They are thereby continuing their explosive growth and are still adding 600 domains on average every single day.

Looking at the Top Hosting Companies Worldwide DreamHost is now placed as 14th, but more intesting is the fact that only WildWestDomains.com (which is a GoDaddy sister company), Yahoo, and 1&1 really offer web hosting. The rest is either domain sellers, domain parkers or domain squatters.

Is DreamHost really the 4th biggest web host in the World (by number of domains hosted)? Or who is bigger? Anybody got some info on this?

Hurray… DreamHost is now hosting more than 500,000 domains according to WebHosting.Info. With an average of 700 new domains a day since they passed 400,000 it has taken less than 5 months to reach this new milestone.

To celebrate this event DreamHost is currently having a crazy promo: A Crazy Domain Insane package with 500 GB storage space, 5 TB bandwidth, 5 free domains and a $50 discount. That’s $69.40 for the first year of hosting if you sign up for the yearly plan.

Unfortunately DreamHost scooped me this time and got the story first. They even started to announce winners of my contest?! Talk about stealing my thunder.

So how did it happen that the lazy guys at DreamHost got the story first? Well, I’m almost sure they killed by cronjobs watching the WebHosting.Info site, delayed all my emails and infiltrated my army of squirrels I had paid to update the blog the second the news was broken!

Luckily I snapped a picture of Josh in his squirrel disguise, and will try to use it to extort him for a few extra prizes. You better listen Josh or I’ll break your nuts!

Contest Result

As most of you would know, we started a contest just before New Year, where the object was to guess when DreamHost would pass 500,000 hosted domains. 108 dreamhosters submitted their guesses in time for a chance to win an iPod shuffle.

The stats from WebHosting.Info shows 496,673 domains for May 7th and 500,796 for May 14th. Interpolating these numbers shows that DreamHost reached 500,000 domains on Sunday, May 13, 2007.

No one guessed the correct day, but there was two guesses on the day before and four guesses on the day after. Later today I will announce the winner of the drawing between the six guesses on either May 12 or May 14.

P.S: No animal was harmed in the making of this blog post.

General stats:

In 6 years the forum have had 78,067 posts, in 15,824 threads, submitted by 9,834 registered users (plus countless of anonymous users). The forum has grown considerably the last year with more than 6,000 threads and 34,000 new posts. Also a big welcome to the more than 4,000 new registered users.

Posts Per Month
Active Threads Per Month
Active Users Per Month

Most active boards:

Most active boards (last 12 months):

General Troubleshooting, Curious About DreamHost? and Beginner’s Forum continues to be the most popular forums, while Beta Testing, Promotion and E-Commerce remains pretty dead.

Most active users (all-time):

Most active users (last 12 months):

rlparker and Raz2133 have both written more than 2000 post the last 12 months, which brings them right to the top on the all time Most Active Users chart. wholly and norm1037 are also newcomers on the the chart.

Most active threads (all-time):

14 of top 20 most active threads has been created within the last 12 months. As always a bit of controversy creates the longest threads…

Congratulations to all the forum users, and let us hope that the next year will bring as many helpful, interesting and controversial discussions as we’re used to!

Hosting Plans
DreamHost started the new year by quadrupling the disk space and octupling the bandwidth on all shared hosting plans. A Crazy Domain Insane plan went from 4800 MB disk storage to 20 GB storage and from 120 GB monthly bandwidth to 1 TB bandwidth.

In October they decided to increase everybody’s storage limits again with up to 10 times the disk storage and at least double the bandwidth. A CDI-plan now has 200 GB disk storage and 2 TB bandwidth.

In order for the users to use these new allowances the dreaded CPU minute restriction was lifted, and only customers interrupting service for other customers would now be contacted.

One-Click Installs
DreamHost introduced One-Click upgrades and a few new One-Click Installs like Zen Cart and ActiveCollab.

New Features
2006 brought a number of great features; whereof some of them had been on the suggestion list for ages.

• Multiple databases per hostname
• Same username and password for multiple databases
• Restore MySQL databases in the Control Panel
• Free Custom DNS
• Free Whois Privacy
• Email logins with user@domain.com
• Subversion

For newcomers this might not seem like a big thing, but for old time dreamhosters, at least some of these additions have made life a lot easier.

