V4.09 September 2002

0. Introduction.
1. DreamHost's 5 Year Anniversary!
2. Get Cash From DreamHost Rewards!
3. Mail Filters!
4. Data Center Moooooved!
5. DHSOTM


########################################################################
0. Introduction.

I'd like to take a moment at the beginning of this, the September 2002
DreamHost newsletter, to introduce to everyone the newest member of the
DreamHost team, Tavis! I thought I'd better do it now, because I only
have a couple of newsletter opportunities before he won't be working
for us anymore. That's right, Tavis (that's Davis without a D but with a
T, or Travis without an r, or avis with a T in front, or sivaT
backwards, or ... ) is an intern. What's more, he's the best sort of
intern: free!

Interestingly enough, using free labor is only _one_ of the many ways we
at DreamHost keep our expenses down so we can provide a high quality
service to you at a reasonable cost. For example, it has _always_ been a
policy of ours that executives only use the corporate jet for personal
business on weekends and/or Tuesdays. Also, the company will _only_ pay
for a meal where at least one employee is present.. and we never tip the
valet. You wouldn't believe how fast the little things add up!

But we never knew until recently what a windfall it is to not pay your
employees! All we have to do for Tavis is sign a piece of paper (for
school he says?) at the end of two months saying he interned here. Heck,
that's so easy, we'd sign it even if he hadn't! We're now working on a
scheme whereby ALL our regular employees are replaced by interns by the
end of the year. The savings will be immense! You (our happy customers)
should appreciate the change, even if most of our current employees
won't. With all the extra cash, we may even be able to loosen up some of
our other policies. The valets will appreciate it.


########################################################################
1. DreamHost's 5 Year Anniversary!

This newsletter may seem a little short on new features, but hey, we
were busy celebrating our five year anniversary over here! In case you
weren't reading the announcements or checking our whois record,
DreamHost.com was registered on September 23rd, 1997. Therefore,
September 23rd, 2002 was our fifth birthday party! To celebrate we had a
little party and got Madonna to play at it. We could afford to because
of all the savings we're getting out of not paying Tavis.

We also (in case you hadn't been paying attention) put up a new site
at http://www.dreamhost.com/ and upped _everybody's_ bandwidth and disk
space allocations! Disk space went up 50MB on every plan and bandwidth
went up a different amount based on your plan, but at least 5GB/month.
You can see the new amounts at our site if you wanna get down and
dirty. Again, thank Tavis and his intern bretheren for lowering the cost
of doing business as a web host!

I repeat, this newsletter may seem a little short on new features, but
next month's should be awesome with all the stuff we're giving Tavis to
do for us. (Did I mention FOR FREE?)


########################################################################
2. Get Cash From DreamHost Rewards!

As I was sitting there this month counting the dozens and dozens of
dollars we should be giving to Tavis but instead are just throwing in
the DreamHost money bin, a thought came to me. "What if we stopped being
so miserly with our DreamHost Rewards program and started actually
allowing people to cash their rewards out (instead of just applying them
towards their hosting account)? Would that cheapen the noble concept that
is DreamHost Rewards? Or would it just make our Happy customers even
happier?"

Then, a second thought came to me, right after the first, "Seeing as how
DreamHost Rewards is already about as noble as Monday Night Football,
it'd probably just make them happier!" And that settled it.

So here you go, effective immediately you can request that any excess
DreamHost Rewards you have after paying off your hosting bill be paid
out as cash via PayPal.com!

The only caveats are that there is a 5% transaction fee for payments you
get cashed out, and cash-outs must be a minimum of $20. The payments
will go out on the first of each month, and you can sign up for
cash-outs at: https://id.newdream.net/?tab=rewards right now! FOR FREE!


########################################################################
3. Mail Filters!

The other new feature this month is the new Mail > Filters tab on our
web panel at https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=mail.filters.

It's a super easy way to filter email on the server level via
rudimentary procmail filters on your mailboxes! You can set up a filter
based on the Subject, From, To, CC, or Body of an email, and you can
have the messages filtered into a folder, forwarded to another email
address, or deleted. If you already have a .procmailrc file on the
mailbox this feature will not work though. If you don't know what a
.procmailrc file is, then don't worry about it and go ahead and use the
new Mail > Filters tab to your heart's content!

(Like it was a FREE intern.)


########################################################################
4. Data Center Moooooved!

I thought it'd be good to have a little re-cap of how the data center
we announced last month went. It seems like good filler.

Basically, it went great! All you DreamHostees who helped out, whether
it was preparation, the move itself, or afterwards did a wonderful job
and deserve a hearty round of applause! I'm sure all the Happy DreamHost
Customers are relieved everything went so smoothly.. I bet most of them
didn't even notice at all. In fact, the _only_ thing we could have done
better would have been to use all interns. We'll shoot for that with the
next move!


########################################################################
5. DHSOTM

This month's DHSOTM (DreamHost Site of the Month, see our web panel at
https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.dhsotm for more info) is not a
moose in a cage. MOOSE ON THE LOOSE!

http://www.loosemoose.net/ is the September 2002 winner! Check it out
immediately! Loose Moose is a claymation animation studio, responsible
for such things as the "Brisk" Iced Tea ads (With Danny Devito, "Bruce
Lee", James Brown, Bruce Willis, etc..) and uh, a lot lot more of other,
less-famous work! I don't know about you guys, but I LOVE claymation.
It sure would be NICE if Loose Moose took some of their free time and
made a DreamHost claymation. Don't get me wrong, of course we'd hire
them for the job! We're always looking for some new interns...


########################################################################

Until we get an intern to do these things,
Josh!

P.S. Are you a woman with an Internet-based business? We want to hear
about it! How did you get started? How has DreamHost helped you? What
success have you achieved? Email us at stories@dreamhost.com and your
business might be featured on our web site or you could be interviewed
by a reporter for a magazine/newspaper.

URL source: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/V4.09_September_2002

---

<-- Previous Dream Host newsletter V4.08 August 2002 | Next Dream Host newsletter V4.10 October 2002 -->

Related newsletters