Zero C!

I have been to the future.

It’s a very well known future, one everybody knows is coming, and yet, it is still, frustratingly, not here.

It’s not the future of nano-bots, flying cars, and hamburger toothpaste that some predict. Nor is it the future of sex-bots, self-driving cars, and hamburger frosties that others believe in. As pleasing as those two possible futures are, they are not the universally accepted inevitability that this future is.

No, this is the future of ubiquitous wireless high-speed INTERNET! Everybody knows that day will eventually arrive, it’s just a matter of when, and through what vessel.

Whether it be an 802.11 mesh, cell phone technology, sattelites, wi-max, that new spectrum Google was bidding on, or some as-yet unknown future technology, I think it’s a pretty much a forgotten conclusion that by the Year 2000, everywhere you go will have wireless high-speed connectivity, and nobody’s going to pay for it.

And of course, everybody knows that’ll be pretty cool. I mean, everybody who’s already got EVDO service (*cough cough*) knows how great it is to have a fast usable Internet connection with you at all times. It’s great because it’s fast, portable, and reliable… but for most people it’s just not $80 a month great.

But, just as cell phones have supplanted landline phones, so will “cellular” Internet replace the “landline” Internet. Once it gets price-competitve (and FREE is very competitive) no long-term contracts or cancellation fees on the planet will be able to hold back the tsunami of people rushing to escape their local telco and cable company.

You see, apart from the reliability, portability, and convenience advantages that wide-area wireless internet provides, there’s one other pro… a little something I like to call “ZERO C”

I’m not talking about the temperature in Boston right now, either. I’m talking about Zero Configuration!

Currently, to get the Internet set up at your home or office, you’ve got to have a service man come and set things up.

Then, to share that internet throughout your multitude of computers, video game systems, slingboxes, iPhones, and refrigerators, you’ve got to set up a not-exactly-something-your-mom-can-do home network.

Then, whenever a friend comes over with their laptop, they never seem to be able to get on the net without your help.

Then, whenever the cable modem drops out in the middle of the final game of a Bomberman Live match, all Time Warner has to say is “everything looks okay on our side“.

Then, whenever you’ve been using your Airport Express for too long, the music cuts out and you’ve got to unplug it, wait fifteen seconds, and plug it back in.

Then, your wireless never seems to reach to the guest bedroom reliably.

Then, you’ve got ugly cat-5 ethernet everywhere.

Then, once every two months you’ve got to do a firmware upgrade on everything for “stability” and re-do the whole thing..

But now think… what if every device you ever bought was always reliably connected to the Internet at high-speed, no matter what, for free?

You’d never have to deal with Time Warner Cable or Verizon DSL again.

You wouldn’t have to set up or manage or worry about a home network.

Visitors would already be on the Internet everywhere they went, just like you are.

Your Xbox 360 would always be able to connect to Xbox Live.

Your airport express would always stream your music reliably, and you could control it from anywhere in the world.

Everything would still work in the guest bedroom.

You would have no cat-5 cables, anywhere.

Devices could automatically get firmware upgrades because the manufacturer would always know they’d be reliably on the net, since it was free and just automatically worked.

However, as I was saying in the beginning… I’ve already been to this future. And my vessle was..

The Amazon Kindle

That’s right, this humble, $400, sold-out e-reader, is our first baby-step to technology nirvana!

Because I wanted to check it out, I got my wife a Kindle for her birthday in January, and the coolest thing about it is its barely-mentioned “whisper net”.

Shhhhh… this “whisper net” is just Amazon hiding the fact that the Kindle comes with Sprint’s 3G EVDO service for free. I’m not sure what kind of deal Amazon made with Sprint, but …. THIS …. IS …. AWESOME.

Because it’s just ALWAYS on the Internet, everywhere, the thing is like magic… and super-easy for moms and (I assume) grandmoms to use. There’s no settings, no account to create, no monthly bill, no passwords, no nothing. Just a physical switch on the back to “turn the internet on” and you’re buying e-books and browsing the full Internet at a perfectly usable speed.

