A Perfect Example of How a Blog Benefits a Company
I proudly host my Web sites with Dreamhost and lately I’ve been a little perterbed with them regarding their Webmail service. It has been slow, timing out, erroring out, and overall frustrating. It is with their blog that I learned of some issues they had been dealing with on some of their systems that directly affected Webmail. So I tolerate the problems knowing they are being addressed. I routinely have been impressed with how Dreamhost handles the glitches that come their way over the three years I’ve been hosting with them.
Last year you may remember that Los Angeles had a major power outage. Turns out that many Web hosts are located in LA, including Dreamhost, and they were hit head-on with the outage. The building their server farm sits in lost power, due to the fact that all their back up systems (deisel generators, UPSs, etc.) all failed. Yes, FAILED. Well after learning from that experience Dreamhost went into pro-active mode and saught out some disaster recovery solutions, like migrating part of their network over to a second host. The long and the short of the story is that in the process of being proactive, some other random server issues, and another power outage severs went down, routers crashed, and service was interrupted again. It is through this blog post Josh, the owner of Dreamhost, explains the problems, how it happened, what was their fault, and how they are fixing it. Through humor, bluntness, and some associated graphics, this post in itself will be the reason why I continue to host with Dreamhost. Transparency is key and this blog, a corporate blog at that in its own unique way, is what makes it possible.
If you are looking for a Web host that has a variety of features, check out Dreamhost. If you are really looking to host with them, let me know and I can hook you up with a discount code to waive your set-up fee. Drop me a line at fred [at] fromthe21stfloor [dot] com



