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May 27, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web hosting provider DreamHost (dreamhost.com) has recently given its customers the rather unusual advice of choosing Google's Gmail (mail.google.com) over its own email service, telling them that "it's something Google...can do better."
The Los Angeles, California based company, which hosts more than 700,000 websites, is suggesting its customers use Gmail for their email instead of the DreamHost mail servers.
And although DreamHost says it is continuing to support all its existing email offerings, co-founder Josh Jones wrote in his blog post last Friday that email is not the company's strong suit.
He writes: "Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into 'simple' old email. And that's kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features…
It's just not something people are looking for from us, and it's something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better. In fact, as you've maybe already seen, we recently made it very easy to use Gmail for all your email hosting with us, still at your own domain! "
The post seems to suggest that DreamHost cannot effectively handle its customer's email demands, and that it would be able to better focus on hosting websites than dealing with support calls concerning email issues.
The company recently announced in its March company newsletter that it would stop providing mail-filtering tool Procmail to its users after years of offering the service, which upset a few customers.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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Comment by Anonymous on Sunday, November 08, 2009
The company recently announced in its March company newsletter that it would stop providing mail-filtering tool Procmail to its users after years of offering the service, which upset a few customers.
More than a few customers are bound to be upset over this change.
I was able to use procmail filtering to reduce my spam received on DH from over 1000 a day to maybe 20 (this being because I had my filtering adapted to my particilar situation).
Now DH moved my e-mail to a server that doesn't support customer filtering (all filtering is now via forwarding to another server or using DH's own filtering). DH's filtering is useless me and doesn't reduce my burden of sorting out spam (It forces me to use their crappy webmail to view quarantined mail).
They say "nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features", but I can say that some people (maybe myself included) DO choose to leave a webhost when they don't adequately deal with e-mail--or in this case actively break solutions that were working for their long-time customers.