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.

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:

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!

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!

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.

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!

If you don’t know of anyone with a DreamHost Apps account and want to get started right away, here’s a few more one-time-use codes that you can use right now!

CYBFWKCH
CYVWJNOI
ETCPDPHM
IIVHBIWK
JIWKYZPY
JYMROGVL
KTLZJN
LHKWLGOC
LJENWGQA
LKLFBMXL
NPHARQIR
NRNIOHJE
PZVDWFIF
Q7djPWkW
SAQYUFCU
VSQITNKV
WDFTVAXC
WRLHZEDO
ZTCLYVAE

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!