Let’s get Earthy

Today is a day for celebrating the air that we breathe, the land beneath our feet, and all the creatures that call this blue ball ‘Home.’

We’re really sitting on something special because from what I’ve heard there’s not a lot of blue balls out there.

Today is Earth Day!

And to celebrate, we’re doing nothing! Not a thing. We’re not even singing to our plants.

We must hate the Earth and be horrible people, right?

Wrong!

We’re not doing anything special because we already rock the earth-friendly workplace every day!

With this being the Earthiest day of the year, it bears repeating that DreamHost is a carbon neutral company. In fact, we’ve been carbon neutral for an entire year!

To date we’ve neutralized over 2800 TONS of carbon emissions and are on track to wipe out a total of 3400 by June of this year.

To give you some idea of just how much that is…One ton of emissions are created when you…

• Travel 2,000 miles in an airplane.
• Drive 1,350 miles in a large sport utility vehicle.
• Drive 1,900 miles in a mid-sized car.
• Drive 6,000 miles in a hybrid gasoline electric car.
• Run an average U.S. household for 60 days.
• Have your computer on for 10,600 hours.

source

All those servers in our datacenter use up a lot of juice - life-giving electrical juice which in turn is created by burning lots of dead dinosaurs. And therein lies the problem!

We’ve already switched to using lower-power CPUs in our fleet of hardware, and just last year we introduced DreamHost PS!

A DreamHost Private Server gives our customers a greener alternative to truly dedicated hosting. Why get (and pay for) a complete dedicated server when in reality you may only need a fraction of its resources? On-demand resource scaling and flexible pricing ensure that servers aren’t sitting idle, sucking up all that dino-juice willy nilly. Customers can apply for PS hosting now from their web panel.

DreamHost PS represents a new earth-friendlier way of doing business and we’re proud to be the kind of company that’s able to offer it.

And remember, if you’re a DreamHost customer and want the world to know that your own website is green, just visit the Home > Green Hosting section of your DreamHost account control panel to get some green icons. After all, what good is being green if you can’t yammer on about it to anyone who will listen!

By the way, thanks for listening to me yammer on!

Hey did you get a keychain?

The Time: 7pm to midnight
The Place: Elevate Lounge
The Date: Three days ago
The Reason: DreamHost’s 10 Year Birthday Blowout Extravaganza

DreamHost turned 10 a month ago and this week we had our official 10 year party!

We usually have a Halloween party around this time of year, but we decided to go high class in a high rise for 2007.

Seriously, check out this view.

Every current and former DreamHost employee dating back to the early days was invited along with a guest for an evening of dancing, drinking, and reminiscing! That’s like…at least a hundred people.

I saw people that I hadn’t seen in years! And I even remembered most of their names! I was so proud.

Yes, there was dancing!

Yes, there was even an open bar! So, so open.

And oh yes, there was swag.

We had special blue M&Ms made with DreamHost.com’s whois Creation Date stamped on them! Funny thing about those…when they come back up, they’re not blue anymore!

I also had some limited edition keychains made special for this event. Four martinis later and I really wanted to make sure everybody got some. In fact, I made it my business to personally invite every single person to get keychains before the night was over.

Or at least that’s what they tell me.

Despite my best efforts, however, I found myself at the end of the night left with a whole lot of keychains stamped with a date that will lose its freshness once 2008 rolls around.

These are nice, nice keychains. Look how they glisten and shine.

So shiny. So pretty.

Shiny.

Did I mention how shiny they were?

Did I also mention that only 500 exist in the world?

Current and former employees have had their fill, so I’m giving away the rest! If you’d like one of these keychains (and maybe some other small goodies…) you need only send a self-addressed stamped envelope to:

DreamHost
Dept: Brett is Awesome
PMB #257
417 Associated Rd.
Brea, CA 92821
USA

Make sure that your self-addressed envelope has at least $0.75 of US postage on it or INTO THE TRASH IT GOES! One envelope per person please.

If you’re outside the US you’re welcome to try sending a stamped envelope, but you’re on your own when it comes to postage (3oz envelope). I’ve heard rumors that international mail is run by an unpredictable cyclops who answers to no one and eats paper like I drink milk. (A lot.)

The friendly people at your local post office can teach you how to mail a letter in case you’ve forgotten. My hangover should be gone by next week, so get those envelopes in the mail to me right away and I’ll start stuffin’ and sealin’ just as soon as I can.

(I’ll update this post when I’ve run out of goodies.)

If you’d like to attend our next party you just need to send us a resume and get hired! We’re always looking for good technical support people, and we’ve got a few open admin/programmer spots as well.

The DreamHost 2017 birthday party is not that far away and we’ll probably have free hoverboard rides. You do NOT want to miss that.

-Brett!

Robbing Your Customers

It’s something we like to do every day!

Yep, the secret to our crazy low prices and amazing ferraris, finally revealed:

We take your billing address and go to your homes at night to steal your jewelry, plasma TVs, and all valuable toiletries!

Not to mention all the credit card numbers we get fund our wild vegas benders (roulette is a great way to launder money) and illicit basketball leagues!

(Damn PayPal and Google Checkout, not sharing the credit card info with us!)

Yeah, overall it’s a pretty sweet scheme we’ve had these past 10 years; and now that we’ve gone into hiding you’ll never catch us, coppers!

Okay Okay Okay

Although I admit what we’ve been doing has been pretty bad, it pales in comparison to what I just found out one of our favorite competitors Lunarpages just did to rob their customers.

According to this thread at Web Hosting Talk, Lunarpages a few days ago turned the default 404 pages for all sites they host (who haven’t specifically customized them already) to one of those ultra-sleazy “domain parking”-style setups. It still happening right now… and here’s an example of a 404 page on a site some poor shmoe has hosted by them, aeroeco.net!

I’m impressed! So roundabout, so complex, so sneaky! We only ever do the simple stuff like read our customers email for blackmail material, or kidnap their pets and their kids.

Maybe Lunarpages doesn’t agree, and maybe it doesn’t seem sooo bad to you, but what they’re doing is outright theft. It’s the Internet equivalent of shoplifting.

For websites, traffic is everything. Stealing a site’s traffic is nothing less than web homicide!

You see, anybody who got a default 404 error before this change, probably just backed up to the site they were on and continued. But now, it seems probable they’ll end up clicking one of the links they see there, or possibly use the “search this site” form, which does nothing of the sort! It searches “http://searchportal.information.com/” instead and Lunarpages gets a kickback!

