Dreamhost.com My New Favorite Web Hosting Company

Ok, so many years ago (10+) I first bought my own domain name, and for the first little while I hopped around from hosting ISP to hosting ISP, and finally settled on Media Temple about 8 years ago and stuck with them all that time mostly out of inertia.

Recently (around xmas time) I decided it was time to start shopping around for a better host. One that had cPanel (which is the industry standard control panel these days) and maybe offered better rates or more space, or more database instances.... then around January I noticed a limitation in Media Temple's MySQL setup. Namely I could grant access to my databases to any IP I wanted to use a management tool from, but there could only be 10 addresses at any given time granted access, and those same 10 addresses had access to ALL my databases. This doesn't seem like much of a limitation to most folks, but I had a database I wanted to set up that would be accessed directly by desktop applications being run from my home and a couple of friends' homes, all of which are on dynamic IPs and I didn't want to be constantly adjusting that approved IP list. So I quickly started hunting for a new host.

Along comes Dreamhost, with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space (actually just a high amount of each that is ever increasing, kind of like the disk space limit in Gmail), and unlimited number of domains hosted, unlimited MySQL instances, that each can be managed individually from their own list of approved addresses (including wildcards) and unlimited user accounts so each domain or database could be managed from a different user account if I wanted.

Add to all of that Google Authenticator based 2 factor authentication on the Cpanel interface, and easy checkbox config for domain level Google Analytics so you don't have to drop Javascript into all your pages. Plus the ability to use Ruby and Django (Python) for some of my sites.

They have one click installs of all kinds of popular web software like mediawiki, Wordpress, Joomla, Moodle, phpBB, OpenVBX, ZenCart, and more!

On top of all that, the security guy in my has to remind you 2-factor auth!!! and encrypted FTP, E-mail and web based FTP.  Yes, IronGeek, Adrian Crenshaw also uses Dreamhost.

All of that and it was 1/2 the price I was paying for MediaTemple. They gave a free trial to start off so I could get set up on their servers and play around until I was familiar enough with it to commit with money paid.

If you decide you want to switch to DreamHost use this promo code and you'll save $10 off a 1 or 2 year pre-paid account. RODSAVEDME10