V4.08 August 2002
From DreamHost
0. Introduction. 1. DreamHost's 5 Year Anniversary! 2. Iprotect. 3. Data Center Move. 4. Secure Webmail! 5. DHSOTM ######################################################################## 0. Introduction. Welcome back... I hope everybody had as exciting and interesting a Labor Day weekend as I did! See, I sprained my ankle pretty badly last week and so I spent the whole weekend lying on the couch and doing my best to keep the price of postage stamps down. I know, I know, you're probably saying something like "sounds like fun, what can I do to help?" Well it's easy! You know how most junk mail you get comes with a postage paid reply envelope? Well, the next time you're dumping all those credit card offers in the trash, just take the reply envelopes out first! Then, drop them all in a mailbox on your way to work and in one fell swoop you've not only helped the postal service gain revenue but you've also hit those direct mail "spammers" with an extra 30-some cent cost! Just imagine if everybody did this.. their direct mail costs would double! What if you could anonymously reply to every spam you received and know you were costing the spammer 30 cents, don't tell me you wouldn't do that EVERY SINGLE TIME! This is the same thing, but maybe even more fun! Mwah Hwah Hwah! Um yeah, so that's the kind of stuff you do over three day weekends when you can't walk. Oh, and how did I sprain my ankle, you may be wondering? Let's just say that 699rentacar.com has a lot of explaining to do. ######################################################################## 1. DreamHost's 5 Year Anniversary! If you've been with us since 1996 or earlier, you'll probably remember September 23rd, 1997 as the day DreamHost.com officially started! I just wanted to say, "Hey that's a pretty good trick, signing up before we even started!" But you don't have to be an old-timer to realize that DreamHost's FIVE YEAR anniversary is less than three weeks away! To celebrate/commemorate/commiserate the occassion we're going to be giving away a $50 web certificate a day from September 23rd until the end of the month. But there's more to it than that. Oh yes. Much more. You see, we'll be releasing a new version of the DreamHost site on the anniversary and we would like eight (8) "DreamHost Stories" for it! Basically, send an email to stories@dreamhost.com with your story (about your site, how/why you found/picked DreamHost, anything that makes your story intersting) and we'll pick eight and put them on our site! Everybody wins, since we get to hear and use your story and you get site publicity plus $50! Other than returning your junk mail, what could be better? ######################################################################## 2. Iprotect. Those of you who've been with us as long as say threnody.net (our oldest active customer! Since September 1997! Woweee!) know we try and add a few new features each month. Those of you who've been with us as long as say customintegratedsensors.com (Since September 2002! Wewooo!) probably don't. Well, now you do! This month we added a new feature known as "Iprotect" which is an Apache module that automatically detects and blocks abuse to membership areas of websites protected by .htaccess files! It's turned on by default on all our servers now, and it works in two ways. One, it notices when a lot of different ip addresses log into the same account in a short time period, and automatically disables that account (password sharing). Two, it notices when a single ip address tries lots and lots of times to log into your site and blocks that ip (password hacking). Whenever Iprotect notices and blocks one of these events, it also sends an email to the webmaster address for your site notifying you of the illicit behavior and the steps it has taken. You can customize your Iprotect settings (enabling or disabling the service, choosing when it emails you and to what email address) through our web panel at: https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=goodies.iprotect Another thing you ROOKS may not know about is our awesome DreamHost discussion area, a wonderful resource for customers (and employees) to help other customers (and employees?) out in a public forum. It's at http://discussion.dreamhost.com/ of course! ######################################################################## 3. Data Center Move. Another thing somebody who hasn't been with us as long as threnody.net might not know is how frequently we move our servers around in order to improve speed and stability! We move them around like all the time! Hence the supreme stability and speed of our service! We move our servers around so much we've even installed them with gentle-ride suspensions (see http://www.uhaul.com/advantages/gentleride.jpg). So it should come as no surprise that we'll be doing YAIDM (Yet Another Internet Datacenter Move) on the night of Saturday, September 14th from 10PM until 3AM PDT (approximately). The reason for this move is primarily due to financial stability concerns of one of our upstream providers. This YAIDM won't affect most of our customers at all, and if you're on one of the machines that is being moved, you'll get announcements on the web panel with more information about the move as it approaches. And actually if you're being moved, you should already have seen the announcement we made last Thursday about the move, so I don't know why I'm even putting this here at all! I guess to kill time while my ankle heals.. ######################################################################## 4. Secure Webmail! Here's YANDF (Yet Another New DreamHost Feature) for you! Everybody already knows about our free webmail service on all accounts, available at http://webmail.yourdomain.com/, right? Well did everybody know you can ALSO access your webmail securely just by going to (notice the "S") https://webmail.yourdomain.com/ ? You just have to accept any warnings that pop up on your web browser because the secure certificate is signed by us and not a "trusted" certificate authority. But that warning doesn't change the fact that all your sensitive email data is still encrypted as it's transferred from your computer to our servers and back! It's always a good idea to be as secure as possible when accessing your email, so we'd recommend using the "s" whenever your browsing environment supports it! And don't worry about those warnings! Really! ######################################################################## 5. DHSOTM YADHSOTMWTM (Yet Another DreamHost Site Of The Month Winner This Month)! For August 2002, the winner is clearly http://www.piattodoppio.com/ , the site of a new New York City event-planning and catering business. The niftiest thing about their site is the little animated people walking around in each of the categories of their flash animation. The second niftiest thing is just the name of the company itself, Piatto Doppio! Like, "It's a me, Piatto Doppio"! The third niftiest thing is the way they chose DreamHost to host their site! Honestly though, we're _all_ pretty nifty in that regard. https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.dhsotm is the place to go to vote on other DHSOTM contestants, or to enter your own site! ######################################################################## Until our email problems are 100% fixed, Josh!