Once the Kindle costs $99 instead of $399 (and there’s no waiting list), it (or something like it) is going to mop the floor as a super-cheap “internet appliance” that “just works” for “people that are old”.

My hats off to Amazon for truly making the first device that is truly always on of the Internet. By making it free, they’ve guaranteed that as long as a Kindle is working, it’s on the net.

Just imagine the other ZERO C possibilities ubiquitous, free, high-speed Internet would bring!

How sweet would it be for your next digital camera to have? No more worrying about sd cards, usb cables, or emailing your pics… the moment you take a pic, it’s backed up to some picture hosting site, shared with the world and freed from your camera’s internal memory. As a bonus, all pics you’ve ever taken would be able to be called up and previewed right from your camera’s (not-so) little LCD screen.

How awesome would it be to have a free-EVDO skype handset? That’s it for paying for cell phone calls.. and it’d be so easy to get everybody to switch from the archaic POTS system to voip when there was finally a no-monthly-fee cell phone that worked everywhere their existing cell did.

How cowabunga would it be to have a Nintendo DS with this? Anytime you’re sitting around, riding on the bus, like I am now, but uninspired from writing any meandering blog posts, you could whip it out, do a couple Mario Kart races, and then when you realize you forgot your Dr. Mario cartridge at home, shortly thereafter remember that there are no cartridges anymore, every game is just streamed directly from your account on Nintendo’s servers!

Anyway, yep, that’d all be very awesomely cowabungifiededly sweet.. but it’s still a ways off. In the meantime, I hope this little ZERO C fix will hold you.

We’ve finally made a true one-click install process, which is the way I always envisioned our one-clicks would work from the beginning, several long years ago.

Just go to our panel’s one-click installer area, and click the new “easy” mode.

From there, you just choose the domain or sub-domain you want to use and give your new site a name, click the submit button, and in literally under five minutes, you’ll get an email when everything’s done.

Previously, you’d have to already have set-up the domain or sub-domain you wanted, and you’d have create or pick a database you wanted to use, and then when you got the email there’d be some more software package-specific installation steps for you to complete.

NO MORE!

This time, one click really means ONE CLICK!

When you get that email, you are done.

It is only available for WordPress now, but believe it or not, this new one-click process we have is actually easier to implement for future software packages than the old way, so it shouldn’t be long at all before we fill in the portfolio with lots of other yummy goodies.

The only downside is, the easy mode actually hosts all the software on a centralized, load-balanced service we’ve set up, rather than in your normal webspace. This means that any customizing that requires changing files won’t be doable. Fortunately, most software packages keep all the customization you’d want to do in the database these days, so this isn’t really that big of a restraint.

The upside is no maintenance (we handle all upgrades), hopefully better reliability and performance (as it’s now effectively a “hosted” service as opposed to a local install), and of course…

ZERO C!

Two Troubling Techniques This Time

Welcome back to this week’s (and the final) edition of Friday illiterative lists!

Two business practices of pretty big-name companies came to my attention this week that I thought were too underhanded/sleazy not to be shared/copied.

#1. Sending something via FedEx Express Saver:

On Tuesday I had to FedEx some stuff from downtown Los Angeles to Chino. It’s only 36.5 miles so I figured, why not save a buck (or twenty?) and choose “Express Saver” .. it must be cheaper and it must get there in the same amount of time when we’re this close!

Wrongo! I guess FedEx really doesn’t want to cannibalize their overnight delivery sales for packages that aren’t going so far. So much so that they will actually ship an envelope from LA to MEMPHIS on its way back to Chino!

#2. Checking a domain’s availability via Network Solutions:

Now I didn’t do this. But a fair number of our customers must still remember way back when Network Solutions was the only registrar, and for some reason go to their site to check the availability of domains before attempting to register them with us.

BIG MISTAKE!

Since at least January 8th, any (non-gibberish) domain you decide to just CHECK availability for via their site, Network Solutions GOES AHEAD AND REGISTERS!

Although undoubtably sleazy, this maybe wouldn’t be sooo terrible if NetSol wasn’t still charging $35/year!