Of course, Go Daddy has been doing stuff like this for ages.. if you register a domain with them and don’t set anything up on it you’re going to get a lame page filled with lame affiliate links. But at least with parked domains, it’s not like there’s an actual site up that you’re injecting content into! Not to mention, they’re Go Daddy. We’d expect nothing less from them!

And, remember the time four years ago where VeriSign tried exactly this with every non-registered domain? ICANN made them stop less than a week later, after a huge (by Internet nerd standards) public outcry.

These sorts of scams (and the entire domain parking industry) are just a server variant to good old desktop spyware that changes your default search engine or dns error pages on your browser. But just because they’re not surreptitiously installing anything on end users computers doesn’t mean it’s not crooked.

(Oh, speaking of crooked.. yesterday our cool anti-spam site spam.la stopped working, as though the domain had expired. Looking it up, it was paid through July 2008 though! Upon contacting the registry, it turns out that although we had paid Domain Discover to renew the domain in July, they had never paid the registry! Yet another creative way to rob your customers that we should try sometime!)

Why, Lunarpages, Why?

I’m guessing it’s the money?

But come on guys, is it really worth it? How much money are we talking about?

I remember one time when this skeezy SEO guy was asking me “How many domains do you guys host?” I told him “zillions”. He said, “How many are parked?” I said, “I dunno, some fraction of a zillion?” He said: “Do you like to make money?” And I said, “I dunno, it depends…” To which he said, “Do you like to make money?” To which I said, “It depends, is the money one dollar and how much **** do I have to suck to get it?”

Okay, I didn’t really say that, but it was what I was thinking. And in a real tough, bad-ass voice too.

It’s obviously a stupid question, “Do you like to make money?” The question is, “Would you do X if I paid you $Y?“

Lunarpages must be hurting pretty bad right now to sink this low. I also noticed they dropped their 1-800 number and only have a 1-714 now! Shoulda been like us, and not offered phone support in the first place, eh?!

But, I gotta give them a break. It’s easy to be all high and mighty and to “Don’t be evil” when you’re rolling in the dough like Google. But the ethics get a lot murkier when the choice is between stealing a tiny bit of traffic from your customers and selling your first born.

(Take Yahoo! for example. Back in 2000 (stock price $100) we tried to advertise with them, and they were all high and mighty about “no animation, no hard sell, no general trashiness.” Now (stock price $28), their site is covered in expanding flash ads, including some for… gasp… Lunarpages!)

Who are your customers?

It’s a good question!

And I don’t mean, are they small businesses, web designers, women, dwarfs, fifth graders, deaf, or asian? I mean, are your customers “People who need a website host” or are your customers “People who pay for traffic”? It seems Lunarpages is trying to get both.

But, you can’t have both. You really have to choose just one and stick with it!

It’s pretty simple in the beginning… your customers are the people (or businesses) who pay for your product (or service). But then later, as you grow, you start to realize that entire “customer base”… that “audience”… is a potential “product” in and of itself. And there are plenty of other types of “customers” who will pay handsomly for it.

Don’t fall for it!

Because your customers don’t like being a product! And, when they finally catch on that they’re PAYING to be SOLD, they’ll vamoose! And you’ll be done… stuck without customers or product!

Just yesteday there was some talk of eBay pissing off its sellers by putting targeted Google ads on their listings… effectively trying to steal their customers’ customers.

This is actually an interesting case.. because who are eBay’s customers, really? Is it the sellers, who directly pay Ebay? Or is it the shoppers, who are the originators of that money the sellers then use to pay eBay?

I’d say, it’s the shoppers. Because even though auction sites are sort of a weird “chicken and the egg” problem, in actuality, it’s just an “egg” problem, and the egg is shoppers.

Because, one thing I’ve learned in this world, is that if you’ve got people trying to spend money, you’ll have no problem finding people trying to take it!

So actually, I’d say eBay is probably fine putting those ads in. If they can help the shoppers find what they’re looking for, even if it’s not through an auction on eBay itself, they’ll be satisfied and come back. The “power sellers” can go suck an egg.. if they leave there’ll be plenty of other sellers who aren’t quite as proud to fill the void.

What to do?

Well, being completely unbiased in the matter, I say vote with your feet!

Any Lunarpages customers who want to switch to DreamHost, we’ll be happy to have you… and we promise to never, never, ever, ever, do anything of this sort, ever! You’re already paying us for hosting.. that should really be enough! (And Lunarpages, if you’re hurting so bad.. just raise prices!)

P.S. Use the promo code LOONEYPAGES when you sign up and get your first year completely free.. it works for current Lunarpages customers only!

Are you older than a Fifth Grader?

We are!

Well, maybe not ALL fifth graders, but I’m sure at least A fifth grader.

Like, one who skipped first grade or something.

Like me! (I was too tall smart.)

Anyway, DreamHost is TEN YEARS OLD!!!

   Domain Name: DREAMHOST.COM
   Registrar: NEW DREAM NETWORK, LLC
   Whois Server: whois.dreamhost.com
   Referral URL: http://www.dreamhost.com
   Name Server: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM
   Name Server: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM
   Name Server: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM
   Status: ok
   Updated Date: 21-sep-2006
   Creation Date: 23-sep-1997
   Expiration Date: 22-sep-2013

In dog years, that’s SEVENTY!

In Internet years, that’s ONE THOUSAND!

In waiting-for-tech-support-to-get-back-to-you years, that’s INFINITY!

To celebrate, I’m doing this super-long blog post retrospective… and if you read the whole thing, you might feel a little less let down about the announcement I mentioned last post just being a freaking birthday announcement.

Stupid Beginnings: Pre-DreamHost

Man, I was just looking through some old emails from 1997, and one thing I can say is, boy, were we dumb!

It’s nice to know some things never change.

Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 15:06:32 -0800 (PST)
From: Josh “Evening Optimist” Jones
To: Honchos
Subject: Plan?

Maybe we should piece together a mission statement or guidelines for
business or goals or something. Maybe we should also come up with some
different plans for pricing web hosting. Like some amount for a small
business site (at most 500 hits a day or so) and some amount for a large
site, with a discount if we were the ones who made the site. All should
probably have 20megs of space, with $5 per 10 more or so (I’m of course
wide open to specific price suggestions, these are just round numbers).
Maybe $30 for a small, $45 for a large, plus maybe $5 more per some number
of hits. Also more if they have a domain name. If we made their site
though, how about $15 off the base price?

