DreamHost

Last updated
DreamHost
Company type Private
Industry
FoundedApril 10, 1996;28 years ago (1996-04-10) [1]
Claremont, California, U.S.
Headquarters Brea, California, U.S. [2]
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez, Sage Weil, Brett Dunst [3]
ProductsWeb and cloud services
Parent New Dream Network, LLC
ASN 26347 OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Website www.dreamhost.com

DreamHost is a Los Angeles-based web hosting provider and domain name registrar. It is owned by New Dream Network, LLC, founded in 1996 by Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil, undergraduate students at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and registered in 1997 by Michael Rodriguez. [4] [5] DreamHost began hosting customers' sites in 1997. [6] In May 2012, DreamHost spun off Inktank. [7] Inktank is a professional services and support company for the open source Ceph file system. [8] In November 2014, DreamHost spun off Akanda, an open source network virtualization project. [9] As of February 2016, Dreamhost employs about 200 people and has close to 400,000 customers. [10]

Contents

Web hosting

DreamHost's shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting network consists of Apache, nginx and lighttpd web servers running on the Ubuntu operating system. [11] DreamHost also offers cloud storage and computing services for entrepreneurs and developers, launched in 2012. [12] [13] The control panel for users to manage all services is a custom application designed in-house, and includes integrated billing and a support ticket system. DreamHost's staff contribute to an official blog and a customer support wiki. [14]

DreamHost does not offer call-in phone support, but customers can pay extra to request callbacks from support staff. Furthermore, a live chat option is available for all accounts when the level of support emails is low. This option is always available for customers that already pay the monthly fee for callbacks. [15] The company hosts in excess of one million domains. [16]

File hosting

In 2006, the company began a beta version file hosting service they called "Files Forever". [17] The company stated that existing customers could store files "forever" after paying a one-time storage fee, and redistribute or sell them with DreamHost handling the transactions. [18] As of November 2012, this service was no longer offered to new customers. [19] In April 2013, DreamHost mentioned that the Files Forever service had been discontinued and that they would focus on building a better-supported storage technology. [20]

Free application hosting

In 2009, the company began offering free web application hosting. With either their own domain or a free subdomain, customers were able to make use of a number of open source applications, such as WordPress and MediaWiki without charge. [21] The service is similar to, and can be integrated with, the Google App Engine. [21] Through a control panel, customers are able to manage their applications or upgrade to the standard, fully managed hosting service.

DreamCompute

DreamHost's DreamCompute is a public cloud computing service that provides scalable compute resources for developers and entrepreneurs. DreamCompute users select the amount of compute resources and storage resources needed and define their own virtual networks. DreamCompute is powered by OpenStack and Ceph and is designed for scalability, resiliency, and security.

The DreamCompute dashboard is built with OpenStack's Horizon project. The dashboard provides a user interface for interacting with DreamCompute's three main services: Compute, Networking, and Storage. Functions such as launching an instance, creating storage volumes, and configuring a virtual network, as well as creating and managing snapshots of both a running instance and storage volumes, are done in the dashboard.

DreamCompute leverages OpenStack APIs for system automation.

DreamObjects

DreamHost's DreamObjects is a cloud storage service powered by Ceph. Ceph's distributed object storage system allows for storing DreamObjects’ data on multiple disks across multiple servers for high fault-tolerance. DreamObjects users store any kind of data (developer content, video, music, etc.) and make it accessible from anywhere in the cloud. Because data is redundantly stored across multiple locations, a fault in any part of the redundant system – such as the loss of a server – will go unnoticed by users, as a user's data remains available and accessible. Commonly used by developers needing object storage to augment or replace S3 or Swift functionally via API, DreamObjects will scale to let a user store any capacity of data. DreamObjects costs are usage based, with no costs upfront.

DreamPress

DreamPress is DreamHost's managed WordPress hosting offering that features WordPress-optimized servers and support for novice and advanced WordPress users. In May 2015, DreamHost released DreamPress 2, featuring the deployment of high-speed Solid State Drives. [22]

Involvement with OpenStack

DreamHost was involved throughout the evolution of OpenStack, contributing developers and engineers to the project beginning in early 2011. [23] DreamHost development team members have been leaders on a number of major OpenStack projects, and have over 1,200 code commits changing over 128,000 lines of OpenStack code. [24] DreamHost CEO Simon Anderson has been on OpenStack's Board of Directors since the OpenStack Foundation's inception. In January 2015, DreamHost was elected by Gold members of the OpenStack Foundation to represent for a third consecutive year. [25]

Inktank

In May 2012, DreamHost spun off Inktank. [7] Inktank is a professional services and support company for the open-source Ceph storage system. [8] Inktank was acquired by Red Hat in April 2014 for $175 million. [26]

Akanda

In November 2014, DreamHost spun off Akanda, an open source network virtualization project for OpenStack clouds, into a separate company. [9]

Anti-Trump site warrant

On July 12, 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice was granted a federal search warrant ordering DreamHost to hand over IP addresses and other personally identifiable data from visitors to disruptj20.org, a website that helped organize anti-Trump protests on and around Inauguration Day 2017. [27] The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog entry there was "no plausible explanation" for such a warrant and asserted it violates the Fourth Amendment. [28] DreamHost went to court, seeking to narrow the scope of the warrant, and in October 2017, Chief Judge Robert E. Morin, of the District of Columbia Superior Court, did just that, ordering that the DOJ could execute its warrant, but that "it does not have the right to rummage through the information contained on DreamHost's website and discover the identity of, or access communications by, individuals not participating in alleged criminal activity, particularly those who were engaging in protected First Amendment activities." [29]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Red Hat</span> Computing services company

Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.

