Well, mostly free.

There are a few new bills that everyone is talking about, SOPA and and PIPA (A.K.A. PROTECT-IP). These two bills have some interesting concepts that, summarized, mean “protecting” US corporate interests by removing US citizens’ access to a free and open Internet.

Now, I’ve read these bills and they have nice tag lines like: “To Promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. Property, and for other purposes.” or “To prevent online threats to economic creativity and theft of intellectual property, and for other purposes.” These things sound great! But, never judge a bill by its cover.

These bills are simply rehashes of an existing law, the DMCA, but with a far more sinister side. The big difference is that these bills state the action to be taken enforces a definitive closure of an entire domain when a claim of infringement takes place. What does this mean? Let’s take youtube.com as an example: If someone can make the argument that youtube.com is hosting too many infringing videos, then ALL of youtube.com could be taken offline with the way this law is written. For smaller sites, you’re just an easier target for the people in charge of deciding if a site is a “threat to US property” or not.

Freeze! Did you catch that? “People in charge.” Yes, SOPA details how the US government will need to create a “Intellectual Property Enforcement” agency that finds sites are a “threat to US property” and sends out the notice requiring a removal of the domain as a whole. What designates a threat goes far beyond just copyright, it includes sites which pose a risk to national security “and other purposes” (as is stated in the bills’ earlier description). Yes, that’s right, a segment of the US government will be dedicated to censorship of the Internet.

Our perspective as a hosting provider that handles a good number of DMCA notifications is that this law, as it exists today, (while it has it’s flaws) works perfectly fine. The DMCA only requires the infringing works to be removed, and for repeat or egregious offenders we’re always permitted to tell these customers to “GTFO”.

Recently, DHS-ICE has also done a fantastic job in shutting down counterfeit goods rings and actually puts the people behind the scheme in jail, not just taking down a domain name. So why is there a need for a new law?

Going further on how this really hits home for DreamHost though, is the requirements expected of hosting providers and registrars (of which we are both) to manage the sort of Internet blacklist this law will create. Failure to comply with this would result in web hosts like DreamHost being treated as if we are assisting in a crime, even if our only involvement was acting unknowingly by registering a domain name for a customer. Keep in mind, we wouldn’t even get a say in the matter if we receive a notice to remove a domain. We would be required by law to remove the entire domain immediately and notify you, the customer, after the domain has been taken offline. This could include disabling things like email, jabber, or other supportive services because the law states that domain services must be removed, not just the site, and not just the alleged infringing works!

Everyone should be aware of these bills before they come to law, as they will dramatically change how the Internet operates within the US. There is a strong movement online to promote awareness of these bills and many sites are offering help on what you can do to address it. So please check out some of these sites, write your representative, or just let your friends know more before this becomes law and before you find that the Internet as you knew it is no longer free.

To find more about these bills yourself, and what actions you can take, please check the following sites:

http://americancensorship.org/
http://savehosting.org/
https://www.eff.org/

Because you asked for it…

MuckerLab is a self-styled “Start-Up Accelerator” which is really just a fancy way of saying “Tech Incubator”. The MuckerLab program is an intensive three month program aimed at helping web entrepreneurs realize their dreams through a comprehensive support system.

5 to 10 fortunate startups are accepted into the program during which they’re given extensive mentoring, office space, and financial support to help get their ideas off the ground and into the web browsers of men and women around the world.

MuckerLab is unique in that they’ve chosen to focus their efforts on empowering start-ups in the Los Angeles and greater Southern California area. As a one-time Los Angeles-based startup ourselves (DreamHost started waaay back in 1997) we know that tech talent is abundant in Southern California throughout Los Angeles County, Orange County, and beyond.

Silicon Valley may get all the press, but the talent pool in Los Angeles is, in many respects, an untapped resource. We absolutely support the vision of MuckerLab and are proud to be associated with any effort that draws attention to the talent and vision of the creative web entrepreneurs in and around Southern California.

Check out our press release for more info!

Although we did not know him personally, we’ve all used the stuff he dreamed up and made a reality.

His legacy is the inspiration and commitment he has given us to dream big, design with flair, build with passion, and never give up inventing better ways to serve you and the world.

Thanks Steve.

Ever wonder what makes DreamHost’s datacenters tick?

