V8.04 April 2006

0. Introduction.
1. New! http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/!
2. No more Miva! No more oscommerce! More Zen Cart!
3. New! Domain WHOIS Privacy Service!
4. A little help from hosting.com!
5. DHSOTM

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0. Introduction.

Once again, it's time again for that time again, the time when happy
newsletter-readers the world over rejoice, for the newsletter we write
every month is being delivered even now as we speak, to you, the happy
audience of DreamHost newsletter-readers, and in this case, it's the
newsletter known as the May 2006 DreamHost Newsletter! However, please
don't believe for a second that everything is right in the crazy world
of newsletter writing.. no way! There are elements about who would like
nothing more than to see this vital independent publishing entity fail
entirely!

Spies are among us, people! No avenue of communication is safe! It is of
ultimate importance that we take every possible step to protect our
citizens' (of DreamHost!) privacy and security. This issue is devoted to
keeping our customers protected against and prepared for all the nasty
scoundrels inhabiting this sess-pool we call "Internet 2006"!


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1. New! http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/!

Since email is such an insecure medium, we've had to be very sneaky and
craft this newsletter to seem perfectly innocuous to prying eyes. What
really lies inside though is a completely sneaky ENCODED SPY MESSAGE...
encoded in a way that only true-blue DreamHost Customers who are super
will be able to find and decode! Really! Try and find the SECRET CODE!

I always knew email was an inherently unreliable method for transferring
private and critical information such as spam, the DH newsletter, and
other messages you need to get but don't want the goverment or other
wandering eyes perusing. And that's exactly why we are no longer sending
everybody DreamHost announcements via email! Well, the truth is nowadays
RSS is just so much cooler, and to be a web host is to be the epitome of
web cool. Which is why we have to use it, and why we've decommissioned,
effective immediately, old announcements system for the much cooler and
better, new off-site status and announcement blog:

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/


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2. No more Miva! No more osCommerce! More Zen Cart!

Virtually all our customers are unaffected by this, but another change
enacted recently is the de-commissioning of Miva and osCommerce, our two
relatively annoying software e-commerce packages we USED TO support. We
inspected a bunch of alternatives and decided the best and most SECURE
option to offer instead, is Zen Cart!

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=goodies.installer

You can now install Zen Cart from our one-click installs area, just like
osCommerce had been before. Actually, Zen Cart really IS osCommerce, but
updated since the Carter administration.

Both osCommerce and Zen Cart beat Miva in our book. Miva was just really
lame when it came to things like lack of MySQL 5 support, poor support
of our customers (and us), and of course it wasn't open source. Which is
why we decided to dump it.. not because "it cost money". I promise.


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3. New! Domain WHOIS Privacy Service!

Privacy is a big thing on the Internet. Well, really, it's not that big,
only because there is so little of it! Especially when you first get a
www.domain.com all your own! You're just settling down, little newbie,
when you realize that ALL YOUR PERSONAL INFO has just been posted for
everyone and anyone in the world to read! Scammers, spammers, stalkers.
Better watch out.. secret codes and RSS feeds ain't gonna help you now!

ICANN requires you to post this contact information. They also require
spammers to not use it. But unfortunately, spammers are generally jerks.

Due to the widespread abuse of WHOIS data, we're now offering a service
everybody can use for FREE to use our contact info as a sort of "proxy"
address on your domains. You also get a free email address that forwards
domain email on to you, without revealing any actual info to spammers!

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=domain.registration


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4. A little help from hosting.com!

Just when you thought the newsletter was over, the newsletter is not
over at all! Lastly, as a way to re-focus our efforts on privacy and
security, we've decided to partner with the dudes (and dude-ettes) at
hosting.com to help provide dedicated servers to those interested.

Just dedicated servers, you ask? No way! We're actually offering tons of
other services through our fun little new partnership with hosting.com:
Now you can get VPS services, including cold-fusion support, colocation,
even WINDOWS shared hosting (and dedicated too)! For all this stuff you
should use "DH1MONFREE" when signing up to get ONE MONTH FREE:

http://www.dreamhost.com/dedicated/


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5. DHSOTM

Is this month's DHSOTM winner yet another beautiful flash-based website,
sucking our bandwidth and making us wish for the sweet release of death?

That would be a surprise. Another surprise, a bigger surprise, a much
HUGER surprise, would be if this month's winner was actually based
entirely on a simple DreamHost one-click install!

http://www.lyricwiki.org

As you might surmise, this site is a wiki. It's not just any ordinary
wiki though, it's a fun and useful wiki: a wiki of song lyrics! That's
even better than a wiki of spy codes and ciphers! Chicks just don't dig
spy codes and ciphers the way they do lyrics. And what better way to
organize a bunch of lyrics than in a wiki, where everybody can submit
modifications and new songs without any kind of central authority or
even basic fact checking? No better way in my mind! This is my favorite
site of the month, EVER. I love that they just used our 1-click installs
to make the whole thing! I love that there are no pop-ups or spyware!

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

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Still paranoid,
Josh Jones!

P.S. Didn't find the SECRET CODE? I bet you're going to want to
unsubscribe from this garbage. Please do so from:

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

URL source: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/V8.04_April_2006

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