DreamHost has just enabled an option to use Google’s Gmail for email on domains hosted with DreamHost. The new option is available in the Control Panel under Mail – Custom MX / Gmail.

If you move your email to Gmail you will get:

• Gmail’s renowned interface as your webmail, but at http://mail.yourdomain.com
• POP3/IMAP/SMTP access (as before), but now using Google’s servers
• Awesome performance, reliability and spam filtering
• The option to add your own logo to the Gmail web interface

You can also chose to setup subdomains for Google’s calendar, docs, sites and start.

You will normally still use DreamHost for everything besides email, but you can even change your domain to use pages.google.com for its main website, which would actually imply that you no longer would be using DreamHost for any services.

I would love to hear some feedback in the comments, if you already have switched your mail to Gmail.

Dear Unofficial DreamHost Blog,

Our system has noticed what seems to be a large amount of “backup/non-web” content on your account (#99999), mostly on user “*****” on the web server “bomberman”.

Unfortunately, our terms of service state:

The customer agrees to make use of DreamHost Web Hosting
servers primarily for the purpose of hosting a website, and
associated email functions. Data uploaded must be primarily
for this purpose; DreamHost Web Hosting servers are not
intended as a data backup or archiving service. DreamHost
Web Hosting reserves the right to negotiate additional
charges with the Customer and/or the discontinuation of
the backups/archives at their discretion.

At this point, we must ask you to do one of three things:

• You can delete all backup/non-web files on your account.
• You can close your account from our panel at:
  https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=billing.accounts
  (We are willing to refund to you any pre-paid amount you have remaining, even if you’re past the 97 days. Just reply to this email after closing your account from the panel.
  OR!
• You may now enable your account for backup/non-web use!

If you’d like to enable your account to be used for non-web files, please visit the link below. You will be given the option to be charged $0.20 a month per GB of usage (the monthly average, with daily readings) across your whole account.

We don’t think there exists another online storage service that has anything near the same features, flexibility, and redundancy for less than this, so we sincerely hope you take us up on this offer!

In the future, we plan to allow the creation of a single “storage” user on your account which will have no web sites (or email). For now though, if you choose to enable your account for backups, nothing will change (apart from the charges).

If you want to enable backup/non-web use on this account, please go here:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/backups.cgi?g=99999999

If you choose not to enable this, you must delete all your non-web files within a week from when we sent this email (by 2008-02-22) or your account will be suspended.

If you have any questions about this or anything at all, please don’t hesitate to contact us by replying to this email.

Thank you very much for your understanding,
The Happy DreamHost Backup/Non-Web Use Team

Note: While personal backups will be allowed, the use of our services for the distribution, acquisition, or storage of illegal or illegally obtained copyrighted material still won’t be. Please make sure that all material hosted under your account is legal and was obtained legally!

I’ve got mixed feelings about this email…

It’s true that I’ve been using my account for backup purposes. I currently sync my two PCs to my DreamHost account, including a backup of all my digital photos – totally approximately 100 GB of data.

On one hand, I agree that these backups are not part of my websites, and I’m just happy that DreamHost now offers a solution where you can pay to use your storage for backup purposes. Actually I don’t find paying $20/month for backup of two PCs too bad. On the other hand I was under impressions that what I did was allowed – maybe not if you read the TOS very strict – but still accepted by DreamHost and that I already have paid to use up to 500 GB of storage.

Back in October DreamHost changed clarified their policies on using server space for personal storage and backup purposes. From being pretty relaxed about what you used your server space for, they now emphasized that files uploaded to your account should be provided with the intent of distributing them to others from your hosted sites.

Apparently the main reasoning was that the top 100 users were using 5% of DreamHost’s total disk space, and nearly all of these 100 users were keeping 200+ GB backups of copyrighted movies, tv shows, anime, p*rn, etc.

At the time I got a friendly email from Josh Jones, co-founder of DreamHost (as a response to my previous post), explaining all this, and that the plan was to notify about 20 users or so per week who were either using their accounts for 100s of GB of backups of copyrighted material, or keeping lots of extra backups of stuff DreamHost already was backing up (like mysql databases, websites or emails).

He even wrote:

If you’re using your account to back up one-of-a-kind personal files, even tons and tons of them, you really are never ever ever going to hear from us and we have no problem with that and things aren’t going to change AT ALL.

I’m not sure if DreamHost has changed their stand on using web space for private backups, if they see backups as a future source of income, or if it is some kind of mistake (fat fingers anyone? ). I will try to get a comment from support, but since I know this subject interests a lot of you, I decided to blog about if first. Any of you got the same email?

What do you think? Should keeping backups still be allowed or is pay-as-you-go a clever alternative? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

RoundCube is a modern browser-based webmail client with an application-like user interface (kind of like Gmail). The use of AJAX makes tasks like folder manipulation, message searching and spell checking a lot easier.

We first wrote about RoundCube about 2 years ago, and we know that a replacement for SquirrelMail has been high on the Suggestions List.

You can give DreamHost feedback in the forums.

