I thought this might have been controversial. I guess I see why it would be so convenient to have personal files stored right next to the hosting service. That would be a real “dream”. But I also see why Dreamhost has too not only make money, but also needs to work out infrastructure so things are not slowed. Flash forward 10 years from now and I am sure everyone will have their own private server. At least us that build sites or have large data to keep off of items that can be stolen or damaged, I live in two different countries and its getting tricky.

All that said, I have tried the personal storage sites, but it would be much easier to just drag the files onto the server using http://ftp...

This appears to be a larger problem for the web as a whole and for service providers… I guess its too big to be solved here. Dreamhost appears to be trying with Files Forever…

I am got a DH account PRIMARILY for a family website hosting and for email. I have a larger than basic account, and I have tons of free bandwidth and storage. If I have to also pay for S3 or something like it, then I am paying for two things. Maybe I will have to switch to a lowet cost plan or host AND do S3, or DH could provide the bandwidth and storage space advertized.

Also, my guess would be that any change to TOS would allow existing customers to cancel a contract. Side note - this is a great way out of cellphone contracts, they change their TOS or text fees all the time.

Anyway, my PRIMARY reason for getting and keeping DH is email and site hosting, no question. If as a secondary puropse I use whats left for backup, what’s the problem?

Thanks for the information.

ISPs will cancel or throttle users who utilize too much bandwidth on their “unlimited” connections. If I was to download at 8Mbps for an entire month on my Comcast cable connection at home, Comcast would be losing money servicing me. They rely on the fact that the average consumer of their service does not come anywhere close to the aforementioned behavior.

The hosting industry is similar in their reliance upon average users to consume far less than the advertised limits.

Let’s do some quick math. The cheapest I can buy a consumer grade 500GB hard disk for is around $100, or roughly $0.20 per GB. I can guarantee you that DreamHost pays much more than $0.20 per GB for their storage taking into account the NetApp filers I believe they use. Not only are they paying for the filers themselves, but they also lose capacity to snapshots and redundancy (RAID or similar technologies).

Even IF DreamHost pays could somehow magically get away with paying the same amount I do per GB and a customer was to max out their 500GB storage allocation, it would take almost 17 months for DreamHost to recoup the costs of JUST that 500GB disk. They haven’t paid their employees, for any bandwidth, any facility costs, or purchased their servers, networking equipment, storage arrays, etc.

I realize that the monthly fee a subscriber pays doesn’t and shouldn’t correlate in a direct fashion with such fixed costs, but I’m trying to make you aware of how the hosting industry works.

These hosting companies CAN NOT provide to every subscriber what they advertise. The legality or ethics of this fact is outside of the scope of this post, and I believe of Jeff’s original statement.

This is not a “problem” that is inherent or limited to only DreamHost. I am no insider, but even from my standpoint, shared hosting of the type DreamHost offers is a heavily saturated, commodity market where a provider cannot survive without advertising such extreme storage/bandwidth limits.

So, what’s my conclusion? I’m not really 100% sure. Is the concept of shared hosting flawed? Are these companies falsely advertising their services? As per previous posts, some other providers already have similar clauses in their respective TOS, and I don’t see how DreamHost would go about operating differently and attempting to stay in business.

Time will tell how this industry adapts to the ever growing need for storage, and I believe we’re presently experiencing some growing pains.

I backup a small amount of files and my iPhoto library to DH (around 16 GB) so I guess I am guilty. I’m going to keep doing it until they tell me to do so. I’m moving all my domains off of here except my personal ones and on the day they ask me to delete my files I’ll cancel my account and go somewhere else.

Too bad, really. What could have been a nice niche market to make a little cash cow for them is now turning into a talisman to ward off new customers and drive away existing ones. Great job dropping the ball, DH.