Snaps for Dreamhost

A few years back a friend of mine sent me a referral code for a hosting company I hadn't heard of called "DreamHost" - the deal got me a year of hosting for around $20 - too good to pass up for many reasons. One was that I was tired of hosting my own domains and many others on my own home machine, it was just too stressful every time I had an outage or went on vacation. More to the point I lived in fear of one of my hosted domains getting slashdotted. Another was DreamHost offered ridiculously high storage and bandwidth quotas compared to anyone else. Most importantly they let you have several domains hosted where others would charge you extra per month for more than once.

So I went with them and never regretted it since. I'll admit it, they are kind of folksy - a kind of neighborhood hosting that has whacky deals and funky outages. For a while I was down for two days due to a power outage in LA, but you know it wasn't my problem. And then they removed the limit on the number of domains you could host with an account, well why not - so long as you keep within the bandwidth and storage limits what do they care? And then they started raising those limits seemingly almost every month. Before I knew it I was enjoying 10GB of storage and several hundred GB per month of bandwidth - then eventually it was 200 GB of storage and 1,000 GB of bandwidth - at that point I really didn't care any more.

Another great feature of DreamHost was their very genorous referral scheme which is exactly what got me into them in the first place. At that time and to this day if you successfully refer a new customer to DreamHost you can collect up to $97 in referral fees, or a 10% one payment on their renewals for life and 5% on their referrals renewals for life. That policy still stands to day and yes it really works - since June 2005 I've only paid $20 in hosting fees and since then I've referred to them a dozen or more customers and still have $40 left over for this years renewal.

The most recent really great thing I've found out about DreamHost is they give completely free top tier hosting to any organization that is a 501c3 tax exempt charity. As it happens I am a webmaster for such an organization and had been hosting their site with DreamHost since 2005. Now I have been able to provide DreamHost with the 501c3 notificaiton from the IRS and all our hosting is free for life. We also score a ridiculous 500GB of storage and goodness knows how many terrabytes of bandwidth per month. We even get free VPN access and I think dedicated IP addresses. Sweet! As the title says snaps for DreamHost

Okay so what is bad about DreamHost? Well I have to admit their email set up really quite funky - especially in regard to spam filtering. It just doesn't work they way I want it, and the way it should work, and sharing a website between several users doesn't work the way it should either. Yes they also do maintenance at the darnedest of times and have had their fair share of technical issues along the way. But these are really small beer compared to the deal you are getting.

In the mean time if you are interested in some cheap and plentiful hosting why not check out DreamHost and if you want a healthy $50.13 off any plan over $50 a year then enter the discount coupon JLDA at checkout time.