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Dreamhost Deal

July 13, 2005

Note: The 777 code described below no longer works. Please feel free to read the post though as I am still very happy about my switch to dreamhost. If you found this post looking for promo codes, try using the code “onehundred” to get one year of “Crazy Domain Insane” for only $100.

So it seems I’m moving in more ways than one… Amy and I are trying to finish up everything here in Gainesville for our big move to Columbia on the 26th, but I’ll be switching my hosting provider at the same time. I’ve been Fed Up and looking for a reason to switch to Dreamhost for a while now…and I think I found it. I just paid $9.24 for an entire year of hosting! Too good to be true? That’s what I thought.

My plan was to wait till the year with my current host was up, but after I heard about the “777” coupon code on thebignoob, I decided now was the time. The deal is that they are offering their Crazy Domain Insane plan for $0.77/mo for the first year of service. (That’s a savings of $110.16!) Crazy Domain Insane is their smallest hosting package, but includes 2400MB of storage, 120GB of bandwidth, and 3 hosted domains, which is more than enough for my personal projects.

I’m not sure how much longer this deal will last since word about it is catching on pretty quick, but if you’re looking for hosting:

Visit Dreamhost
Sign-up for the 1 year pre-pay on Crazy Domain Insane
Your total will show $119.40 until you enter 777 in the special promotions box on step 5.
Watch your total magically change to $9.24 when you submit the promotion code…that’s it!

Back online and running smoothly. Sorry to those of you who got denied while I was working out mySQL issues.

10:48 PM/ Web :: Comments (6)

Comments

Ash at 12:07 PM on Thursday, Jul 14, 2005

I have also been wanting to change host for a little while now and this just seems like too good an opportunity to pass up.

Thanks for the tip!

Jason Beaird at 5:40 PM on Thursday, Jul 14, 2005

I was able to get everything copied over last night, but getting it all working was another story. I had references all over my code to the server root from my old host, and for some reason mySQL didn't want to import my 11MB Movable Type database. :) Thanks to the helpful support staff at my new favorite host though, I was able to get it installed via shell account command line. w00t!

Brian at 11:29 AM on Friday, Jul 15, 2005

Gotta love a good host. You got a great deal, it seems like the site move was easier than the home move.

Ray at 12:07 PM on Friday, Jul 15, 2005

Wow, that is one heck of a deal! I was going to ask you via comments yesterday whether or not the deal was still good, but I saw that you were in the middle of the move. I'm definitely moving over to Dreamhost if that deal is still good when I try it next week.

Jason Beaird at 1:09 PM on Friday, Jul 15, 2005

It is a great deal... I actually finished writing that post much later than 10:48 - I was up till about 1:30 that night backing stuff up and copying it over. So reading it now, it sorta feels like an informercial...and I hate informercials. But with all the positive feedback I've heard about Dreamhost, and my experience with them so far, I say go for it. The nice thing is that you don't have to enter payment info until after you find out if the code still works...so if it has stopped working by then, you could wait.

Insert Real Name at 11:03 PM on Sunday, Jul 17, 2005

I signed up to exactly the same deal a few weeks ago.
The only bummer so far is that I was hoping to switch from using CVS to Subversion, but the Linux NFS-mounted home directories lead to the 'make fsfscheck' sanity checks (before 'make install') randomly failing for repositories located on the mounted file system. The Subversion FAQ suggests changing the NFS mount options, but I doubt if the dreamhost team would do that--I'll try a support ticket, though.

The other small beauty spot is their self-signed SSL certificates used in secure access to IMAP accounts generated a browser/mail-client SSL warning dialog bacause the hostname in the certificate does not match the actual hostname. but that's a complicated problem to manage, apparently, when there are a lot of aliased machines in a cluster handling email.

I'm still uncertain exactly how reliable Dreamhost actually is; I suppose there are ways of determining that via cron-managed scripts doing various tests, but I'd be a little shy of imposing unnecessary loads on Dreamhost machines.

At the price we pay for the first year, I think one gets *more* than we paid for, though!

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