It happens.

Customers leave DreamHost and old customers come back to DreamHost. Every day.

It happens to us, and it happens to other hosts.

It’s an endless cycle of creation, destruction, and rebirth.

It keeps things interesting and it keeps us on our toes.

There are many reasons for customer churn. Pricing, features, service levels, and positions on hot political issues are just some of the many criteria that a discriminating hosting customer might look for when selecting a home for their website.

“SOPA” has been in the news a lot lately. It’s a piece of legislation that threatens the very nature of the Internet. DreamHost opposes SOPA. Many web hosts do. But not all.

The Save Hosting Coalition explains why SOPA is bad for web hosts. And americancensorship.org explains what’s wrong with SOPA in a great infographic.

If your host has rubbed you the wrong way about SOPA or any other issue, allow us to lather you up with this special offer…

It’s a great way to get yourself up and out of a bad hosting situation, and in to the loving arms of DreamHost – lovers of open-source software, WordPress, free speech, freedom on the Internet, puppies, kittens, and candy.

Hey, Mac. Have I got a deal for you.

Yes, you!

If you’ve not considered signing up for dedicated hosting with us in the past, now might be a good time…to start considering it!

For a limited time we’re offering our Blue Moon 4 dedicated server package (normally $169/mo) for the price of a Half Moon 4 ($139/mo).

We’ll also throw in a free 13th month of service for no reason at all.

Sign up now to get a quad-core, RAID 1-enabled powerhouse for the price of a dual-core, non-RAIDed, not-as-good-(but-still-pretty-good) dedicated server.

New customers only.

We’re down to our last JackBack. It could be yours…

Just follow these simple steps!

• Take the last four digits of our FAX number.
• Subtract the year in which dreamhost.com was registered.
• Add in the amount of money we would pay affiliates for sending us three direct referrals using the “one-time payment” option.
• Add the year that Dan Johnson was deploying crickets in the government sector.
• Subtract the date in the month of July when Simon Anderson became DreamHost’s CEO.
• Multiply by the first two digits of our “Community Manager” job posting’s tracking code.
• Subtract the monthly cost of configuring 2800 MB of RAM on a DreamHost VPS.
• Subtract the year we became an ICANN-accredited domain registrar.
• Divide by the number of requests per second DreamHost.com received while we were hosting the “Draw Mohammad Day” website.
• Make yourself a stiff drink.
• Call your mother. Tell her you love her.
• Bathe. Please.
• Post your final number in the comments below.

We’ll ship this lovely piece of phone augmentation to the first correct answer we see.

Be sure to list a valid email address so we can contact you if you’ve won!

UPDATE 9/1/2011
You guys solved this one in no time!

The JackBack goes to “Joe” who posted the correct answer first: 21.0204

Joe, keep an eye on your email!

Because my math teachers always taught me to show my work, here are the answers:

9098
-1997
+97+97+97
+2009
-11
*45
-140
-2002
/20000
=
21.0204

Some days we felt downright ugly. The truth of the matter is we were just old. Stale. Aspercremey. Prone to hip breakage.

Five years ago we were smokin’ hot! But, let’s face it, time marches on and things can’t always look as good as we used to think they did. Everything that once dangled or bobbed sags southward eventually, and all we could do was sit there feeling sorry for ourselves and watch as the months ticked by.

One day something clicked and we decided we’d had enough! So we did what everyone in Southern California does.

We paid someone to just start cutting.

And sculpting. And suturing. Cutting some more. And sculpting some more. And suturing some more.

For a while there we were a bloody mess and couldn’t even recognize ourselves! But the wounds have healed, we’ve got a spring in our step, and our face has never been more handsome.

We’d like to thank our friends over at Bolton Design for their hard work in deciphering the ramblings and stream-of-consciousness fallout from our many brainstorm meetings.

They took all of that insanity and transformed it all into a functional, helpful, easy-on-the-eyes website that we’re proud to have in place at dreamhost.com.

Like so many who have gone under the knife, we were empty inside. Our souls were dead. Our self-esteem was at an all-time-low. No matter how many times people told us we were pretty, we could never believe it because we lacked the emotional capacity to take pride in ourselves or our accomplishments.

Our cosmetic makeover was really just a way for us to mask a much deeper problem. For years our website was served up by static HTML pages – boring, lifeless HTML pages. It was bit of a maintenance nightmare but we always told ourselves that it was “good enough.”

