Comments on: Pay to Use DreamHost for Personal Storage

By: steven

steven — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:51:51 +0000

I explicitly asked support last year if it was permissible to use the file space for backups. There was a clear statement that as long as the files (including legal owned mp3s) weren’t publicly accessible then this was fine. The suggestion was to have backup folders at your server space route.

This is of course now not allowed and I have had a massive inconvenience making alternative arrangements.

The moving of the goal posts is bad enough, but even though I had removed all ‘offending’ content within their deadlines they STILL shut all my sites down and took far too long to reinstate them.

Thanks.

By: Yurtdisi Egitim

Yurtdisi Egitim — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:28:21 +0000

it seems like e very good web site but my English is not good. It would be great if it might be availible in other languages too. Thanks.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:30:45 +0000

I’m with Dreamhost on this.
From their point of view they don’t mind people shoving their personal photos up as they could reasonably be for friends and family, even in a password protected folder. Their problem is with the people backing up copyrighted material, they don’t own the copyright to, on their servers.
You’re not paying for all that space and bandwidth to use it for backups. You’re paying for using it as a website. They’re a webhost not a backup solution (well now they are if you get that service). If you’re using 200meg for a website and 50gig for backups then you’re misusing your account. It’s as simple as that. Dreamhost readily admit they oversell because they know a majority of websites will never use that sort of space. However with the advent of file sharing people are needing more and more space to store stuff and using your Dreamhost space is cheaper than buying a new hard drive.
Dreamhost has noticed this and are now offering a very fairly priced solution which also covers them as a host. If someone is uploading films onto their servers and people start downloading them then Dreamhost get taken to the cleaners for hosting copyrighted material. Then all their customers lose out when Dreamhost is shut down. Offering a non web accessible backup solution is a great idea. Your backups are safe from prying eyes and they’re not seen as hosting copyrighted material.

By: Scott Y.

Scott Y. — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:39:44 +0000

Maybe I am the odd one here, but SIGN ME UP for a good secure backup plan at $0.20/GB!! I am currently paying quite a bit more than that for a rsync/rdiff-backup account to backup all my servers, and I will be more than happy to switch to DreamHost’s backup service if the price is right.

By: Matt Nordhoff

Matt Nordhoff — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:13:06 +0000

@Tim:

I’m pretty sure the filers are smart enough not to make multiple copies of a file when it isn’t modified.

Also, they are huge and slow.

By: bignumbers

bignumbers — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:26:45 +0000

This is very disconcerting. What defines files “primarily for a web site?” Do all files on your web site have to be available to the whole world? What happens if I have a full copy of all my photos, but they’re behind a password-protected image gallery script just for friends and family? Is that a web site, or an archive? How about the same thing with home videos?

If you had 5MB encrypted backup files (per the example someone gave above) but had them with a .jpg extension - would DH try to open them to determine if they were, in fact, jpg files?

It’s the policing that bothers me the most (and a close second is the fact they keep changing their stance on this).

By: rlparker

rlparker — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:39:28 +0000

I’ve got mixed feelings about it too, and I understand why some are frustrated. I don’t think anyone is “actually paying for” the kind of storage that DH “makes available” - that is just overselling, but I *do* think that it is nice to have all the space your need to serve websites - and *THAT* is what DreamHost is structured to do.

Last time I checked, FTP bandwidth was “logged” but *not* included in DreamHost users’ bandwidth quotas, so syncing 100’s of gigs of stored stuff is an additional cost to DreamHost that is not “metered” - it’s probably not a big deal for the typical site updating stuff, but it could become a big deal if everyone started backing up tons of stuff onto DreamHost’s servers.

As obnoxious as Elliot can be at times, he has a point - you can do what you want with your own server, and that seems to me to be a better approach for those wanting backup storage.

DreamHost’s infrastructure is designed to provide efficient serving of websites, and there would likely be significant design changes indicated if it became significantly used for backups.

At the end of the day, I don”t think DH’s proposed charge for using the service as a backup vs a webserver is unreasonable; there may be cheaper alternatives but it would be your choice whether or not to avail yourself of that.

I think it’s really hard to be “all things to all people”, and I’d rather see DH’s resources used to host sites than as a distributed storage, or data processing, platform - though I understand that YMMV.

By: Annoyed

Annoyed — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:53:16 +0000

My backups are split into multiple, encrypted archives around 5 MB each.

My backup system handles date-based changes already; if DH provided it, I’d be happy to disable their automatic backups of my backups.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:47:09 +0000

Are your backups in one big file? Or is it like a bazillion little files? The thing I could see is if people were all uploading 200GB zips or what not it could cause problems since all the folders are also backed up automatically. So that 200GB file becomes multiple 200GB files, and they probably didn’t design it to handle huge files.

They also are putting all these files on servers that are supposed to be readily available (ie ready to access any file instantly). Maybe if they had one of those huge file servers that’s a tad bit slower but insanely bigger, it would be more cost effective to put backups on that.

As for photos, I’ve talked to them about that. I plan on using my full allotment of disk space with photos at some point, but then again that’s on a site where I’m trying to sell photos so it’s clearly not a backup

By: Annoyed

Annoyed — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:55:26 +0000

This email from right before I became a DreamHost customer should explain how I feel:

From: DreamHost Sales Team
To: annoyed@example.com
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 18:51

Hello,

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, you wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I’m a fellow Debianite, and I’m interested in your basic hosting plan. I
> don’t have any big web sites, so I wouldn’t expect to use that much bandwidth
> or disk space with public HTTP traffic. However, one of the things I would
> like to use my account for would be backup, specifically using Duplicity.
> Duplicity is included in Debian, and uses Rsync (among others) as a
> transport. Provided the data didn’t exceed my account’s quota, is this an
> acceptable use of a DreamHost account? I didn’t find anything on your site
> prohibiting anything like it, but I wanted to be sure.

Sure, you can use your account here for that purpose.

> Also, do I understand correctly that e-mail bandwidth doesn’t count against
> accounts’ bandwidth quota? I wouldn’t expect to ever exceed the monthly
> bandwidth quota, but if, for example, someone decided to hit a public file a
> million times and sucked up all the bandwidth, would I still be able to send
> and receive e-mail? I’m considering replacing my e-mail only service with
> DreamHost, using it for both e-mail, web, and backup, but although it’s
> extremely unlikely, I wouldn’t want my e-mail to get cutoff because of
> something like that.

Your email won’t be shutoff if you go over your bandwidth. If you come
close to reaching your bandwidth limit, we’ll let you know ahead of time
so that you can reduce your usage. If you do go over, you’ll just pay for
the extra that is used and will not have your services affected by it.
Let us know if you have any further questions.

Thanks,
Dan