I’ve been a happy Dreamhost customer for over two years now. I have always been impressed with the cost effectiveness of their hosting plans, the features they offer (unlimited bandwidth, huge storage, unlimited MySQL databases) and how they listen to their customers by adding the features that we ask and vote for. But their latest announcement that they are now a carbon neutral company has made me even happier with my choice to use their services.

What does carbon neutral mean for a company like Dreamhost? They define it as…

It means we’ve calculated our carbon footprint. Our footprint represents the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use - paper in the office, electricity for our 1300+ servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.

So how do they become carbon neutral…

Organizations large and small are constantly working on reducing their environmental emissions to meet government-imposed (and self-imposed) emissions caps. When they do so a neutral third party then steps in to verify the reduction and issues what are known as “emission reduction credits”. Companies like DreamHost can purchase these credits which are then immediately retired on their behalf. This effectively takes them off the market and the money goes toward funding further emission reduction projects. We are not currently able to actually power our servers with the wind or the sun, and this is the next best thing!

I personally am not convinced that simply purchasing carbon credits is good enough for long term sustainability of our climate, but it’s definately a start. My hope would be that in combination with carbon credits, they would begin using solar arrays, wind generation, and more power effective servers in their data centres. They have already begun by purchasing servers with lower powered AMD processors, so I beleive they are headed down the right path!

If your looking for a good and environmentally friendly host and want to save a bit of money sign up at Dreamhost and enter the promotion code DMM to save $60 off your first year’s hosting bill.

I just recieved my monthly Dreamhost newsletter and as usual, they have some big (and I mean huge) announcements.

They QUADRUPLED disk space on all shared hosting
plans and they’ve OCTUPLED (eight times) the bandwidth on all plans! They have also added free custom DNS management for all plans, so no need to pay extra fees to add and manage subdomains.

I highly recommend Dreamhost, and if you’re in the market for some good, inexpensive hosting with tonnes of great features, go and check them out.

For regular readers of this blog, you can use the Promotion Code dmm when you sign up for any account to recieve $60 off your first year of hosting. That makes your total cost for one year of $59 which works out to less than $5 per month! (please note that I recieve a referral fee if you use this promotional code).

I just recieved an email from my hosting provider that indicated that a feature I had requested had just been implemented.

This is just a note to let you know that we’ve now completed the suggestion - “Install RubyGems” … We did it! RubyGems is installed on all shared hosting
servers along with a selection of gems.

Here is how it works, Dreamhost allows their members to make suggestions as to how they think Dreamhost can be improved. Member make suggestions like “Install MySQL 5.0″, “add module x to PHP”, etc. Other members can then vote on the suggestions, and those that recieve the most votes, get the highest level of consideration from the Dreamhost team. But to make the system even better, each member is given a limited number of votes, so you can/should only vote for the suggestions you feel most passionate about. If the suggestion you vote for is implemented, you get that vote back to support another suggestion.

If you’re in the market for a new webhost, you should check out Dreamhost and their excellent packages that include unlimited domains, unlimited mySQL databases, unlimited sub-domains, high bandwidth and storage quotas, and support of PHP4, PHP5 and Ruby on Rails! If you’re happy with what you see, signup and use the Promo Code dmm to recieve $60 off your first year’s hosting cost.