DreamHost

From IndieWeb

DreamHost is a web hosting company that is used by several members of the IndieWeb community, and who hosted several Homebrew Website Club meetups in Portland.

How to

How to get started

Try searching for "Dreamhost deals" in your favorite browser/search engine and you may find some promotions by Dreamhost.com as ads in the search results. If you find one you like, click it. This may save you some money compared to just going directly to dreamhost.com.

Choose the "Shared [Unlimited]" option because you it includes unlimited email at your domain, and you should use your own domain for your primary email (instead of a gmail etc.), and

  • click "Sign Up Now" at the bottom of the column

If you’re asked if you want a new domain or not, choose the option like:

Once you have gone through the payment options, login to the panel to configure your setup!

How to setup a static site

From the panel (https://panel.dreamhost.com/)

  • Choose Domains, Manage Domains from the left column.
  • If you don't see your domain in the list
    • Click "Add Hosting to a Domain / Sub-Domain"
    • Enter your domain name
  • Otherwise click "Edit" on the row with your domain
  • (*) Remove WWW.
  • Create a New User (something short you'll use to sftp/ssh with)
  • [x] HTTPS
  • [x] Automatically upgrade PHP
  • If you have a CloudFlare account already (or want to create one now)
    • [x] Enable CloudFlare on this domain
  • Click "Change Settings" (or "Fully host this domain" if you just added it)
NS1.DREAMHOST.COM            64.90.62.230
NS2.DREAMHOST.COM            208.97.182.10
NS3.DREAMHOST.COM            66.33.205.230

If this is a new domain it should work within a few minutes.

If this a migrated domain, it will work after your TTL on your domain has expired.

You should be able to browse to your domain being hosted at DreamHost.

(How can you verify DreamHost is serving your site?)

Services

Indieweb examples

IndieWeb involvement

Documentation

Downtime

All web hosts experience downtime this is an area to track downtime for DreamHost for people to consider when choosing a hosting provider.

Most recent first:

  • 2019-04-02 DreamHost experienced a prolonged time where the DreamCompute and DreamObjects services were unavailable to the outside world. This took place during a schedule maintenance that claimed to have no effect on servers. It prevented users from access their servers via the control panel, SSH and HTTP. This essentially cut off all outside access leaving Eddie Hinkle's server complete inaccessible for 10 hours. The prevented access to scripts that run routinely on the server, prevented use of Micropub and Micropub because they are hosted on the server, and made his website present as unavailable for 15 hours (10 hours of outage, 5 hours while sleeping and unaware he could relaunch the website).
A graph showing 50% downtime over the last 24 hours of the outage
A graph showing downtime between 5pm and 2am during the outage

See Also