I’d actually thought about this a while ago. I thought, “If *I* were a good-for-nothing cyber-squatter, I’d set up a registrar, advertise insanely cheap rates, and then whenever anybody went to check or register a domain with me, I’d just register it for myself and then offer it to them for much more!”

But then I thought, “What about when people caught on? They’d come and check completely fake domains they never wanted, and then I’d be out the $7 a year for all these worthless domains!”

Of course, all this was way before ICANN’s Add Drop Grace Period (AGP) came into effect. The AGP provides registrars with a five-day grace period to delete a domain they’ve “mistakenly” registered and to get all their money back. The original purpose was to help people out when they make typos or when a registrar is the victim of fraud; noble enough goals.

In practice, the AGP has resulted in “Domain Tasting,” the numerous ill side-effects including:

Allowing Net S.O.L. to actually implement this practice at no financial risk.

Allowing the “Drop-Catching” business to thrive… currently 100% of expired .com/net domains are re-registered immediately by cyber-squaters and AdSense fiends.

Allowing these skuz-buckets to register hundreds of thousands of domains a day, testing their typo-traffic-potential, and then deleting hundreds of thousands that don’t make at least $7 a year.

Allowing these skuz-buckets to actually only require a domain to make 42 cents a year to be profitable… even the domains they intend to keep, they go ahead and delete every five days. And then immediately re-register. That way, they’re never out the $7/year.. they’re only out the interest they could be earning on the money they have to keep with Verisign in order to keep their zillions of domains in perpetual register/delete/re-register limbo!

In practice, the noble goals that the AGP hoped to solve are just not very big problems. If you’re a “legit” domain-registering entity and you typo a domain: you’re out a few bucks. It’s your fault, c’est la vie. If you’re a registrar and you’re being massively frauded every day (as we are), you quickly develop techniques to find and fight fraud and you prevent suspicious domains from even getting registered in the first place.

The AGP as it is now hardly ever saves us any money from fraud, because the vast majority of bunk registrations we catch before we even submit them, and the rest we don’t catch until long after the five days have already passed!

There is a bright side to all of this! Thanks primarily to Network Solutions’ ballsy new policy, ICANN decided last week to finally end Domain Tasting!

Hooray! This is good news for the Internet, bad news for Google!

Good thing I sold all my Google yesterday and bought Yahoo!

Good thing I wish I sold all my Google yesterday and bought Yahoo!

A Strike on One Laptop Per Child

The writers strike continues, and so do I. This is my third strike in a row, a turkey in the parlance of our times, which I now offer to you in the belated spirit of Thanksgiving.

The real turkey however, is the target of my now hardly-notorious STIKES.. the one laptop per child project.

For those less charitably-minded, let me explain the project a little. A few years ago Nicholas Negroponte, already hardly-notorious for his crazy Wired columns and being director of the the MIT Media Lab, decided that what would most benefit the poorest children of the world is not basic necessities and safe living conditions (like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet believe), but consumer electronics!

A Great Idea!

I believe this all started back in 2005, and I guess the main idea was to make a sub-$100 “laptop” that used very little power (so little as to be able to be hand-cranked back to life), but would at the same time catapult poverty-ravaged children into the 21st century! The laptop would have to be durable, easy-to-use, keep kids interested, and include learning software that could replace expensive books.

The lucky millions of children who got to use these laptops would get all this great “computer experience” and so be more ready to compete in the REAL WORLD when they happened to not die of starvation first.

A Great Idea?

Unfortunately, there are only two practical advantages to giving third-world children laptops:

There could possibly be savings compared to current textbooks and learning materials.

The children could gain familiarity with the most important tool in the modern world: the computer.

Well, it’s almost three years later, and what’s finally come out of the project is a $200 laptop, that runs some custom learning software on a custom operating system with custom hardware.

And frankly, the third-world is no longer interested! Despite being promised orders of several million from such reputable countries as Libya and Nigeria, so far Negroponte has only delivered 2,000 laptops so far, and has total orders for less than 200,000… many of those to rich westerners!

On top of that, Microsoft and Intel have teamed up to offer the ClassMate, a real-deal laptop running actual Windows for just a bit more than the crazy, custom, non-standard OLPC is turning out to actually cost. Negroponte is crying foul and saying, “They don’t care about the children … they’re just selling these things at a loss to protect their market share!”

