DreamHost have a history of running great promos on their birthday, from 1 year of hosting for only 77 cents/month (7th birthday), unlimited domains to everybody and 80% off new accounts (8th birthday), double bandwidth, 10 times the storage and $99.99 off (9th birthday), to last years $110.10 off new accounts (10th birthday).

This year, the first 1,111 new customers to sign up with DreamHost will get unlimited resources, both disk space and bandwidth for the life of their hosting account! Never run out of disk storage, never again run over your bandwidth limit, host as many domains and subdomains your like. I guess it can’t really get any more generous than that.

Additionally you can save $50 on your first hosting bill if you sign up with our coupon code DH11.

Lunarpages has silently added a new 404 File Not Found page to all customer accounts. The page displays the domain name of the account holder, a search box which returns sponsored ad results and a number of links (dating, mortgage, ringtones, etc.) to Oversee’s PPC search engine searchportal.information.com.

While the customer’s domain name is displayed, there is no link back to the customer’s website and Lunarpages are thereby effectively stealing traffic from its customers!

You can see an example error page if you go to aeroeco.net/404.

If you recognize the layout of the error page it’s because the same page is used by many domain parking services and expired domain holding pages.

The issue has been discussed intensely at Web Hosting Talk, while any threads about the issue started at Lunarpages Forums are apparently swiftly deleted.

When the legality of these error pages was brought up, Lunarpages quickly updated their TOS to include the following passage:

In an effort to help create the best possible user experience we have created a series of content sensitive error pages which are displayed in the event any user enters an erroneous URL for any activated domain name within the Lunarpages server structure. You may use our error page at no extra charge and you hereby grant to Lunarpages a limited, non-exclusive license to use any right you may have in any mark consisting of, derivative of or related to the domain name for the purpose of displaying such error pages under your domain name or any sub-page thereof in the event that for any reason your page fails to resolve or does not exist. Such error pages may at the option of lunarpages contain links to your domain, to Lunarpages or to any other site or service.

In a move to lure away customers from their competitor, DreamHost is now offering one year of free hosting for Lunarpages refugees who want to escape this sleazy practice.

500 GB Disk Storage, 5 TB Monthly Bandwidth, plus many more features – from $5.95/month!

Sign up for hosting with DreamHost TODAY and prepay for a year of service (or more) using the promo code 10ten10diez10dix10dieci10shi and get an instant discount of $110.10 of your bill!

This means that you can get 1 year of hosting for only $9.30 (normal price $119.40) if you’re a new DreamHost customer:

Full details here: Happy Birthday to US!

DreamHost’s 10 Years Birthday is approaching and traditionally this has been celebrated with a fantastic birthday promo for new customers. Many of you will remember the crazy 777 promo for DreamHost’s 7th birthday, which gave 1 year of hosting for 77 cents/month, the 8-year birthday which gave unlimited domains to everybody and 80% off new accounts and last year birthday where everybody got double the amount of bandwidth, ten times the amount of disk space and new customers could get $99.99 off.

Rumours I’ve got from reliable sources tells that this year DreamHost will offer a special birthday plan with more storage and bandwidth than the Strictly Business plan, but cheaper then the Crazy Domain Insane plan!

Stay tuned for more breaking news about DreamHost’s Birthday Promo.

Many of you might have heard of the crazy promo DreamHost ran at the 7th birthday two and a half years ago. I assume they have gotten more than 50,000 new customers on this promo and it was indeed the same promo that lured me into signing up with DreamHost.

Now they are running the promo again, but only for today:

Sign up for a year of our “Crazy Domain Insane” package TODAY and use the promo code “777“. You’ll get an INSTANT discount of $110.16 off your bill.. leaving you at just $9.24.. 77 cents a month!

The Fine Print:

• This offer is for new customers only – those who do not have an active account with DreamHost.
• If you sign up and forget to use the “777” promotional code, you WILL NOT receive the sale pricing and boosted allocations. No amount of complaining will change this!
• Domains and accounts may not be transferred from an existing DreamHost Web Hosting account to a “777” hosting plan.
• We reserve the right to deny this sale pricing to anyone at our discretion.
• This offer only applicable to one and two-year prepaid accounts. Monthly accounts are not eligible.
• This sale will remain in effect until July 7th, 2007.
• At the end of 12 months, your account will be automatically extended at the current (non-discounted) rate. You will then be asked to pay for your account if you’d like to keep it. If you do not wish to continue at that time, you may close your account via our control panel.
• No referral credit will be provided to referers of customers who sign up for this promotional sale.

The “Crazy Domain Insane” package gives 146 GB disk storage, 1.46 TB monthly bandwidth and a free domain name. You can host an unlimited number of domains and subdomains. You get PHP4, PHP5, Ruby on Rails, Unix shell access, etc.

More info at http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html.

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.