Anyway, I was thinking we need some reason that people would want
to use us instead of our competitors. Why would they now? We are good at
design and graphics and programming, but honestly there are plenty of
places that are good at that. We have to be something others aren’t. Like:
quicker at getting the job done, better sites, cheaper sites, or maybe
even something like better customer service or even more advertising. The
reason I thought that low price would be a good way to go is because we
have an advantage over most other places in that. We aren’t actualy
dependent on this (at least not _yet_) whereas others are. I don’t think
we have an advantage in speed, especially since we are all full time
students. We are good at design but it’s hard to sell people on our sites
being the highest quality I think. I can imagine some people really liking
our work and other people not so much, there is a lot of personal taste
involved. Another thing which I guess is sort of obvious is that it would
be good to get some large sites that we need to change a lot and sort of
constantly maintain and add things to, because we can keep charging for
that. Like when we get a job, we should outline clearly what is included
in the setup, and additional things (like more pictures, etc..) are
clearly going to cost more later. Okay thats it. I would have written this
earlier, but my connection was flakey yesterday.

Josh

But wait, isn’t that email dated January 1997?! We didn’t register dreamhost.com until September! What oh what were we doing in the meantime?

The thing is, the actual company over here is really called “New Dream Network” .. and the goal was never (and still isn’t!) to be a web host. We did some web hosting on the side to try and cover the network we were stealing from a friend, but we generally didn’t want it to ever get too big.

Buuuuuut, once we started actually raking in the dough, that mentality changed quick. Let me give you an idea of how much dough there was to be raked back when we decided to get serious and get an actual domain name..

07.29.97 pillar Pillar Communications $20.00
07.31.97 pinzler Andrew Pinzler $48.00
07.31.97 jbark Joseph Bark $46.00
08.06.97 tim Timnet $126.00
08.12.97 threnody Cheryl Dowling $136.00 VOID
08.12.97 jhb5 Vickee Sepich $46.00

Here’s an interesting little exchange I found too… the origins of the DreamHost name:

Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 14:06:21 -0800 (PST)
From: Dallas Bethune
To: Honchos
Subject: Re: everyhost.com

Hey,

I just discovered that dreamhost.com is not taken!

We could snatch it up! What do you think?

I’m making an ad for hosting right now, BTW…

->Dallas

> > Hey what do you guys think of everyhost.com? We could make it our mission
> > to make having a website with a domain name easy and affordable for
> > everyone from private citizens to small to large businesses. Therefore..
> > everyhost.com (it’s not taken). Also Dallas, are front page extensions
> > still installed somewhere? I’m going to take advantage of the beta status
> > of FP98 to download it and see if we can get our server to work with their
> > extensions. It would be good to put at least on our hosting server once we
> > get it.
> >Josh
>
> I’m not that taken by everyhost.com. I don’t think I would personally want
> to have my site there. It would be fine if we were trying to focus on
> sites with their own domains, though.
>
> I believe I deleted the FrontPage stuff. We never got it working right,
> and were low on space at some point.
>
> I’d almost rather not have FrontPage going on our servers. It seems kinda
> neat, but I’m still worried about what access to our server that it seems
> to require…
>
> ->Dallas

Ha, EveryHost! Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

I do feel somewhat vindicated that everyhost.com was snatched up less than two years later!

(One thing sort of funny is… we were assuming most people would be getting sub-domains of our main domain. Dallas was saying that he wouldn’t want dallas.everyhost.com as much as dallas.dreamhost.com! Of course “It would be fine if we were trying to focus on sites with their own domains, though.”)

A Nightmare is Born

Woooooheeee! Thanks the Wayback Machine I’ve been able to find and recreate the entire history of DreamHost.com and lay it out for you here, complete with what I think are the most interesting points in each design! Unending boredom awaits..

This was our first design!

Designed by Dustin Vannatter, New Dream Member extraordinaire, I’ll always hold a special place in my heart for this one!

Back then, we actually had specifically an “adult site hosting” plan.. it was $99.95/month and, like all our plans, included unlimited bandwidth! As unlimited as half a T1 can be! It came with 100MB per 5GB of transfer you used, which was really weird in retrospect.

We also had our Crazy Domain Insane plan for $9.95/month with 20MB of storage, Archive Boy for $17.95/month with 40MB, Code Warrior (we hadn’t gotten that Cease and Desist from Metrowerks yet!) for $23.95/month with 50MB and a telnet user and CGI access, and Strictly Business for $44.95/month with 100MB of storage along with 20 email addresses and anonymous FTP!

It turned out, that Adult Site hosting plan with unlimited bandwidth was the only thing that kept us solvent those early months. As soon as we put that “too good to be true” offer up there, we started getting deluged (as in, multiple PER WEEK!) with signups for it! And these were big customers too.. $100/month!

It took about a week before we realized that unlimited bandwidth plus adult content equals not good. Some of these people were using over a GB a day of transfer.. and according to an early email from michael, we needed to be making $200/GB to stay afloat! We immediately had to re-negotiate with some of those early adopters.. one guy began paying $700/month, and others left.

We did learn an important lesson though, and that was that some of those $100/month adult sites used hardly ANY bandwidth at all! And thus, the truth about overselling was realized!

(Ha, if you thought having a dedicated adult hosting plan was crazy, before dreamhost.com launched we had a dedicated warez hosting plan!)

We also had “colocation” options back then:

For $995/month you got 50GB bandwidth, 64MB RAM, a 3GB SCSI drive, on a Pentium 200Mhz!

For $3000/month you got a PII 400Mhz, 256MB RAM, two 9GB SCSIs and 300GB of bandwidth!

The deals would have been a little sweeter if I’d had my way though…

Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 11:35:29 -0800 (PST)
From: Dallas Bethune
To: Honchos
Subject: dreamhost.com site

I looked at it…

I’m alarmed by the colocate page.

How do you think we’re going to offer

200MHZ Pentium II
64 MB RAM
4.2 GB drive
Full Debian Linux Distribution

Only $300 setup
$300 a month.

At this ridiculously low prices?

We’re trying to make money…!

The offer I was talking about would be a 100 MHz Pentium with 16MB Ram and
2 gig drive for $1500 setup and $500/mnth

That price is even low…

Also, I’d rather not give everybody full CGI access that is a client of a
reseller. That would be a good way to open ourselves up for a lot of
attacks from people we don’t even really know at all. I think we should
develop a set of cgi scripts that most people would want to cover people’s
want or need for CGI without opening the server up. We can’t afford to
get new hardware too often…

I also feel especially unsure about granting full CGI to people with warez
pages. They would be the ones most likely to try to cause trouble,
right? (maybe I’m just getting old)

Most people don’t need cgi except for little things. If we can provide
those things, we can secure ourselves from big programs that use up the
processor or what not. I’m paranoid.

