The Happy DreamHost Apple-A-Day Tablet Contest!

This day has been a long time in the coming.

A long time. A long long time. A loooooooooooooooooooong long time. A looooooooooooooooooong looooooooooooooooooong loooooooooooooooong time! A really long time.

In fact, at this point I’m starting to get a little tired of hearing about it. Actually, I’ve been tired of hearing about it ever since day uno. Day ichi. Day un. Day one.

Finally, Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 will be a day that lives in infamy on the Internet.. a day in which the most annoying Internet “meme” of all time was mercifully put to rest… that’s right, today will forever more be remembered as:

THE DEATH OF FAIL!

I’m not exactly sure how it started … I guess probably failblog … but it has annoyed me TO NO END when those hip, snarky, oh-too-clever-to-come-up-with-their-own-schtick, kids on “teh internets” use “fail” to mean “failure”.

Just like lolcats, it was kind of clever when the whole thing started, but now, three years on, when there are over 100 tweets a minute with “fail” in them, IT IS JUST PLAIN PATHETIC.

It’s about time somebody put their foot down.

Introducing the Happy DreamHost Apple-A-Day Tablet Contest!

Here’s how it works:

1. The contest is open to US residents only anybody in the world (where not prohibited by law) who are not employees nor related to employees of DreamHost. No purchase necessary, you do not have to be a DreamHost customer to win.
2. You may enter the contest only once per day, starting today, January 27th, 2010…. days are counted based on the U.S. Pacific Time Zone.
3. To enter, simply post a “tweet” via twitter that includes the word DreamHost in it (upper case and content of tweet do not matter… but spelling does!).
4. The contest ends on the day we get 20 16GB Wifi iPads $10,000 worth of Apple Tablets physically in our possession. If by some miracle there ends up being no such thing as an Apple Tablet, the prize becomes $10,000 worth of whatever the hell Apple announces today instead.
5. At that time, we will randomly pick floor($10,000/$price_of_tablet)20 winners from the valid entries (we will be logging all tweets with “dreamhost” in them in the meantime) and contact them via twitter (from our @dreamhost account) to verify their eligibility.
6. And now, the final twist… a winner will be determined ineligible (and a replacement picked) if at ANY time between now and the end of the contest they have posted ANY tweet(s) with the term “fail” in it/them (or any clever alternative spelling)! “Failure” is fine. “Sucks” is fine. “Crappy” is fine. “Nightmare” is fine. Just not “fail”. Nor “#fail”. Nor even “@fail” (poor guy).

That’s it! Simple really.

So let’s put an end to the insanity, let’s use the power of Steve Jobs and the Apple hype machine to do some good, and let’s win us some iMacSlablet Pads iPads!!

Update:

Okay, it’s going to be 20 of the $499 models (16G wifi-only) given away. Also note: if you don’t live in the US but give us a US mailing address when we contact you after you win, well, how are we going to know the difference? Also also note: Apparently twitter search bans some users from appearing in the results. If that’s the case with you, you’ll need to make sure your tweets have “@dreamhost” in them. Also also also note: it’s okay to use the term “fail” correctly, as in “I fail to see the point of twitter.” Also also also also note: you can now not use the term “win” either, at least not in the context “full of win”.

Update Update:

Only twitter accounts with at least two tweets from BEFORE today (January 27th, 2010) are going to be eligible to win. I’m talking to you @dreamhosttablet! Also, remember you can only enter once per day no matter how many times that day you tweet with “dreamhost” in it…. once again I’m talking to you, @dreamhosttablet!

Update Update Update:

Okay, we’ll now ship the winning iPads ANYWHERE! We just weren’t sure before if they were going to be tied to the US phone network or something. Since we’re doing the wifi-only versions, it’ll be fine… as long as you’re okay with the U.S. version (documentation, power cord, etc..). Keep in mind though, to win all your posts from now until we get the iPads must be in English only (otherwise we won’t know if you’re trying to sneak in a “fail”!) See below.

Update Update Update Update

Okay whiners, fine: you can post in any language, but your DreamHost-mentioning posts must be in English.