New Web Applications
DreamHost tried to tell the world that they were very Web 2.0 by introducing several web applications. The old email announcement system was replaces by the DreamHost Status Blog and Media Tools and Files Forever (an advanced online marketplace for DRM-free files) was launched in public betas.

Community
In 2006 DreamHost could both celebrate 200,000, 300,000 and 400,000 hosted domains and has thereby doubled in size in less than a year.

The discussion forum had close to 30,000 posts (29,533 to be exact) in 5922 threads by 4508 individual users. That’s an approximately 50% increase on all fronts compared to 2005 (20,430 posts, 4360 threads, 2973 users).

Down Time
I won’t go into details here, but just point to Anatomy of a(n ongoing) Disaster and Anatomy of a Disaster, Part 2. Even if this summer was a dark chapter in DreamHost’s history, DreamHost’s honesty and transparency also impressed the blogger community.

Future
I think we’ll see DreamHost develop even more web applications in 2007. I’ve heard rumors that DreamHost is working on upgrading Keywords to version 2.0 (aka a web 2.0 version of the software). I also expect to see more to Files Forever. I believe DreamHost will try to create a community around the service, and maybe combined with the Media Tools it can evolve into a full featured media store.

What are your predictions for DreamHost in 2007? Which services to you hope they will start to offer or how to you expect the company to evolve in 2007?

Last January they passed 200,000 domains, in July they reached 300,000 domains and the last 6 months they have continued their growth with tremendous pace. This means that they now have doubled in size in less than one year.

This also means that DreamHost are now finally in the top 20 of the biggest hosts in the world – currently as number 19!

Congratulations once again DreamHost and a Merry Christmas to all of you!

Updated:

Back in January I predicted that DreamHost would reach 250,000 domains before 1th of June 2006, but they passed that milestone already in April and almost grew twice as fast as predicted. Any guesses about how many domains they will host in 6 months time? Maybe I should set up a contest?

On a similar note I’ve heard rumors that DreamHost is going to purchase space from another hosting provider inside the Garland Building in order to be able to continue their growth. The Garland Building is home of numerous hosting providers and telecommunication companies including (tm) Media Temple, PowWeb and Freeway. This might be good news for the ones of you who are waiting for dedicated servers.

DreamHost Control Panel > Support > Contact Support

Unfortunately my script broke about 3 weeks ago (I changed my control panel password, but forgot to update the script), but I still have a bit more than 5 months of data from the 11th November 2005 to 22nd April 2006 (totally 3880 observations).

Average Open Support Requests
Daily – Last 6 months

The graph shows how the support queue has evolved over the last 5½ months. It started pretty high in mid-November with an average of around 800 requests in the queue and even surpassing 1000 a few times.

Since then it has hit the 800-mark just before Christmas, down to the 70’s at New Year and back in the 800’s in mid-January and in the beginning of February, where it even reached 1054 open support requests for a few hours.

Since mid-February the queue has been noticeable shorter, which the following chart clearly shows.

Average and Maximum Open Support Requests
November 2005 – April 2006

While the average number of open support requests in November – February was between 500 and 600, the average in March fell to 258 and 213 in April. The maximum of open support requests has also fallen from between 900 and 1100 in November – February to 701 in March and 614 in April 2006.

Average Open Support Requests
Weekly

Another interesting observation is how the support queue changes over the week. There’s clearly a weekend effect with fewer requests on Saturday evenings and during Sundays (or at least fewer requests per employee). It’s also evident that the queue is longest around noon each day and shortest around midnight.

It’s important to notice that the queue size doesn’t tell anything about average response time and it’s impossible to derive anything about response time from the data I have. DreamHost states that they strive to answer all emails within 24 hours, but obviously had troubles fulfilling this goal last fall, because of the recent growth.

When taking in to consideration that the growth has continued and the number of hosted domains has grown from 160.000 to 260.000 in the last 6 months (60% growth), I find it impressive that they at the same time has been able to shorten the support queue. DreamHost honcho Michael recently revealed that 55% of support questions are now answered within 2 hours and 95% are answered within 24 hours. The more difficult the question, the longer it takes to find a resolution.

I’ve been digging deep into the archives to come up with the following Birthday Stats:

General stats:

In 5 years the forum have had 43881 posts, in 9703 threads, submitted by 5779 registered users (plus countless of anonymous users).