Gluster Inc. was a software company that provided an open source platform for scale-out public and private cloud storage. The company was privately funded and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an engineering center in Bangalore, India. Gluster was funded by Nexus Venture Partners and Index Ventures. Gluster was acquired by Red Hat on October 7, 2011.

Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which data, said to be on "the cloud", is stored remotely in logical pools and is accessible to users over a network, typically the Internet. The physical storage spans multiple servers, and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a cloud computing provider. These cloud storage providers are responsible for keeping the data available and accessible, and the physical environment secured, protected, and running. People and organizations buy or lease storage capacity from the providers to store user, organization, or application data.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model where a cloud services vendor provides computing resources such as storage, network, servers, and virtualization. This service frees users from maintaining their own data center, but they must install and maintain the operating system and application software. Iaas provides users high-level APIs to control details of underlying network infrastructure such as backup, data partitioning, scaling, security and physical computing resources. Services can be scaled on-demand by the user. According to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), such infrastructure is the most basic cloud-service model. IaaS can be hosted in a public cloud, a private cloud, or a hybrid cloud.

Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in San Antonio, Texas. It also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Dubai, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Mexico and Hong Kong. Its data centers are located in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Virginia (USA), Chicago (USA), Dallas (USA), London (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), Hong Kong (China), Kansas City (USA), New York City (USA), San Jose (USA), Shanghai (China), Queenstown (Singapore) and Sydney (Australia).

Ceph is a free and open-source software-defined storage platform that provides object storage, block storage, and file storage built on a common distributed cluster foundation. Ceph provides distributed operation without a single point of failure and scalability to the exabyte level. Since version 12 (Luminous), Ceph does not rely on any other conventional filesystem and directly manages HDDs and SSDs with its own storage backend BlueStore and can expose a POSIX filesystem.

Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a cloud computing service model where users provision, instantiate, run and manage a modular bundle of a computing platform and applications, without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure associated with developing and launching application(s), and to allow developers to create, develop, and package such software bundles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rackspace Cloud</span> Cloud computing platform

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud computing</span> Form of shared internet-based computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenStack</span> Cloud computing software

OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users manage it either through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through RESTful web services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenNebula</span> Cloud-computing platform for managing heterogeneous distributed infrastructure

OpenNebula is an open source cloud computing platform for managing heterogeneous data center, public cloud and edge computing infrastructure resources. OpenNebula manages on-premises and remote virtual infrastructure to build private, public, or hybrid implementations of Infrastructure as a Service and multi-tenant Kubernetes deployments. The two primary uses of the OpenNebula platform are data center virtualization and cloud deployments based on the KVM hypervisor, LXD/LXC system containers, and AWS Firecracker microVMs. The platform is also capable of offering the cloud infrastructure necessary to operate a cloud on top of existing VMware infrastructure. In early June 2020, OpenNebula announced the release of a new Enterprise Edition for corporate users, along with a Community Edition. OpenNebula CE is free and open-source software, released under the Apache License version 2. OpenNebula CE comes with free access to patch releases containing critical bug fixes but with no access to the regular EE maintenance releases. Upgrades to the latest minor/major version is only available for CE users with non-commercial deployments or with significant open source contributions to the OpenNebula Community. OpenNebula EE is distributed under a closed-source license and requires a commercial Subscription.

CloudStack is open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud computing software for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services. It uses existing hypervisor platforms for virtualization, such as KVM, VMware vSphere, including ESXi and vCenter, XenServer/XCP and XCP-ng. In addition to its own API, CloudStack also supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API and the Open Cloud Computing Interface from the Open Grid Forum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abiquo Enterprise Edition</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">HP Cloud</span> Set of cloud computing services

HP Cloud was a set of cloud computing services available from Hewlett-Packard. It was the combination of the previous HP Converged Cloud business unit and HP Cloud Services, an OpenStack-based public cloud. It was marketed to enterprise organizations to combine public cloud services with internal IT resources to create hybrid clouds, or a mix of private and public cloud environments, from around 2011 to 2016.

Zadara is a cloud computing company founded in 2011, with headquarters in Irvine, California. The company develops computer software that it markets as storage-as-a-service, which can be used for cloud or on-premises servers, a model sometimes called private cloud.

Inktank Storage was the lead development contributor and financial sponsor company behind the open source Ceph distributed file system. Inktank was founded by Sage Weil and Bryan Bogensberger and initially funded by DreamHost, Citrix and Mark Shuttleworth.

