Got It!

I got one!

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

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

AIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!

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

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

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

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

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

The Big 5-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!

I refuse to be scooped this time!

We finally passed half a million domains hosted, according to webhosting.info.

Wow, that’s 125,000 domains for every DreamHost-sucks site!

I guess that means it’s about time for The Unofficial DreamHost Blog to give out an iPod Shuffle (now available in springy colors!) to “Matt Skorina”, or if he isn’t contactable, “George”?

Too bad we didn’t announce this yesterday (May 14th), because then it looks like “Kevin Hatfield” would have won. Or maybe “Jessica” .. or “May” (ha, big surprise SHE guessed a day this month!). And then, whomever runs the unofficial blog would have had a fun time since it looks like none of them left any way to be contacted!

Never ones to quit while we’re ahead, let’s see if we can turn 500,000 into 500,500!

With another one of our oh-so-rare promo code moments!

Tell your for-some-reason-still-not-hosted-with-DreamHost friends.. the first 500 people who sign up for any L1 hosting plan with the promo code 555 will get 500GB of storage, 5TB of bandwidth per month, and FIVE free domain registrations for the life of their hosting.. not to mention $50 off!

Now, for those of you already customers.. please don’t get jealous. You’ve probably already got that much anyway thanks to our weekly quota growth policy! As for the free domain registations.. well, come on, who really needs more than one domain anyway?

And, remember, each new customer we get, you get one more person to brag about how you signed up “back when they didn’t suck.”

We’re green.

Effective today, DreamHost is now a carbon-neutral company.

That’s awesome!

But what does it mean?… It means a few things, actually!

It means we’ve calculated our carbon footprint. Our footprint represents the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use - paper in the office, electricity for our 1300+ servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.

Electrical power plant emissions clog up our atmosphere. Cars idling in LA’s renowned freeway traffic turn the skyline a muddy brown. Angry profanity-laced faxes are printed on laser printers which generate headache-inducing ozone. (Thanks for those, by the way.)

Putting a price on carbon output is just one way to help make the world a better place. It’s a first step towards true energy sustainability. Organizations large and small are constantly working on reducing their environmental emissions to meet government-imposed (and self-imposed) emissions caps. When they do so a neutral third party then steps in to verify the reduction and issues what are known as “emission reduction credits”.

Companies like DreamHost can purchase these credits which are then immediately retired on their behalf. This effectively takes them off the market and the money goes toward funding further emission reduction projects. We are not currently able to actually power our servers with the wind or the sun, and this is the next best thing!

The market for purchasing voluntary offsets is blowing up right now, and as such it’s a bit of a wild west.

You can find “offsets” for as little as ~$5 at ton all the way up to $30. At the low end you risk purchasing an offset that is not actually doing what it says.

To ensure we got the good stuff we worked with The Green Office to obtain credits with true value that aren’t considered “trash tags”. We learned that our ecological footprint is 30,600 acres and we generate 2725 tons of CO₂ per year. That’s about the same amount as 545 average homes!

We’ve offset that by doing a few things.

We’ve purchased Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) certified by Green-e. RECs don’t offset electricity-related emissions, but combined with the purchase of regular electricity they do help us to avoid them.

We’ve also purchased carbon credits certified by The Gold Standard. These credits come directly from reductions that meet standards established by the Kyoto Protocol and offset emissions from projects that would otherwise not exist.

We’re also looking for more ways to reduce our resource usage around the office and the data center. We’ve switched to using coffee cups made from fully renewable resources. In the last couple of years we’ve also been deploying many more servers with notoriously power-efficient AMD processors. As processor and server technology continues to evolve we’ll follow the path of power efficiency. It just makes sense!

And because Los Angeles is so large we’ve also got two offices on either side of the expanding megalopolis to ensure our employees spend less time sitting in traffic and more time not polluting.

“Big deal, DreamHost! Yahoo’s already carbon neutral! You missed out on the PR train to Happytown.”

Yeah well, Yahoo’s cool and all…but they’re not carbon neutral YET and so their train is broken down between Happytown and Pollutiontown! They’re still brown! Here’s a clown!

It only took us three days to go from “Hey let’s do this” status to “Hey it’s done!” status. Three days and several thousand dollars, but that’s another story. You don’t have to be a tree-hugger to appreciate the value of renewable energy and you don’t have to charge a premium for your services to afford it, either.