Posts Per Month
Active Threads Per Month
Active Users Per Month

Most active boards:

Most active users (all-time):

Posts	Username	Title
1940	will	DH Pooh-Bah
1556	ardco	DH Pooh-Bah
1450	matttail	DH Pooh-Bah
1160	Anonymous
900	scjessey	DH DreamNinja
811	chrisjj	DH DreamNinja
777	Jeff @ DreamHost	DH DreamNinja
758	Atropos7	DH DreamNinja
614	user919	DH Grizzled Veteran
566	TorbenGB	DH Grizzled Veteran

Former DreamHost employee Will Yardley leads the pack with 1940 posts since he joined the forum in May 2001.

Most active users (last year):

Posts	Username	Title
1268	matttail	DH Pooh-Bah
775	scjessey	DH DreamNinja
602	ardco	DH Pooh-Bah
446	Anonymous
381	dallas	DreamHost Honcho
358	chrisjj	DH DreamNinja
335	Raz2133	DH Smarty Pants
328	guice	DH Smarty Pants
290	bygodaddy	DH Enthusiast
287	Atropos7	DH DreamNinja

College student “matttail” (known for his always helpful replies) has written an impressive 1268 posts in the last 12 months, almost the same as Simon Jessey (known for his work with the wiki) and Bob (known for his cryptic signature) together.

Most active threads:

Lesson learned: A great fairy tale should involve a disaster, a controversy and a troll + fun, hope and love!

Anyway, Happy Birthday DreamHost Discussion Forum! I will now prepare my birthday surprice and get ready for the party! Hope to see you all in the forum soon.

Two months ago I predicted that DreamHost would reach this magic number just after New Year. Since then they have continued their exponential growth, and is now number 39 on WebHosting.Info’s Worldwide Top 50 Web Hosts based on their total domains count.

So, what’s next? 250.000 domains before 1th of June 2006?

Hosting Plans
All the shared hosting plans has increased significantly over the year. The disk storage has gone from being measured in hundreds of megabytes to be measured in thousands of megabytes thanks to first the Triple Sale and later the Double Sale and the infinitely growing quotas. A Crazy Domain Insane package which one year ago included 800 MB disk storage is now allowed 5620 MB (including weekly additions). Likewise the bandwidth quotas have grown at nearly the same rate.

Another great addition this year has been the unlimited domains and subdomains policy change. One year ago all plans were limited to either 3, 7, 15 or 31 domains (which still was a lot better than most other web hosts), but now you can host as many domains as you like with no additional costs. Which other web hosting company gives you this possibility. I believe this is truly unique…

Server Software
In the end of May DreamHost finally started to official support PHP 5 and MySQL 4.1. One month later they added the Zend optimizer for faster PHP execution and started to official support Ruby on Rails and FastCGI as one of the first bigger web hosts.

One-Click Installs
The number of One-Click Installs has also increased significantly over the year. Late last year DreamHost introduced WordPress as a One-Click Install. This year they’ve added phpBB 2, OSCommerce, MediaWiki Wiki, Joomla (Mambo) CMS, Gallery 2.0, WebCalendar and WordPress 2.0.

Community
This year DreamHost launched the DreamHost Community Wiki, which is now featuring more than 150 articles, and launched the official DreamHost Blog.

In March DreamHost crossed the 100.000 hosted domains mark and are now at more than 188.000 domains. Many of all these customers are active in the discussion forum. The DreamHost Discussion Forum has received more than 20.000 posts in more than 4.000 threads in 2005.

Finally the blog post “Let’s Save Our Environment” became an “internet sensation”, and developed into a funny remix competition with web hosting for life as the grand prize.

Down Time
Two major incidents happened in 2005. The Power Outage in entire Los Angeles in September and a massive DDoS attack in December. Major crisis like this is impossible to avoid, but when it does happen, it’s nice to have a web host that is quite informative about what’s going on.

Wishes for 2006?
This was the round up of DreamHost related events in 2005. What’s going to happen in 2006 is still an open question. What are your wishes for 2006? Post a comment with your predictions for DreamHost, your wishes to services DreamHost should start to offer, or how you would like to see the company evolve in 2006.

Happy New Year