Well Duh

Duh, Nicholas. If they cared about the children they wouldn’t be making cheap laptops for them at all.. they’d be starting foundations to train teachers and start schools and buy books and provide water and medicine and all that other boring stuff. But that’s not what Intel and Microsoft are for. That’s what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is for.

Intel and Microsoft are for making computer hardware and software (and dominating while they do it).

How in the world did you think you could start a company with 20 people and beat the entire computer industry that’s been doing this for decades and decades? And how in the world did you think you could beat them on price?

What To Do

Don’t worry Nicholas, it’s not your fault. You’re a bold thinker, and bold thinkers don’t get that way by worrying about details.

I, however, am an italics thinker! And italics thinkers get that way by being practical and worrying about details. Fortunately for you, I am now going to give you some italics advice for free.. as long as you promise to follow it.

One Nintendo DS Per Child!

Give up on selling the hardware! You’ve said so yourself, “I’m not good at selling laptops, I’m good at selling ideas!”

You’ve already done the hard part and convinced at least some people that what the poorest children in the world need are home electronics.. now it’s time to let somebody with some experience fulfill the manufacturing.

The Nintendo DS is literally perfect for your needs:

It’s cheap. ($129… and I’m sure if you order 150 million Nintendo will cut you a deal.)

It’s power-efficient. (Easily lasts 14 hours on a single charge, even with the screen bright enough to be seen in direct sunlight.. there’s even a hand-crank charger!)

It’s a computer. (All advantages to be gained by giving a young child a laptop are also gained by giving a child a DS. Just by using a DS they’ll become confident and “fluent” in the use of technology, and future “real” computer use will come much much easier. Worked for me!)

It’s got wi-fi. (In fact, it even does ad-hoc networking, and allows downloading content from one host DS to all the others.. just the teacher could have the lesson plan on their DS and wirelessly beam it to all the students at the start of each class!)

It’s rugged. (Nintendo’s been making toys for actual children for over 100 years and Game Boys have survived actual wars.)

It’s powerful enough. (If it can handle Mario Kart tournaments, it can handle Multipli Kation tables.)

It’s small and has a touch screen. (Like the iPhone. Just like laptops have replaced the desktop, in the future ever smaller portable electronics will replace the laptop. Why teach on antiquated technology?)

It’s forward-compatible. (Nintendo’s portable systems have very long life cycles. Any software you write for the DS will very likely still be runable on the hardware they’re selling in a decade.)

Children love it. (You want a teaching tool that’s “fun to use?” You want a teaching tool that’s “collaborative” You’ve hit “the jackpot.”)

It’s a world-wide standard. (Over 53 MILLION have been sold already. The platform has thousands of developers. The future leaders of the developed world are growing up playing Nintendo DS.. why give the future leaders of the developing world anything less?)

It’s already used for education. (Millions use their DS to learn a language, develop logic skills, practice cooking, learn math, read books, research, and browse the web every day!)

It worked for Japan. (Since the original Game Boy was released in 1989, Japanese GDP has grown over half a trillion dollars, which is clearly 100% attributable to the device.)

For Reals

So please, Mr. Negroponte, hear my plea! Give up on the laptop, and just make a Nintendo DS cartridge with your educational software on it!

If only you’d done this from the start, you would have had your hardware already and maybe a couple million African kids would be on their way to a digital future years ago.

It’s not too late though.. switch your “buy one get one” promotion to be DSes now, and you could have that couple million yet! You could even partner with Nintendo and make a “special edition” DS you can only get through your program.

I suggest it have this picture on it, in honor of the italic thinker who made it all possible:

Josh Jones

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.)

Schadenfreude

Almost exactly a year ago today, DreamHost experienced its last unplanned power outage.

Last ever?

Last ever so far! Who knows what the future holds? (Besides me.)

But for now, I’m just glad the present has been a little better for DreamHost customers than for 365 Main’s!