To help these customers DreamHost is giving a full year of their fully featured Crazy Domain Insane hosting plan including a domain registration transfer and renewal for free (worth $119.40)!

From DreamHost’s website:

To help the struggling customers of RegisterFly (recently ICANN un-ccredited) DreamHost is letting anybody who has a domain currently registered through RegisterFly to transfer them to DreamHost absolutely free! You also get a year of our most-popular, fully-featured L1 hosting plan to boot! This offer is good for accounts with domain registrations previously with RegisterFly that sign up before March 31st, 2007 at 11:59 PM PDT only!

Make sure when signing up you choose the option for “I already own a domain, I want to host it AND transfer the registration for free!”, enter a domain currently registered via RegisterFly, and use the promo code “FLYAWAY” at the bottom!

The Fine Print:

• This offer is for new customers only – those who do not have an active account with DreamHost.
• If you sign up and forget to use the “FLYAWAY” promotional code, you WILL NOT receive the sale pricing (FREE). No amount of complaining will change this!
• Domains and accounts may not be transferred from an existing DreamHost Web Hosting account to a “FLYAWAY” hosting plan.
• We reserve the right to deny this sale pricing (FREE) to anyone at our discretion.
  This sale will remain in effect until 11:59 PM PDT, March 31st, 2007.
• At the end of 12 months, your account will be automatically extended at the current (non-discounted) rate. You will then be asked to pay for your account if you’d like to keep it. If you do not wish to continue at that time, you may close your account via our control panel.

Read all the details at http://www.dreamhost.com/promo.html

Updated: More in DreamHost’s Blog.

Half the guesses were for a date in April or May, but we managed to avoid too many “double bookings” (except for May 14 which was the most popular guess with 4 guesses for this exact day).

DreamHost is currently at 425,229 domains and counting…

To celebrate DreamHost just passed 400,000 hosted domains I’m going to throw a small contest here at the Unofficial DreamHost Blog.

First prize will be a slick iPod Shuffle – the world’s smallest digital music player, which let’s you wear up to 240 songs on your sleeve.

Guess when DreamHost will pass 500,000 hosted domains

Every Monday WebHosting.Info releases their weekly stats with the total domains hosted by each web hosting company. DreamHost just passed 400,000 hosted domains and I expect that they will pass 500,000 domains in 2007. Your job is to guess which date this will happen.

Since WebHosting.Info only posts weekly data I will equally split out the weekly increase over the past week in order to calculate the winning date. As an example the winning guess for 400,000 domains would be 21 December 2006.

In order to participate you should post your guess in the comments within the next two weeks. Make sure you use a valid email address in order for me to contact you if you’re the lucky winner.

Rules:

• 1 entry per person (remember to use a valid email address)
• Make your entries in the format of January 1, 2007 to avoid any misunderstandings.
• The cutoff for posting entries will be at 11:59 pm January 14, 2007.
• In the event of a tie (multiple guesses on the same date or same distance to the correct date for multiple entries) I’ll randomly draw a winner between the closest guesses.
• In the event of no winner (the contest has to stop for some reason like WebHosting.Info cease to release their stats) or in case DreamHost doesn’t pass 500,000 domains by December 31, 2007 I’ll randomly draw a winner between all the participants.

Prize:

• An Apple 1 GB iPod Shuffle (worth $79)

Best of luck to all of you!

Have we got a treat for you! Save $99.99!

To celebrate nine years in the hosting biz, we’re having an absolutely CRAZY one-day-only sale! TODAY! This offer is good for accounts that sign up on October 3rd, 2006 before 11:59 PM PDT only! Don’t miss the boat!

Sign up for any of our hosting plans TODAY using either the one or two-year prepay option and use the promo code “9999″. You’ll get an INSTANT discount of $99.99 off your bill!

But that’s not all!
We’ve also upped our plan limits like crazy! All our plans now have at least DOUBLE the amount of bandwidth and up to TEN TIMES the amount of disk space they had yesterday! You’ll get to keep that extra disk space and bandwidth for as long as you keep your account active!

The Fine Print:

• This offer is for new customers only – those who do not have an active account with DreamHost.
• If you sign up and forget to use the “9999″ promotional code, you WILL NOT receive the sale pricing. No amount of complaining will change this!
• Domains and accounts may not be transferred from an existing DreamHost Web Hosting account to a “9999″ hosting plan.
• We reserve the right to deny this sale pricing to anyone at our discretion.
• This offer only applicable to one and two-year prepaid accounts. Monthly accounts are not eligible.
• This sale will remain in effect until 11:59 PM PDT, October 3rd, 2006.
• At the end of 12 or 24 months (depending on your pre-pay length), your account will be automatically renewed at the current (non-discounted) rate. If you do not wish to incur extra charges, be sure to specify an end-date on your account control panel before your renewal occurs.

No referral credit will be provided to referers of customers who sign up for this promotional sale.

Congratulations DreamHost!