May 5, 2010
Dreamhost supports dedicated SSL certificate. Dedicated SSL like any other host also requires dedicated IP address which is available for $3.95 monthly. If you buy Dedicated SSL cert from dreamhost you will the certificate and free installation, all for just $15 year. This is the best SSL deal, you won’t find it elsewhere. To setup SSL just go to manage domains in your control panel. Shared SSL sadly, from my research, it is not supported on dreamhost servers.
SSL certificates
You may have noticed when you access your gmail or yahoomail account the https in the internet browser address bar. Https stands for hyper text transfer protocol secure, meaning the information from your computer to their servers and from their servers to your pc. The data is transferred over the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) with the help of certificates the domain is authenticated by third party, then data is encrypted before submitted. This way true data can not be seen by others. Dedicated SSL is a must if you have an online store or website where you accept important info (credit card payments and other). It also authenticates your domain and prevents possible phishing.
April 23, 2010
Dreamhost allows SSH access and it is available to all customers, but first needs to be enabled on your account before you can use it. Enablling SSH access on dreamhost is easy and consist of creating FTP/SSH/SFTP user and granting permissions. A tutorial is available at the following web address: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Enabling_Shell_Access.
SSH
SSH is a powerful feature and a tool which allow you to have secure and encrypted access to your server or host. With SSH you can copy files, access CVS (concurrent version system), cron jobs, setup file permissions, list files and many other tasks. Dreamhost uses OpenSSH as a SSH server which is free and open-source tool, currently the best on the market. After you enable SSH on your account (there is 20 minute delay) you need to install a SSH client to be able to connect to the server. Good client for Windows is Putty, for linux is ssh (openssh) and for Mac OS X is built in. After you connect to the server you can unzip/zip files, modify files, create new directories and access other dreamhost services.
April 12, 2010
Dreamhost Nameservers are:
ns1.dreamhost.com – 66.33.206.206
ns2.dreamhost.com – 66.201.54.66
ns3.dreamhost.com – 66.33.216.216
In order your site to be hosted on dreamhost you need to setup your domain so it is pointed to these nameservers. This can be setup at your domain registrar.
What are nameservers for?
Nameservers maps IP addresses to names (domain names). Every computer including web servers needs IP address so it can be connected to the Internet. Because numbers are hard to remember, especially long numbers, people have invented the domain name system (DNS) which is responsible for this. There are several root dns servers around the world that respond to queries for domain names. They return the authorative nameservers for specific domain, which return the IP address browser needs or any other application. The application then connects to the IP address and asks for the webpage in question. Nameservers can be setup at any domain registrar. At least two are required because if the first one fails the second will continue to serve the queries.
April 2, 2010
MySQL
MySQL is the most popular free open-source (GNU GPL) relational database management system (RDMS). It is used by many popular web applications (wordpress blog, joomla cms, drupal, phpbb forum, galleries and many others) for data storage of settings, text and even binary data (photos or other files). MySQL is often mentioned with together with PHP web programming language, and with Apache HTTPD and Linux OS they are part of the popular LAMP setup. Lots of tools have been developed to ease the work with MySQL databases. The most popular is phpmyadmin tool (written in PHP) that allows you to easily manage databases, create/edit tables, execute queries, browse databases and other tasks.
DreamHost MySQL
Dreamhost supports MySQL on their servers. Interesting option is that you can have your own VPS dedicated MySQL queries in case your site or service are very popular. With dreamhost control panel you can easily add new databases, setup mysql hostnames, users etc. You can have unlimited databases.
March 24, 2010
phpBB Forum software
phpbb (PHP Bulletin Board) is a popular forum script built with PHP web programming language. For storage of data uses MySQL database system, but it also supports other DBS (including PostgreSQL, Oracle, Firebird, MS SQL, SQLite and others). It is free, open-source software, and it is licensed under GNU General Public License. With phpbb you can create online communities with unlimited users, subforums, permissions for users and/or usergroups, administrate, ban. Users can self register, there is a captcha (visual confirmation image) to prevent bots to auto register, or users can be added via admin panel. Plugin (mods – modifications) system is integrated, which allows develelopers to add new features withot altering the core code. There are many plugins available and offer many features including friendly urls (SEO), user and admin tools and other. With style manager you can easily change the entire look of your community forum. Large number of templates are available and you can easily edit them to further style your forum.
