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% !
January 30, 2010
PHP is the best web programming language. It was originally created as Personal Homepage Tools but now stands for HyperText Preprocessor. It is powerful, simple to learn and code, have large community of contributors, users and there are many extensions, codes, classes, scripts and web software available, both free and paid. Almost all web hosting providers (if not all) offer PHP Web Hosting services to their clients. This is because php is very popular, and it is used on more than 20 million websites to create their webpages. There are many popular scripts that require PHP: WordPress (a weblog software for creating blogs), Joomla (CMS – content management script), Drupal (also CMS), phpbb (forums, bulletin boards), and all are free and distrubuted under GNU General Public License. Paid scripts like Vbulletin are also very popular and offer many features to users. PHP often comes with MySQL – a Structured Query Language database relational system for storing data. Dreamhost allows the following four PHP configurations: user-installed php running as cgi, php4 running as cgi, php5 running as cgi, and php5 running as an Apache module (only available on dreamhost ps). There is also support for custom php.ini but this is somewhat difficult for you to setup, check this article: http://www.wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/PHP.ini for more info, you need to have proper unix knowledge to setup custom php.ini.
January 19, 2010
WordPress is, according to its creators, state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. It is free weblog(blog) web software licensed under GNU General Public License, which gives you the freedom use, copy, modify and distribute the software. But it is much more than a blogging platform (it is the most popular weblog software), because it have many features it more like Content Management System rather than simple blogging tool. Supports theme system with widgets where you can easily change the look of your web site, and it is very easy to design wordpress theme. If you are not good with designing (like me) there are thousands of free and professional templates available on the internet. Official wordpress theme directory is available at wordpress.org/extend/themes/ with more than 1000 themes (currently). Lots of new themes are added daily, being tested first before publication. Other feature worth noting here is the extension (plugin) system. It adds new functionality to the software. Also there are many plugins available, check wordpress.org/extend/plugins . Other features supported are: rss feeds of recent posts, user management system (add, edit users) with user registration, static pages, link management, comments, cross-blog communication tools, standards compliance and much much more. Download it from wordpress.org the official website.
DreamHost WordPress Review
This website is hosted by dreamhost and built with wordpress. It runs fast and all wordpress features are available. Fantastico is not offered, but one-click installation is available with their own one-click installer, which I used it to create this blog. Happy blogging!
January 6, 2010
Dreamhost offers several web hosting plans with lots of features.
Shared Hosting
Great for bloggers and personal sites. There is only one shared hosting plan available with the following features: unlimited storage, bandwidth, host unlimited domains/subdomains on one account, unlimited mysql databases, e-mail accounts, php, perl, python support, ruby on rails, ssl (secure socket layer – https) and much more – check all features here: http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-features.html
VPS hosting
Vps stands for Virtual Private Server. These servers exist virtually (actually it is software manipulation) in physical servers. These type of hosting is suitable for mid-size sites with occasional bursts in traffic. There are two vps plans available: Dreamhost PS and DreamHost PS MySQL. PS is available as one-click addon to your shared hosting account. PS MySQL is Virtual privata server designed for high performance mysql databases. Every feature from shared hosting plans is available inluding the unlimited space and bandwidth. Plans start from $15/month/150mb RAM up to $400 a month with 4 Gigabytes of RAM. You get protected CPU and memory, full root access and more.
Dedicated Server hosting
Dedicated hosting is actually a physical server located in data-center leased for monthly fee and not shared with other customers. This type of hosting is best for large traffic websites or web services that require dedicated memory, cpu, space and/or bandwidth and net traffic. After acquiring large equity stake in Alchemy Communications, Inc dreamhost started offering dedicated servers.
Colocation hosting
This type of hosting allows users to lease space and place their own servers in web hosting data-centers where internet connectivity is provided by the data-center. Dreamhost is offering this type of hosting via Alchemy Communications, Inc. The servers are secured with 3 megawatts UPS (Uninterpretable Power Supply), redundant fire suppression, cooling systems etc.
December 24, 2009
Dreamhost have custom control panel. At first I did not like their control panel, but after exploring a bit I found out that their control panel is simple, and have many tools to manage various tasks. From the control panel you can access their domain manager (where you can add subdomains, register, transfer domains etc.), email tool (to add/edit new accounts, modify mx records, manage autoresponders etc.), databases tool(manage databases and users), goodies (one-click installs for popular scripts (wordpress, drupal, joomla etc), cron jobs, subversions, media streaming, .htaccess and more), users tool where you can manage users(create new users, edit, add restrictions and more), dreamhost tool (where you can backup your account, submit your site for website of the month, panel migrator and more), ftp tool, billing tool, contact support. If you are migrating from other host cpanel, you can use the dreamhost panel migrator(beta at the time of writing) to copy existing settings on your old cpanel to your new dream host panel. The panel can be accessed at this web address: https://panel.dreamhost.com .
Screenshot of the control panel:
December 16, 2009
I signed up a week ago with Dream Host, and payed one year upfront. 3 days after the signup I got details that my hosting account is activated on dreamhost. I logged in the control panel and was looking for some kind of one click installer for wordpress. I found that they do not have fantastico but have their own one click installer.
Fantastico, shmantastico! DreamHost now has its very own one-click software installation!
All software listed here has been judged best in its class by us, not to mention being open-source and completely free!
Unless you choose our “Easy mode,” you are also responsible for upgrading your old installations (you can do it from here!) should any critical security holes be discovered!
We do not provide technical support for this software beyond the initial installation. For technical support, contact the software authors at the official sites linked below.
— copied from dream host control panel.
As you can see there two modes available easy and advanced. In advanced mode the files are on your server so you can add your own themes, plugins or other files while in easy mode the files are on other servers and you do not have access to them. There were several popular scripts available: wordpress, drupal, joomla, phpbb and others. I chose wordpress and viola my blog (this blog) was setup.