Because in case you hadn’t heard or noticed, power outages in San Francisco today caused downtime at Craigslist, Technorati, TypePad, LiveJournal, Yelp, RedEnvelope, and more!

Who here is glad DreamHost is in sunny, safe, earthquake, mudslide, forest fire, riot, tsunami-free, Los Angeles now? And who here is publicly enjoying that 365 Main is not?

Here’s a big hint: he’s really good looking and wrote this post.

Of course, the real reason we had no problems is not because our data center is finally super reliable, or that Los Angeles itself never has so much as a cloudy day, or even that we’re just lucky.

It’s because I am in Chicago at HostingCon and so am temporarily unable to break anything.

Of course, that’s not really true either. I’m not in Chicago; as everyone knows, I’m a compulsive liar. In fact, this statement is a lie.

But, even if I was at hosting con (and everybody knows we don’t go to hosting conventions), my ability to break DreamHost systems knows no boundary of time or space, and strikes at any time, usually without warning and definitely without mercy.

Why were we were spared this time?

The honest truth is that any data center can, at any time and for any reason, no matter what precautions they take, have an outage! You’d think making a reliable data center would be a lot easier than making a reliable software service, seeing as how it’s all just power cables, air conditioning, and gasoline.

And yet somehow, it seems like all even the best and most expensive data centers can do is make the outages a little less frequent.

What IS a poor host to do?

Nothing, really.

I mean, the only way you can really achieve “five nines” uptime is by having an entire architecture designed around the assumption that ANYTHING can fail… and at the worst possible time. Duh.

However, like most Las Vegas escorts, that sort of redundancy does not come easily. Or cheap. And the truth of the matter is unless you’re Google, most likely an entire day of downtime once a year is not going to cost you as much as it would to truly prevent it.

In fact, I wish there were some low-reliability data centers out there! I bet if somebody made an ultra low-cost data center, one that provided “adequate” cooling, network, and power capacity, but no UPS, fire-suppression, generators, crazy physical security, or extra earthquake protection, they would clean UP.

They could probably charge around half of any data center I’ve ever seen, and I bet with only twice the downtime… and that would be very appealing.

I mean, think about it… how many of you could deal with an extra day of downtime per year for half the price? Heck, you’d probably be fine with FOUR days of downtime a year if it meant 75% off.. but would you pay double to save 12 hours of downtime a year? Would you pay FOUR times as much to save 18? Eight times as much to save 21?

That’s pretty much how it works, and I’m guessing not a lot of you would.

Of course, maybe I’m over-estimating the cost savings of skimping on redundancy in a data center a little, and maybe I’m under-estimating the reliability hit a tiny bit. On the other hand, my blog posts have never been wrong before.

AND, if somebody did come out with a “Crap-of-the-Art” data center, it’d make it a lot more feasible for those who really need reliability to get two; thereby keeping all their company’s eggs out of one risqué basket.

In fact, what we’ve been doing over the last year is breaking our system down into smaller and smaller isolated “clusters,” and distributing them between three data centers (all in LA). The idea being, data centers will go down.. let’s at least try and keep the eggs in our other baskets un-scrambled. And since we’re not really counting on much reliability from them anyway, it sure would be nice if those data centers all charged a lot less!

Of course our network still has a single (though redundant) point of failure, but we are working towards eventually making each data center a complete stand-alone “node”… some day.

This day, however, I think I’ll just go to bed… while taking pleasure in the fact that it was somebody else this time!

Friggatriskaidekaphobia

Usually I’m no triskaidekaphobiac, but I already know it’s going to be a very unlucky day for me today; the 13th of the month.

Not only that, I don’t know about you folks in Europe and Asia and Africa and Mexico, but right now, this July, in America, the 13th is falling on a Friday!

And everybody universally knows (even Thetans) that bad things happen on Friday the 13th.

Especially for me. Especially today.

Why?

Because today is my wife’s last day at her job. She’s retiring at the ripe old age of 30 from cancer biology to start a floral design business.

I, on the unfortunate hand, am not retiring. In fact, I’m going to have to work about 8% HARDER.. just to make up for the lost income! And, if she decides to spend any of her extra free time not designing florals but instead buying, in a month or two I estimate I’m going to have to be working about 800% HARDER!