If you guessed an army of helper monkeys that is all hopped up on Red Bull and grain alcohol, then you sir, are sorely mistaken.  Contrary to popular belief, our primate relatives are not allowed in our datacenters because their fingerprints are incompatible with our biometric security system, and our employees prefer Monster Energy Drink, thank you very much.

Give up?  It’s a powerful combination of software code, hardware, a talented crew from Engineering and NOC, and an obsession with automating processes that borders on OCD.

We take automation seriously.   So seriously in fact, that we have a corporate mantra that involves repeating “au-tow-mate” in a robot’s voice.  You see, automation has always been ingrained in our company culture.  Since we have software developers with mad coding skills, we’ve been able to create our own tools that really leverage automation.

For example, we have a homegrown web panel, migration tools, provisioning systems, and databases that all work together in harmony.  At the press of a button, we can migrate a Shared customer to VPS, or provision and configure bare metal Dedicated Servers.  With this level of efficiency, we can better serve our growing customer base of over 300,000 while maintaining competitively low prices.

So what’s next?

As we scale out our infrastructure to accommodate our growing number of customers and services, our crack team of engineers is constantly looking for the best solutions.  The team recently decided that the Dell™ OpenStack™ Cloud Solution meets our future needs for scalability and integration into DreamHost’s existing private cloud.

Permission to geek out!!!

Dell has combined their PowerEdge™ C servers with the OpenStack cloud operating system to produce a cloud solution that can easily be deployed.  As you probably already know from a previous post, we’re big fans of the OpenStack project.  What especially caught our eyes was Dell’s new open source installer framework, Crowbar.

Crowbar automates OpenStack deployment on bare metal servers.  Its software framework uses a modular approach to express every system capability in what they’re calling barclamps.  The benefit of this approach is that other users may write their own barclamps to add functionality and expand the code base.  Our engineers are actively writing a barclamp to integrate Ceph™, the DreamHost-sponsored open source distributed storage system, into Crowbar so that we can automate the instant provisioning of Ceph storage nodes.

We’re excited to have Crowbar hanging from our Batman-style automation utility belt!

Read DreamHost’s quotation in Dell’s press release.

The OSCON schedule is extensive and, quite frankly, a little overwhelming!

DreamHost’s own Ben Cherian will be making appearances on stage at two sessions:

Prying Open the Cloud with Dell Crowbar and OpenStack
10:40am Thursday, 07/28/2011
Location: E141

OpenStack + Ceph
1:40pm Thursday, 07/28/2011
Location: E141

Ben will be joined at OSCON by DreamHost’s CEO Simon Anderson and some of our finest system administrators!

Our meeting calendar is filling up fast, but if you’d like to have a sit-down with us in Portland next week, be sure to contact events@dreamhost.com.

No time for meetings? No worries – DreamHost reps will also be in the OpenStack booth on the expo floor Wednesday between 1 and 3pm!

Look out Portland!

Today is the day that DreamHost gains its first full-time CEO.

You may want to check out the press release if you missed it last week. There’s some…good stuff in there.

DreamHost was founded by four friends way back in 1997. While there’s never really been any “one” in charge, the four head honchos have been overseeing operations and steering the ship from the get-go. It’s a system that has served us well for many, many years. And luckily business has been good.

However, the hosting landscape is changing and we’re anxious and eager to change with it. We’re smart enough to know that any tech company, particularly one that’s still run like a startup, could benefit from an infusion of outside talent and experience.

So in January of this year we resolved to locate and hire DreamHost’s first full-time CEO – one voice to unite them all!

We started with a big list of candidates and whittled it down through phone interviews, in-person interviews, and even some all-hands interviews. We wrapped up the entire process with an employee vote (hello WorldBlu!) and, in the end, the winner was clear.

Simon Anderson comes to us from Pictage.com where he served as Chief Marketing Officer for many years. Simon’s honed his skills throughout the tech industry, having also held key roles at Affinity Internet, Authenticlick, and BiggerBoat.

Simon signed his employment contract last month and, effective today, is now the CEO of DreamHost.

Simon’s what the Internet calls an “Australian-American,” so we we made some minor changes around the office to welcome him into the company this morning.

Simon’s desk is outfitted with the latest trends in Australian cuisine as well as some training material on VHS – PAL format, of course.

