Oct
3
(2006)
Woah. Dreamhost is celebrating their 9th birthday, and decided to party by increasing limits on accounts. Account holders now get 200 GB (200 gigabytes - a fifth of a terabyte) of disk space. And 2 TB (2 terabytes) of bandwidth per month.
That’s insane. Three things must have happened, in order for them to be able to offer this at $7.95/month.
- bandwidth costs have come waaaay down over the years
- the cost of hard drive space has come waaaay down over the years
- almost nobody comes even close to using their full allotment of either
It’s awesome that Dreamhost is doing this. It’s pretty cool knowing I’ve got 200GB backing my account, and that I’ll never have to worry about bandwidth. Now, if only the performance of the MySQL server would get a boost…
So… Why hasn’t the decreasing cost of bandwidth affected my home DSL connection at all?
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15 Responses to “Dreamhost ups account limits”
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I don’t quite agree with your logic. The cost of bandwidth hasn’t gone down, it’s about the same, though large hosts close to backbones can get it relatively cheap, it’s still not much cheaper than it was. The fact is that most people don’t use the space nor the bandwidth that they are offered. If everyone was to, they would soon be out of business. Instead, they offer you that much knowing that about 20% will take them up on it, and the rest of the 80% won’t use even 1/2 of that (pareto’s principle). The other points though I think are valid.
Good point, Sami. They’re likely using it to oversell servers, hoping if they come close to capacity that there will be time to add more iron before it caps out.
Still, pretty cool.
Darcy,
We here at UMW have been wondering if we would be able to run a Pachyderm installation off of Dreamhost. Rachel Smith gave us an excellent demonstration of Pachyderm last May and we are currently considering an installation for some museum projects for the Spring. Can you offer any advice on what webhosting provider would be best for such an application -I vaguely remember Rachel suggesting that their are certain requirements for running Pachyderm that would necessitate Mac-based server software, but I amy be off on this.
Thanks!
it’s a webobjects app, so the elephant should run anywhere that can run java. the image thumbnail preview generator was initially macosx-only, but is now cross-platform. I’m not sure what java services Dreamhost offers - but if they do, it could work there. I know of others using dedicated servers at GoDaddy, but that involved some futzing with apache modules, etc… Ideally, you’d build Pachyderm as a servlet package, and just deploy in Tomcat.
http://blog.dreamhosters.com/kbase/index.cgi?area=689
ah, well there ya go. no java apps on dreamhost’s servers. thanks for finding that, sami!
Your points on the 80/20 rule are very valid.The bigger issue of internet charges have been dropping as well.
In the commerical grade network connectivity, internet access has gotten cheaper - especially where metro ethernet based services are availble. Once you pay for a fibre pull the local loop costs for 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps aren’t too scary. The real differental today is the bitrate charges for ‘bursty’ traffic. Before we were paying by the bit, now it is more a matter of peak data rates really being the cost. So if you want to sit there an suck 200Mbps all day your golden, if your pushing video that peaks at a few Gbps then drops to nothing the rest of the time - yikes. Same number of bits, two very different bills.
I recently changed from Vizaweb to Dreamhost. Vizaweb got their domain hijacked and knocked everyone off for days - could risk waiting for them to fix it. I went partly because of your discussions about searching for a new host a while back.
I went for the $15 package they had on sale which now went to 400GBs, so I’m a pretty happy camper too. But here’s the rub - my .Mac subscription is up in 7 days. I support several members of my family on .Mac but I get 4 email address and 1 GB of disk space for the same as my hosting costs with DH. I guess I’m going to spend the next week figuring how to get the iApps all working with WebDav from Dreamhost.
Bill - since Dreamhost has enabled Appleshare, it should be pretty straightforward to set up a shared family space, ala .Mac webdisk. Also, WebDAV is an easy setup.
The one thing I REALLY miss from my .Mac account is iSync. It’s a totally arbitrary commercial decision to tie it solely to a .Mac account. Why not tie it to a MacOSX Server? Or to a Appleshare volume? Is there much logic on the server for it, or could a more simple rsync or subversion solution work?
I don’t like WebDAV at all, it’s the flakiest file transfer system that I know. Perhaps its better with a mac?
It’s pretty stable, and built into the Finder. IIRC, Apple’s .Mac runs entirely on WebDAV to let you connect. I agree that it seems like a hack - a webserver on top of a filesystem - but that’s not such a stretch - subversion is basically the same model, and it’s really stable. Maybe it’s flakier on Windows?
Crap … I didn’t realize DH had AFP turned on .. thanks Darcy. .Mac uses webDAV and Sami is right - it is flakier than a box of Kellogs but it is the standard for all the iApps. I figured if you could hack iSync well enough you could reprogram the server for .Mac to something else. I think that will happen in 10.5 as some of the .Mac services will come to OS X server and you will need to be able to point your client to your local server.
Let’s zoom out a little to the bigger deal, when this kind of storage - that you own for yourself - not some Web2.0 might be free but we haven’t figured out the business model - then your thinking really changes. I got 400 GB and its increasing by 2GB a week. I don’t generate 2GB of work in a week, even counting every podcast I download. Neither do the rest of my family, my sisters family and my aunt that has my old lime iMac.
We are in the world of - don’t bother deleting anything. Gmail started it for me although I did archive stuff to Zip Disks, Cds and DVDs before that but this is almost a different level.
Jim: In general, you need a hosting service that will let you run Java applications. GoDaddy’s virtual dedidcated hosting or full dedicated hosting services will work. Mac OS X isn’t a strict requirement for deployment, although it certainly is the easiest.
I just signed up to dreamhost and am pretty happy (although uptime has been lousy, mainly on the mysql box). Never considered using it as offsite storage but for backing up essential files it might be a good deal. Am on the 200gb deal which would fill up pretty quick if I uploaded my images but otherwise would be more than enough.
D’Arcy, you should list your DH affiliate code
Dreamhost mine as well just go unlimited with the limits that they are offering, either way they can’t truly give you what they offer.
- http://www.thehostguru.com