I think we may have to discuss our prices overall, as well. We are way
lower than a lot of places. This helps us get business, but we may need
to reassess our costs, and our income, and all that.

->Dallas

Yeah, early on you got ONE mailbox, ONE hosted domain, ONE ftp user, and NO cgi access unless you were at least on Code Warrior.. and you liked it! Not to mention domain registrations were $70/year from Network Solutions (and only Network Solutions!)

From the very beginning we had a “reseller program” (you’d get 20% off) and in November 1998 I started the monthly newsletter. Oh yay.

So yep, that was it, one server, four honchos, and $200 in the bank.

Two Years Pass: September 1999

First thing I noticed on this redesign.. our 1-888-261-4484 is nowhere to be found! I must have gotten tired of all those voicemails setting off my pager. Good riddance to phone support! It wouldn’t return (in the form of callbacks) for three years.

By our two year birthday, DreamHost has grown from the four honchos to 19 people.. and gone from no profit to profit to no profit again, thanks in large part to Sage’s WebRing millions!

We’d dropped the unlimited bandwidth, but added some “extra options” at this point: get an extra ftp username for $5/month, and extra mailbox for $2/month, and extra storage for $5 per 10MB!

We’ve dropped the adult plan, added a domain parking plan for $30/year .. NOT including registration (but refunded if you upgraded to full hosting!), renamed “colocation” to “dedicated” (after all, we still don’t have our very own data center!), started offering squirrel mail webmail, and were giving away a free iBook! This was back when people used to read books!

We later had a lot of other giveaway contests.. DreamCasts, Handspring Visors, Game Boy Advances, and even, on the launch of “DH2″, a PS2!

DreamHost 2: September 2000

Pretty much since I graduated from college in May of 1998, we’d been working on “the future of webhosting.” We were going to call it “DreamHost 2000″ in the theme of “Windows 2000″, but by the time we actually got it out and done, the year 2000 didn’t really seem like the future anymore, so it was just “DreamHost 2.0.”

What did DH 2 bring?

Well, mostly the panel as you more-or-less know it today. We also had a system that should have pretty much seamlessly scaled from 3 or 4 servers to 3 or 4 thousand. And I guess it more-or-less did.

We also started doing our “own” domain registrations (through register.com, then joker, then tucows, and finally, many years later, our own ICANN account!) for $30/year.

We dropped the “Archive Boy” plan and created “Sweet Dreams” and upped our storage offerings to 30/75/150/250MB, our bandwidth to 2/4/7/12GB a month, and our mailboxes included to 3/10/20/40!

We also raised our prices to $10/$20/$35/$60 per month and added more extras: discussion lists for $10/month each, SSL access (not including a cert) for $20/month, extra MySQL DBs for $7/month each, and extra bandwidth for the rock-bottom-remainder price of $15/GB!

We also didn’t include any sub-domains on Crazy Domain Insane back then.. or even CGI access! We did however have an official logo! And 31 employees though.

Promo Codes, DreamServers, and Disaster: September 2001

September 2001: did you forget that American flags weren’t just in meatspace? We got on the bandwagon ourselves.

Witness, the humble beginning of promo codes… originally a way for us to give college students a discount! We also started giving away a free registration with hosting, and had a domain checker right on the front page. We created the KBase and launched DreamServers; starting at only $395/month now.. for 40GB of bandwidth, a 10GB disk, and a 600Mhz Celeron with 128MB RAM!

We were now hosting 29,380 domains! And.. we went crazy and way upped disk to 60/300/600/1000MB, and bandwidth a smidge to 2/5/10/30GB, and dropped pricing for overage to $15/$10/$10/$5 per GB.

Even crazier… on the front page, a huge form where you could specify how much of each feature you wanted and how much you were willing to pay, and we would “recommend” a plan for you! The actual point of this feature was market research though.. after months of data collection I would go back through and decide how to best update our plans to maximize revenues!

At this point we had gone through our own little mini dot-bomb.. our head count was only 28 since we decided to stop borrowing money from Sage! Fortunately, our stock art head count had tripled in the same period.

Rapid Growth: We Turn Five!

Really, we started growing faster a little bit before this completely sweet redesign. It started when I analyzed all those “recommendation” requests and realized we really should just be giving more away on our cheapest plan. Sure, less people are “up-sold” on our more expensive plans, but really, those people were just going to our competitors.

So, we gave CGI on CDI, upped our disk to 100/400/900/1500MB, our bandwidth to 2/10/20/30GB, our mailboxes to 20/60/140/300, and gave away unlimited MySQL databases on all plans… I believe an industry first? Oh ho ho!

Of course, we did put a limit on the database usage you could have… the short lived “conueries” metric! 25 times your connections plus your queries! And you got 10M “conueries” per month on CDI!

But still, the redesign was nice too.. we did it thanks to the prodding of a PR company we hired for the still-ridiculous price of $10,000 a month. The biggest thing we learned from that was how easy PR is.. in fact, they even told us they couldn’t have done our press releases (they made us do) any better.

With the fifth birthday, we renamed Code Warrior to Code Monster, upped disk space another 50MB each (of course, all old customers got it as well!), and jumped bandwidth up to 20/25/30/40GB a month. DreamServers was now just DreamHost Dedicated (too many brands the PR company said!), and for $199/mo you got a 1.6Ghz P4, 256MB of RAM, a 30GB drive, and 75GB of bandwidth!

Another critical thing we started here was the ability to cash out your rewards (10% of all payments for people you referred, plus 5% of people they referred), instead of just applying it towards your hosting bill. That was a pretty big deal for our burgeoning affiliate crowd!

We were down to just 24 employees, and $300,000 in the bank!

The Sale Era: September 2003 and 2004

A lot of you reading this probably trace your history with DreamHost back to this period.

Although 777 on our 7th birthday was the culmination, the beginning was actually back on our sixth birthday, in September 2003, while I was actually in Hawaii at a friend’s wedding.

We decided to try, as a lark almost, giving our Strictly Business plan (1.6GB of storage and 40GB of bandwidth plus every other feature) for the price of Crazy Domain Insane, forever.

At that time, we were peaking at about 30 new customers a day. I thought, optimistically, the sale would give us a 50% bump.

The day I turned it on (from Hawaii), we got 300 new customers. The next day, 600! The third day, at which point everbody was screaming for me to turn it off, 1200! In a period of 3 days, we’d provisioned as many accounts as we usually got in 3 months.

