We hit 300,000 customers today!

Thanks to each and every one of you for allowing us to do what we do – we wouldn’t have been able to eat this cake without you!

Have a great weekend!

As a company, one of the largest expenses we’ve got is payroll.

And the largest team within the company? Technical support.

Faced with those two facts it’s easy to see why so many hosting companies choose to outsource their support.

Add in something like dial-in telephone-based technical support and most companies would be lucky to break even.

Outsourcing is a four-letter word at DreamHost. It’s also an eleven-letter word.

I know that’s confusing.

Let’s just split the difference and call it seven.

Outsourcing is a seven-letter word at DreamHost. Just awful.

Our technical support staff is not only US-based, but located within our own offices. They are DreamHost employees, and we’re always looking for more.

We see real value in hiring and training our own employees directly. They become intimately familiar with our services, our hosting platform, and are best able to represent the spirit of DreamHost on the front lines.

The end result is a more personalized, higher-level of support provided by people who are empowered to solve problems and not simply “escalate” them.

We’ve been very careful about how we choose to offer phone support. It does add a significant cost to our operating expenses and we’ve never wanted to pass that expense along to our customers.

The only people who pay for phone support at DreamHost are the ones that want to, you know, use it. For $9.95 a month our Premium Support package includes up to three callbacks per month.

Up until very recently we’ve asked our Premium Support customers to specify a three-hour window for their callbacks. It was a handy service, but the whole three-hour window thing was a little off-putting. You can thank cable companies, phone companies, appliance installers, and any number of related service industries for that.

Effective not-so-long-ago, we’ve made a small but significant change to the way we handle callbacks.

That three hour window? It’s now one hour, Monday through Friday.

Weekends are still on the three-hour system. For now!

You’ll get the same high-level of support you’ve come to know and love from our knowledgeable tech support team – faster than ever before.

The next time you need to contact our technical support team just look for the Premium Support checkbox on the contact form to enter into a world of steamy singles waiting to chat with you!*

*Some of them are, anyway. You know techies.

Every morning we drag ourselves out of bed and take a good, long look at ourselves in the mirror. For the last few months…we haven’t liked what we’ve seen.

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!

DreamHost has multiple levels of tech-oriented security services that we run for all of our customers at no extra cost (Web application firewalls, server/network firewalls, jailed environments, easy ways for customers to upgrade website software, secure server configurations, password generators and a highly skilled security and admin team to manage all of these services.) We have begun to take a user-oriented approach to security.

Even with the best firewalls and prevention methods, websites can still be compromised (and this makes us sad.) The top methods of compromise have been the same over the last few years, either an FTP/SSH password is guessed/stolen or the customer is unknowingly running insecure software on their site.

Our human oriented method to security is simple: We send emails periodically to customers whenever an emergent security concern comes up. Don’t be afraid of these emails, they’re just notices to let you know we’ve found something you should probably know about. We will never ask you to reveal login details or other key information about your account.

When/Where?
These emails are sent to the account owner, as needed when one or more of their sites may be threatened by criminals! This isn’t to say we will email everyone immediately when their site’s software has an update, only when our security team has identified their hosted sites may be vulnerable to an imminent attack. (sort of a warning before the storm)

What?
These email notifications will be sent from a DreamHost.com email address and will show up in your panel’s support history page.

We will contact customers if their sites are running software currently being targeted by malicious botnets or have been compromised already (e.g.. they’re hosting known web based backdoors.) Typically we will take any immediate action that is needed (such as taking a backdoor offline) but you will still need to take further steps to patch the security hole in your site! Our security team will be glad to help you with what to do, just reply to the email and our staff will be glad to help.

Why?
Site security is a joint effort. We prefer not to muddle with how you run your site, but we will let you know if there is something serious to be concerned about!

Web-based botnets are growing every day. We have multiple layers of security to help our customers’ sites prevent these attacks but site security can’t be left up to (and blamed on) your host. We want to help customers be more aware of security matters and take the proper actions to prevent becoming a victim.

How?
We perform a completely non-invasive review of each site’s web activity. Using the inferred information we can identify either insecure software or bot-net related activity running anywhere on our network. This scan reviews somewhere around 1,000,000 sites hosted across 20,000 or so servers, in only 30-45 minutes (yes, those numbers are real. Yes, that is actually really fast!). During the scans the sites function as normal, in fact there is no way they could be affected by this scan. If your site is detected as in danger we will keep it up and let you know of the danger (and what to do to prevent an attack). If your site has already been compromised we will do our best to quarantine the problem and let you know what to do next.

DreamHost is coming to San Diego and we’d like to see you there!

http://www.dreamhostparty.com/

HostingCon 2011 will be taking place at the San Diego convention center August 8th-August 11th. We’ll be there too, in large numbers, Tusken Raider-style.

We’re throwing a party Monday night and you are absolutely invited. We’re looking to connect with vendors, partners, potential partners, customers, and even competitors over drinks, music, and games.

Our CEO, Simon Anderson, will be there. More than a dozen key DreamHost employees will be too – getting to know you, fielding your pitches, answering your questions, and taking note of your feedback about all things DreamHost!

Rumor has it that Jim Curry and a small contingent of the OpenStack team will be there as well!

If you’re over 21 and will be in the San Diego area August 8th, we’d love to see you there whether you’re attending HostingCon or not.

Visit http://www.dreamhostparty.com/ today to RSVP!

Once you’ve registered for this free event we’ll email you the secret password to get in the door 24 hours before it begins.

Come out and play with us!

(2 out of 3 physicists approve of the title above)

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.

Next week we’ll be attending the Open Source convention by which all others are measured: O’Reilly’s OSCON 2011.

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!

Not too long ago the almighty keeper of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, referred to FUSE (File System in Userspace) implementations as “toys”. Read his comments and you’ll see – he doesn’t pull any punches.

As is often the case whenever Linus takes a stand on anything it ignited a bit of controversy among Linux users the world over.

DreamHost co-founder and Ceph chief architect Sage Weil weighs in on the debate over at the Ceph blog on Kernel filesystems vs FUSE.

Ceph is already a part of the Linux kernel and can be implemented either in userspace or at the kernel level. Which is right for your installation? The answer is tricky. Sage breaks it down!

Not-too-long-ago Humphrey Cheung worked at DreamHost.

He decided that his true calling was something a little more risky: Wartime journalism.

Today and through the end of this week, Humphrey’s videos are front-page news at Gizmodo.com!

He went from “Field Marketing Manager” to “Markedly Managing to run through a Field” – almost overnight!

We wish you continued success and no bullets in your body, Humphrey!

Today is a momentous day in DreamHost history.

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.