ThisDomainWasFree Weblog

An Honest Dreamhost Review

Administrator — Wed, 24 May 2006 19:05:49 +0000

Update: How novel, I’m only chatting a little shit! You should read this. You can read my post if you like, but those two are a lot better.

I have been with Dreamhost nearly a year now and I feel that this is a reasonable amount of time to review them. A lot of people are suspicious about Dreamhost, and they have every right to be. Why? Referrals.

It cost me about $20 to sign up for the “Crazy Domain Insane!” plan, as opposed to the $119 it should have cost me. This is because I used a “referral coupon”. If someone ever gives you a Dreamhost referral coupon that takes off less than $97 then they are profiting from that coupon. You see, once you’re a member of Dreamhost you can create your own coupons redeeming up to $97. If you make a $50 coupon then you get ($97-50)=$47. So never, ever believe what anyone with a < $97 coupon says, they just want you to give you their money. This coupon business is what makes me very suspicious about Dreamhost, the vast majority of their sign ups result in them getting only $23.

Twenty three dollars does NOT pay for 20 GB of disk space and 12 TB of Bandwidth (1 TB per Month).
Or does it? The truth is that Dreamhost are so huge that everything comes to them at crazy wholesale rates. They’ve never publicly said how much it costs, but many times they’ve commented on how it costs them cents for every plan and despite the referrals they make profit.

Somehow it still seems too good to be true, right? Yes, that’s because one important factor is missing, this is processing. One Dreamhost server can host thousands of websites. On one server alone I see 1,139 user accounts, users may host as many websites as they like on their account so this could equate to tens or hundreds of thousands of websites. And handling them all is Dreamhost’s main problem. This is where they are known to get a bit tricky. They don’t tell you what their limits are, don’t tell you when you’re near your limit and are generally vague about the whole thing. Of course, if you do go over it they will kill your site and send you a nice e-mail suggesting you stop eating up their CPU and buy a dedicated server from them. Rumour has it that they do not impose a processing limit on sites that aren’t at the end of their 97 day “money back” period.

In all honesty, this is a problem for many hosts. Back in the day they served up HTML files and now they have to support PHP, MySQL, Ruby on the Rails, etc. etc. all of which can use up serious processing power. Controlling and limiting this is difficult.

Processing problems appear to be the main cause for a lot of anti-Dreamhost sentiment I’ve seen lately but people also take issue with the support. Frankly, up until recently I would have to agree with them. One support ticket took a week to get a response others misunderstood me completely and did not help. However, lately the support has really gotten its act together, it took 4 hours to get a reply from an enquiry about a broken MySQL server (which they politely pointed out was my fault).

So to conclude:

Don’t believe anyone with a Dreamhost coupon for less than $97. They are lying about Dreamhost.
Wholesale prices mean Dreamhost’s deals might be legitimate, but there is probably a little overselling.
Processing is where the catch is, if you have a PHP site likely to generate 1TB of traffic a month .. get a dedicated server.
Support and stability are getting better
Every host has these problems

If you came here in search of a coupon then I have made one for you: FF9797OFF

This coupon gets you everything off that it can, to proof this I have attched a screenshot :

Portscanning the Internet

Administrator — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 16:34:06 +0000

I’ve often wondered about portscanning the entire Internet.

There are 4,294,967,296 possible I.P. addresses, I know that a lot of these are unused or reserved for things like private networks (around 19,000,000 according to Wikipedia) but I think were I to scan the Internet I would want to try them all. Just for good measure.

After much deliberation I decided I wouldn’t be able to scan all 65,535 ports. I believe I would stick to port numbers 21, 22, 23 and 80. Just the four, to get an idea of what’s going on. It would be tempting to throw in 135, 139 and 445 just to see how many people still have publicly accessable Windows shares but that would almost double the amount of ports I would scan. I think that four would be perfect.

