Hosting

If you already know about Dreamhost, you can fast forward to the Special! Discount! bit.

Here’s the deal. Dreamhost is (in my opinion) a kick-ass web hosting service. I’ve been using them for four years now, and haven’t had a single issue in that time. They offer more than most, for cheaper than most, and I haven’t had more than a couple of minutes downtime that I’ve noticed yet on any of my sites, total. I’m using the cheapest (L1) plan, and I haven’t even come close to maxing out the limits. By an order of magnitude or two. I currently host 6 domains and a multitude of subdomains on my plan, one of which was the free domain (in perpetuity, if you stay with them) that they gave me on signup.
If you don’t see any reason to believe me (which is a perfectly reasonable thing), here’s a recent thread from Ask Metafilter where loads of people say pretty much the same thing, and one from SH/SC at SA. [Update September 2006: Just a note to add that when this site was Dugg, Techcrunched, Ars Technicated, and basically inundated with traffic (upwards of a million visits, all in) from all the Big Sites, it held up like a champ. No down time, no Digg-effect. I was impressed, and it makes me all the more inclined to stay with Dreamhost....] Anyway, here are the highlights of what they offer at the time of writing this:

  • $5.95 a month with no setup fee if you pay for a year initial
  • Unlimited pretty much everything, basically…
  • PHP4/5, Full UNIX shell, Crontab, Full CGI, Ruby on Rails, Server side includes, CVS repository, etc etc
  • Stats, one-click installs, a whole whack of other stuff

Deals are coming and going all the time, so it’s entirely possible that you can get MORE! BETTER! than this, even, at this very moment.

As a Dreamhost user, you can refer other people, and get a small percentage of their registration fees as a referrer reward. I’ve posted about it a few times to the ‘bottle, and as a result, quite a few people have used me as a referrer, and I’ve been able to cover my hosting costs for the past few years with those ‘rewards’. Not a single person who has signed up through me has complained to me about the service. If they did, I’d post it here, I promise. Anyone who reads my ravings regularly should know how much I hate intrusive advertising. I don’t think this is, exactly, and here’s why.
If I point you to what I think to be an excellent service (*points*), and I get some referral coin out of it (and am totally upfront about that fact), and you sign up and in turn become a referrer and get some cash from it in the future too, on top of getting some cheapo quality hosting, hey, everybody wins. Sounds like a pyramid scheme, but if it is, it’s a virtuous one, and there’s no marketing involved, beyond this little primer. It’s personal, me to you, no middleman, and doesn’t involve cluttering our online playground with ads all over the damn place. Dreamhost gets some more business as well, of course, but I’ve got no trouble at all recommending them. If they ever turn evil, I replace this page with details of how and why they turned to the dark side. Easy-peasy.


Special Wonderchicken Discount!

One other swell thing that Dreamhost allows me to do is to give people I refer a special discount code, which will get them a cheaper price (shown before you cough up your credit card number) than the usual, which is awfully good already. The discount’ll come out of my referrer rewards, but hey, we’ll be helping each other out, here.

Update 2009: Someone emailed me and asked me why I was being stingy with the discounts — to be honest I hadn’t looked at my promo code in a long time, so I’ve gone ahead and tripled the discount I was offering before ($20 to $60).

So: use me as your referrer, or enter the promo code ‘GOWONDERCHICKEN2′ (no quotes) during the checkout process, and the system will give you the following discounts when you sign up as a new Dreamhost customer:

Payment Period Cost This Code’s Discount
Monthly $60.90 $50.00
Yearly $119.40 $60.00
Two years $214.80 $60.00
Three years $286.20 $60.00
Five years $417.00 $60.00
Ten years $714.00 $60.00

Bottom line : Say you go with a one year registration. Normal price upfront is $119.40. Use ‘GOWONDERCHICKEN2′ as your promo code, and you get it for $59.80 (60 bucks off). Woohoo! Go for two years, promo code gets it for you for $154.80 (also 60 bucks off). Double woohoo!

I wouldn’t recommend the monthly plans, (the monthly plan fees above are for setup + first month, the others are grand totals for 1 year or 2 years) as you have to pay the setup fee and will therefore end up paying more for the year. Go for one year or two years from the get-go and they waive the setup fee.

If for some reason you don’t like it, they’ve got a 97-day money back guarantee.

Like I said earlier, DH has been way more than I’ve needed for this site, even while getting Dugg and Slashdotted and so on.

So here’s the poop. If you

  • Follow my referrer link, it’ll give you a cookie marking me your referrer if you sign up. (If you’ve got an older cookie from a Dreamhost referral, that one wins, and I get no credit, so clear your Dreamhost cookies!) If you use my Discount Code (GOWONDERCHICKEN2) I’ll get a one-time credit (minus the discount I gave you). If you sign up without using my Discount Code, I’ll get ongoing credits if you decide to stay with Dreamhost in future.
  • Use wonderchickenindustries@gmail.com
    as the referrer email address; I’ll get ongoing credit if you stay with Dreamhost in the future (unless you use my Discount Code). This is the best result for me.
  • Clear your cookies before you sign up, do not use the above email as your referrer, don’t use my Discount Code, and you’ll still get good cheap hosting, and I’ll get sweet bugger-all. That’s OK with me, if that’s the way you want to go. It’s all good.
Signup once, signup often!

And never say the wonderchicken doesn’t treat you right, friends and neighbors!