Every single DreamHost customer now benefits from our carbon neutral status. If you’re a DreamHost customer trying to reduce your footprint on the environment, rest assured that your hosting is taken care of! You are welcome!

Maybe you want to brag about how green your hosting is. We can hardly blame you! We’ve made some images below to help with that.

If you run into any of these icons in your web travels, click them! You’ll be taken to a page that’ll confirm (or deny) that the site is hosted with us and is therefore green!

If you’re a DreamHost customer and want to add these icons to YOUR site, just visit the “Home > Green Hosting” section of your DreamHost account control panel for linking instructions.

We may not be the first green web host out there but we’re probably the largest. Maybe we can encourage the whole industry to do it. It’s not really that expensive and it’s worth it!

PEACE OUT!

Our Smog Shall Blot Out The Sun

Then we shall surf in the shade!

Apparently the Hollywood Hills caught on fire this afternoon!

We also just got a notice from our building… coincidence?

To All Garland Tenants,

At or about 1:33 PM, 1:45 PM & 1:55 PM today, 3-30-07, the Garland Building experienced 3 spikes from DWP. The building infrastructure is currently running normally with no issues to report and is not on generators. We will continual to update you with more information as it becomes available.

If you should have any questions or concerns please contact the Office of the Building.

“Continual”, eh?

Their grammar may need work, but at least our power’s okay!

Oh yeah…

Have you checked out https://panel.dreamhost.com/ in oh, say, the last five minutes?!

After more than six years of the current panel, we thought it was maybe time for a little update..

Really, all that’s changed is:

1. it’s got a hawt new “web 2.0″ look.
2. we’ve css-ified everything.
3. we’ve added a TINY bit of Ajax.

Functionality-wise for you, the Happy DreamHost Customer, not all that much has really changed.

YET!

But, getting all our various panels standardized and modernized was a huge first step in being able to make lots more little improvements across our panel.

More features? Faster load times? More AJAX?

…who knows!

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE NOW!

And it’s all thanks to Brett!

P.S. Feel free to post comments/critiques/bugs in the comments here, or over at this thread in our forum!

Super Lame Apology

We are all really bearry sorry about the extended downtime this Sunday from the planned power outage!

The power was only out for about an hour, but as it came back on, there was trouble, trouble, trouble. Our router started acting funny, some file servers were mis-configured, some web servers didn’t want to come back on, and so on, and so on, and so on…

Although most things were back up and running within the five hours, the network in general was still flakey for about 8 hours, and everything wasn’t TOTALLY fixed for about 36 hours.

We really thought things would go a lot smoother, given that for once we had some advance warning, but good old Murphy was in full effect, y’all, again.. urgh.

Anyway, to try and make up for it a little bit, we thought we’d offer something we’ve never offered before at DreamHost, something we thought we’d never need, something we always thought a little silly… an SLA!

That’s right, I’m offering you a… Super Lame Apology!

HA ha ha! Oh, did you think I meant a “Service Level Agreement”?

But really, isn’t that all a typical SLA is?

“We’re sorry we broke our promise, here’s credit for the 46 minutes you were down. Sorry.”

Lame!

In web hosting, it’s usually a credit for the exact amount of time you were down, sometimes a full day’s worth, or I guess if you are really paying a lot, a month’s worth.. though an SLA like that even in the high-end business world would be a rare animal indeed.

In the case of the outage this past weekend, if you were paying $8.95 a month you were down for anywhere from 6 to 44 cents worth of service. What would you think to yourself if we automatically credited you 44 cents on your next monthly bill?

You’d probably think either:

A. Is this 44 cent credit because February only had 28 days?

or

B. My site is down for hours and all I get is 44 cents?! That barely pays for the stamp I’m going to need to mail my foot all the way up your butt, DreamA$$Host!!

In fact, even if we gave you a full month’s credit, $8.95, you’d probably think the same thing. Either A. you didn’t really care, and the money doesn’t matter, or B. you really did care, and the money doesn’t matter.

The truth is though, we do offer an “SLA”… the same “service level agreement” you’ll find at McDonalds, Nordstrom’s, Staples, or just about any other successful business. If any customer ever comes to us with even an eigth-way legitimate gripe, we’ll do our best to fix it, even if it means giving them an account credit or their money back (even after our 97-day money-back guarantee period). Better to lose a customer on good terms than on bad, eh?

