The Happy DreamHost 62nd Birthday Contest!

September 21, 2009 on 4:16 pm | In Funnyish, Promotions by Brett | 478 Comments

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.

Bump it.

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.

Who is this guy

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!

Hey, it happens

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!

Here's some inspiration

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.

The New Dream Machine

June 25, 2009 on 8:55 am | In Funnyish, Insider View, Promotions by Josh Jones | 21 Comments

That's not as in beach, playa!

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…

Or maybe you'd play ping pong.

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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    Ken, Andrew (the winner), Josh, and David!

    See you tomorrow at the Venetian!

    Big Boy Time is Up!

    June 22, 2009 on 4:04 pm | In New Features, Promotions, Updates by Josh Jones | 19 Comments

    The many faces of Big Boy time.

    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:

    Just a little magic dust for the Happy Meals...

    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

    The term "fail" is "fail".

    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

    iPhone Crapps!

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

  • Sweet Dreams iTunes link (free)
  • Dream Admin iTunes link (free)
  • DreamApp (free?)

    Why the three-way tie?

    Well, Sweet Dreams seemed to have more functionality than Dream Admin, but Dream Admin looked better. DreamApp looks good AND has a lot of functionality, but as of the time of judging it wasn’t available for download at the iTunes store! So in our minds, that all works out to a happy three-way-tie!

    Third Place: $500

    Go"Flabby" more like it!!

    Uh oh.. ANOTHER tie? This time it’s a tie in the more traditional sense, but not so traditional as to be a formal decoration worn around the neck, just in the traditional sense of only being between two contestants:

  • Hit Map .. view visitors to your site in real time on a map of the world. (Warning: requires user-list_users access to all your passwords!)
  • A fun flash PS-rebooter tool: I highly recommend trying this one once (just use the test API info).. hee hoo!

    Second Place: $1,250

    Dalmatian instant breakfast... you're gonna love it in an instant!

  • Dalmatian.. a full-featured windows app for managing announcement lists!

    (Not a tie!)

    First Place: $2,500

    Speaking of Dream Mounts!

    A tie again!!!

  • Slashdot Effect Prevention Kit… have your PS resize/run any code when it starts to get a bunch of hits!
  • Dream Mount.. an OS X tool to automatically mount your DreamHost accounts as a disk on your mac’s desktop!

    Grand Prize: $5,000

    After all those ties, how could we possibly give away the Grand Prize to a single contestant?

    The truth is, we could!

    But, we didn’t.

    The Grand Prize winnerS are:

    Do Dream Bots Electric Sheep?

  • DreamBot… a daemon you run on a PS that logs into a jabber account, allowing you to tell it to run API commands or any other shell commands via instant message!
  • MemCron… another tool for DreamHost PS that auto-resizes your memory based on need in an intelligent way (to save you money!) … with pretty graphs!

    And That’s That!

    Do you collect money on free parking, or what?

    Congratulations to all winners! You should check your email for a message from DreamHost Support asking if you’d prefer your money via check or PayPal!

    And hey, just because the contest is over doesn’t mean the API is! It’s going to keep working and keep growing and improving, so please check out all the applications people have developed so far… and maybe even consider making your OWN.

  • Broken Browsers Part Two

    May 28, 2009 on 3:51 pm | In Musings, Promotions, Rants by Josh Jones | 51 Comments

    What my blog posts sound like.

    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.

    5 bit encryption!

    SSL Secure Certificates!

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

  • Your data was encrypted between the browser and the server.
  • The domain you were connecting to was owned by some kind of “legitimate” entity.

    And way back in the day, in order for a trusted authority (trusted by the web browser developers) to sell you any secure certificate, they first actually did a little background checking (you had to fax them – in South Africa – some sort of proof of your organizational status b.s.).

    Nowadays, buying a secure certificate is an entirely automated process: one that only requires you to have access to an email address @ the domain you’re buying the certificate for. All a secure certificate is telling you nowadays is that:

  • Your data was encrypted between the browser and the server.
  • The owner of the domain you are connecting to dished out $100 to some authority “trusted” by the browser!

    This in no way reflects the opinion of New Dream Network, LLC, it's owners or any affiliated entities. We're not even sure why it's here.

    Rewind

    I’d like to now take a moment to step back and think about what benefits secure certificates provide to the end user.

    They encrypt your data. Okay, although I’m not sure there’s ever been a reported case of a third party sniffing sensitive information on the Internet as it passed through their routers, I can at least see the theoretical benefit this provides.

    They verify that the owner of the domain you see in your web browser has paid some money to some company that has paid some money to the creator of your web browser. I don’t see any benefit to this. In fact, I see several drawbacks to this.

    For one, users don’t necessarily realize that the only thing that little lock icon is telling them is, that yes, just like their location bar says, they really are connecting to banchofamerica.com!

    Or do!

    Phishing has hopefully taught us that the average end-user doesn’t really understand the way URLs are formed, and the fact that they REALLY ARE connecting to brankofamerica.com or www.bo/fa.com/signin.cfm means exactly bum diddly nacho to whether or not the information they are about to type into this web site is securely going where they think it is.

    In fact, having that little “secure lock” icon, or any of those other “mcafee site advisor”/”verisign secured seal” logos as a proxy for actually critically examining the site you’re sending info to is a lazy cop-out that doesn’t work.

    Secondly, by putting up this artificial barrier to encrypting website traffic, you’re discouraging people from using encryption. I mean, anybody can easily make a self-signed secure certificate for free (from our panel) and get 100% of the encryption benefits of these expensive certs.. but they don’t because browsers bring up a TERRIFYING WARNING that … oh horror of horrors … this certificate was not created by a trusted authority!

