For nearly a year, I leased a server for hosting websites, mail and DNS for web projects and consulting clients. It was expensive, but I thought it was necessary because I needed maximum control over the environment in order to run whatever web apps I needed and to create custom configurations to meet the needs of my clients. Then I discovered DreamHost.
DreamHost is a web hosting company that leverages open source software and mad geek skillz to bring you almost all of the benefits of having your own leased server environment, but for shared hosting prices. This is a company that really gets it when it comes to web technologies. They understand that their users know that vhosts, DNS entries and open source software does not incur the costs that most hosting companies charge for, so they include these things for free, even in their cheapest package. It’s over the top.
While you can’t directly control Apache directives, the sysadmins have created a full featured setup that lets you achieve pretty much anything that you would want to do anyways. For example, you can use their custom-made and very functional control panel (included free with all plans) to setup a vhost with your choice of these server-side environments and/or services:
- Full Shell and/or FTP access
- Ruby on Rails
- Perl/CGI via mod_perl
- PHP4, running as CGI or not
- PHP5, running as CGI or not
- A MySQL host with unlimited databases
- Frontpage extensions
- .htaccess password-protected directories
- Quicktime and/or RealAudio/Video streaming servers
- Jabber instant messaging
- IMAP and/or POP3 services, with virtually unlimited user accounts
- Automatic “one-click” installation of numerous popular open source programs, like WordPress, phpBB, Joomla! CMS, Gallery, MediaWiki, Webcalendar and more…
Their cheapest plan ($7.95 USD/mo) includes 1TB of bandwidth, 20GB of disk space, unlimited MySQL databases, 75 shell/ftp users, 3000 email accounts and unlimited extra domain and sub-domain hosting. As if thats not enough, as an incentive for sticking with them, they increase your bandwidth quota by 8GB per week and your disk quota by 160MB per week.
The icing on the cake is their referral program: they give you $97USD for everyone that you refer to their service (if they sign up), or 10% of what your referred customers pay plus 5% of what their referred customers pay.
My only concern with this company is whether they can afford to stay in business at these prices, and whether they can keep upgrading their infrastructure at a rate that matches the customer growth that they are surely experiencing. Having said that, I encourage anyone who is either looking for new hosting or wants a better deal on their current hosting to check out DreamHost.
