DreamHost

Web hosting provider and domain name registrar

DreamHost is a Los Angeles based web hosting provider and domain name registrar. It is owned by New Dream Network, LLC, founded in 1996 by Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil, undergraduate students at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and registered in 1997 by Michael Rodriguez. DreamHost began hosting customers' sites in 1997. In May 2012, DreamHost spun off Inktank. Inktank is a professional services and support company for the open source Ceph file system. In November 2014, DreamHost spun off Akanda, an open source network virtualization project. As of February 2016, Dreamhost employs about 200 people and has close to 400,000 customers.

DreamHost's shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting network consists of Apache, nginx and lighttpd web servers running on the Ubuntu operating system. DreamHost also offers cloud storage and computing services for entrepreneurs and developers, launched in 2012. The control panel for users to manage all services is a custom application designed in house, and includes integrated billing and a support ticket system. DreamHost's staff contribute to an official blog and a customer support wiki. DreamHost does not offer call in phone support, but customers can pay extra to request callbacks from support staff. Furthermore, a live chat option is available for all accounts when the level of support emails is low. This option is always available for customers that already pay the monthly fee for callbacks. The company hosts in excess of one million domains.

In 2006, the company began a beta version file hosting service they called "Files Forever". The company stated that existing customers could store files "forever" after paying a one time storage fee, and redistribute or sell them with DreamHost handling the transactions. As of November 2012, this service was no longer offered to new customers. In April 2013, DreamHost mentioned that the Files Forever service had been discontinued and that they would focus on building a better supported storage technology.

In 2009, the company began offering free web application hosting. With either their own domain or a free subdomain, customers were able to make use of a number of open source applications, such as WordPress and MediaWiki without charge. The service is similar to, and can be integrated with, the Google App Engine.

DreamHost was involved throughout the evolution of OpenStack, contributing developers and engineers to the project beginning in early 2011. DreamHost development team members have been leaders on a number of major OpenStack projects, and have over 1,200 code commits changing over 128,000 lines of OpenStack code. DreamHost CEO Simon Anderson has been on OpenStack's Board of Directors since the OpenStack Foundation's inception. In January 2015, DreamHost was elected by Gold members of the OpenStack Foundation to represent for a third consecutive year.

In May 2012, DreamHost spun off Inktank.

In November 2014, DreamHost spun off Akanda, an open source network virtualization project for OpenStack clouds, into a separate company. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog entry there was "no plausible explanation" for such a warrant and asserted it violates the Fourth Amendment. DreamHost went to court, seeking to narrow the scope of the warrant, and in October 2017, Chief Judge Robert E. Morin, of the District of Columbia Superior Court, did just that, ordering that the DOJ could execute its warrant, but that "it does not have the right to rummage through the information contained on DreamHost's website and discover the identity of, or access communications by, individuals not participating in alleged criminal activity, particularly those who were engaging in protected First Amendment activities."