Synnefo is a complete open-source cloud stack written in Python that provides Compute, Network, Image, Volume and Storage services, similar to the ones offered by AWS. Synnefo manages multiple Google Ganeti clusters at the backend that handle low-level VM operations and uses Archipelago to unify cloud storage. To boost 3rd-party compatibility, Synnefo exposes the OpenStack APIs to users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sage Weil</span> Software engineer

Sage Weil is the founder and chief architect of Ceph, a distributed storage platform. He also was the creator of WebRing, a co-founder of Los Angeles–based hosting company DreamHost, and the founder and CTO of Inktank. Weil now works for Red Hat as the chief architect of the Ceph project.

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SAP Converged Cloud is a private managed cloud developed and marketed by SAP.

References

  1. ↑ "DreamHost.net WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info - DomainTools". WHOIS . Retrieved 2009-04-04.
  2. ↑ "DreamHost Company" . Retrieved 2020-03-30.
  3. ↑ "Interview with Brett Dunst, Vice President at Dreamhost". Hosting Review Box. 15 June 2016.
  4. ↑ "Company History". Unofficial DreamHost Blog. January 24, 2001. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
  5. ↑ "California LLC Registration Search". ca.gov. Archived from the original on 2013-05-23. Retrieved 2009-04-01.
  6. ↑ Perez, Juan Carlos (2008-01-15). "Update: Billing nightmare for DreamHost customers". InfoWorld. Retrieved 2009-04-05.
  7. 1 2 "DreamHost spins off Inktank, provides professional services for Ceph cloud storage" . Retrieved 5 February 2013.
  8. 1 2 "Startup Inktank Supports Ceph Open-Source Storage Technology". 4 May 2012. Retrieved 5 February 2013.
  9. 1 2 Burt, Jeffrey (November 3, 2014). "DreamHost Launches NFV Company Akanda". Eweek. Retrieved September 6, 2016.
  10. ↑ "DreamHost Knows the Cloud is the Future of Computing, Interview with Jonathan LaCour, Vice President, Cloud and Development, at DreamHost". HostAdvice. February 1, 2016.
  11. ↑ "Change Is In the Air' – DreamHost Upgrades". Dreamhost. June 3, 2013. Retrieved 2014-07-16.
  12. ↑ "DreamHost Introduces DreamObjects Cloud Storage Service". finance.yahoo.com. 5 September 2012.
  13. ↑ "DreamHost Introduces DreamCompute Public Cloud Computing Service - MarketWatch". www.marketwatch.com. Archived from the original on 2013-08-01.
  14. ↑ Berlind, David (August 3, 2006). "Honesty, transparency can offset customer service disasters". ZDNet. Archived from the original on August 18, 2006. Retrieved 2009-03-30.
  15. ↑ "DreamHost Wiki: Contacting Us Methods". Archived from the original on 2011-09-25. Retrieved 2010-06-01.
  16. ↑ "Web Hosting Report for DREAMHOST.COM". Webhosting.info. Archived from the original on 2004-09-27. Retrieved 2010-06-08.
  17. ↑ Penalva, Javier (4 October 2006). "Files Forever, nuevo servicio de DreamHost" (in Spanish). Genbeta. Retrieved 2009-07-01.
  18. ↑ Jones, Josh (2006-11-29). "Files Forever - Dreamhost". DreamHost Wiki. DreamHost. Archived from the original on 2011-09-15. Retrieved 2014-05-17.
  19. ↑ "Files Forever - Dreamhost". DreamHost Wiki. DreamHost. 2012-11-14. Archived from the original on 2013-03-30. Retrieved 2014-05-17.
  20. ↑ "Twitter / DreamHost: @BrattyBlkBarbie We cancelled ..." DreamHost Twitter feed. DreamHost. 2013-04-12. Retrieved 2014-05-17.
  21. 1 2 Lee, Justin (January 9, 2009). "DreamHost Offers Free Apps Hosting Service". The Web Host Industry Review. Archived from the original on 2009-06-23. Retrieved 2009-06-26.
  22. ↑ Burt, Chris (2015-06-17). "DreamHost Improves Dedicated Server Performance with Solid State Drives". The Web Host Industry Review. Retrieved 2015-10-06.
  23. ↑ "DreamHost-Openstack a Match Made in Open Source Heaven". DreamHost. Retrieved 6 October 2015.
  24. ↑ "Stackalytics: DreamHost contribution in all releases". Stackalytics.com. Retrieved 6 October 2015.
  25. ↑ "OpenStack Board of Directors". OpenStack.org. Retrieved 6 October 2015.
  26. ↑ "Red Hat Buys Ceph Provider InkTank for 175M Cash to Beef up its Cloud Storage Offerings". 30 April 2014. Retrieved 6 October 2015.
  27. ↑ Fox-Brewster, Thomas. "Feds Demand '1.3 Million IP Addresses' Of Visitors To Trump Protest Website". Forbes. Retrieved 2017-08-14.
  28. ↑ "In J20 Investigation, DOJ Overreaches Again. And Gets Taken to Court Again". Electronic Frontier Foundation. 2017-08-14. Retrieved 2017-08-14.
  29. ↑ Farivar, Cyrus (2017-10-11). "Court significantly reins in what data anti-Trump website must give to feds" . Retrieved 2018-09-27.
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