Being online since 1996 means that I have seen my fair share of the hosting world. Since my first experience with “free” hosted pages on Homestead until a year ago, I had been on a crusade to find an operation that made me feel comfortable. Just before I made the switch I was hosting with I-Powerweb. I-Power was pretty typical of the mediocre, mysterious hosting providers and I had stayed with them out of pure laziness. Enter Dreamhost. So here are the top ten reasons why I love Dreamhost (in no particular order):

  1. They’re funny. This is often overlooked in business. From their about page down to the bordering-on-the-edge of psychotic monthly newsletter, they make it seem like the company is operated by people instead of robots.
  2. Transparency. When a server crashes or a catastrophic power outage disrupts service, they’re quick to post to their status blog. The only time I heard from any of my previous hosting providers was when I owed them money. Dreamhost isn’t afraid to flaunt it’s faults, it embraces them.
  3. Value. With most other providers you’ll pay for everything. Subdomains, additional domains on the same account, more email addresses… DH gives that stuff away like candy. Unlimited subdomains and domains, more email addresses than I will ever need, they’ve increased my storage and pretty much done everything short of hosting my pages for free.
  4. Rewards. Referrals to DH equal $97 in your pocket or a percentage of every dollar spent by that person. You even get a cut of the cash from the people that they refer.
  5. Custom control panel. I loath cpanel. DH, I suppose, does too. They built their own control panel that’s much more robust than anything I’ve ever used. Though it does slow down from time to time, it really is much more useful.
  6. Suggestions. An entire area of the control panel is dedicated to accepting user suggestions and voting on those suggestions in a digg’esque kind of way. The best part is, they actually implement them.
  7. Support. Finding the answers yourself is handled by a pretty extensive dreamhost wiki, but when you need to email someone in support via the panel, they really respond. Because they’re so efficient through email, I have never had to call, therefore I can’t comment on their phone support.
  8. Excellent blog. This goes back to the transparency thing. Never have I felt a sense of camaradeire with a company like I do with DH. In the company blog, they dish the dirt on what’s really going on in the company from their encounters with trying to buy extra storage to funny stories about the wife of the company president falling victim to a phishing scam.
  9. Goodies. Want a wordpress blog, phpBB, Joomla or ZenCart? Well they’re just a few of the one-click installs.
  10. Domestic. Sorry, I think Indians have a right to a job just as much as the next guy, but unlike my previous hosting providers, Dreamhost keeps it in house.

So if you’re in the market, or looking for a change of scenery, I fully recommend Dreamhost.

dreamhost

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