When KittenAuth was launched I was forced to look for an auxiliary host to offload all the images and after a day or so of scouring the internet and finding some places that were obviously dodgier than others, I found DreamHost.
At a glance on their website, you might be fooled into thinking they’re absolutely insane believing that people will think their packages and prices are real. I know I certainly had a few doubts before handing over my money. Their package names include: “Crazy Domain Insane!”, “Sweet Dreams” and “Code Monster”. What made it even more ridiculous were the prices for what you get… Here are the stats for the lowest package (at the time of writing):
- 24 hour email support (tested – and extremely fast)
- 97-day money back guarantee (not tested and I wont be testing it)
- Control Panel access (its their own and very powerful)
- Jabber Chat Server
Now the bits that count:
- Storage: 20gigs!
- Bandwidth: 1 terabyte !!! (yeah – 1TB!!!)
- MySQL DBs: Unlimited!
- Email accounts: 3000 (through pop, imap or squirrelmail with spamassassin)
- 75 Shell/FTP users
- 1 FREE domain
- Can host UNLIMITED domains
- Can host UNLIMITED subdomains
Programming support:
- PHP4 and 5
- Full CGI
- Ruby on Rails
- SSIs
- Full shell access
- CVS and Subversion (SVN) repositories!
So how much for all of this? Well their standard price for this is (if you pay yearly) $119.40 – an amazing price already – but wait for this…
Using the code DREAMKITTEN when you purchase, you get $90 off any of the packages, including the cheapest! So that brings the price down to $29.40 per year (or $2.45 a month over 12 months)!!! If you’re not sure, you’ve still got the 97-day money back guarantee and you haven’t lost anything!
From what I can tell on their website, the disk space and bandwidth have limited signups, but once you’re on the plan, you can keep that usage level forever!
The most important thing about this company is they are real people. They admit when they trip over a power cable and there’s 10 minutes of downtime. They even have their own blog! In fact they have 2 but the other is just for service status messages. Their policy is to have fun and not rip everyone off along the way. They recently took on a hosting-review site that was effectively blackmailing them to improve their ratings on the site. Dreamhost replied with this: Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry.
Ok enough of me babbling on about how great they are… Check out their website for yourself. They’ve got great prices and the experience is even better.