No longer.

DreamHost.com is now powered by WordPress.

You heard me. We’re all-WordPress, all-the-time over here.

WordPress may have started out as a blogging platform, but it has since grown into something much larger. We happen to find that it’s pretty great as a content management system, too!

We hope you like the changes. We sure do!

We commissioned a small fleet of these pedal-powered taxis to get people around the city during HostingCon 2011, helping to reduce the city’s carbon footprint if only for a small time.

It also meant that the DreamHost logo was never more than a head-turn away during HostingCon. That was nice, too.

People-powered transportation fits in nicely with our green sensibilities, so these were kind of a no-brainer for us.

Here’s DreamHost CEO, Simon Anderson, showing us how it’s done!

Thanks to Yellow Bike Cab of San Diego for coming through on these. We couldn’t have been happier with the final result.

Our love for WordPress and its vibrant community of users, developers, and evangelists knows no bounds.

We’ve watched WordPress grow both in featureset and popularity over the years and have been proud to include it as a staple offering of our one-click software installer.

Which is why we’ve chosen to this year become a “Bling Bling” sponsor of WordCamp San Francisco 2011, going on right now at the Mission Bay Conference Center.

If you’re attending WordCamp this weekend be sure to stop by the DreamHost booth to meet our most WordPress-savvy employees. They may even invite you to a little after-hours get-together that we’re hosting Saturday night.

We’re proud to be associated with WordCamp San Fransisco and can’t wait to meet up with all of you!

Yep, there it is.

We recently had Adam over at JackBacks put together a few custom iPhone 4 backs for us. Is this not beautiful?

That’s our logo laser-etched into real, carved walnut.

Because this is a back replacement and not simply a cover, it adds no thickness at all to the phone.

Two screws are all it takes to pop the old backing off and get the new one on there, snug and secure. These particular backs are designed to fit onto black GSM iPhone 4 devices.

We didn’t buy these for ourselves. Oh, no. We would never spend that kind of money on ourselves.

We bought these for YOU. It’s much better to give than receive, and we’re giving!

We’ll be giving away a few of these little beauties in the weeks to come. How and where is a closely guarded secret.

Just keep an eye on us throughout the month of August for your chance to win.

Want a hint?

Follow @DreamHost, @DreamHostCare, and @dhstatus. Like DreamHost on Facebook. Bookmark this blog or, better yet, subscribe to its RSS feed.

Those are just suggestions. You don’t have to do any of that.

But it might help.

If you didn’t know exactly what you were doing going into the process you could easily spend weeks learning how to manage inventory, accept credit cards, and even do something as simple as change your store’s color scheme.

Our customers have approached us regularly for ECommerce assistance, and we’ve never really been able to point them toward an all-in-one ECommerce solution that was easy-to-use, feature-filled, and affordable.

Today we’re happy to pull the curtain off of CafeCommerce, an extremely comprehensive ECommerce system developed by our friends at WebAssist.

CafeCommerce launches today and we’re happy to have been chosen as their exclusive launch partner. Our two development teams have been working closely for months to ensure that CafeCommerce provides the absolute best ECommerce experience for DreamHost customers.

CafeCommerce includes more than a dozen different themes (with more on the way) created by professional designers to give your online storefront that “lived in” look, and each theme can be customized using CafeCommerce’s built-in graphical editor. Color, layout, and fonts can all be changed site-wide – immediately – with nothing more than just a few mouse clicks.

You can sell physical products, digital goods, and even services with Cafe Commerce. You can easily accept credit cards, manage products, view orders, and connect with your customers – all by using CafeCommerce’s built-in management tools.

In addition to its own reporting tools, CafeCommerce was designed to easily integrate with other tracking systems like Google Analytics or Crazy Egg.

And because CafeCommerce stores run on the DreamHost infrastructure, there are of course no limits at all on disk space or bandwidth, so you can comfortably grow your business without worrying about unexpected charges later on down the line.

All this functionality comes in at a flat rate of just $30 per month.

Oh sure, there are some ECommerce competitors that may appear to come close to that $30 price point, but they’ll snag you down the line with inconceivable limitations and heinous fees that are structured to essentially bleed you dry the second you start actually making money.

They’ll take a percentage of every transaction!
They’ll limit the number of items you can stock in your inventory!
They’ll even limit the amount of disk space your stores can take up! How are you supposed to store hundreds of high-resolution product images with only 100 megs?

