Let me tell you about DreamHost

In April, 2004, I could tell from the magazine ads in Wired that the web hosting provided by my ISP was bullshit. Shortly thereafter, I saw mention on the MacInTouch web newsletter of a hosting service some people like a lot. It had some hard-to-find features, yet it was very cheap and offered huge disk space and huge bandwidth, so I checked around on Google and found nothing but rave reviews.

DreamHost has been around since 1997, making it one of the pioneers in this business, so they’ve been refining their service for a long time. It was founded by a bunch of guys in college, and I understand that one of them is now using the money he makes to put himself through Stanford. This is no big, impersonal corporation.

Anyway, I signed up, and I can’t rave enough about these guys.

Here are some high points:

The price is amazingly cheap.
Reliability is excellent.
Support is excellent.
DreamHost is small, with people you can talk to, not a big, impersonal corporation.
You can have multiple domains.
You can have multiple linux shell login accounts and even your own unix group accounts.
Mac users can can mount their DreamHost directory with true Apple File Sharing!
You can host shared calendars with WebDAV.
You can host QuickTime Streaming movies (like this).
They allow you to administer your own DNS.
The Admin interface is deep and excellent.

My friend David Asprey, co-founder of the Professional Services Division and later Director of Strategy for Exodus Communications (for a time the largest web hoster in the world) says, “I have been hosting for almost 7 months with DreamHost; they are the best hoster for the money, hands down.”

There are plans as low as $8/month.

The plan I have is $20/month for

90 web sites (15 with top-level domains)
7.6GB disk space, adding another 60MB every week
192GB bandwidth per month, adding another 3GB every week

They used to guarantee the same features and price for the life of your account. But that wasn’t great enough, so they put in place a program to give you extra disk space and bandwidth every week, while holding the price the same. When they did this, on July 6, 2005, they retroactively upped everyone’s accounts, pro-rated for how long they’ve been with DreamHost, up to one year. So my disk space is now 10.9GB and my bandwidth is 350GB! I tell ya, I love these guys!