Wed, July 6, 2005

Back in November, I moved onebee from the servers of WestHost (which previously hosted the site for over 4 years) to the sunny, shiny, California-based DreamHost. DreamHost has lived up to its name in every way – hosting with them is truly a dream. Not only did this move save me tons of money and grant me access to dozens of new and exciting features, it also allowed me to host the 'Porter under the same account, saving Arksie even more money!

Best of all, it signed me up for the singularly delightful DreamHost monthly newsletter, written almost once a month by Josh, a DreamHost honcho (and newlywed). It's worth reading – silly and fun, the exact opposite of any corporate communiqué, and packed with thrilling feature announcements, every month.

And July 2005 is no exception. Not only does DreamHost now offer one-click access to Ruby on Rails – the Ruby web application framework developed by 37signals web hottie David Heinemeier Hansson – they've also added infinite* hosting!

(*infinite in the theoretical sense, at least)

In the short eight months I've been a member, DreamHost has already doubled my bandwidth and disk usage quotas, which is a) fantastic and b) a pretty regular thing for web hosting providers to do, since hardware keeps getting cheaper. But rather than remain on a path to repeated quota upgrades in the future, DreamHost decided to revolutionize the entire process: for as long as you remain a customer, they'll increase your quotas every week. This is pretty impressive!

And because DreamHost is as frickin' awesome as anything, they've even retroactively upgraded their existing customers – I went to bed last night with a 2.4GB disk quota, and woke up with 3.08! Next week, it'll be 3.1! Very impressive! To quote Josh's newsletter, "if that's not something to blog about, I don't know what is!" (Except that I don't blog. Never have.)

This is exactly the sort of thing a hosting provider should be doing. Randomly scheduled doubles in service are great, but it's hardly something the customer can plan on. With this model, everything is out in the open. Of course, 2.4GB is well beyond onebee's current needs (last month we averaged about 0.52, and that includes a lot of duplicate pages for the redesign). But it allows serious room for expansion, which is good because just this weekend I was thinking about that very topic. DreamHost (God love 'em) recently added QuickTime streaming as an account feature at no extra charge. I thought it might be fun to offer movies, to share my computer animation progress as I create clips and shorts over the coming years. The only considerations were: bandwidth and disk usage. And this new plan renders those considerations even more moot. (Also, with the new onebee photography section getting spruced up, there's the potential for sharing more – and larger – photos in the future. Good to have some wiggle room!)

So, switch to DreamHost. Do it now. (Unless you just finished switching to Cedant, in which case I'm terribly sorry I didn't get to you sooner.)