It was a hectic time, fo’ sure. The support team hated it. Fortunately, they’re not in charge!

As a result of the incredible demand we witnessed, I was able to convince everybody to allow me to up our offerings a few months later to 500/1000/1600/2300MB of disk and a bit more bandwidth too. We also dropped the price of Code Monster to Sweet Dreams “temporarily.”

The next year, we did essentially the same thing, except we tried just making our cheapest plan SUPER CHEAP.. the 777 sale allowed you to get a year of CDI for just $9.24! Are we Crazy? Insane? Domain?

At that point we’d also already upped disk to 800/1600/2560/3680MB doubled bandwidth to 40/48/64/88GB (and dropped overage to $4/$3/$2/$1 per GB) as well as tripled the number of included mailboxes. We’d also started giving a 20% discount for pre-paying for two years. Pretty much just so we could say our price was $7.95/month!

We also started offering a 91-day money back guarantee (since 1 and 1 had appeared on the scene offering a 90-day!) and allowed opting for a one-time payment of $65 for referring somebody to DreamHost!

Our dedicated servers had a $99.95/month option with a Pentium 4, 512MB of RAM, a 30GB disk, and 500GB of bandwidth.

We had 23 employees for the entire two year period, had paid Sage off the money we’d borrowed (without much interest, which turned out to still be a pretty good return for 1999-2002), and had a cool mil in the bank!

It Gets a Little Ridiculous: September 2005

So, in January 2005 we decide to triple disk and bandwidth to 2.4/4.8/7.6/11GB and 120/144/192/264GB! We had to, man! It was like all you had to do was up those numbers and you got more money!

In the “Spirit of ‘97″ (not at all because others were offering more, nope!) we upped our rewards payout from $65 to $97, as well as our money back guarantee from 91 days to 97. In March we hit 100,000 domains!

And that’s when our power problems began.

I won’t get into it tooooooooooo much right here, but our main data center essentially ran out of power over two years ago and is still out today. We immediately stopped selling any new Dedicated Servers (at that point we were adding about one a day). I wasn’t too heart-broken because my first love had always been shared!

So never mind all that!

We added Ruby on Rails support shortly thereafter, and this blog got started in July with let’s save our environment, truly one of this generation’s great folk hits.

We double disk again, and added the feature where your bandwidth and disk grows every week you stay a customer with us… we’re still the only host who does this that I know of/care about!

Anyway, the 888 promo code only gave you 80% off, and wasn’t nearly as big a deal as 777 (which we’d actually secretly still left working for most of the year!), but we did also up all our plans to finally include unlimited domains and sub-domains, something customers had been asking for for years, which gave us a pretty big boost.

Domain registrations also dropped to $9.95/year and extra bandwidth was now $1-$0.50/GB. We had 30 employees now.. an unsettling trend in my book!

I Just Like This Fat Kid

That was our website in January 2006, when we went completely insane and finally upped our disk FORTY TIMES and our bandwidth TEN TIMES to 20/40/60/90GB and 1/1.2/1.6/2.2TB.

Around now was when we got sick of just losing all those potential dedicated server customers (still no power) and decided to just start linking them over to hosting.com for some affiliate sugar.

Fan Gets Hit With It: September 2006

That summer there’s more power outages and we have TWO FULL MONTHS of pretty darn bad service. It was pretty sucky all around.

We did about the only thing we could do.. made a new site all based on “community” and doubled bandwidth and 10 timesed disk again!

At this point we’re also giving away 3000/6000/12000/24000 mailboxes and 75/175/375/775 shell accounts. We have a 999 promo code which gives $99.99 off (again, it’s no 777!) and take it a little easy.

We’ve got 300,000 domains, 50 employees and a lot of infrastructure stuff to deal with.

Everything Is Wonderful: September 2007

In January of this year, we took a step back. A step away from everything that’s made us who we are, our very essense, and we actually started reducing how much disk and bandwidth we included on our plans.

We had (close to) no promo code sales all year, and never upped those quotas a smidge. It’s been very very very painful for me.

Well… sweet release is finally here!

The Payoff

If you’ve read, or at least scrolled, this far… you deserve something!

And here it is.. for the big One - Oh, DreamHost is now offering only one plan! It’s called “Happy Hosting” (though it doesn’t really need a name when it’s the only one) and it comes with 500GB of disk, 5TB of bandwidth per month, and unlimited users and mailboxes, etc, etc, etc…

Current customers immediately get the unlimited users and mailboxes, and their bandwidth doubled. We’re also doubling your existing disk space, but it will be rolled out incrementally. If you want to switch to the new plan, you can today from our panel!

It’s $10.95/month, but if you prepay for 1 year it’s $9.95/month, 2 years it’s $8.95/month, 3 years it’s $7.95/month, 5 years it’s $6.95/month, and 10 years it’s $5.95/month! There may be a crazy 777-ish promo code too (for new customers) if you look around.

TEN YEARS?

Who would pay for ten years in advance?

I dunno, but at least we’ve finally shown we can do ten years!

Happy Hosting!

P.S. And, when you renew in 2017 you’ll (most definitely) be up to 12.5 PB of storage and bandwidth for $1.95/month!

What a CON!

Well, it wasn’t a TOTAL con.

At least Dallas and I didn’t pay anything to go. He was on a panel about green hosting, and I got free admission by signing myself up as “press”. I guess in a way I’m paying now via this feeling of obligation to blog-post about it though.

Anyways, now I finally understand why we say we don’t go to hosting conferences.

They’re not for us.

Overall, we just got a really “businessy” feel from the whole thing. I mean… we can’t be the only host who’s just doing this until our band makes it big, right? And man, nobody told me to wear a logo collared short-sleeved shirt; the official uniform of hosting cons.

What Happened

Basically, we checked out the display booths (it looks like the new trend is to give away Wiis, iPhones, and Mini Coopers.. sadly, Dallas already has those, and I don’t want a Mini Cooper because I hate the environment), had three meetings, went to three talks, the best of which by far was Dallases panel. And that was just because I interrupted a lot.

We also went to the keynote, which was by some myspace founder guy, and probably the second most-famous person at the con showed up, Carson Daly.

(The most famous? Hmmm… well, I don’t see you reading the Last Call Blog, do I?)

The booths really didn’t do anything for me.. it was almost entirely places offering pre-packaged software (we use only open source or develop our own) and out-sourcing / reselling opportunities (again, we try to be as “vertically integrated” as possible, and don’t outsource anything besides our data centers and network connectivity.. plus, any add-on service we do add we develop (and fully control) ourselves).

