V1.08 August 1999
From DreamHost
Table of Contents 0. Introduction. 1. New Customer Email Discussion List. 2. Dreamhost Webring and Directory! 3. New Mailman Listserver for Customers! 4. New Counter Editor Utility! 5. A Note About Passwords and SSH. 6. PHP For ALL! 7. Dreamhost Customer Survey 8. DHSOTM August '99. 9. Random Quotes(s) From newdream.net 10. Coming Features. 0. Introduction. Howdy Howdy, Y'all! How was your July? Ours was swell! We spent a lot of time working on the back end for our new Dreamhost (and the rest of New Dream Network) system, but there's still a lot to go. We hope to have it done sometime in the next couple of months at the latest. In the meantime we're still adding a bunch of features to the old system, mostly taken from _your_ suggestions to us! We apologize for not being able to put every suggestion into effect, but a lot of them are impossible under our current system, which is exactly why we're undertaking this major overhaul in the first place, pardner! 1. New Customer Email Discussion List Just to help foster the feeling of community among us all and to encourage open discussion and communication, there is now a Dreamhost Discussion mailing list. We don't have a specific topic for this mailing list, but we'd appreciate suggestions on what sort of email lists you, our customers would be interested in us providing. You can subscribe to the list simply by going to: http://lists.dreamhost.com/mailman/listinfo/general-list and using the form there. The first discussion should be about what other lists people might like. Because a typical exchange in this broad-based list might be something like: C1: "Hey everybody, I'm a Dreamhost customer! My site is http://www.blah.com/ and I really like Dreamhost! Um.. yeah.. sooo.. anybody here from Turkey?" C2: "Hi! I've got a site hosted with Dreamhost too. I'm not from Turkey.." C3: "Me too. Me neither." and so on.. So that's why we want to make some subjects. Possibilities we've come up with are: CGI, web design, net culture, linux, politics, web hosting, but we need everyone's help in brainstorming this stuff. So see you on the general list perhaps! 2. Dreamhost Webring and Directory! Speaking of community, we really do seem to have formed a bit of one here, even without any effort from us! Completely on their own volition (Honestly!) two customers of ours have set up the Dreamhost Webring and the Unofficial Dreamhost Directory! See what the Dreamhost Webring is all about at http://tattletale.net/host/ and don't forget to add your site to the Unofficial Dreamhost Directory at http://www.nightmist.com/dreamhost/ so that thing begins to fill up and get fat. Gee, I hope we don't ruin its Unofficial status by mentioning it in the newsletter.. 3. New Mailman Listserver for Customers! It wouldn't be fair if we started setting up discussion mailing lists on our site for our customers to use and yet didn't let them set up discussion mailing lists for their own sites! So we've gone ahead and installed the Mailman mailing list server (see http://www.list.org/) for use by our customers. One thing though, we aren't sure yet what sort of a strain these new lists will put on our servers, and how popular they'll be, etc.. Therefore, we don't know what would be a fair price. So for now, we'll be charging $10/month for each Mailman list you want on your site, not based on usage. After we see how it goes, this price will be revised possibly to be based on the number of messages sent out. It will still of course be a reasonable price! Why wouldn't it be? 4. New Counter Editor Utility! You may have noticed now off of the main admin page there is a place to edit your counters. Do you know what that means? You can now directly edit the value of your Dreamhost Counters (see http://counter.dreamhost.com/) from the web panel whenever you'd like to, and they update immediately! You just have to name the dat files for your counters in this format: username-countername. So for example if your username is "myself" and you decided to make a counter called "home" for your main page you would just put this html snippet (for example) into your home page: <img src=http://counter.dreamhost.com/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=myself-home.dat&dd =E&istrip=T&pad=F&ft=0> and that would automatically create the counter which you could then edit the value of through our handy-dandy, spic-n-span, ROTFLOL, counter-editing utility! 