As a Dreamhost customer for the past 15 months or so, I’ve learned that the beginning of the month is something to look forward to. That’s when they send out their newsletter, and it’s usually about some new features or enhancement they’ve added. Maybe it’s more disk space or bandwidth (like 68GB disk space and 1867GB bandwidth isn’t enough?!?…that’s not a typo). Or maybe they’ve dropped the price on something. Like this month they announced that the price for a unique IP went down from $59.40 for the year to $47.40. I have a unique IP for the C3 site to accommodate our SSL certificate so that’s good. Or maybe it’s a new feature, like this month’s addition of the ability to restore a MySQL database from their backup right from the control panel:

Now that’s good. May never need it. But nice to know it’s there and that easy.

Another part of their monthly newsletter is their charity of the month. Dreamhost allows members to donate to selected charities, charging the amount directly to their account and Dreamhost matches the amount.

It dawned on me that I had nothing to lose by pitching C3 as a charity of the month. It’s a customer site and it’s now colorectal cancer awareness month. Which means I should have asked them a while back, but it’s never too late.

When I was filling out the contact form, I noticed that they changed the language in the “severity” meter which used to be pretty dry & standard. Now it’s:

“People are DYING!” When email is down and I’m getting IMs and phone calls from frantic folks that’s exactly how I’m sure my emails to them sound. 🙂

The last time I had a serious issue with Dreamhost was in December when their email servers crushed under the auto-responders. Since then, no complaints that lasted more than a few minutes. Not bad for $19.95 a month.