We also spruced up Simon’s office a bit to remind him of home.

(fullscreen)

Our office in Brea even got some love.

Simon approves!

You can follow Simon on Twitter – @DreamHostSimon.

Feel free to follow @DreamHost too while you’re at it – you never know what we’ll be announcing next!

The future of DreamHost has never been brighter! Or more handsome! Or sweet-smelling. Or strong. Or hypnotizing. I should probably stop there.

If you’ve ever tried to register one yourself, you know exactly why that is – all the good stuff has already been taken!

Every one, two, three, or four-letter “.com” that can be registered HAS been registered. You have to get pretty creative at even the five and six-letter domain level, too.

Do you really think that Flickr wanted to be called Flickr? Of course not. Because that is a dumb name that an illiterate gorilla wrote on a piece of paper after absorbing half an episode of Sesame Street. Well, not really. But it makes me happy to think that that’s how it all went down.

The truth is that the people who started Flickr were smart. They were smart enough to…well…create Flickr. And they were TOO smart to spend thousands of dollars on a domain name to some a-hole living in his parents’ basement in Florida.

Flickr is called Flickr because flicker.com was already taken.

People just buy these things up in bulk hoping that – someday – some deep-pocketed idiot will come along and take an interest in at least one of the domains they’ve got in their “portfolio”. And then – overnight – their mortgage disappears, their kids’ college is paid for, and a yacht shows up out of nowhere.

In my day we called these people “domain squatters”. Today they call themselves “domainers”. Their position on the Internet’s social chain is still pretty low though.

So it’s pretty clear now that the .com top-level-domain (TLD) is a junkyard. People have basically made a business out of of buying and selling piles of garbage domain names.

What’s the next frontier? Not .com, that’s for darn sure.

.net and .org have been the go-to secondary choices for many many years, but none have ever come close to breaking the stranglehold that .com has on the Internet.

We’re an ICANN-accredited registrar, and even we don’t know what the next big TLD will be. So, effective today, we’re now handling registrations for 21 TOTAL TLDs! One of them is bound to topple .com.

Eventually.

We’ve even begun to offer NINE ccSLDs (country code second-level domains) like .co.uk and .com.nz!

As a customer you’d think that by moving to a different TLD you’d be able to avoid the extortionate rates charged by .com-loving domain resellers.

And you would be wrong. Resellers have started to slip their greasy tendrils into some other TLDs too.

Overstock.com just paid $350,000 for o.co. I’m not even making that up. That really happened. I would love to shake the hand of the person who green-lit that purchase because whenever crazy people manage to seamlessly integrate themselves into society it’s an event to be recognized and celebrated.

So what’s new? Here’s what we’ve got:

If you’re a current customer and would like to register one of these new TLDs – or transfer a registration over from another registrar – just visit the Domain Registrations section of your control panel to get started.

If you’re not a current customer and would like to sign up, you can make that happen today! Every DreamHost account includes one free .com, .net, .org, or .info domain registration and it stays free for as long as you keep your hosting plan active.

What do you think of this .nu .biz feature? Tell .us all about it and .cc your friends!

1. Get chicks.

2. Get rich.

Most of us have taken care of number one.

Number two has proven to be slightly more elusive.

It’s been a little harder to push out, you might say.

For the past decade or so a little-known entity called the Endurance International Group, Inc. has been quietly buying up web hosts worldwide and building a portfolio of hosting brands.

Indeed, we’ve seen many of our competitors get gobbled up by “EIG” over the years. The acquired companies usually retain their branding and avoid making any mention of EIG on their websites.

So exactly what does EIG own? As far as we could tell (from this list and in chats with various sales teams), 37 web host brands. Maybe more.

Collectively they represent an enormous customer base and may even make EIG the largest “hosting company” in the world.