So after a bit of fiddling with nmap I settled on this, simple command:

nmap -P0 -p 21,22,23,80

I think it might require a bit of tweaking but that would probably just about do it. This would at least give me an idea of just how long this would take me. I tried google.com as my first target, to get an idea of how long responsive servers would take to scan

lag:~# time nmap -P0 -p 21,22,23,80 google.com

Starting nmap 3.81 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2006-04-11 17:25 BST
Interesting ports on 72.14.207.99:
PORT STATE SERVICE
21/tcp filtered ftp
22/tcp filtered ssh
23/tcp filtered telnet
80/tcp open http

Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 11.724 seconds

real 0m11.731s
user 0m0.010s
sys 0m0.000s

11 Seconds. Oh dear.

I then tried an I.P. that I knew wouldn’t exist

Starting nmap 3.81 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2006-04-11 17:27 BST
Interesting ports on 123.4.5.6:
PORT STATE SERVICE
21/tcp filtered ftp
22/tcp filtered ssh
23/tcp filtered telnet
80/tcp filtered http

Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 3.417 seconds

real 0m3.424s
user 0m0.010s
sys 0m0.000s

3 seconds, not too bad.

Now let’s assume we have the 19,000,000 non-existant/network I.Ps

19,000,000 * 3

Added to oh, let’s say that half of the I.P. addresses that aren’t reserved for private networks are active

1/2(4,294,967,296-19,000,00) * 11

And the remaining

1/2(4,294,967,296-19,000,00) * 3

It’s some seriously rought estimating, but it could give us a decent ball park figure.
O.K., I make that: 30,108,471,072 seconds

Which apparently works out a a whopping 3767~ years.

And by then IPv6 will almost certainly be in place. Crap.

OneAndOne / 1&1 Suck.

Administrator — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 12:31:48 +0000

1&1 Internet suck. At providing domains. But they suck so much at providing domains, I bet they suck at hosting too.

Over two years ago I bought a domain with them. About one week after purchasing a domain with them I transferred that domain to another provider (1-2-3-reg.co.uk) because 1&1 couldn’t offer me the most basic function of control over the domains DNS servers. This is so they can tie me down to a hosting package. I was having none of that, so I transferred. It cost me something like £5-10. After this ordeal I made a mental note to never use the company again and promptly forgot I had an account with them.

A year or so later 1&1 started giving away .name and .info domains. If I remember correctly you could get 50 .info and 50.name domains .. for free .. if you had an existing account with them. This reminded me that I had an account with them and I signed in and registered three or four domains. Now I knew the scam, they make you register a domain “for free” but it’s only free for a year. After a year they assume that you want it renewing, they don’t want to hastle you about it so they don’t tell you. They just renew the domain silently. So I made another mental note to delete the domains or whatever I had to do to stop them from billing me in about 11 months time.

Eleven months later I actually remembered, I was quite pleased with myself, I logged in and after some searching found that I had to cancel my “contract”. So I did just that. Of course this is 1&1 so it wasn’t easy, I had to fax them confirmation. Signed confirmation. That I wanted it cancelling. Of course this was for “my security”, er .. no, it was so I would stick with 1&1 because I couldn’t be bothered. Fortunately I was one of the few individuals who still owned a fax machine, so I promptly faxed them my cancellation (twice, just to make sure) and left it at that. I didn’t receive any more e-mails from 1&1.

And now it’s over two years from the registration of the initial domain and I still haven’t had any e-mails. I did get a letter, though. Well, actually it was an invoice. Simply stating that I owed them £30+ and If I didn’t pay up soon that would be come £45+ and some nasty men would be collecting it from me. What?! I logged on to the site, turns out my contract wasn’t cancelled. I don’t know why! But I owe them £30. Bugger. Well I decided I can’t be bothered following it up, I knew that there would be some small print hidden away in some obscure ToS that was referenced once in a letter they sent to me two years ago that said I had to cancel my contract twice or that random billing of me was ok. So I’m paying it. I think. I entered my new credit card details and nothing seemed to happen. Currently I’m waiting to see what happens. I don’t want nasty men knocking at my door. I’ve also cancelled my contract. I did it twice this time. And will check that it’s still cancelled tommorrow. And the next day.

