Dreamhost is the best place for hosting your website
Summary
The hosting company dreamhost caused a revolution on the Internet. Just like Microsoft or Google, Dreamhost is the most viable choice for anyone looking for a hosting company independant of country. In a short time they grew to be the #16th ranked webhosting company on the planet hosting more than 540.000 domain names.
The reasons are: extremely low price but outperforming all other hosting companies in terms of conditions and reliability, very good end-user experience based on options and a custom build control panel and a very active customer “fan” club which is party responsible for the more than 7.000.000 entries in Google. In this article we will try to convince you why you should switch.
I started in the 90′s with my first website on our university network, later I moved to free webspacehosting at Geocities and Xoom. And still later I had my own hosted webserver. Then I began the cycle of trying out all kinds of hosting companies, some which provided huge amounts of space at a very low space and other because of stories I read on the Internet and yet again others because they all kinds of other bells and whistles. During these times I had collected some domain names, some friends and relations who wanted a “shop” and which I placed there and there but also a keen eye on many of the new (web2)open source web applications like blogging (Worpress), forum (phpbb), wiki and so on which I unfortunately could only host one at a time and only if I had the money. Then dreamhost came around and it allowed me to host all my websites on all domains against unlimited databases and unlimited subdomains under just one very cheap account. It changed my life. Within an hour I can
put a new concept in the air and try out anything I read about but most of all it is cheaper than anything out there. Long live the web2.0 age. I am now actively evangelizing dreamhost to all my friend, independant of their hosting needs, dreamhost is the place to be.
what does it offer?
1. Unlimited domains
dreamhost offers unlimited domains under 1 account. This means that you can move all of your domains to a single account. Via the simple control panel you can point the domain to the webdirectory on your remote disk. Click. Ready.
quick how to
- go to godaddy
- buy a domain name e.g. “aweblog.net” for some dollars ($1.99 for new customers)
- enter the panel at godaddy and change the DNS Settings to
DNS1.DREAMHOST.COM, DNS2.DREAMHOST.COM, DN3.DREAMHOST.COM- enter your dreamhost account and click “manage domains”
- click “Add new domain/subdomains”
- Fill in the following form:
- You are done. Just note that you also choose for redirecting a domain,parking, forwarding, cloaking, all from the same panel.
If you ever dreamt of grabbing hundreds of domain names and loading them with GoogleAds, this is your chance. On Ebay they sell adsense packages. Meaning: if you get just 1 or 2 users to click on your site in a month (duh) the calculation is simple: just buy domainnames and throw them on the Internet and you get rich sleeping. I made you a quick how to guide for this.
Only if you are interested, else read on below:
quick how to
- perform the previous howto for each domain name
- sign up with google adsense
- if a domain name costs $7.95 a year, you need at least $7.95 income.
So for each website you need to earn at least $7.95/12 = $0.60 a month
Just 1 click can bring in at max $70 (!) but on average you get about $0.25
for 1 click. So you will need about 3 people in a month clicking your
google ad. It is difficult to determine but that means about 150 visitors
to your site in a month, in other words around 5 visitors a day.
So if you can manage to get 5 visitors a day to your new website you
break-even. If you get more you gain profit.- But…if you want to be less cool, but still pretty cool, you could just
buy 1 good domainname and then start adding subdomains e.g.
“weblog.aweblog.net”, “forum.aweblog.net”, “games.aweblog.net”, in this
way you always run profit since there are no domain costs. Luckily
dreamhost offers unlimited free subdomains, see next.
2. Unlimited subdomains
dreamhost offers unlimited subdomains to each domain. So e.g. for your domain “http://www.aweblog.net” you can create “http://forum.aweblog.net” or even “http://some.forum.aweblog.net”. You can create them using the same control panel as in the picture above.
So why is that more useful than “http://www.weblog.net/forum”? Because in this way it becomes a real domain where you can attach e-mail accounts, applications, ftp, and so on. It is also handy when submitting a subdomain to a search or indexing website because it will be seen as a real cool new domain.
In my case I own the domain “leau.net” so i could create “http://edward.de.leau.net” and then add my own e-mail account to it which becomes “mail@edward.de.leau.net” and so on.
Also think about “http://del.icio.us”. If you would own “icio.us” you could
create all kinds of cool subdomains attracting visitors on its own.
In some time you will think of hundreds of different combinations, the handy thing with a hosting party which enables you to add and remove them on the fly is that it empowers you to actually play with these things.
3. Near Unlimited space: 75.000 digital pictures or 50.000 mp3′s!
dreamhost offers
so much space that it probably will dazzle you. In the cheapest package “crazy domain insane”
you get around 200 gigabyte of space (!) and every week you get 1 gig extra, so you never will run out of space.
Notice the last bit: every week you get 1 gigabyte extra free forever!
Just for comparison: a big company with a large website will probably occupy around 50mb! Unless you will start a new flickr you will never use more than a percentage of this space (2% ?), even if you upload some episodes of LOST and most of your vacation pictures!
