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Introduction
Welcome! Welcome to the April 2011 DreamHost newsletter, where our reputation for quality web hosting and fine dining are world renowned. Do you have a reservation with us this evening? Ah yes here we are. Table for one. And I see here you're celebrating a birthday with us today. Happy birthday. It'll be just one moment while we prepare your table. Would you care to wait at the bar? I'm told our cucumber martinis are exceptional. Ah, I see your table is ready. Right this way please. Here we are. Would you like to see our wine list? Of course - here you go. I'll give you a minute to look things over and be right back to take your drink order. | |
Meet Our New Owners, EIG | |
Oh those drapes? Yes, as a matter of fact they are quite new. And they do match the carpets now, thank you for noticing! Our new owners insisted on them. You see, we've recently been acquired by the Endurance International Group, a conglomerate of many different web hosting brands. They assure us that nothing about our service will change, but they have recently made some changes to the decor. And indeed some aspects of our hosting services will be changing as well. Our in-house technical support team is being moved onto other projects within the company as we prepare to transition to a more cost-effective offshore support platform. Perhaps the most visible change to you, the customer, is that we'll be retiring our control panel in favor of the industry-leading cPanel administration system. You can read more details of the acquisition on our blog: I can see from the look on your face that you've perhaps not caught my meaning - this was, in fact, an April Fool's joke. The new drapes were my idea! | |
Jetpack Launches | |
Here's a little something to cleanse your palate, compliments of the chef. He calls it "Jetpack". Jetpack is an add-on for WordPress, written by the WordPress team themselves. It's essentially a collection of WordPress.com's most popular and most useful plugins - eight of them to be exact - with more to come. All NEW WordPress installations that are completed with our one-click installer will include Jetpack by default. If you've already got WordPress up and running you can grab your copy of Jetpack (it's free) right now: One of the plugins included with Jetpack is called "After The Deadline" which adds spelling, grammar, and style checking to WordPress, which good liek an idea, seems. We've sourced our Jetpack from the hinterlands of Automattic, deep within the Silicon Valley. I think you'll find it's very fresh. | |
Dedicated Hosting Returns to DreamHost | |
This next course is quite substantial - dedicated hosting - well done! We've not offered dedicated hosting in several years, but some of our long-time clientele have continually asked for its return to our menu. We're happy to announce that dedicated servers have returned to our service lineup. This shouldn't come as a surprise. We announced it on our blog. Twice. Traditional web hosting is a great solution for most people, but it does require you to share the resources of a single machine with many other customers. You also share hardware with a VPS hosting package, but VPS lets you carve out a specific chunk of guaranteed server resources and pay for only what you use. Dedicated hosting is for the true power user. One customer. One machine. One price. There's no fiddling with resource sliders, no worrying about other customers abusing your server...none of that! It's all you, all the time. Our entry-level dedicated server includes a dual core CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 500GB of disk space, all for just $89 per month. We've never been able to offer dedicated hosting at such a low price point before, and I'm sure you'll find it to be both satisfying and cost-effective. Not that someone of your position needs to give much thought to pricing. Might I add that's a very nice watch. | |
Ceph Support Is Coming | |
From the depths of the sea off the coast of Los Angeles we have Ceph, the open-source file system ideally suited for managing petabytes of data, designed and developed by DreamHost co-founder Sage Weil. Sage's discerning palate and commitment to fresh ingredients prove that, in Ceph, both quality and quantity can exist together on the same plate. What's that? No, you don't need a special fork for Ceph. We get that a lot, actually. Not many people know the best way to consume Ceph. It's made us realize that we should step up and offer enterprise-level support for large scale Ceph deployments. We intend to offer a variety of Ceph support packages later this summer and are currently compiling a list of interested parties: As your server I consider it my duty to ensure you have all the tools at your disposal to fully enjoy all that we offer. | |
Gift Cards Are Back | |