And that’s where the web hosting angle of this post comes in. (I still feel an inexplicable urge that I need to tie my posts into Web Hosting at least a smidge.)

You see, as unlucky as it is for me to start working 800% harder, it’s doubly unlucky for you, Happy DreamHost Customer.

It’s well known in business. Wait, scratch that.. it’s well known in the Web Hosting business. Okay, sheesh.. it’s well known in the DreamHost Web Hosting business, that things work best when the Honchos are on vacation.

It always seems as though the moment I start messing with anything, just trying to whip up some random boring newsletter feature, the rest of the company goes irrationally bonkers.

JUST because I don’t notify them first? JUST because I don’t test things even once before I copy them live? JUST because it causes hundreds upon thousands of unnecessary support cases, that could have been avoided if only I’d rolled it out a tiny bit more gradually?

Seems a bit unfair to me, all that hate. I just ask that everybody wait one day before passing judgement, please!

Everything I do, I do only to mercilessly crush our competition! And that’s to everyone’s benefit. Especially mine my wife’s.

But really, as nice as it is to sit back and your tray table in their upright and locked position, it doesn’t really make any sense! And I’m not just talking about that sentence. What I mean is if, like mine, your goal is to ruthlessly crush all those inferior, it doesn’t make any sense to sit back and blog post all the time when you could be working 800% HARDER to make some crazy new feature that breaks everything… at first!

But at second, things start to heal… and, just like a torn ACL, they heal stronger. And with more money. And blog posts. And wives.

What am I babbling about?

Well, the real take home message is that I should probably lay off the wine before writing this stuff. Really, I should just lay off the wine before seven in the morning, period. That’s rum time.

Anyway, I think I’ve sort of made this point before, and I don’t want my posts to start repeating themselves so soon in my blogging career, so I’d better come up with an original point before I wrap things up.

And uh, that is, that, er.. how about: we stopped decreasing disk and bandwidth quotas for new signups!

Does that mean “our precious rep is restored?” I dunno, maybe a little? Maybe a little more will be restored in a fortnight, when it’ll have finally been a full year since our last (unplanned) power outage?

Aw yeah. That’ll be pretty sweet. Our competitors must now be trembling in their homeless shelters!

Oh yeah, that also reminds me: July 23rd-25th Dallas and I are going to HostingCon 2007 in Chicago. Since we’re soo un-lame, we’ve never been before. We’re really only going this time because Dallas wants to meet my other friend named Dallas, who lives in Chicago. Then, July 26th-28th we’ll be in Cincinatti, visiting my other good friends, Houston, Austin, and New York.

Secondarily, Dallas (of DreamHost) is going to talk at the con about us “being green.”

I’m tagging along in the hopes I meet some competitors to rend limb from limb. (And heh, I got a free pass by registering as “press.”)

Isabel Wang said I could… and I really need to conserve money.

(I’ve got a wife to support.)

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.”

How to be a Famous Blogger

As I see it, there are THREE ways to become a world internet-famous blogger.

1. Already be famous, and start blogging.

(Tip… a good way to be famous is to be an entertainer, pro athlete, politician, serial murderer, or very rich.)

2. Read other famous blogs and respond to each and every one of their posts with insightful, witty, and above-all-else flattering commentary. Eventually one of them will link back to you, and you’re on your way! It’s all very incestuous.

(Tip… if you can’t think of anything witty to respond with yourself, just read the comments to their post! Then, make your post a simple re-phrasing of the best ones!)

3. Make lots of wild, zany, crazy, insane, wacky, looney, and controversial predictions on your blog… eventually you’ve got to get one right, and you’ll be instantly rocketed into the blogosphere stratosphere!

(Tip… the easiest controversy is to just say the opposite of what makes sense.)

There. Now, let me get to the task of becoming a famous blogger myself!

First off, there’s nobody taller, younger, richer, smarter, AND funnier than me in the world, so in a way, you could say I’m already famous. Check off #1.

Now, let me just say, Michael Arrington, I believe we can probably expect to see this type of thing increasing in th