New Years Gift

My hosting company is DreamHost.com and I have to say I'm pretty darned happy with them. Lots of storage - starting at 4.8GB, tons of bandwidth - starting at 120GB/month (I haven't found anyone that comes close on bandwidth for the price), a free domain registration, full DNS, php, unlimited mySql databases, full shell access (ssh and all that) and best of all unlimited domains so great for hooking up your friends with free hosting because lets face it you're never going to use all that storage and bandwidth. Even better is every week they add another 40MB of storage allowance and another 1GB/month of bandwidth.

Because I'm a generous chap and all, and yes because in a years time I'll get a 10% slice of your hosting fees (and you can do the same with your referrals) I've shamelessly created a maximum discount code for you to use. It gives you up to $97 off your first year of hosting fees. So if you sign up for a year of their very generous "crazy domain insane" hosting it'll only cost you $12.40, that's just $1.03 per month.

How do you get this? Well go to DreamHost and use the promo code 0101010MAX to get a maximum discount for all their plans.

What's the downside?

The only things I could ding DreamHost on are:

1. They don't have as many one-click installs of php apps as some hosting companies - but no problem if you're a do-it-yourself person, and to be honest they have most of the important stuff like phpBB.
   
2. No Java - interesting to me but probably not most people, and its still pretty rare to find supported by anyone else (GoDaddy is now offering Java).
3. Not the greatest email filtering - they support SpamAssasin but you don't get a huge amount of control over its configuration and I don't really like the way its integrated with their webmail.
   
4. Some weirdness with configuring FTPaccess for sites to allow independent developers, you can use WebDav to get around it but then you have problems with php. I think they need to get a pure web based file management package that removes the need to create FTP accounts to modify your sites files.
   
5. They had an uptime glitch during the LA power outage in 2005. Miy sites were down for about 5 hours, some sites said 24 hours or more. The problem was caused by power supply issues (generators that failed) which is actually pretty common but I'd rather they did some more testing and preparations. Ultimately it doesn't matter too much to me because I'm not a commercial operation. If you are you should find someone with a guaranteed level of service - it'll be much more expensive.
   
6. No unique IP and you'll need to purchase one if you need SSL - its $4.95 a month extra but that's not unreasonable IMHO.
   

Probably the worst issue is mail filtering, out of the box its just not that effective. I'd say it gets about two thirds to three quarters of all spam and my home mail server that does no more than realtime-blackhole filtering catches about 90% or more. For this reason I still send the bulk of my mail through my home server. But if you're a do-it-yourself kind of person even this is not a fair criticism of DreamHost since they do let you do whatever procmail filtering you want which means you can just install and configure your own copy of SpamAssassin.

Overall the unlimited domains, DNS and massive bandwidth provisions make it too good to pass up. I've also had pretty good experience with getting responses from their customer support re. questions and problems. Problems have been resolved in an hour or two, and even dumb questions have got repsonses within 24 hours. Yes there is some trash talk here and there on their forums from people who had a bad experience, but I haven't found anything of substance in them - mostly its blowhards who want the world for nothing and in particular don't realize what shared hosting is - they often expect to get level of service equivalent to dedicated server hosting for just $9.95 a month - good luck finding that, just the electicity cost alone would rule it out for now. More likely you'll see cheaper and cheaper shared hosting plans as virtualization technologies make it easier and cheaper to do. Overall my take is that pretty much everyone else at DreamHost is happy or very happy. Overall I'd say I'm very happy especially considering that value for money.

So remember, if you want to start 2006 with fab and cheap hosting TECHTIMEMAX is the promotional discount coupon code to use!