DreamHost is a

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

-based web hosting provider and

domain name registrar A domain name registrar is a company, person, or office that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. A domain name registrar must be accredited by a generic top-level domain (gTLD) Domain name registry, registry or a country code top-l ...

. 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 Harvey Mudd College (HMC) is a private liberal arts college in Claremont, California, focused on science and engineering. It is part of the Claremont Colleges, which share adjoining campus grounds and resources. The college enrolled 902 undergra ...

Claremont, California Claremont () is a suburban city in eastern Los Angeles County, California, United States, east of Los Angeles. It lies in the Pomona Valley at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. As of the 2010 United States Census, 2010 census it had ...

, 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.

Web hosting

DreamHost's shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting network consists of

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

nginx (pronounced "engine x" , stylized as NGINX or nginx) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Russian developer Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 20 ...

and

lighttpd lighttpd (prescribed pronunciation: "lighty") is an open-source web server optimized for speed-critical environments while remaining standards-compliant, secure and flexible. It was originally written by Jan Kneschke as a proof-of-concept of the ...

web servers running on the

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

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.

File hosting

In 2006, the company began a

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; or ) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represe ...

version

file hosting service A file-hosting service, also known as cloud-storage service, online file-storage provider, or cyberlocker, is an internet hosting service specifically designed to host user files. These services allow users to upload files that can be accessed o ...

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.

Free application hosting

In 2009, the company began offering free

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

hosting. With either their own domain or a free subdomain, customers were able to make use of a number of

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

applications, such as

WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

and

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

without charge. The service is similar to, and can be integrated with, the

Google App Engine Google App Engine (also referred to as GAE or App Engine) is a cloud computing platform used as a service for developing and hosting web applications. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple Google-managed servers. GAE supports aut ...

. Through a control panel, customers are able to manage their applications or upgrade to the standard, fully managed hosting service.

DreamCompute

DreamHost's DreamCompute is a public cloud computing service that provides scalable compute resources for developers and entrepreneurs. DreamCompute users select the amount of compute resources and storage resources needed and define their own virtual networks. DreamCompute is powered by

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pla ...

and Ceph and is designed for scalability, resiliency, and security. The DreamCompute dashboard is built with OpenStack's Horizon project. The dashboard provides a user interface for interacting with DreamCompute's three main services: Compute, Networking, and Storage. Functions such as launching an instance, creating storage volumes, and configuring a virtual network, as well as creating and managing snapshots of both a running instance and storage volumes, are done in the dashboard. DreamCompute leverages OpenStack APIs for system automation.

DreamObjects

DreamHost's DreamObjects is a

cloud storage Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which data, said to be on "the cloud", is stored remotely in logical pools and is accessible to users over a network, typically the Internet. The physical storage spans multiple servers (so ...

service powered by Ceph. Ceph's distributed object storage system allows for storing DreamObjects’ data on multiple disks across multiple servers for high fault-tolerance. DreamObjects users store any kind of data (developer content, video, music, etc.) and make it accessible from anywhere in the cloud. Because data is redundantly stored across multiple locations, a fault in any part of the redundant system – such as the loss of a server – will go unnoticed by users, as a user's data remains available and accessible. Commonly used by developers needing

object storage Object storage (also known as object-based storage or blob storage) is a computer data storage approach that manages data as "blobs" or "objects", as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems, which manage data as a file hierarchy, ...

to augment or replace S3 or

Swift Swift or SWIFT most commonly refers to: * SWIFT, an international organization facilitating transactions between banks ** SWIFT code * Swift (programming language) * Swift (bird), a family of birds It may also refer to: Organizations * SWIF ...

functionally via API, DreamObjects will scale to let a user store any capacity of data. DreamObjects costs are usage based, with no costs upfront.

DreamPress

DreamPress is DreamHost's managed WordPress hosting offering that features WordPress-optimized servers and support for novice and advanced WordPress users. In May 2015, DreamHost released DreamPress 2, featuring the deployment of high-speed Solid State Drives. In December 2024, DreamHost partnered with BunnyCDN and integrated their CDN into DreamPress, naming it "Essential CDN". This partnership aims to enhance site performance and reliability for DreamPress users, ensuring faster load times and improved user experiences.

Involvement with OpenStack

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.

Inktank

In May 2012, DreamHost spun off Inktank. Inktank is a professional services and support company for the open-source Ceph storage system. Inktank was acquired by Red Hat in April 2014 for $175 million.

Akanda

In November 2014, DreamHost spun off Akanda, an open source network virtualization project for OpenStack clouds, into a separate company.

Anti-Trump site warrant

On July 12, 2017, the

U.S. Department of Justice The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the U.S. government that oversees the domestic enforcement of federal laws and the administration of justice. It is equi ...

was granted a federal search warrant ordering DreamHost to hand over

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface i ...

es and other personally identifiable data from visitors to disruptj20.org, a website that helped organize anti-Trump protests on and around Inauguration Day 2017. The

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...

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 First most commonly refers to: * First, the ordinal form of the number 1 First or 1st may also refer to: Acronyms * Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters, an astronomical survey carried out by the Very Large Array * Far Infrared a ...

activities."

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dreamhost Employee-owned companies of the United States Web hosting File hosting Domain name registrars Cloud platforms Technology companies established in 1996 1996 establishments in California