heckuva lot easier.

And, don’t worry… you can still do everything you used to be able to like use a .procmail filter or process email with a script. Just set your public email address to forward to:

username@machine.dreamhost.com
(or username@psname.dreamhostps.com if you’re on DreamHost PS)

And then email will get delivered directly to your web server, and you’ll be able to run your script or filtering just fine! The only difference really is that we don’t run pop/imap/smtp on those web servers (so, if you’re just filtering, you’ll have to set up a recipe to forward it on to another mail account you can actually check).

Hooray, user scripts and procmail filters won’t be running on our mail servers… making everything a little better isolated.

If all this is over your head, that’s fine, just ignore it like I do! All I’m trying to say is it technically shouldn’t be impossible to do anything you used to be able to do, and it’s going to make things way way way easier for us going forward, and hopefully therefore better for you!

The Later More

Yeah, in a way we are taking some steps to stop providing email. It’s just not something people are looking for from us, and it’s something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better.

Did somebody say.. Google? In fact, as you’ve maybe already seen, we recently made it very easy to use Gmail for all your email hosting with us, still at your own domain!

Now in our panel when you go to add (or manage) a domain, or visit our MX section, there’s a checkbox option for you to use Gmail!

Of course, this was something you could do before yourself, but now we automatically handle setting up the right DNS records, AND we’re even tied into them with an API to automatically add an account for you on their end! There’s just one final step you have to do on their side to create a management account, but I promise you, THAT IS IT!

But why would you use Gmail? Well, they do have a pretty cool web interface, which you can add your own logo to and access at your own domain; but besides that they also have regular POP/IMAP/SMTP access, plus awesome archiving, searching, filtering, reliability, accessibility, and they’re hotter than the Firefox girls.

Along with Gmail, you can also get the full suite of “Google Apps for your Domain”, which gives you their “Office” apps (web-based word/excel/powerpoint replacements), jabber-based chat (like we already do), and a start page for your users a la igoogle.com.

So right now you’re probably thinking, “When was it exactly that DreamHost sold out?”

To which I say, “I guess right about now!“

Well, not really.

Here’s how I figure. Honestly, Google does do a great job at email. And, we’re still offering everything we used to. And, offering easier integration with Google Apps / Gmail was one of our top 5 most popular suggestions. And, we’re still not worried about Google getting into web hosting, as I explained two years ago!

So far, I’ve been right… and even if Google does get into it, we’re still not worried, because we’re the top web host in LA! And seriously, we would be better than them at it. Google may have a googol of computer science PhDs, but (no offense Maureen) based on my experiences so far working with the Google Apps team, they’re all working on search.

So in the end, I guess some people might say Web Hosting is for DreamHost!