So, if we’ll happily give refunds anyway, why not go ahead and lay it all out in a “real” SLA?

I guess mostly because we feel they’re B.S. Case in point, we actually have SLAs from our data centers! Which is why I sleep sowell at night, knowing our servers are safe and sound. HA!

Not only do they fail to meet the SLA, I believe we’ve never gotten a single service credit out of them for outages… and I’ve asked!

The only useful thing you can get out of an SLA is the ability to break a long-term contract without penalty. All you really want is for everything to just work. If you’re constantly having to exercise your SLA, you’d trade all the service credits in the world for a new provider!

If that’s not the case, you don’t really care about the downtime and are just complaining to get the money! Shame on you! Go back to fatwallet.com where you come from! Hissssss!

All I’m saying is, since we’re in an industry with such a low barrier to entry, and since there’s nothing stopping you from switching hosts at any time, we really already have a lot of incentive to make our service as good as we can.

I know we fubar it sometimes, and I know we fubar it a lot, and when we do, you guys are doing the right thing by bitching and moaning and even quitting us. But a service level agreement wouldn’t change a thing.

So, so-o-o-o-o-o-o-orry!

And that’s the Super-est, Lame-est, Apology-est SLA you’re going to get!

Read This Now!

Quick, before it’s gone!

If you enjoy all the hilarious hijinks, illuminating illustrations, and jovial jokes of the DreamHost Blog, you better suck down a local copy TODAY…

We’re having a planned power outage tomorrow night!

(Click that link for some more details.. it’ll be from 11:15pm PST (GMT -0800) tomorrow night (Saturday) to hopefully much less than 5 hours from then.)

Not planned by us though, planned by our building. It would have been very nice if they could have given us a little earlier heads up, or avoided the outage at all, but no, they just can’t. And trust me, we want this to happen even a tiny bit less than you do!

So, this site will be down then, as well as all other DreamHost services, with the exception of ns2.dreamhost.com and dreamhoststatus.com, which are kept off-site for exactly this sort of situation.

Well, I just thought I better post something about it here too.. thanks for your understanding, and we’re really really really really sorry.

P.S. Here’s the pic the building emailed us of the problem:

So, um, yeah. I think what that shows is a piece of metal is vibrating next to that wire and cutting into the rubber insulation… and if it gets much further in, KABOOM!

Some Late Night Moves!

Last night we made some moves.

Patrick and I moved about 60 servers!

And I only dropped one! (Sorry about that, bomberman.)

It took about two hours, and here we are, wrapping things up:

Stage 2? At 12:30 in the morning, after moving 60 servers, what else could we possibly want to move for a STAGE 2?

Hmm… something about “Brea”?

We passed this car in the parking lot.. and soon, we were at the OTHER DreamHost office.

We waited.. THE CON WAS ON!

Patrick had told Pete (who lives right by the office) that he was just in the area, at 1:30am on a Wednesday, and I wanted him to pick up some WWF glasses for the downtown office. But, HAD PETE PLAYED US FOR FOUR FOOLS?!

Apparently not….

We made short work of the coveted sign.

And then I decided to go raid the kitchen…. WHAAaaaa!!!!

Yes, very funny, Brea. But who’s wearing the cool shades now?!

As long as we were there, we thought we might as well have some fun…

And some more fun…

We took our time. We even checked out the Official DreamHost Museum!

Why hello there, Señor Corona, you sure are working late tonight!

Of course, we couldn’t just leave those poor, unsuspecting Breaites bare-walled!

Around 3:30, we were back “home.” Mission complete. Tired. Satisfied. Ugly.

The neon sign was finally where it has always been destined to be. Down in our NOC. The HEART of DreamHost.

Epilogue…

We’ve been burgled!

Last night DreamHost’s Brea office was burglarized.

Someone gained access to our building, broke into our locked office, and stole a critical piece of hardware.

Our neon sign.

This one-of-a-kind artwork was commissioned for our 2006 Christmas party and had been proudly hanging on the wall of our office in Brea ever since. Until today.

The thieves left this sign in its place.

What confuses us most is that the thieves didn’t steal any computers. Those 20 inch LCD displays? They’re still there. Dell and Mac desktops? Check. Foosball table and arcade machine? They were all unmoved and seemingly untouched.

