Want to add a newsletter ? Use the contact form to let us know!
Dream HostnewsletterV7.06 June 2005 Jun 6, 2005
0. Introduction.
1. Ruby on Rails and FastCGI!
2. Watch your disk and bandwidth quotas GROW!
3. Miva 5!
4. Zend optimizer!
5. Get a daily CPU usage report!
6. New Charities!
7. DHSOTM.
8. DHSOTM.
Welcome, one and all, to the ever-so-late June edition of the (great)
DreamHost newsletter! I have a REALLY good excuse for why this one is
late too.. I lost the script that sends it out! I know, I know.. why not
just use the customer announcement list server like the Happy Customers
have to? Well, I like to think of myself as better than our customers,
thank you very much! Should I, head honcho extraordinaire, be forced to
eat the same dog food I force on you, the non-honcho rabble? It is to
laugh!
Ha ha ha! Just kidding of course! The REAL reason we have to use our own
silly script is because our newsletter needs to do some programmable
things like automatically only go to people who have active accounts and
haven't updated their subscription preferences to not receive it! In
actuality, I love dog food! In fact, I was just in China for my
honeymoon and ate a lot of "dog" food. And I'm not talking about Purina.
How does one go about "losing" a script, you might ask? THAT is a very
good question.
########################################################################
1. Ruby on Rails and FastCGI!
One thing I didn't particularly like about the dog food I ate in China
was picking the fur from my teeth afterwards. Fortunately just about
every restaurant in China provides toothpicks for exactly this. Just
like it sucks to eat dog food, it sucks to have a web host that doesn't
provide Ruby on Rails support or FastCGI!
You can count your lucky stars you're with DreamHost and not www.net.cn!
Those guys wouldn't know Ruby on Rails if it jumped out of their food
and scratched them across the eye. And nice "The Incredibles" rip-off,
you no-IP-respect-having Chinese!
If I wasn't making myself clear, DreamHost now supports Ruby on Rails
right out of the box (so no further need to follow the crazy
instructions for doing it yourself like people were posting at
wiki.dreamhost.com), along with FastCGI (which you pretty much need -
unless you prefer Ruby on Snails).
That's about all there is to it, if you don't know what Ruby on Rails is,
don't worry.. it's like a programming environment thing to help you make
fancy web applications in the Ruby programming language lickety-split!
http://www.rubyonrails.com/
If you don't believe me!
########################################################################
2. Watch your disk and bandwidth quotas GROW!
The reason I mentioned getting scratched across the eye was because MY
own personal dog, Salt (named after his taste), scratched ME across the
eye last night! How did a 2' 3" dog scratch a 6' 5" sexy human across
the eye you might ask? THAT is a very good question.
Perhaps Salt grew, as only living things do? Only living things until
NOW that is! Because right now, or maybe yesterday, depending on when I
find that script to send this newsletter, all DreamHost shared hosting
customers' disk and bandwidth quotas are GROWING CONSTANTLY!
That's right! Every week, your plan limits will grow as follows, at
absolutely no charge:
L1: 20MB disk and 1GB bandwidth each week!
L2: 40MB disk and 1.5GB bandwidth each week!
L3: 60MB disk and 2GB bandwidth each week!
L4: 80MB disk and 2.5GB bandwidth each week!
So, the longer you host with us, the more you've got! AND, we're so nice
we've even retroactively grown your limits based on how long you've been
hosting with us already (up to a one year max)! If that's not something
to blog about, I don't know what is! I haven't been able to get on Oprah
and zap her with lightning from my finger tips... this will have to do!
In a way, it's sort of like all our plans now come with INFINITE disk
and bandwidth! Of course, that doesn't mean they're NECESSARILY a good
deal, because in that same way, all our plans also cost INFINITE money!
There's just something about the number five that always gets me right
here. It's the number of siblings I'd have if my sisters had both been
twins. It's how old I was back when I was a kid. And most importantly,
there's no better way to get back at a club bouncer than by chanting
"FIVE DOLLARS AN HOUR, FIVE DOLLARS AN HOUR, FIVE DOLLARS AN HOUR".
