Dream Host: V12.01 January 2010


Jan 1, 2010
0. Introduction.
1. New: The Amazing DreamHost 20 iPad Twitter Contest!
2. New: Alchemy Dedicated Servers now Regularly $59 a Month!
3. New: MongoDB on DreamHost Private Servers!
4. New Charity!
5. New DreamHost Site of the Month Categories!
6. DHSOTM

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0. Introduction.

Only groundhog's day and already the January DreamHost newsletter? Does
it feel like we only just finished burying December's newsletter to you
too? Is it too soon to joke about all the stupid New Zealand stuff from
that one? Too late? Too just right?


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1. New: The Amazing DreamHost 20 iPad Twitter Contest!

Speaking of too late, those of you just reading this newsletter now are
already almost TOO LATE to win one of TWENTY Apple iPads from DreamHost
in the amazing Happy DreamHost Apple-A-Day Tablet Contest:

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2010/01/27/the-happy-dreamhost-apple-a-day-tablet-contest/

Why is it _almost_ (but not quite) too late? Why is it called the Apple-
A-Day contest? Same reason! Because to enter all you have to do is send
a "tweet" from "twitter" at most once per day (you can only enter once a
day no matter how many tweets you do) with the word "dreamhost" in it!

And the reason you're _almost_ too late, is because loyal blog readers
would have already found out about this contest a week ago, and so could
have, like, SEVEN more chances to win than those of you only just waking
up to the possibilities of a totally FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE iPad!

Oh yeah, there's one catch too.. when the contest ends (the day we
physically receive our 20 16GB Wifi-only iPads) and we draw the winners,
we're going to manually go back and look at all the tweets they've made
since the contest started on January 27th. Winners will be DISQUALIFIED
and a replacement picked if they have a SINGLE post that uses the word
"fail" in the sense "massive fail". It's just a stupid, stupid
bastardization of the English language and it. must. be. stopped.

(Also, you'll be disqualified if it's been determined that you've
created multiple twitter accounts to "ballot stuff" the contest! We're
logging all mentions of "dreamhost" and have ways of discovering any
funny business!)

Other than that, that's it! Anybody can win, you don't have to be an
American or even a DreamHost customer... so tell your silly friends!


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2. New: Alchemy Dedicated Servers now Regularly $59 a Month!

Speaking of silly friends, you may remember a few months ago that we
announced we acquired a large equity stake in our colocation provider,
Alchemy Communications:

http://www.alchemy.net/

You may also remember how about then we finished our (hopefully last
ever) data center move, and had a lot of leftover servers. So, Alchemy
began offering dedicated servers at the super-low rate of $49/month!

Of course, being the silly friends that they are, that price was only
good for the first year, and only if you pre-paid for the whole year.
Otherwise it was $79/month... and the price would go up to $89/month
after the first year no matter what!

Well, a lot of you Happy DreamHost Customers became None-Too-Happy-With-
That-Fine-Print DreamHost Customers and let us know! SO, we talked with
Alchemy and convinced them to take away the big price jump after a year!

So. NOW the price is $59.95/month (when pre-paid for a year), but it's
NOT going to jump up to $89 after the first year!

https://servers.alchemy.net/order/products_nd.php

The servers specs are:

Processor: AMD Opteron 2.2GHz Dual Core
Memory: 4GB
Hard Drive: 250GB SATA
Bandwidth: 1TB / month

And remember, these are just completely unmanaged dedicated servers from
Alchemy, who are a separate company from DreamHost! Although we do work
very closely with them and have a big chunk of their equity, and the
servers are in the same data center, this means the servers do not come
with the DreamHost control panel for management.


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3. New: MongoDB on DreamHost Private Servers!

Speaking of management, as a member of management I would like to assure
you that everything is fine, and we're always doing our best to make
sure your online experience is smooth, comfortable, enjoyable, clean,
affordable, and soluble.

We also provide a number of tools to assist you in your own personal
daily hosting account management needs. Not the least of which is the

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=vserver.settings

area, where you can configure all the settings for your own DreamHost PS
(Private Server).

Why talk about this now? Because management would like you to know that
that area has a sparkly new feature, instant configuration and deployment
of MONGO DB!

http://www.mongodb.org/

What's MongoDb?! Why, it's an open source, scalable, high-performance,
schema-free, document-oriented database! As opposed to MySQL, it is not
a relational database, but rather used for the management of key-value
data stores. You would use MongoDB for your own internal programming
project (because just about everything out there currently uses MySQL),
and only if you didn't need transactions but did need the ability to
scale out to potentially zillions of servers (or DreamHost PSes!).

For specifics, here's a page of our internal wiki that I'm sure will
help:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/MongoDB

Whoops, it's blank right now. Uh, maybe by the time YOU read this there
will be some content there, thanks to the philanthropy of your nerdly
peers!


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4. New Charity!

Speaking of nerdly peers, I mean philanthropy, it's about that time again
for some new charities! Last time, the charity was The Learning Center for
the Blind in Los Angeles:

http://www.tlc4blind.org/

Well, in three months we only got $378 from 11 people! That's pretty weak
folks. Maybe everybody was busy donating to Haiti? Well, that's fine and
dandy, but there are tons of other charities still out there too, ones
that are maybe more cash strapped and closer to home, like this time's
charity:

http://www.homeforwomenandchildren.com/

Because the amounts were so low this time, we're also upping our matching
for the Home for Women and Children to QUADRUPLE whatever is donated
instead of just double like before! This charity will be up for three
months, and at _that_ time we'll switch to a Haiti-related one, because
by May it doesn't seem too likely that anybody else will still be thinking
about them. And I'm going to guess things won't be completely perfect by
then either!

http://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.charity

Is the place to go to make your donation! Remember, the charge goes right
on your hosting bill and it's tax deductible!


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5. New DreamHost Site of the Month Categories!

Speaking of tax deductible, it's about time we made some changes to our
venerable DreamHost Site of the Month contest:

http://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.dhsotm

For over a decade, we've been giving out this prize each and every month
to whatever site is rated the highest by other Happy DreamHost customers.

Well, all that is about to change. Sort of. All thanks to this guy:

http://pressbin.com/dreamhost-site-of-the-month-manifesto

Starting next newsletter, there will now by FOUR (or maybe five) DHSOTM
winners each month! Sites are now to be rated not just on "overall score"
but on four separate categories:

Content
Design
Structure/Navigation/Technical Strength
and
Originality

Intriguing n'est pas? Think of the possibilities this opens up!


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6. DHSOTM

Speaking of thinking of the possibilities this opens up,

http://www.brewmorebeer.com/

is the winner of the January 2010 DreamHost Site of the Month contest!

A historic moment to be sure, not only because it's a flash-free site
with lots of info about brewing your own beer, and not only because it's
the final monthly winner ever under the old-style rules, but mostly
because it's a site of completely no use to Josh Jones.


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Speaking of,
Josh Jones!

P.S. Do you prefer newsletters that don't segue so nicely from each topic
to the next? You can unsubscribe by managing your contact preferences at:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/id/?tab=contact

dreamhost.com website logo

URL source: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/V12.01_January_2010
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