We were a little shocked to find out that some fairly sizable hosts just use The Planet for their entire infrastructure… they don’t own any of their servers!

The talks didn’t really do anything for me.. I already knew all the gibberish Dallas was going to say.. so predictable, man!

The next talk, from a Tier1 Research guy, allowed me to self-affirm the seemingly irrational disdain I’ve always held for market research companies. His talk was entitled “Marketing Web Hosting Services in a Rapidly Transforming Market” and basically his message was “I think everybody should partner with Microsoft and other value-added resellers to make more money by offering more junk to your customers.”

Exactly what we don’t want to do.

Oh, and he also threw in for good measure “Just offering lots of disk and bandwidth isn’t going to get you any more customers.” Ah, now that actually sounds like a pretty reasonable assumption, Philbert… if only it weren’t 100% exactly WRONG! “Research” is always easier when you just declare your hypothesis correct rather than bothering to actually test it…

(Ouch, my punches are un-pulled!)

(Oh yeah, and despite what I said before, bad stuff DID happen while we were away. A $64,000 rack of NetApp storage got dropped on the loading dock by the delivery guys! The gentle curving of the rack you see above is not to reduce wind resistance.)

The last talk we went to, before we decided we had to stop for fear of death (and not by boredom actually, but by freezing in the lecture halls!) was by founder of Open Hosting, entitled “Virtual Private Server Hosting with Utility Pricing.”

I had some high hopes for this talk; at least the guy giving it actually runs a web host! Unfortunately, it turned out to pretty much be a bust. I guess there’s just not a lot of insight to be gleaned from a host with 2,000 times fewer customers than you!

Also, it turned out what this guy called “utility pricing” wasn’t anything of the sort. It wasn’t something cool like Amazon … instead, he had regular old (and not very generous) monthly plans with hefty overage fees for excess CPU and memory.

The whole point of “utility pricing” is if you don’t actually USE something, you don’t have to PAY for it! Not to still pay $19.95/month minimum no matter what! This guy has taken the worst from both worlds and combined them.. no “overselling” and yet still a high minimum monthly fee! Where’s the VALUE?

The Open Hosting guy also claimed that they were the only Linux-Vserver-based host in the U.S. Say whuuuuut?

Who Happened

On the bright side, every person we met was very nice… plus I got to taunt lunarpages, as well as eat lunch with the just-a-little-bit-less-cool-than-us Media Temple entourage. I also got to meet all my secret admirers, and let me tell you, THERE WERE A FEW.

Honestly, I guess if there’s any reason for us to ever go back to a hosting convention, apart from avoiding our smelly employees, it’d probably be the chance to try and recruit some decent “human capital”. That’s what it’s known as in the “biz”, which is what the biz is known as in the “biz.”

Oh, before I forget, there was maybe one more tiny thing that that came out of our three days in sunny Chicago. We got an idea for a brand new feature.. and it’s already ready to go!

Perhaps it was the Tier 1 guy yammering on about upselling, or maybe it was the Open Hosting guy’s illuminating discussion of Linux-Vserver, but we’re not here to play the blame game.

Nonetheless, for some reason, we’re now proud to announce our first entirely new product in a lonnnng time: the massively simple, tremendously useful, surprisingly cheap, and enticingly prestigious, currently invite-only DreamHost PS!

(Yep, DreamHost just became one more American host offering Linux-VServer. And Open Hosting just became one American host offering Linux-VServer less special.)

Photo Finish

I’ve decided.

We got a lot of reallllly bad entries to our iPhone contest, but we also got a fair number of not completely horrible ones, so I’ve decided to make a 2nd and 3rd place prize as well.

First place is still a Josh’s-forehead-greased-up 8GB iPhone, but 2nd place (and there’s an 8-way tie!) is either a $120 DH account credit or an iPod shuffle of your choice (I’ll be emailing the winners to ask their preference), and lowly 3rd place (a 7-way tie!) is still a not-entirely-shabby $50 DreamHost credit!

3rd Place

2nd Place

And now.. the winnnnnnner:

Why them?

1. They followed the instructions.
2. They did a pretty good photoshopping job.
3. They tied in the whole iPhone thing.
4. They made a PUN.
5. They used an old-school DreamHost logo.
6. They even included a flattering picture of the judge!

Congratulations, them!

Before we wrap things up, let me go ahead and give you my unsolicited impressions of the iPhone.

First off, it makes a great forehead de-greaser. The glass screen is very clear and cool to the touch, and good at sucking up grease when applied to a human forehead. Other than that, I didn’t really get to do too much to it; it’s basically a $599 skipping stone until you activate it with AT&T.

It is definitely very cool in actual person… smaller than you probably imagined and with a super bright, crisp, colorful, high-res screen. I spent several hours just sliding to unlock and then calling 911 (”Hi, just playing with my new iPhone before it’s activated! Bye!” “Me again!” “Ack, I’m being stabbed! ” “Just kidding, it was me again!” “I’d like to order 911 pizzas, please!” and so on).

Before it came out I didn’t really want one, since it doesn’t have 3G, forces you onto AT&T, and I’m happy with my indestructible phone. But, when you actually get one in your hands, all logic starts to drift to the wayside, and you get very strong urges to just RUB IT ON YOUR FOREHEAD NOW!

(An aside. I’ve always had a thing for rubbing my forehead grease on large, pristine glass surfaces. It just feels like I’m getting a good deep pore clean when I look back at the mirror, window, or whatever, and see a long streak of my oily face mess. In fact, in my last job ever before starting DreamHost (over the summer after my freshman year in college), I worked at a very small pre-press place. Every time I would go to the bathroom, I’d rub my face on the mirror while washing my hands. And, pretty much every day when I came back, the mirror would be clean again! It was great.

Then, one day, I was talking with the one other guy who worked in the shop with me and he was like “The other day, the building janitor asked me if I knew if you’d been rubbing your face on the mirror in the bathroom.” (!!!!!!!!!!!)

And I was like, “Huuuuuuuh? What are you talking about?”

“You know, haven’t you ever seen those streaks on the mirror in the bathroom? He’s been cleaning them every night, and they’re pretty high up so he figured it must have been somebody tall. And there aren’t really that many people who work on our floor. And it only started happening this summer.”

Sweat beading up on my brow, I finished the lie: “Nope, no idea.. I never noticed that! How strange.”

And we left it at that.