We have no idea who could have done this. Our building and our office are locked up tight after hours. We had people working here until the wee hours of the morning and nobody saw anything! We’re stumped and the Brea police department has never seen anything like it.

Sure, there’s plenty of people out there who want to blow us up and some who even want to kick our f$ckin’ a$$es. But who would break into our office just to steal a neon sign?

It is a mystery.

If you happen to come across our sign, we’d like to know about it! We don’t have any leads to go on, and that sign holds great sentimental value to our employees. Please contact us if you see or hear anything!

No Run-Of-The-Mill Week, This!

MONDAY!

We started the week off by having a little MLK, JR. weekend sale on our web site. Apparently, some of our affiliates hate civil rights because we got some angry emails that our little MLK, JR. day stunt was stealing their referrals by putting a promo code of our own right on our website!

They have a good point. Why would somebody use the promo code they were given when they get to the website and see a better one in a pop-up window! All these affiliates are working super-hard in the hopes of some good paypal lovin’, only to find out the very company they’ve been shilling to all their croneys has turned around and STABBED THEM IN THE FACE!

Et tu, Joshé?

Now, why so ever would we do something like that? Of course we don’t want to hurt our affiliates! So why steal their referrers in this way? Especially when our promo code was more than $97, it actually costs us more to “steal” these people about to sign up with some other promo code.

The strange, but true, but unbelievable, but really honestly true, but you-can’t-comprehend-it, but it’s for reals, truth is we’ve found that putting a pop-up promo code like that on our main site actually helps all signups, ACROSS THE BOARD.

We’re not sure why ourselves, but we get more no-promo-code signups, more affiliate-promo-code signups, and of course, more DreamHost-promo-code signups whenever we have that pop-up there! And, it seems to also have no residual effect on signups on other days afterwards.

Maybe people just feel some loyalty to their original promo code. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they just don’t see or read the pop-up. Maybe seeing that code gets everybody in some kind of weird web-hosting frenzy and they just decide to sign up, whether they use the code or not! I know, it’s CRAZY, but that’s why I like marketing!

So basically, please please PLEASE trust us, affiliates! We try our best to only take actions in everybody’s best interests, and we’ve got nothing to gain by “stealing” your referrals!

TUESDAY!

Brett was checking the public voicemail when he came across this little gem apparently from a phone number in British Columbia.

Now, most of us didn’t really think that was the scariest bomb threat they’d ever heard. But, it was decided to notify our main data center building anyway. They then called the LAPD, and so a lot of Tuesday was spent explaining what “we do,” and how we have a “voice mail” in a “computer file”.

Also that “Brea” is a city in the LA area, different from “La Brea”, a street.

P.S. No bomb so far.

P.P.S. And really, what sort of threat gives you a deadline that’s a 48-hour window?

WEDNESDAY!

Head Honcho Michael is out of town right now, so apparently ANONYMOUS LAZY HAPPY DREAMHOST EMPLOYEE thought it’d be fine to sneak in a little nap on his office couch. And it would have been fine, if he could have only kept his pants on.

(Notice the huge amounts of DreamHost power that permeate the office?)

THURSDAY!

Aw shucks! We just got a huge shipment of World Wrestling Fund (or something?) pint glasses and travel mugs for thanks for the generous donation DreamHost and her customers gave a few months ago! Well, we’d split all the glasses in half with you, but I guess we’re just pessimists.

Consider them gifts from you to us for keeping prices down while we REDICLOUS-LY add (and subtract) bandwidth and disk space!

FRIDAY!

Whoops, did I spell something ridiculously wrong up there?

My apologies, I must have just been influenced by this SECRET PACT email I received today from an UN-NAMED WEB HOST!

I’m just trying to get some key players in the industry to agree on a few things:

a. That the current disk space/bandwidth allocations are rediclous
b. To cap them at a specific range (based on price)
c. To create a self-enforcement method for the industry

I was wondering if DreamHost would be interested in joining the discussions. So far, I have spoken to almost every major hosting provider in our segment.

I guess somebody doesn’t read our blog! Doesn’t he know our whole “lowering disk and bandwidth” thing is just a coy marketing ploy?

And in summary, what a wild, zany, not-run-of-the-mill week it’s been!

And, OH, I just remembered.

This IS a run-of-the-mill week at DreamHost!

Busted!