    Of course, there are other reasons that people don’t use encryption (slightly slower, caching issues!) on websites, but as things are now, if you do want to do it, you’d better be ready to put up with a little extortion!

    Who wouldn't trust her authority?

    What should web browsers do?

    They should give up on “trusted” certificate authorities. Only tell us that a site is encrypted or not, and then do some anti-phishing checks to see if hey, the site you’re visiting looks like it’s Bank of America, but it’s URL is Bunk of America! (.vn!)

    (There are already plenty of anti-phishing technologies being built-in to browsers these days. I’m not sure if they do this or not, but what if a person has saved any login info with the browser, you warn them (heavily) when they try and submit that same login info to a different site! Because everybody uses the same throw-away login info for a ton of unimportant sites, only do this check on a list of heavily phished sites, e.g. ebay/paypal/banks/gmail/etc..)

    Other than the phishing issue, what exactly is the point of verifying that the web site you’re visiting is “who they say they are”?

    They may be a totally “legit” business who just doesn’t do the best job of storing their customer’s private data. They may be a “legit” company that has poor customer service policies. They may be a “legit” company who practices the best security and customer service, but their web site just looks like it was thrown together by some Vietnamese teenagers.

    You got a problem with my S-Tyle?! Yo yo yo.

    What can we do about it?

    Well, I was thinking about offering a bounty of $1000 for a plugin for Firefox/Chrome that would make it consider any certificate signer a “trusted” certificate signer, but I figured that’d probably rile up all kinds of people and security nerds.

    So, rather than trying to bring down “trusted” secure certs… we’re going to bring “trusted” secure certs down… to all kinds of people!

    By offering them for just $15/year… forever!

    Which, I’m pretty sure, is the cheapest price offered anywhere… by far. This offer is (currently) only good for existing DreamHost customers.. you can add your certificate from our panel’s Manage Domain area.

    These certificates are exactly the same as what we used to sell for $100/year! They’re not going to cause any pop-ups in any of your site visitor browsers, and they really do encrypt the data. You can use them with us or any other web host. The reason they’re so cheap is we’re now reselling a different “trusted” certificate signer and our volume is enough that we’ve got a much much better price… and we’re not making anything on them because we feel the whole business is a scam!

    And the record is UNbroken!

  • Broken Browsers Part One

    May 13, 2009 on 4:40 pm | In New Features, Promotions, Rants by Josh Jones | 70 Comments

    The First Broken Web Browser

    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!)

    Firefox eats IE because IE is delicious!

    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.

  • Flight of the Navigator anyone?

    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!

    The back button needs to relax at relax the back.

    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?

    My mom always told me this would happen if I didn't stop eating all that grey poupon.

    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!

    All my images in this post are ROUND!

    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!)

    Except this one.

    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

    May 11, 2009 on 10:52 am | In Insider View, Promotions, Tech News by Josh Jones | 16 Comments

    You're not fooling anybody, beeeeeeeyottch!

    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.

    HIDEOUS!

    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.

    Sir, you don't HAVE to be completely naked.

    Terri didn't want to see that!

    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.

    Ah shit Jeremy, he did it backwards!

    Oh no Terri, yours too!!

    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!

    HIDEOUS!

    I’m enraged.

    They’re Internet History

    April 24, 2009 on 3:09 am | In Business, Insider View, Musings, Promotions, Rants, Tech News by Josh Jones | 95 Comments

    Sorry we wasted $3.57 billion.

    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!

    Copyright Violation?! Nothing ever changes.

    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).

    We got involved!

    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

    The Shape of Things to Dumb

    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!

    Happpppy Day

    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

    They're wasting a ton of energy with that white background crap!

    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!)

    Very Yahoo! Yet not.

    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:

    Why wouldn't I!!??

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

    Then in 2007.. Social Networking!

    Eat your heart out Friendster!

    And today… Web 2.0!

    WebRing BLOG? Oh, the shame.

    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!

    Big Whoops

    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.


    Big Boy Time

    April 9, 2009 on 5:48 pm | In Musings, New Features, Promotions by Josh Jones | 215 Comments

    I'm a big boy, standing in my big-boy stance!

    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?

    We feel your pain, Barack!

    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.

    It was this guy's idea.

    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!

    The other side says "P".

    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.

    You are now entering the 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!

    Free Web Hosting For Life!

    February 9, 2009 on 12:53 pm | In Insider View, Musings, Promotions by Josh Jones | 112 Comments

    Groening is seriously going to sue me someday.

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

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

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

    Inspiration.

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

    WOULD YOU?

    Here it is: Start your auction at 99c.

    If only every sandwich were called the "baconator".

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

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

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

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

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

    Yabe evol I!

    The Opposite of eBay

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

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

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

    Real estate is for sisters.

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

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

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

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

    In this case, the price IS fair.

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

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

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

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

    Step 1. Cut a hole in the box. Step 2. Put a sloth in that box.

    Why wait?

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

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

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

    I shouldn't blog at lunch time.

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

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

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

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

    and get back to facebook!

    Free Web Hosting for Life?

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

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

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

    The dog can be yours for an extra $11 million.

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

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

    It was like that when we bought it.

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

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


    DreamHost Apps Invitation Codes

    January 27, 2009 on 3:00 pm | In Dreamhost Apps, New Features, Promotions by Brett | 52 Comments

    DreamHost Apps!

    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…

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