V7.10 October 2005

0. Introduction.
1. Close Your Own Account!
2. User Creation/Deletion/Changes Happen Fast!
3. Sarged!
4. New Charities!
5. DHSOTM

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0. Introduction.

BOO! Yet another frightening edition of this, the October 2005 DreamHost
newsletter, for your candy-eating enjoyment begins now!

You know what's weird? Ever since I graduated from college I don't
remember ever having a single trick or treater at ONE of the five
houses I've lived in. I don't know if it's just the neighborhoods I've
been living in, the "trick or treaters not welcome" sign, the foul smell
or what, but nary a ghost and goblin has darkened my doorstep since the
late 90s.

Every year it's the same old thing, 5 pounds of candy wasting in a bowl
October 31st turns into 10 pounds of fat rolling on my waist November
1st. But THIS YEAR would be different! I was determined to get trick or
treaters at my door by hook or by crook! This newsletter depended on it.

My first step, right at 5pm, was to don my Michael Jackson costume.
Because, when it comes to thrilling the kiddies, ain't nothing more
killer than Thriller!

But, by 5:10pm I was still waiting for my first bite. Apparently the
children were less than Thriller-ed... and I was starting to get
desperate. What was wrong? Why no customers? And then it hit me! It had
to be that my candy selection (dum dums and cheese whiz) wasn't up to
snuff. I knew exactly what to do to spice it up.. I quickly hit up the
closest ATM and zipped back to my house.. and by 5:24 I had a big sign
up on the sidewalk that read:

'Attention Trick or Treaters!
Special, tonight only:
I pay $20 per kid!!
-- "Michael Jackson"
(P.S. I'm desperate!)'

Now I *knew* I'd have a line of adorable little costumed creatures at my
door within ten minutes that stretched clear around the block!

But by 5:32 I was getting nervous again.. STILL no candy (or crisp
Jacksons) had made their way from my fun bucket into the joyful
little goody bags I saw bounding everywhere ELSE on the block. Was I
more of a "dum dum" than the suckers I was trying to give away? More of
a sucker than my dum dums? What did the other houses on my street have
that I didn't?! How could they get group after group of happy kiddies
while I listened to nothing but loop after endless loop of "Darkness
crawls across the land, the midnight hour is close at hand, creatures
crawl in search of blood, to terrorize y'alls neighborhood."?

And then it hit me! Again! All the houses getting trick or treaters on
our street were decorated in some sort of selection of scary seasonal
scenery. And my house was as boring and mundane as always! Perhaps there
is was an unwritten rule nobody ever bothered to teach me? Decorated
house == trick or treaters welcome? Boring house == stay far from? Maybe
kids actually put weight into that classic line, "The scarier the
landing, the greater the candy-ing!"

I definitely had to scarify my house, and I had to do it fast! But how?!
It was too late to head over to my local party supply store and I
couldn't really borrow any scary stuff from any neighbors. They're still
not speaking to me after Tuesday's pumpkin cannon incident.

And then it hit me! Ouch! I dashed to the back yard and headed straight
to my barbed wire cage where I kept my Dobermans "S***head" and "Iron
Balls McGinty"! I took them around front and tied them up right on my
porch, then placed the candy bowl about three inches in front of the
furthest spot they could reach when straining all the way on their
leashes. HA! There's NOTHING scarier than that...

I can't wait to see how many trick or treaters I get NOW!

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1. Close Your Own Account!

After that huuuuuge and completely irrelevant introduction, I'm sure
right now a lot of you are thinking "What's the quickest way to close my
account?" Not to mention, "No amount of great web hosting at affordable
prices is worth this kind of torture on a monthly basis."

(Well... you know, you don't *have* to close your entire account to stop
getting this newsletter... just scroll down to the bottom of this email
for instructions on unsubscribing. If you DO still want to close your
account with us though, WE don't want to know about it! It's just too
depressing.)

Which is WHY we've now made it possible for you to close your own
account directly from the control panel with no interaction from us! You
just go to:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=billing.accounts

Then click the "close account" link, and follow the instructions from
there! Easy as pie! No tricks nor treats involved at all.

Now, hurry right over there and please do not use this feature ever!

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2. User Creation/Deletion/Changes Happen Fast!

For those of you who didn't just go and close your account with us, here
are some other new features we've added which will have close to zero
effect on your day-to-day site and email operations.

Now when you make, destroy, or change any server users (including email
accounts) the changes happen much faster! What used to take sometimes as
long as an hour or two should now always happen within a few minutes!

This isn't really a new _feature_ per se, more like an incremental
_improvement_ of an old feature, but in case the introduction didn't
clue you in, this month's newsletter pickin's are pretty sparse!

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3. Sarged!

Speaking of which, we finally finished "Sargifying" all our shared web
hosting servers this month! "Sarge" is the newest version of the Debian
Linux operating system we run, and it was a pretty big project to
upgrade our hundreds of servers in a way that minimized each individual
server's downtime.

Now that that's out of our hair we've got plenty of time to work on the
kind of things that will make the November newsletter introduction
shorter... actual new features!

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4. New Charities!

Well, as it turned out, I wasn't able to give out ANY Halloween candy
last night. But it's not a total charity-loss for me though, because
today is time again to switch our DreamHost Charities at:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.charity

The last two months we had the Red Cross Hurricane Katrina relief and
the open source blogging software "WordPress". Overall we got 34
donations to WordPress for a total of $489.89 which we then matched for
a total of $978.78.. and we got 261 donations for a total of $20,992.10
for the Red Cross; the most we've ever gotten for any cause ever by an
order of magnitude!

We matched that and donated a total of $41,984.20 to the cause..
($30,000 of which we already sent back in September) way to go
Charitable DreamHost Customers!

And, now's your chance to donate to two new charities for the next two
new months. They are Habitat for Humanity and the FreeBSD foundation..
one builds free homes and the other free bsds.

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5. DHSOTM

Uh oh, I'm down to the last section of the newsletter and I still
haven't written anything funny. Too late now I guess. Or is it...?

FART!

Ha ha ha hah ahhahah ha! I did it! The newsletter is another uproarious
comedy success! Somehow, month after month, one way or another, I keep
managing to pull it out. It's absolutely amazing! What else is
absolutely amazing? Somehow, for the first time in I think two full
months, a completely flash-driven site has won our DreamHost Site of
the Month contest:

http://www.zephyrsyndicate.com/

Is a "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"-esque site for a group of
Chicagoans who apparently do nifty artsy stuff as their business.
Check everything out, except for maybe the animation videos which are
HUGE files and may very well break the Internets if you click on them..

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.dhsotm

Is where to go to submit your OWN fart site under the harsh light of
peer review in a vain attempt to reach the pleasing glow of being
featured last in some future hilarious installment of this very
DreamHost newsletter!

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10-15 pounds heavier,
Josh!

P.S. Thought I forgot?

https://panel.dreamhost.com/id/?tab=contact

is the place to go to unsubscribe from this newsletter without also
closing your entire hosting account!

Dream Host customer newsletter

Dream Host newsletter - V7.10 October 2005 - Oct 10, 2005