Opened my DreamHost control panel today and found the Rewards Section is now completely different. A new item has been added — DreamHost Invitations, which I have no idea what it is, since I don’t currently have any of this special offerings.

I have searched on Google, WHT and a few other blogs, and cannot find any info on what exactly DreamHost Invitations are. Any one has any idea? I am in the process of getting a DreamHost account to a not-for-profit organisation, and a discount like $150 off 5-year plan would be very useful.

Update: Yes I’ve got some now. And as a referral you do get the full $97 referral commission if someone uses your code. Therefore if anyone tries to post their code in the comments, they will be mercilessly deleted.

Yesterday on my personal blog, I wrote about WordPress 2.3.3 upgrade due to a security exploit, and one issue I wrote in the comment, is that there are just too many blogs out there installed by Fantastico and alike, that are never updated. They are often targeted by the hackers, employed by blackhat SEO, to inject hidden links into existing blogs. Matt from WordPress agrees:

I think you also have a good point that we need to put pressure on the hosts and Fantastico to take responsibility for the blogs that they set up and stay current with releases.

Then I received DreamHost’s latest newsletter (January 2008), and in section 2 they introduced their new one-click install “easy mode”:

Yes. Sure. Computers often crap themselves, but problem often exists between keyboard and chair, i.e. the actual users. Around 10 minutes ago an account executive at work called as all the site customisations are gone. It turns out she explicitly clicked on the option to wipe out all the customisation and had made no back up. Now she needs to dig up old backups from October last year and try to fill in all the missing pieces.

S*** happens. Some are big s***, however, a few are bigger!

The latest change to DreamHost promo code is about to make what I have written a year and half ago irrelevant.

Effective next Tuesday, December 11th, $97 will no longer be the maximum discount a DreamHost promo code can give… it will be dropped to $50. Keep in mind, $97 is still the total value of a referral… so if somebody signs up with your $50 promo code you.ll still get $47 ($97-$50) credited to your account.

So if you still want to get $97 discount from signing up a new DreamHost account, which makes a 1 year shared hosting plan as little as $22.40, today is your last chance. Search for “dreamhost coupon” on Google and there are plenty to choose from.

“So, DreamHost has started their own Virtual Private Server hosting business.”

“You kidding?!”

“Yes, it is true!”

From DreamHost Blog’s latest entry, What a CON!, where Josh Jones has again done what he does best — humiliating the whole HostingCon, companies such as Lunarpages, HostGator, Tier 1 Research and OpenHosting. Very enjoyable read for an otherwise boring Friday afternoon.

By this time everyone should have already knew it — ICANN has terminated the accreditation agreement with RegisterFly because of the issues that I will not talk about here, but are thoroughly tracked and documented at RegisterFlies.com. The fiasco has caused 900,000+ domains in limbo over the past few weeks — people cannot log into their account, cannot renew nor transfer the domains to other registrars. To some it might mean $10 registration fee doing down the drain. To others it might mean lost of a few very important domains!

Jeff Atwood blogged about Google building their own servers instead of buying off-the-shelf boxes, probably to justify his over-the-top workstation at work. The argument is,

• Google built their own servers on plywood back in 1999.
• Google is still building their own servers today, 450,000 of them!
• Therefore, build your own PC is good! Pre-built might only work for typical users, and programmers are not typical users!

Therefore Jeff concluded,

The best way to truly understand the commodity PC is to gleefully dig in and build one yourself. Get your hands dirty and experience the economics of computer hardware first hand— the same economics that have shaped the software industry since the very first line of code was stored in memory.

I disagree.

Jeremy Zawodny’s blog post from early last month has prompted me to look at offsite backup solutions again. Currently I am backing up all my websites, from various servers and accounts, to my home server using rsnapshot, running at 4am every morning. So far so good, and I loves the flexibility of rsnapshot. I guess if one of my server dies, it would be trivial re-populating another server, moving the DNS records, and start serving again.

Moreover, the cost of running a home server is in fact less than what Jeremy has calculated. My home server (a 1Ghz Duron + 3 smaller disks) uses less juice, but more importantly, it needs to be running anyway regardless whether I am using it to perform backups or not, as it also provides a few other services. Like, acting as a file server for my home network.

DreamHost is turning 9, and has announced a few crazy things in its birthday bash.

Disaster happens — even to web hosting companies. You get operating system/software issues, server hardware issues, network glitches and data centre issues and even interrupted electricity that plague your hosting business. Worse, when they all come one after another within a short time span. It is what happened to DreamHost last month, and they are still in the process of picking up the pieces. Many web sites were affected, and outrages were everywhere around the blogosphere.