AccountSupport
ApolloHosting
BizLand
BlueDomino
BlueHost
DomainHost
Dot5Hosting
Easy CGI
eHost
EntryHost
FastDomain
FatCow
FreeYellow
Globat
HostCentric
HostMonster
HostYourSite
HyperMart
IMOutdoorsHosting
iPage
Ipower
IPowerWeb
Justhost
Netfirms
Networkshosting
PowWeb
PureHost
ReadyHosting
Spry
StartLogic
USANetHosting
VirtualAvenue
VPSLink
WebHost4Life
Webstrikesolutions
Xeran
YourWebHosting

Some you’ve never heard of. Some you definitely have. Some were large. Some were tiny. It makes no difference to the insatiable maw of the Endurance International Group! They’re like a scrap metal magnet for web hosts! (Or wrecking ball, depending on who you ask…)

And while EIG and others have certainly approached us regarding a buyout in the past, the money has never really been good enough for us to pull the trigger.

Until now.

I’m happy to report that our key stakeholders flew out to Massachusetts last night, signed the paperwork, and it is DONE! DreamHost is now officially owned and soon-to-be operated by EIG.

They bought us for 10 times our annual revenue.
Two of our four founders will also serve on the EIG board.
Many of our employees were made into millionaires overnight.

DreamHost is the latest web host in a long line of hosts to join the EIG family.

We couldn’t be more thrilled!

DreamHost customers can expect some emails from EIG shortly that will lay out the transition process and explain how they intend to migrate our customer data over to their own unified hosting system.

This is all happening just in time, too. Do you have any idea how sick we are of doing all this? The hardware failures, the endless stream of incoming tech support, writing these insufferable blog posts…UGH.

Our web panel will unfortunately not be making the journey to EIG, so I hope you guys like cPanel!

I was sad to see it go too, but I’m staring at FIVE POINT THREE MILLION DOLLARS in my bank account right now.

Five. Point. Three. Million.

I keep refreshing my online banking just to make sure it’s still there.

So shit, cPanel for everybody!

Yeah, I said shit. What’re they going to do – fire me? Well they can’t fire me because I QUIT. I’m buying a yacht and moving to Laguna Beach.

So shit.

Shitty shit.

Also, balls.

As a DreamHost old timer I’d like to thank you for sticking with us up to this point, but I have five point three million reasons not to care what you do with your hosting anymore. HASTA LA VISTA!

We’ll be updating this post tomorrow with some additional details for DreamHost – I mean EIG – customers that should help to ensure the transition goes as seamlessly as possible.

Update 4/2: April Fool’s. :)

And anytime anyone changes the game, people tend to get confused. And needy.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ll soon be offering advanced corporate and enterprise-level technical support for Ceph implementations.

This includes:

• Consulting and advisory services
• Custom Engineering
• Design and Implementation
• Integration into Established Infrastructure
• Installation
• Performance Audits
• Onsite Troubleshooting

All this comes to you direct from the team that financed and developed Ceph!

We are currently compiling a list of potential beta participants prior to the official launch of a Ceph support offering. Please visit cephsupport.com to express your interest and we’ll contact you when things get rolling.

Full-blown Ceph support will be available later this summer.

Today Automattic launched Jetpack, a WordPress plugin that “supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com”. Their words, not ours. Hence the quotes.

Jetpack is a collection of eight plugins that together combine to strengthen the WordPress core and make it even more powerful. Think of it as an expansion pack. With jets.

DreamHost is proud to be a Jetpack launch partner!

Included in the Jetpack core:

• WordPress.com Stats
  “Simple, concise site stats with no additional load on your server.”
• Twitter Widget
  “Display the latest updates from a Twitter user inside your theme’s widgets.”
• Gravatar Hovercards
  “Show a pop-up business card of your users’ gravatar profiles in comments.”
• WP.me Shortlinks
  “Enable WP.me-powered shortlinks for all of your Posts and Pages for easier sharing.”
• Sharedaddy
  “The most super duper sharing tool on the interwebs. Share content with Facebook, Twitter, and many more.”
• LaTeX
  “Mark up your posts with the LaTeX markup language, perfect for complex mathematical equations and other über-geekery.”
• After the Deadline
  “After the Deadline helps you write better by adding spell, style, and grammar checking to WordPress.”
• Shortcode Embeds
  “Easily embed videos and more from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and SlideShare.”

…and that’s just the start! There’s more features in the works for Jetpack.

As of about thirty seconds ago, all new WordPress installs completed with our One-Click Installer will include Jetpack by default.

Already using WordPress? No worries – Jetpack is free. You can download it right now and start using it within minutes.

SET JETS TO MAXIMUM THRUST!

That is all.