5. A Note About Passwords and SSH. We've been shoring up security around here recently, and the number one way that you can help us is by being careful about your password. For one, you should keep your password to yourself, and not share your account among others. We had a break in to someone's account and they told us 8 of their friends used the account! It's really hard to keep your account safe when 8 different people (and maybe their friends too) have access to it. Also, it's good to pick a hard password. That sounds pretty obvious, but a hard password means one that doesn't have a dictionary word anywhere within it, nor is based on your personal information at all. It should also mix cases and include some non-alphanumeric characters. A good way to come up with hard passwords is to take the first letter of a sentence. For example: "I have four dogs not named Rover!" would help you create/remember the hard-to-guess password of "Ih4dnnR!" Soon we'll be requiring that your passwords for your pop,ftp, and telnet accounts be good passwords, so you should save yourself effort later by coming up with a good one now. Good security doesn't just stop at good passwords, though! One of the biggest security risks for us is the use of administrator shell accounts. A shell account gives you as a user direct access to one of our server systems. It can be a very powerful tool for any programmers or designers, and you can also use it to easilly check your email from anywhere. The most commonly used way to access a shell account is through a telnet client. The telnet protocol causes us a bit of strife because it's totally unencrypted. Anything you type into a telnet shell is theoetically accessible by virtually anyone on the Internet! It's not quite that bad, but it is a cause for concern still. To eliminate this problem, anyone with a shell account should be using a client that supports Secure Shell (ssh). Ssh works pretty much like telnet from the user perspective, but it encrypts all of your data going both directions, keeping your private information safe from prying eyes! In addition to that, they tend to be much better shell clients than the one that comes standard with Windows. Download now! --- Windows --- http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html and http://www.zip.com.au/~roca/ttssh.html (you need both parts) or http://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/index.html -- Macintosh -- http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jonasw/freeware.html (non-USA only) You should also check http://www.datafellows.com/download-purchase/ For all sorts of good cryptography software. They have a Mac SSH client that's legal in the US, too! Thanks! 6. PHP For ALL! Remember last month how we mentioned that PHP was available on Code Warrior and above? Well, we don't want to seem elitist, so PHP is now available on every single dog-garn plan no matter what! Just tell our tech support people you'd like to enable it on your plan and they'll do so. What is PHP? Check out php.net and see, it's neat! 7. Dreamhost Customer Survey We want to hear from you! We need some feedback on how we're doing so we can focus our energy on your needs. It's a give and get even more back sort of thing. You give us some feedback and you get even more high-quality web hosting in return. Simple! Go here: http://www.dreamhost.com/survey/ 8. DHSOTM August '99 This month the category was web stores and malls only, but aparently that didn't stop most of our contestants from entering! Because of the confusion caused by only opening the Dreamhost Site of The Month contest to particular categories based on the month, we're happy to announce that starting this month there will no longer be any restrictions on what sort of site can win at what time. But no complaints from the peanut gallery about who the winners are and why, please! So without further ado, the DHSOTM award proudly goes to http://www.adiosbarbie.com/ which is in a way a web store, as you can buy the book (Adios Barbie, by Ophira Edut) there via Amazon.com. The site is more than just a shop though, it is "a body image site for _every_ body" and offers various resources on the topic. We thought this was a nice example of a site selling a product but offering more in the process to its visitors. Not to mention the whole place looked very very nice! Don't forget to submit your own site for DHSOTM next month (through the customer support page at the web panel.. choose DHSOTM as the category) and you too may be featured here 31 days hence (and win the privilege of putting the award image on your site)! 9. Random Quotes(s) From newdream.net "A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry." 10. Coming Features. The main new features in the upcoming month will be a rework of the billing system, because the way it is now just causes too much confusion and hassles for you and us both. That will also be packaged with a bunch of new plans as well as the launch of dreamparking.com.. Oooo what's that? Find out next month! Waaaa hooo! Newsletter Online: https://secure.newdream.net/admin/newsletters/dn1.8.html Other sites to check out from the DHSOTM contest for August, (most of them aren't sticking with the theme, but that's okay since we changed that!): http://www.bewitchen.com/ http://www.fi9.com/k-9center/ http://www.financemanager.net/ http://www.hawkeye-designs.com/ http://www.hike-nh.com/ http://www.imperialdragon.com/ http://www.kreativedesign.com/ http://www.loosemoose.net/ http://www.northwardbound.com/ http://www.proenski.com/ http://www.ravensmoon.com/ http://www.rockymtretreats.com/ http://www.sillycat.net/