Fortunately, this was all on my last week of work that summer, so I was able to hold out and not do any more greasing for the rest of my tenure. However, on the very last day of work, I was seriously conflicted about whether or not to leave one, final, good-bye streak. It’s a good thing I ultimately decided against it… because as I came out of the bathroom, who just so happened to be walking by, right then? The janitor!

As soon as he saw me, his eyes lit up, and he immediately bolted into the bathroom! Oh man, the look on his face.. he was so excited to finally catch his alleged mirror-greaser in the act.

Mwahh ha ha ha ha haaaa!!

NOT TODAY, MR. JANITOR MAN, NOT TODAY!

)

As I was saying, the iPhone is pretty lust-inducing. Fortunately, in the name of the contest, I was just barely able to resist! But, my cell-phone-fever was not to be denied. Because the very next day I went and bought two of the only phone you need from T-Mobile! I thought I’d never retire my old Nokia 6010.. but this new Nokia 6086 has something going for it no other phone in America, not even the iPhone, has:

Seamless transitions between VOIP and Cellular wireless calls (via UMA)!

It’s actually pretty freaking amazing. When I’m by any free wifi, or any T-Mobile hotspot (at Starbucks, airports, and Starbucks in airports), the phone automatically switches over to making VOIP calls.. which are unlimited for free (incoming and outgoing!) .. then, when you leave the wifi range, it seamlessly switches back to the T-Mobile cellular network, even while on a call!

And it really works!

It is soooooo good.. I probably use 90% of my minutes at work or at home already (since I stopped having a land line about 8 years ago), and it means if I’m overseas, I get free unlimited calling to (and from) the US on my regular number anywhere I can find a 802.11b/g signal! It even beats Skype because it’s a regular old telephone number on a full-featured cell phone!

And you know what ELSE? I just remembered I can actually turn my laptop INTO a wifi hub, which then uses its Verizon EVDO Rev. A PCMCIA card to access the internets… so I could theoretically have free calls anywhere there’s EVDO coverage too!

I’m expecting my usage to drop to about 100 minutes a month.. and all this for only $9.95/mo extra and a $49.95 phone! However, if you hurry and go to one of these t-mobile stores at 8am tomorrow wearing a bathrobe they’ll give you the phone and a year of service ($170 value!) FREE! This thing was only launched last Wednesday!

So, what am I, some kind of T-Mobile shill? And what, now I can’t afford those expensive regular cell phone plan? Well, no, but I feel like in 4-5 years everybody’s going to be using wifi to make cell phone calls, and for like $40/month you’ll have unlimited calls to any number in the world, from anywhere in the world… and I’ll be able to say:

“I resisted wiping my forehead grease on an iPhone to be down from day one.”

Got It!

I got one!

You’ve still got 30 minutes to submit a pic!

I waited in line for THREE HOURS (fortunately I was, ahem, working the whole time) at an AT&T store, and when I was just about to get in the store they announced “We only have 4GB ones left!”

AIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!

Well, since I promised an 8GB model, I quickly hopped on the subway down to the SOHO Apple store (a guy had come by and said that everybody should go there, they had a TON and the line was SUPER FAST! But at that point I was sooo close..) and whammo, about 5 minutes later I was checking the authenticity of the box they’d given me..

So, let this be a lesson for you, old East-Coast-iPhone-Waiter. Just go to an Apple store around 8pm. They have a TON and it’ll take about five minutes.

I don’t feel bad waiting though. For all the hard work you guys are doing making those photoshopped images, it was the least I could do.

Now I’m in a cab on my way to a dinner BBQ. Hooray for EVDO! There will be one more post with more exciting pictures of the CHAMPTION iPhone later this weekend, I promise.

P.S. Everybody go buy one, I have apple stock.

Sold Out!

No, not the iPhone.

DreamHost!

That’s right, we’ve sold out!

Let me ’splain:

There are only two ways to grow a company’s revenue:

1. Get more customers.
2. Get more money from each customer.

(or 3… both 1. and 2.)

It’s been our feeling at DreamHost that we’d rather go with the former than the latter (or even both).

But why?

Mainly because you don’t have to be so sleazy when dealing with your customers, always trying to upsell them and nickle and dime them to death for extra features. People appreciate no hidden fees and no bait and switch, and by not going for #2 at all, you help #1.

And, you can always save #2 for later, if you ever reach a point where you can’t grow your existing customer base as fast as you’d like (we ain’t there yet!).. which is basically the old “get big fast and worry about monetizing later” philosophy you hear about so much in Internet start-ups.

We’re getting kinda old for a start-up (Almost a decade!), but I guess we’re still happily in that “get big slow” phase!

Let’s check out the sign up process at godaddy:

On the first page you see this at the top (among the dozens of ads for other services):

On the next step you see:

(heh, I just discovered godaddy doesn’t allow you to register domains with the string “godaddy” in them!)

Ignore everything (even MeUnemployment.com, if you can), click continue… and…

Compare that to our signup process. One page for your hosting info, and one page for your payment info.

It’s a little amazing what people will go through to save a couple of bucks a year!

You know what else is amazing? One of our support guys used to work at godaddy and guess how they measure the effectiveness of their phone support team?

I’ll give you a hint.. it’s not based on number of calls. It’s not based on customer feedback. It’s not based on random monitoring of quality. Nope, none of these things.

It’s based on sales! That’s right.. they actually treat their customer service line as a SALES team. Your job as phone support is not to help a caller with their question or issue.. it’s to upsell them on other services!

I can just imagine a typical godaddy support exchange:

godaddy: Welcome to godaddy, can I interest you in an adjustable rate home equity line of credit?
UGC: Um.. hi. Er, no? I just need some help transferring my domain registration away.
godaddy: No problem! However, it’s important when transferring your domain away that you turn on domain privacy. Would you like me to add that to your account now?
UGC: Uh.. really? I need that? I guess so if it’s required. Wait, how much is it?
godaddy: It’s really cheap, less than the cost of a latte a day! And, if you also get it with the new American Airlines Citibank Mastercard we’re offering, you can get it for even less!
UGC: Well, wait. I’m trying to transfer my domain away from you.. it doesn’t seem like I should be adding new servi..
godaddy: Don’t worry, I’ve already added the privacy for you! But with the credit card and heloc I signed you up for, you’ll actually be saving money, long term! If you can’t afford it right now, don’t worry, I ALSO just signed you up for a payday loan, and you should see your shipment of Viagra in 2-3 business days. Thanks for calling godaddy, goodbye!
UGC: Blam! (Shoots self.)