Oh, I just remembered why I set out the write this rant. THEY BILLED ME FOR THE DOMAIN I REGISTERED TWO YEARS AGO. The domain that I transferred away from them 1 year and 11 months ago. The domain that they have absolutely nothing to do with. They’re still billing me for it. I don’t know why, the domain isn’t mentioned anywhere in my control panel just on my “online invoice”.

So I’mve finished complaining. I hope someone finds this post and decides to go with godaddy or another decent domain provider. One and One are bad domain providers. They try every trick in the book to keep you as a customer, they don’t warn you about renewal (godaddy warn you every week for two months when a domain is coming up for renewal), they don’t really let you know what’s going on and they bill you for domains that they haven’t had anything to do with for two years.

Good Night!

Installing Perl modules without privileges

Administrator — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 02:25:03 +0000

This is for me, really. To install Perl modules without ~~priveleges~~ privileges do the following;

wget http://location-of-perl-module.com/perl-module.tar.gz
tar xfzv perl-module.tar.gz
cd perl-module
perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=`pwd`
make
make test
make install

Then, add to the top of the perl script

use lib “`pwd`/lib/”;

Where `pwd` is the directory you have write access to, i’m just being lazy.

Wikipedia and Googlebombing, Pagerank Boosting and just plain Spamming

Administrator — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 13:59:50 +0000

The benefits of getting your URL on Wikipedia are pretty huge, especially if you’re in to Google Bombing or want to boost your Pagerank. This is not only because Wikipedia has a Page Rank of 7 but also because Wikipedia has thousands of mirrors and forks. So once your URL is on Wikipedia, it’s eventually going to end up on hundreds of other websites. If you read the linked articles on Google Bombing and Page Rank then you will realise this means quite a bit.

So here’s my plan on how to abuse Wikipedia for your Googlebomb and Pagerank boosting needs.
I’d say it’s nearly impossible to get your URL into a Wikipedia article without it being whipped about by a Wikipedian within hours, assuming the URL you’re trying to sneak in isn’t all that relevant or just looks suspicious. Beleive me, I’ve tried it. So what’s the solution? Make a Wikipedia article! Even if the article is about the site you’re linking to, that’s acceptable on Wikipedia, it doesn’t matter. I have also tried this, and this works so much better. Once this is done, you consult the list of thousands of mirrors and forks and get constructing a link to the article on each of these forks, to make sure Google indexes that and sees lots and lots of links to your website. Of course, it will take some time (these mirrors don’t update in real time), but eventually you will start to see your link everywhere.

Here’s an example that I just thought up, you have a website and you have a sponsor”, your sponsor pays you $20 for each book about Rasputin they sell as a result of a hit from your website. Your website is http://rasptutin-rocks.com and you just have some blurb about Rasputin then a big link to your sponsor’s site. Now, you want to boost your Page Rank and Google Bomb your site to the top for the query “Rasputin Books”. Now, the uneducated Wiki spammer would go look up Rasputin on Wikipedia then add their link at the bottom, with the text “Rasputin Books”. A blatant attempt to Google Bomb and advertise that would result in the immediate deletion of the link. But the educated Wiki spammer, what would they do? Start and article about this particular sponsor. Give some made up company history, a little information, whatever. Even disparaging comments about the site to make it look less like spam. And then, at the bottom just a little “Examples of Sites Promoting this Sponsor” and then a nice link to the Rasputin books site. You could even make it look like this article is declaring the sponsor to be a bad site that seeks traffic and purchases through deception and then “name and shame” the evil, naughty sites that promote the sponsor.

So that’s my idea.

For the record, I really like Wikipedia; I think it’s a great site and I look forward to seeing how they deal with this kind of spam.

I couldn’t help myself.

Administrator — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 22:33:55 +0000

I started a damn blog, and it’s even got “blog” in the name.
Bugger.
Oh well, as long as no-one knows about it..