What's cooler than http://<yourname>.blogspot.com?

Recently I decided to get back into blogging. So I did what most other people did. I went to take a look at blogspot, wordpress, movable type, livejournal, typepad, livejournal, spaces, multiply, and what not. In the end, I decided to settle with blogspot. Mainly because of its links with google.

After spending a quick 5 minutes opening an account and playing around with the layout, I quickly got the hang of it. So that started about a month or so of blogging. After spending some time blogging and learning the limitations, I thought of moving to wordpress, since well, wordpress are for pros  (haha actually not, its just wordpress has more themes.)

Then I realised, the free hosted version of wordpress is not the same as the downloaded, hosted on your own domain version. So, here I am. (But then, I decided not to use wordpress in the end.)

So I went out on my search for the value for money web host with the potential of expansion and I found DreamHost. DreamHost was established back in 1997, which means its about 10 years old already. One of my experiences with webhosting is that too many people want to enter the webhosting game and thus, they stay for a while, get a few customers, then they disappear. For DreamHost, they have been in business for so long, and are currently managing more than 350,000 hosted domains. That says a bit about their staying power.

I went to take a look at a few things that I thought were crucial for getting webhosting, namely, management history, pricing, and features.

The management for DreamHost are known to be customer oriented and that can be seen by the discussions and support between their technical team and the customers. Very friendly environment I might say.

As for the pricing, just a few years back, I paid S$6 per month for a 100 megabyte hosting with 1000megabyte bandwidth. Today, DreamHost is offering 160gigabyte of space with 1.6terabyte of bandwidth. And thats for US$9.95 per month(if paying monthly or 1 year prepayment) or only US$7.95 per month(if paying by 2 year prepayment). One word, Wow.

Feature wise, thats really the part that caught my eye. Honestly speaking, the webhosting industry is a very price competitive one, and usually theres fairly little customer loyalty. For DreamHost, they came out with 2 really interesting concept to capture the market share. The first is 'ala gmail' style space increase. Apparently, when you sign up with DreamHost, your space and bandwidth gets increment weekly! For example, their cheapest price plan, the 'Crazy Domain Insane' package is US$9.95 per month which gives you 160 gigabytes of space and 1.6terabytes of bandwidth. On a weekly basis, the space increases by 1gigabytes and the bandwidth increases by 16gigabytes. How cool is that?

Thats not all. They also throw in a free domain name for the time you have an account with them, and  you also can host multiple domains unlike some webhosts which limit you to only 1.

The second concept they have is the affiliate program. For every customer you send their way, depending on the price plan and the rebates offered, you can get up to US$97 per customer. I can almost hear some of you saying, 'Fergus, xxx webhost is offering better price packages!' But thats not it you see. For every customer, that your referral refers, you actually get another US$5. Small amount, but think of the potential of it.

Overall, the DreamHost price plans represents value for money. With the support system in place, the simple to use webpanel, and not to forget, the crazily low price, who can argue that getting your own domain is expensive?

After all, What's cooler than http://www.<yourname>.com?

PS: If you do decide to use DreamHost for your hosting needs, to check out our special offer with Equiworx Solutions, which will give you an instant US$40 US$50 on all DreamHost plans. or just go to DreamHost to sign up now!

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