But they’re not the only one! I registered a domain with Aplus.net once just to check em out.. and look at this screen shot I took of their admin panel:

It’s crazy.. more then half their navigation is dedicated to selling you more services!

But, I can’t really blame these guys. People really do fall for these stunts, and you really do earn more money. It doesn’t hurt that when you start to get big enough, you’re approached almost daily with some amazing new opportunity that needs access to your loyal customer base.

After a while it starts to wear on you and you decide to try just one.

And you find out it really does bring in some extra cash. Not much, but hey, every little bit counts, right? And it’s at no expense to you, so it’s all profit! So you try another, and another, and another, and before you know it your business is starting to remind you of a default Dell desktop!

Long term, all this selling out can be damaging to your brand. Godaddy is huge, but (as far as I’m concerned), pretty much universally reviled. When customers start to lose their naivete, they start to realize they’ve been shelling out for a lot of junk they really didn’t need.. or at least didn’t need to pay extra for. They start to realize they’ve been taken advantage of. And that realization hurts!

Alright already… what’s this about DreamHost selling out?

Okay, enough meandering. What I’m trying to say is, we’ve been approached so many times for things we finally decided to go ahead and let some of them get through. However, we’re approaching it in the most straight-forward, un-annoying, not-invading-your-privacy, open, and passive way we could…

There’s now just one place on our panel where all of these offers will be collected. It’s the new Home > Partner Offers area (thanks for the inspiration, aplus!), and if you never visit that tab, we won’t blame you.

Besides keeping it so confined, we’re also only adding “partners” who:

1. We deem as useful to DreamHost customers specifically.
2. Offer our customers something they couldn’t just get by signing up on their own.
3. Seem at least somewhat non-skeezy to us.

We’re also doing something I bet you’ve never seen anywhere else; we’re fully disclosing whatever kickback we’re getting for each of these offers. I’m not sure how that will affect people’s decisions, if at all, but hey, anything to be different, right?

Finally, we’re launching this new area with a “partner” (imagine the double curly air fingers thing) we’re actually somewhat stoked about teaming up with… Bandwagon! It’s Mac software that costs $24 a year (they have to host your meta data or something?) that allows you to back up and sync your iTunes library with an FTP server.. a la your DreamHost account.

So, the deal is, any DreamHost customer can get a free year of Bandwagon and any Bandwagon customer can get a free year of DreamHost! Seems fair (except wait, isn’t a year of DreamHost worth five times a year of Bandwagon? WE’VE BEEN HAD!) If you want to try Bandwagon out for free for a year.. just go to that new Home > Partner Offers area, and click away!

Just what we need, everybody actually using their storage.

D is for DreamHost

Just now we had this little customer exchange:

I can’t get to one of my sites via web browser. My other sites hosted by you are available.
Happy DreamHost Customer

Hello HDC,

Sorry for the inconvenience.

However, I had no problem viewing your site from this side. I’ve
also viewed your server history and saw that no reboots were done. So
all looks well with your site from what I can see.

Please contact us if you’re still not seeing your site from your
side.

Thanks!
Kacy

Alright, we’ll just chalk it up to this guy:

Heh, that sure caught us off-guard! Hee hee… I almost wonder if he just lied about there being a problem so he could send us that!

Nonetheless, it sort of ties in nicely with the fact that we were thinking about giving away an 8GB iPhone, if only we could come up with a good reason to!

You see, ever since I heard about this guy camping out for an iPhone since Monday morning, I thought it’d be fun to camp out for one myself. Not have one, mind you, just camp out.

I’m perfectly happy with my Nokia 6010 on T-Mobile (although this is intriguing) .. mostly because I can drop it out a third story window, watch it explode into a dozen plastic pieces, and then put it back together and make a call. In fact, that’s exactly what I do every day when leaving work, just so I don’t have to lug it down the elevator.

(Aside: when I heard that somebody was already camping out on Monday, I thought to myself: “That’s insane! They estimate there will be 3 million iPhones available at launch. And anyway, isn’t the point of camping out to minimize your time in line while still guaranteeing you get one of the items? In fact, wouldn’t you have to be a little insane to be the first person in any camp-out line? If nobody else is waiting yet, why would you need to?” Honestly, I really did think that whole thing.

Well, this answers my question! There is a benefit to being the insane first person in line.. you get interviewed by the local news!)

Anyway, I was inspired. I promise I’ll be getting one of them thar 8GB iPhone’s tomorrow.. as soon as I see somebody else camped out in front of my local AT&T store, I’ll line up right behind them, with my laptop, EVDO, extra battery, and faithful hound in tow.

And then, after taking it out of the box and ogling it for a couple hours, I’m going to just give it away!

But to whom?!

Hmm. How about… to whoever posts in the comments of this post a link to the (photoshopped?) image that best illustrates (in my sole opinion) the cause for mysterious DreamHost downtime! The cuter the better, the cleverer the better, the cornier the better, the DreamHost logo-ier the better.

So far, that Cookie Monster one above is winning!

The deadline for the comment post is 6pm PDT, tomorrow, Friday June 29th, 2007; west-coast iPhone launch moment!

…

GO!

(P.S. The winner will have to activate the iPhone themselves with one of AT&T’s plans. Or re-sell it on ebay or craigslist.)

Shameful Plug

I am so ashamed.

And yet flattered.

I SWEAR I didn’t nominate us myself. The blogger’s choice awards ain’t no digg!

And they ain’t no Golden Globes either. These are the top-notch, no-hold-barred, keeps-the-homeless-away, freeekin’ OSCARS of the blog award industry, no doubt! Who cares if they’re run by blogosphere pariahs pay-per-post: working hard to commercialize what used to be all about the art of what I ate today, man.

And with the type of high-class, bourgeoisie, bathtub-filled-with-perrier web hosting and blog-writing establishment we run here, we wouldn’t accept a nomination for anything less.

So please, click both of those beautiful icons above and go through all the registration mambo-jambo (you could use spam.la to fake your email address) to vote for us.

It’d be so great to win because:

1. My ego is almost as low as my blood sugar after being on South Beach for a week. If we win, I will eat a spaghetti.
2. If we win, YOU will be the kind of person who signed up with a web host and even read their blog before they were famous and sucky.
3. The awards (solid diamond) will be given out in Las Vegas on my mom’s (Joan Jones) birthday, and my mom loves her some Cheetahs. I mean Spamalot.

Then, in September I really hope somebody nominates us for The Weblog Awards and then in January somebody else nominates us for a Bloggie.

Don’t worry, I already submitted us for a BloggY.