There are no such limitations with CafeCommerce. From the get-go you’ll be able to establish a web store with an unlimited number of
- Products & Images
- Customers (kind of important!)
- Store Administrators
- Pages
- Categories and Sub-Categories
- Transactions
…all for a flat rate of just $30 per month.

You’ll also get access to chat-based support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

It just makes no sense to look elsewhere! CafeCommerce’s flat-rate pricing is a bargain! And we’re not just saying that because we went in on this together! It’s truly the most affordable, feature-filled commercial ECommerce software we’ve found.

Both current and new DreamHost customers can sign up today for a fully-featured two-week free trial!

CafeCommerce is incredibly powerful, extremely customizable, and absolutely affordable – we don’t think you’ll need two weeks to figure that out, but go give it a try and see for yourself.

If the free trial doesn’t convince you that CafeCommerce is the solution to all of your ECommerce problems, I’ve got good news and bad news.
The bad news is that you’re wrong.
The good news is that you can safely cancel your CafeCommerce account within the trial period and owe nothing.

Check it out!

Want to learn about Ceph, the latest and greatest scalable Linux file system?  Attend DreamHost co-founder Sage Weil’s talk titled, “CEPH: Petabyte Scale Storage for Large- and Small-scale Deployments” on Sunday, February 27, 2011.  There you’ll get a dose of redundant file system rapture as you learn how to configure your own storage cloud.

If securing web applications is more up your alley, security guru Robert Rowley will be giving his talk, “Securing Web Applications for System Administrators,” on Saturday February 26th at 4:30 PM.  There you’ll learn the most common attack vectors against web apps and the best defenses – in no time, you’ll have your applications locked up tighter than Shawshank… err Alcatraz.

The Southern California Linux Expo will be held at the LAX Hilton from February 25th to February 27th and organizers expect more than 1500 people to attend.  Mingling with thousands of Linux geeks, blowing out your eardrums listening to landing jumbo jets and eating tasty burgers at In-and-Out on Sepulveda Blvd, what more could you really ask for in a weekend?

How much would you expect to pay for an event of such magnitude?  A million Dollars? A star in DreamHost’s name?  How about a paltry $70?  Too expensive you say?  For a limited time, we are offering you a super-duper secret, Julian Assange-proof discount code: “DREAM” good for 50% off the registration fee.  Heck at that price, buy two tickets – one for you and one for your imaginary Valentine.

The votes are in, the dust has settled, and we have our winners!

The grand prize winner of a 17″ MacBook Pro (USA model) is:

concrete5 (avg: 4.611 stars) concrete5 is a CMS that makes running a website easy. Go to any page in your site and an editing toolbar gives you all the controls you need to make changes.

Our three second-place winners of 8GB iPod Touches (USA model) are:

	Textpattern CMS (avg: 4.444 stars) A flexible, elegant and easy-to-use CMS
	Omeka (avg: 4.409 stars) Create complex narratives and share rich collections, adhering to Dublin core standards with Omeka on your server, designed for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and enthusiasts.
	ecoder (avg: 4.069 stars) ecoder is an open-source web-based code editor with real-time colour syntax highlighting. It allows multiple documents to be edited directly online at the same time.

Our five runners-up and winners of 3G Kindles (USA model) are:

	GetSimple CMS (avg: 3.938 stars) GetSimple is an open source CMS that utilizes the speed and convenience of XML, a best-in-class UI and the easiest learning curve of any simple Content Management System out there.
	XODA (avg: 3.882 stars) XODA is a simple Document Management System targeting end-users and also developers.
	Friendika (avg: 3.833 stars) Friendika is a distributed social network application which runs on commodity hosting platforms – PHP/MySQL/Apache.
	ComicCMS (avg: 3.500 stars) ComicCMS runs and manages your webcomic website. Really well. It’s powerful and easy!
	Contao (avg: 3.176 stars) Contao is an open source content management system (CMS) for people who want a professional internet presence that is easy to maintain.

Congratulations to all the winners! Every one of these apps is impressive in its own right.

If you’ve not had a chance to experiment with any of them, please do! We know you’ll like what you see.

If you submitted one of the apps listed above keep an eye on your email box – we’ll be contacting you this week with more information.

And of course, keep an eye on our one-click installer as new apps are added regularly throughout 2011 and beyond!