Less awesomely, it's also the version of the Miva E-Commerce store we
now install, with at least FIVE new features, such as:
*MySQL Support
*"Store Morph" Technology - provides complete control over the
look of your store with customizable page templates.
*Version Histories - many store customization features save each
update in a version history so you can go back to an
older version if some changes you make aren't so hot.
*Redesigned Admin Interface
*Import Customers and Categories
*Automatic Updates
Sometimes I feel like I have represented the East side for far too long,
and so I'd like to represent a new side. It's time like this I'm glad we
just added the repre-Zend optimizer to PHP on all our zervers!
http://www.zend.com/zend/optimizer.php
What does it do?
Well, just like FastCGI for Ruby on Rails, it makes PHP run in a more
"zend optimized" way, and hence FASTER! Incidentally, it also lets you
run "encoded" PHP code, which is like PHP scripts that somebody sells
you but they don't want you to be able to see the source code. Now you
can run them all the way back to China!
########################################################################
5. Get a daily CPU usage report!
Wouldn't it be funny if somebody pronounced CPU "see poo" instead of
"see pee you"? And wouldn't it be funny if people could make their CPU
"poo" because of running lots of really resource-intensive scripts on
their shared server?
Well now YOU can see your CPU poo too! Because there's a new option in
our Users > Users area:
https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=users.users
If you click "Edit" you can turn on "CPU reporting" for a user! If you
turn that on it'll put a report each night detailing how much CPU time
each of your scripts used yesterday! The report will be at:
http://yoursite.com/stats/resources
This is useful to know because if you're being a super huge resource hog
we may ask you to upgrade to a dedicated server or temporarily put you
on a resource hog server. This lets you keep your own tab on things so
you can figure out if it's just some silly INFINITE loop that's pooing
the see poo for you!
########################################################################
6. New Charities!
For those of you with subtle minds trained in the art of reloading, you
may have noticed that the last charities were up for THREE months
instead of two. You may think this was just a lapse on my part. You may
think I was in China and didn't want to interrupt my canine cuisine. The
TRUTH, however, is it'd been bugging me for a looong time that charities
were updated on the odd months instead of the even ones. Ahhhhhhh.
Anyway, big thanks to all those who donated in April-June to LAEP!
We raised $363.15 from 20 contributors, and then matched it! Big thanks
again to all those who donated in April-June to HeartGift! We raised
$697.23 from 19 contributors, and then matched it!
The new charities for July-August are therefore as follows:
https://www.katalysis.org/ : providing micro-loans to low-income
micro-entrepreneurs in South America.
https://www.ctcnet.org/ : providing support to community
technology centers in low-income areas in North America.
Donate today, and help us help build the next generation of DreamHost
competitors! As always, you can donate to these charities directly from
your web hosting bill... plus we match all contributions... here:
Hooray for the DreamHost site of the month, back to its regularly
scheduled monthliness! This month we're having two winners to make up
for not having any last month to make up for TYPO-ing the winner the
month before that!
One winner is:
http://www.greatwriting.co.uk/
A great site which may or may not have flash! Visit them immediately!
And, if you've got your own site which may or may not have flash,
submit it for ruthless peer review and maybe YOU can get a mention here
someday!
https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.dhsotm
And, smart me, I made all this text completely site-neutral so I can
just cut and paste it below, saving me valuable decades of time!
Hooray for the DreamHost site of the month, back to its regularly
scheduled monthliness! This month we're having two winners to make up
for not having any last month to make up for TYPO-ing the winner the
month before that!
One winner is:
http://www.glimpsesphotography.com/
A great site which may or may not have flash! Visit them immediately!
And, if you've got your own site which may or may not have flash,
submit it for ruthless peer review and maybe YOU can get a mention here
someday!
https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.dhsotm
And, smart me, I made all this text completely site-neutral so I could
just cut and paste it from above, saving me valuable decades of time!
Wow, 2^8 lines of text is too much for most people. I won't eat your dog
if you decide to unsubscribe from the newsletter here:
https://panel.dreamhost.com/id/?tab=contact
Especially since I also promise to also announce all the JUICY BITS the
day after sending the newsletter, without all the cheap filler. So you
won't really miss anything.. although you won't hear about it until the
next day. But without all the filler.