Hattip: Tom

Now DreamHost introduces DreamHost PS MySQL.

• Now, you can get exactly the same sort of memory and cpu isolation you’re used to from DreamHost PS for your MySQL databases as well!
• DreamHost PS MySQL is completely separate from DreamHost PS; you can get either one without the other, neither or both!
• For MySQL, CPU time is much less important than RAM and disk speed (MySQL PS uses local, raided, high-speed SAS drives). Since it is not a potential bottleneck, on MySQL PS CPU time is approximate… though still proportional to your RAM level.
• If you get both DreamHost PS for your web server and for your MySQL, you get 20% off your combined monthly DreamHost PS fees!

Prices are the same as for the web server: From 150 MHz CPU and 150 MB RAM for $15/month to 2300 MHz CPU and 2300 MB RAM for $230/month (but you get 20% off if you get both the PS web server and the PS MySQL server).

The Control Panel has been updated accordingly.

DreamHost has just announced that they are launching DreamHost Private Servers.

DreamHost PS is a premium shared hosting service based on Linux-VServer, which gives each user their own “virtual machine” and thereby protecting their CPU and RAM from other users on the same physical machine.

While virtual servers gets more and more common in the hosting business, I belive the pricing model is pretty unique.

The price is currently $1.00/month for each 10 MB RAM and 10 MhZ CPU.

You choose your guaranteed server resources and can readjust whenever you want (you don’t even need to reboot the server).

You can still burst up to the full 2.3 GHz CPU and double the memory. This means that you can start out small and scale as you go.

A couple of examples:

• 150 MB RAM / 150 MHz CPU ($15/month)
  99% of all predominantely static sites (e.g. www.dreamhost.com)
• 300 MB RAM / 300 MHz CPU ($30/month)
  A top 100 blog (e.g. blog.dreamhost.com)
• 512 MB RAM / 512 MHz CPU ($51.2/month)
  A busy forum (e.g. discussion.dreamhost.com)
• 2300 MB RAM / 2300 MHz CPU ($230/month)
  A very popular web app. (e.g. panel.dreamhost.com)

The price includes 2 unique IPs and the ability to name your own “server”.

Besides the protected and guaranteed CPU and RAM everything else works as your old DreamHost account. Same features, same web panel, same amount of bandwidth and disk, same support, etc.

The service is currently invitation-only, but you can already get added to the wait list through the control panel.

This version includes a number of bug fixes and addresses a number of security vulnerabilities and it’s therefore strongly recommended to upgrade as soon as possible.

If you use DreamHost’s One-Click Upgrade please remember to back up your existing installation as the upgrade might overwrite any customized files.

DreamHost has just upgraded their Control Panel with a new design and a number of “web 2.0″ features. The new design is more in line with the newish frontpage and is more modern in both look and technology.

The new menu looks more professional and visual more appealing. It does not currently have any new menu items, but all pages and forms have been redesigned and are now more clearly laid-out.

The new design uses a small bit of Ajax (with the prototype library), e.g. for the handy Account Status dropdown, and I think we can expect more use of fancy features in the future. Another “Web 2.0″ feature is a tag-cloud-like menu on the frontpage of the Control Panel.

The Official DreamHost Weblog has just been updated with more about the new design.

Hat tip: Kevin

WordPress 2.1 was released just 3 days ago and is already available in the DreamHost Control Panel as either an one-click install or an one-click upgrade.

The new version includes a ton of new features like:

• Tabbed Editor
  Allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing seamlessly.
  
  
• Autosave
  Your drafts will be autosaved in the background while you’re writing from the moment you write the title of your post.
• Search Engine Privacy Option
  In case you don’t want you blog to be indexed by search engines like Google.
• WordPress Migration Functionality
  Lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Content Management System Functionality
  Set any “page” to be the front page and put the latest posts somewhere else.
• More Efficient Database Code
  An expert from MySQL has optimized every query for maximum performance.
• Upload Manager
  Easier upload of pictures, video and audio.
  
• Akismet
  New version of the comment spam filtering service is bundled with WordPress.

More info about the new features in the WordPress Development Blog and 10 Things You should Know About WordPress 2.1.

Some plugins might not work in the new version, so you might wish to check for upgrades before you press [Upgrade to 2.1].

Anybody knows what DreamHost is up to?

Guess we’ll see in the next newsletter due any time now…

Updated:

As Wendel and Daniel point out in the comments, the DreamHost Blog has just been updated with an explanation…

DreamHost has licensed Jeroen Wijerings Flash Media Player – a tool that enables DreamHost customers to embed streamed audio and video into any of their web pages.

The Flash Media Player supports playback of any media file the Adobe Flash Player can handle: Images (JPG, PNG, GIF), Music (MP3) and Flash (FLV, SWF). DreamHost will also provide support for converting videos in AVI, MOV and MPG into FLV via the support panel.

Examples of how to use the new DreamHost Media Tools at http://media.dreamhost.com…

Updated:

The wiki has been updated with Flash Media Player and Flash Image Rotator and a new media section is available in the control panel.