However, here are some ideas what you could do with this amount of space:
- autosync your laptop’s backup with your dreamhost directory. It will
be safe there. Use a smart syncer which auto syncs only the deltas.- upload all digital pictures you ever made to a dreamhost account. This
will probably, as in my case, fill up your account in the end. Then
auto-click-install “gallery” from the dreamhost panel and you’ve got
a massive online foto gallery, who needs flickr anyway. You can
probably store about 75.000 foto’s on it.- store your mp3 collection on it. The biggest iPod is 80 gig so you
can store 2.5 ipod collections on it (and probably never listen to
this stuff again – are you crazy?), install some opensource webplayer
and you have a streaming website holding all your favorite mp3s. Uhm
those are about 50.000 mp3s…- make hundreds of copies of your weblog and submit them all to search
engines generating massive traffic (this is illegal!)
Remember: its’s auto-increasing with 1 gigabyte every week, so make sure
you keep up with uploading stuff to it 
Seriously: it will be enough for your personal weblog! And remember, this space is
your own. So if your music or fotos or weblog, hosted at some other free company
burns down or decides otherwise, all your stuff is gone. Remember that.
4. Near Unlimited bandwidth
In the cheapest package you get around 2 TeraByte of bandwidth, which increases
every week with 16GB. Terabyte! I will compare this with the cheapest hosting
company in the Netherlands: hosting2go. They give 20 MEGAbytes of bandwith.
You will never reach this amount of traffic unless you start Hyves.nl or
some very popular porn sites.
Here is my personal usage for some PR5 websites I run on this account:
Exactly: lower than 0%!
5. Unlimited mySQL databases
Dreamhost offers unlimited
sql databases. Meaning you could create unlimited websites e.g. unlimited weblogs,
forums, wiki’s, shops, foto gallery’s etc… all on the same $7.95 account. It
also means you could host all the shops of your customers on the same account AND
just download any open source application and just install it on some subdomain
and play around with it (and then blog about it).
Many other hosting companies limit the amount of mySQL databases you can host. Which
means you can either run your WordPress weblog OR you foto galley but not both. In
the case of dreamhost you can install any number of database based application (or write
your own).
6. Shell Access
Dreamhost offers complete shell access. This means you can telnet to your server and basically…do anything you like. You can setup your cronjobs (though the control panel also allows you to do that) but you could also compile your own php if you wanted some extra features in it! If you are a webdeveloper or want to have more complete control over your sites then shell access is absolutely vital, just think of changing your .htaccess or tweaking some config files or just checking the usergroup in /etc/group.
- I was also looking for, on the one hand, an easy control panel which basically would let me do anything: adding domains and subdomains, one button installs of most populair software (e.g. wordpress, wiki, gallery, forum, etc), control my databases, control users, e-mail, etc… BUT on the other hand Via the control panel you can handle all things easily. So if you are a novice user that would be enough. However if you are a developer and e.g. would like to schedule jobs via crontab (e.g. reading del.icio.us every night or do some other screenscraping), compile your own stuff e.g. compile your own php, all of that is possible, complete control.
- Then I found out the goodies that they
provide which are the cream on top of it:
- automatic backups. Visible for you to see and grab stuff from. Always handy! E.g. I can see several directories like “cogmios.nl.old.2″ etc… so if I ever change my layout and accidently overwrite my old style.css I can always go back some generations.
- Subversion Server. Yes. You can create as much subversion projects under as many domains as you like. Subversion is a version control system and pretty much near the functionality of Rational ClearCase. Meaning you can store all your documents and code in the database and you will never lose any version of your documents or code. Directly within the control panel you can easily configure it.
- php, ruby, your own jabber server, oneclick installers,etc…etc…
Look here for more information!
7. Earn your hosting costs back by community loyality
Dreamhost is unique since it does not advertise or pay to be in all kinds of “best top 50 webhosts” websites (which all work by placing the most paying hosts at the top). It refuses this although it would bring them more users. They work however via users evangelizing the quality to other users and rewarding active community users with discounts. On top of that you can set up special codes which give extra disk space or memory or just a large amount of discount on hosting costs for your friends or people in your network. If you are an active community member you can easily earn your hosting costs back. For readers of my blog I have setup the code “GODUTCH” which gives you the maximum discount. This used to be $97 but since a few months this has been brought down to a maximum of $50 discount, which still makes it worth your while since the monthly costs are $7.95…More discount is not possible, its the max on this moment.
Think about it, analyze other hosts, make excel sheets with feature comparison tables, read Google on all background, compare the features with your own hosting and then come back and use “GODUTCH” on Dreamhost, it gives you the maximum discount on signup. I really wouldn’t know why you wouldn’t host here but you can investigate and compare yourself. There is a reason why they are one of the biggest. Smaller hosting companies can not compete anymore with this.