Dreamhost phpBB
On dream host you can install and run phpbb without any problems. Your dreamhost account is perfectly setup. For fast installation you can use the one-click control panel installer or if you prefer you can install dremhost manually. On our test the software was running great.
March 14, 2010
Three months since I have an account with dreamhost web hosting provider, and they have been excellent in everything including support, uptime, features etc etc. They are really good host. The price is reasonable and you get what you pay for. Plus there is room to grow (dreamhost offers VPS virtual private servers). In the past three months I have tested dreamhost with various web applications including wordpress, drupal, joomla and others. All scripts worked great on dream host without any problems. Most of the hosts offer Fantastico one-click installer, but dreamhost have it’s own one-click installation tool that works great. For me it ios one of the top 10 web hosting companies in the world. A Happy Dreamhost customer!
March 5, 2010
Uptime for my dreamhost review blog hosted at dreamhost have been great! I have setup uptime monitoring account at serviceuptime.com to monitor this blog’s uptime and downtime. In February out of 1332 checks, none failed! This means that my site have been up 100%. This is great for an online business or even personal site/blog because your site is always accessible at any time. If you want live monitoring statistics check this webpage. Here is a screenshot of the report:
Dreamhost have the best uptime than most of other hosts, and this is big plus. The average loadtime/response time is 0.438 seconds (less than a second) for the server to start sending data back to the browser. This is excellent too (anything below 0.6 seconds is great). With these reports dreamhost have shown that they are serious company and that you can rely on them.
February 25, 2010
Drupal is a free open-source content management script and a framework for creating web sites. Created in 2001 by Dries Buytaert, have become very popular in recent years. Many websites are powered by drupal, ranging from personal sites to larger corporate and government sites (whitehouse.gov). It is programmed in PHP the most popular web programming language and uses database system like MySQL for storing data, permissions and settings. Many features are included in the drupal core the official drupal distribution package: content management (text and media, content types like blogs or static pages, and you can create your own content types with custom fields and settings!), powerful user management with permissions, RSS feeds, modules (extensions that add new features without editing the core code), template system (change the design of the entire site, separated from PHP code), multi-site support, caching, search and lots of other features. It is available in 45 languages (including Engilsh) at the time of writing this review, and it have large community of developers. Support is provided on the official website: drupal.org, including forums, mailing lists, irc channels and rss feeds. Also many modules and themes are available. So if you choose drupal to create your next site you will not make a mistake.
DreamHost Drupal Review
All drupal requirements are satisfied. Dreamhost have the latest PHP and MySQL version, and support for PHP.INI (for changing register_globals if needed). I installed drupal and the installation went without any problems. After running some tests I can say that Dreamhost is very good drupal host.
February 17, 2010
Joomla is both Content Management System and web application framework programmed in PHP programming language, and uses MySQL database system for storing data and settings. Joomla is very popular free open-source script and you can create almost any type of website (blogs, polls, forums, social networks and others) with it. Thanks to the large community of developers and users many features are available and bugs, vulnerabilities are fixed very fast. New features are added via the extension system, while the base package includes standard features like: content/media management, blogs, RSS feeds, search, internationalization (available in many languages), user management with powerful permissions system and many others. The template system separates logic from design, and webmasters can change the layout of the entire site with a single click. Support is also available for free at their community forums. There are also many extensions available in the official joomla directory. Today many websites are powered by Joomla, and according to Open Source CMS Market share report Joomla is the most popular Content Management Script. You can run Joomla on Dreamhost easily because every requirements are satisfied. In my test it did run perfectly.
February 8, 2010
Dreamhost have been great host for me! I have been almost two months with them and I am happy with them. So today I will share some dreamhost coupon codes to get the best discount when you signup with dream host (these coupons never expire):
“SAVE57″ – save up to $57 depending on hosting plan and payment (montly or yearly)
“UPTO97OFF” – save up to $97 depending on payment type and hosting plan.
“FREEDOMAIN41″ – free domain name and $41 off – any hosting plan
“FREEIP21″ – Free dedicated IP address and $21 off
“COUPONMAX” – maximum discount on any hosting plan.
Some of these coupons give you free features like Free IP address or domain name. So choose the one that suits you the best. My next post will be about dreamhost uptime. They guarantee 100% uptime, and this is true. All my uptime monitoring reports say that this blog have been up 100% !