DreamHost Offers Free Apps Hosting Service (January 9, 2009) - Web hosting provider DreamHost (www.dreamhost.com) announced on its blog Friday it has launched a new hosting service for web-based applications (www.dreamhostapps.com), available now for free in its beta release.
"Well, it's free for now anyway. We're flirting with the idea of a $50 yearly fee once it's out of beta…but if you sign up RIGHT NOW to help us test things out we'll let you use DreamHost Apps for free for ever!"
Current DreamHost customers can already log into the DreamHost Apps service with the same DreamHost Web Panel login.
The exact same functionality has been available to customers for months under the "Easy Mode" in the "Goodies / One-Click Installs" section of the account control panel.
Meanwhile, other individuals looking for free hosting of a WordPress Blog, Drupal Site, Zenphoto Gallery, Mediawiki Wiki, PhpBB Forum, Google Apps and Gmail can gain access to the service by invitation only.
DreamHost has posted about 100 invitation codes in the comments section of the blog post, explaining that if the code fails to work it has already been redeemed. It also adds that it may post more invitation codes in the coming days.
Users of the free DreamHost Apps service will not have access to FTP access, SSH access, email, or technical support. DreamHost Apps users can install and delete apps through the DreamHost Apps management interface, while using each Apps' own web-based interface to make application-level changes.
DreamHost says the service was developed "over the course of a few months by a small team of four hardworking DreamHost Employees, Pete V, Mike P, Joshua H, and me, Brett D."
In other applications hosting services news, Google announced last month that Salesforce.com's Force.com has now been integrated into Google's App Engine.
Use Gmail, says DreamHost (May 27, 2008) - Web hosting provider DreamHost (dreamhost.com) has recently given its customers the rather unusual advice of choosing Google's Gmail (mail.google.com) over its own email service, telling them that "it's something Google...can do better."
The Los Angeles, California based company, which hosts more than 700,000 websites, is suggesting its customers use Gmail for their email instead of the DreamHost mail servers.
And although DreamHost says it is continuing to support all its existing email offerings, co-founder Josh Jones wrote in his blog post last Friday that email is not the company's strong suit.
He writes: "Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn't add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into 'simple' old email. And that's kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features…
It's just not something people are looking for from us, and it's something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better. In fact, as you've maybe already seen, we recently made it very easy to use Gmail for all your email hosting with us, still at your own domain! "
The post seems to suggest that DreamHost cannot effectively handle its customer's email demands, and that it would be able to better focus on hosting websites than dealing with support calls concerning email issues.
The company recently announced in its March company newsletter that it would stop providing mail-filtering tool Procmail to its users after years of offering the service, which upset a few customers.
Dreamhost Drops Procmail Support (April 17, 2008) - Web hosting provider Dreamhost (dreamhost.com) recently announced in its March company newsletter that it will stop providing mail-filtering tool Procmail (procmail.org) to its users, leaving a few customers upset with the hosting provider's decision to cut one of its services after offering it for years.
Procmail is a program for filtering electronic mail and is useful for presorting and preprocessing large amounts of incoming mail. It is used to sort out mail from mailing lists, to dispose of junk mail, to send automatic replies or to run a mailing list.
It isn't unprecedented for a hosting provider to stop offering a service it has offered in the past, especially when it is explaining to customers that it will be replacing it with its own in-house filtering mechanism and that it is grandfathering the service for existing accounts. But browsing the Dreamhost discussion board, it seems as though some customers are offended by the way Dreamhost decided to halt the service without a proper 30 to 60 day notice of a change.
One forum user shared the response he received from the hosting provider after sending in a support ticket regarding the Procmail announcement.
Dreamhost wrote: "The plan is to make the Keyword Filter section of our panel more robust so [sic] mimic many common procmail jobs. Regretfully there won't be any direct access for users to create and maintain your own procmail. We understand that this is a bit of a step backwards as far as our long known open access, but it's a bit of a necessary evil if we are going to proceed with a new paradigm to allow for more reliable mail."
Dreamhost's methods of dealing with customer issues have been both praised and criticized in the past, which explains why some customers are accepting and supportive of Dreamhost's Procmail decision while others don't appear to be taking as kindly to the change.
After an outage in 2005, Dreamhost published a very public and detailed account of the problems in its blog, which was met with a widespread and mostly positive response from customers. But earlier this year in January, Dreamhost was heavily criticized for the informal, and as some described it, condescending, way it dealt with an issue where the company accidentally over-billed its customers for approximately $7.5 million.
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