Hopefully the Final Update

Okay, Twitter accounts created since (or hadn’t tweeted twice before) the start of the contest are now okay. However, you may not tweet to multiple accounts in an attempt to “ballot stuff” the contest. We’re going to manually review all the winners as well as run some analysis on ALL tweets received during the contest… any fishy stuff will get you disqualified!

Holiday Shopping

For some of you, it’s that time of the year again.. holiday shopping!

I say some of you not because some of you are not Christian, Jewish, African, or employed, but because some of you are not early holiday shoppers.

For those of us already finished with our seasonal purchases, it’s that time of the year again.. holiday sleeping!

Now, when I was young, early holiday shopping meant at least ONE of the big boxes under the tree wasn’t filled with an “I O U: 1 Cobra Terror Drome – SANTA!” But nowadays, thanks to the influences of my lovely spouse, I’ve been able to get all my shopping (apart from gifts for her) done E A R L Y.

What’s my secret?

It’s easy!

She gets everything! Her family, my family, her friends, my friends, everything! The only thing I have to get IS my gifts for her!

And man, she starts EARLY. Like, it’s an all year thing. If she sees something that would be perfect for my brother in May, BOOM she buys it for Christmas. If she finds a sweater on sale in February that would look great on her mom… POW bought and stored. If she comes across an amazing deal on Zhu Zhu Hamsters December 26th.. well, they’ll probably still be popular next holidays too, right?

It’s weird. I mean, compared to how I was brought up (which I’m 100% sure is the norm) it’s down-right un-American. But, I’ve slowly come around. Sadly, I’ve started to find myself buying things in the spring with an eye towards December. And not just me.. DreamHost too!

Remember in the last post when I mentioned how we bought (some of) Alchemy Communications back in May? Well, here it is, December, and that forward thinking is finally starting to pay off… for you!

In honor of our new relationship (and by using ex-DreamHost shared hosting servers) Alchemy has just started offering Dedicated Servers at pretty much the best deal you can get anywhere (we checked!):

And the winners are…

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

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

1940s, Andrea:

1950s, Ken Grett:

1960s, Gabriel Mello:

1970s, Brian:

1980s, CSEID:

1990s, Jeffrey Dates:

2000s, Pushka Ben:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest! Now…

The Happy DreamHost 62nd Birthday Contest!

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

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

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

He died of venereal disease in 1953.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Just kidding. We’re 12 today.

UPDATE: The winners have been announced!

The New Dream Machine

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

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

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

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

What’s it to you?

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

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

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

The California State Open

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

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

Jones, Josh 725

Lee, Kenneth 927

Liao, Hung Ju (Andrew) 844

Lu, David 958

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

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

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

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See you tomorrow at the Venetian!

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 Two

A couple of weeks ago I posted Broken Browsers Part One, which I can only pray gave you ample preparation for today’s post, Broken Browsers Part Two!

The truth is, not that much is broken in browsers these days. They’ve been around 15 some years now, so it’s not the biggest surprise all the major flaws to be resolved by now.

In fact, I’d say the reason these two broken behaviors of modern web browsers still exist is because most still (and as I’ll try to convince you, erroneously) consider them features!

The browser should just listen to the caching info sent by the server!

Agreed… WHEN REQUESTING CONTENT FROM THE SERVER!

The fact is, pressing back or forward shouldn’t even request content from the server at all!

As one commenter brought up last week, whatever happened to “offline mode” in web browsers? Because that’s what back/forward should still be… instant “offline mode”!

Anyway, on to the second (and final) part of this browser brokenness brouhaha.

SSL Secure Certificates!

Way back in the day, a secure certificate for your website meant two things:

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!

Tuz Tatz

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

Blah blah blah, on to the IMPORTANT stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m enraged.

They’re Internet History

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

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

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

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

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

I was right.

15 years and $3.57 BILLION later.

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

The main reason is WebRing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greetings Geocities

And, sell it he did… to GeoCities!

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

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

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

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

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

The Vesting

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

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

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

The Downfall

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

By 2001 they were done, and everybody hated it.

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

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

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

Then in 2007.. Social Networking!

And today… Web 2.0!

Reminiscing

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

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

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

DreamHost acquires Geocities

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

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

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

Whoop dee do.

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

No strings attached.

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

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

And we promise to never shut down.