A gift card you say? Certainly, I can take that from you now. I'll be happy to apply it to your bill later this evening. This would be a good time to mention that DreamHost gift cards are now available for purchase and are redeemable by current customers and non-customers alike. DreamHost gift cards are composed of uniquely eco-friendly renewable resources. I have one in my wallet right now and it literally takes up no space at all. | |
Downtime | |
Next up we have a local delicacy: a steaming pile of downtime. I'm told it's quite good, despite the smell. Or the color. Or the... stubble. One fateful Monday in March we experienced a major network connectivity problem as our primary Cisco switch suffered an inexplicable and hard-to-troubleshoot hardware failure. You may not have noticed, but you deserve to know what happened: Not fully cooked you say? Send it back? But of course. My apologies. The chef regrets his failure to satisfy you completely. | |
New Charity: Group B Strep International | |
Throughout February and March we solicited donations for FIRST, an organization created by Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway Personal Transporter) as a way of inspiring young people to take an active interest in science and technology through mentoring programs. Eight of our customers made donations, some of which were EXTREMELY generous, for a total of $3,328.49. We then matched that amount three times over for a total donation of $13,313.96! We do hope that more than eight of you will consider giving to our next donation target. DreamHost co-founder Josh Jones lost his newborn son, Wren, to Group B Streptococcus (GBS) a year ago. It's a horribly sad story and a horribly horrible disease. Learn Why GBS Awareness is Important! GBS International is an organization that advocates for international awareness and prevention of Group B Strep disease in babies before birth through early infancy. In memory of Wren we'll be soliciting donations for GBS International for the next few months. We will, of course, quadruple the total amount of money collected before passing the funds along to GBSI. To make a donation please visit The funds donated will appear on your DreamHost bill. | |
DreamHost 101: Anonymous FTP | |
This next dish is an old recipe, but one that has stood the test of time. It's a bit of comfort food - something familiar. FTP is a great way to share files among friends and colleagues. In most situations, every one of those friends would need their own unique FTP username and password to connect to your server. But let's say...you're a record label. Let's say you're looking for new artists to sign. You don't want to have your inbox jammed up with demos and you certainly don't want to create FTP logins for every wanna-be out there, so what do you do? You set up an anonymous FTP site, that's what you do. No login is required and people can come and go as they please, uploading files willy-nilly without so much as a heads-up to you. Then, when you're ready, you can review those files at your leisure. Note that you will need to add a unique IP(v4) address to your account to make use of anonymous FTP. You can enable anonymous FTP for any fully-hosted domain here: You'll find that our anonymous FTP has a certain robustness and full-bodied flavor that most other web hosts simply can't compete with. | |
DreamHost Sites Of The Month! (DHSOTMs!) | |
Just when you thought you couldn't eat any more, along comes our dessert course, gastronomically designed to fit into whatever nooks, crannies, and crevices may still exist within your stomach. The DreamHost Sites Of The Month are an excellent way to round out any serving of newsletter. As voted by you, the winners for MARCH are as follows...
The winner in the OVERALL category is:
The winner in the STRUCTURE category is:
The winner in the DESIGN and ORIGINALITY categories is: http://lightbulbcreative.co.uk/ Congratulations to the winners! Don't forget to cast your votes (and enter your own site) for the next round of DHSOTMs at https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=home.dhsotm I'll just leave the bill here and pick it up whenever you're ready. | |
Take our Survey - Win an iPad! | |
Would you care to fill out this comment card? Our kitchen staff would greatly appreciate your feedback on your meal this evening. We may also have some questions for you about your current hosting experience and what you may be looking for in future offerings. One survey respondent, selected at random, will receive a 16GB Wifi Apple iPad for their efforts. Aaaand here's your receipt. The copy on the left is yours. I took the liberty of calling you a cab...it seemed like you might need one. Thanks very much for dining with us today! You're welcome here anytime. | |
See ya next month! | |
Come again soon, P.S. - We value your business. If the feeling is not mutual you may unsubscribe from our newsletter at any time: |