Daniel Egeberg

A recent topic on the PHP Freaks Forums called “Which Bit Rate?” made me want to do a little bit of “investigative journalism” about DreamHost’s plans with alleged unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Not surprisingly, you don’t actually get what you are paying for.

I decided to send them an email to find out where I could purchase the infinity hard disks they must be using:

Hi,

I was wondering where you are purchasing your infinity disks. Where did you get them? Also, do you know if they come for laptops? It’ll be nicer getting a such one instead of bringing an external hard disk with me.

Regards,

Daniel

Within few minutes I received this email from Chris L. of the DreamHost team:

Hello,

I’m afraid that I’m not sure what you’re asking for here. This is Dreamhost, and we offer webhosting solutions. If that’s who/what you’re looking for, go ahead and reply with a bit more info about what you’re looking for.

Thanks!
Chris L.

Considering he wanted me to elaborate on my query I did so:

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your quick response.

I was checking out your website and you say that you provide hosting with unlimited amount disk space, so I am interested in knowing where you purchase the hard disks for your servers that can hold an infinite amount of data. They sound pretty neat so I’m looking into buying one for my laptop, but I am having trouble finding someone who can provide me with one. Considering you have some I was thinking you could tell me where you have purchased them.

Regards,
Daniel

To my disappointment, it appears that DreamHost don’t have those. I probably couldn’t afford one anyway, it would probably cost an infinite amount of money.

Hello,

Ah-HA! Well, it seems you’ve caught us in our little ploy. There aren’t any hard drives that are individually infinite. We are able to offer this to you by using dozens and dozens of servers working together to create an infinite amount of space for you (please keep in mind that we don’t have infinite amounts of space, as we add more and more space as the need arises).

Rest assured, you’re not likely to ever fill our hard drives, ever.

Sorry I couldn’t direct you to that infinite hard drive! They simply don’t exist, I’m afraid.

Thanks!
Chris L.

They just admitted to deliberately scamming people. Off goes another email:

Hi Chris,

But isn’t the only reason why you will not run out because you know that people generally do not use that much disk space? Moreover, your “Unlimited Policy” [http://www.dreamhost.com/unlimited.html] prohibits usage of all kinds of sites that could possibly use large amounts of disk space. Unlimited means that there are not limits (because of the negating prefix), but that’s not really true seeing as you are in fact imposing limits on your clients due to your policy regarding usage of “unlimited” resources.

Also, it’s per definition impossible to reach infinity, which is implied by unlimited, so that means you are overselling akin to the way some airline companies oversell plane tickets because they expect that some people will never show up at check-in anyway (unless they have planes that fit an infinite amount of people).

To me this entire unlimited thing seems like false marketing, or scamming if you wish, to me. Or maybe it’s just ignorance about the fact that there are always limits on anything.

You say that I wouldn’t be able to fill your hard drives, but the only reason why that is true is that if I attempted, then my account would be terminated/suspended due to violation of the unlimited policy. Filling the hard disks would be pretty trivial to do. I’d just have to write a small script that will generate a lot of large files until the disks have run out of space.

You are claiming to have unlimited bandwidth as well, but that’s a lie too. If we say that the network card on the server node has a speed of 1 Gbps and that a month has 30 days then you will per month only be able to use (60*60*24*30)/8 GB = 324,000 GB.

So, after I’ve verified that you are in fact not in possession of some sort of Area 52 prototype infinity hard disk, my actual question is: Why you are selling something you do not have? If I go down to the store and purchase a bottle of unlimited milk then I will expect that there is no way whatsoever that I will ever run out of milk again…

Regards,
Daniel

My emails were not being handles by Jeff H. I assume that Chris must’ve been sleeping. I can understand that… I should’ve been sleeping when I spoke to him too actually.

Hello Daniel,

Let’s make a deal. If you can find a way to use infinite disk space (within the constraints of our ToS, of course, which is hardly
unreasonable. We’re a web host and we expect you to use the space for web hosting…not movie backups, not puppy mills, and not radish farms. Pretty standard, even if you want to argue crazy semantics), we’ll shoot down an alien craft or something and find a way to provide you with infinite storage.

In the mean time, for a perfectly honest and forthright explanation of how this business model works, have a look at this entry from one of our owners:
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Jeff H

Apparently they still haven’t figured out that a limited unlimited plan is a logical contradiction, so the discussion must go on:

Hi Jeff,

I am aware of the fact that the vast majority of your users do not use very many resources. In fact, I said so myself in my last email (”But isn’t the only reason why you will not run out because you know that people generally do not use that much disk space?”).

That blog posts says that you would be losing money if you sold 20 GB disk space and 1 TB bandwidth to every user without overselling for the prices you currently charge. You also say that you know people won’t use that and you will thus have a lot of wasted resources available. However, this doesn’t make sense to me. If you know the average Joe doesn’t use that, then don’t sell it to him. Sell him a 50 MB/150 MB plan and get over with it. I’m not typing this email from a multi-million super computer either. I’m typing it from a laptop that suits *my* needs (well, it may sometimes be slightly underpowered, but that’s irrelevant). Sell people what they *need* and give them the option of upgrading should the need arise. Don’t give them the illusions that need 20 GB if they only need 50 MB. Then at least you could market yourself as being honest instead selling limited unlimited plans.

Are you telling me that if Google decided to move e.g. all Youtube’s hosting to your datacenter that you would provide them with an
unlimited plan at $5.95/month? This site [1] estimates a bandwidth usage of 25 PB/month, but that post is from 2006 and the figures are likely much higher now. In 2006, Forbes estimated that the bandwidth costs alone were around $1,000,000/month [2], so that would be a kind of sweet deal.

[1] http://willy.boerland.com/myblog/youtube_bandwidth_usage_25_petabytes_per_month
[2] http://www.forbes.com/intelligentinfrastructure/2006/04/27/video-youtube-myspace_cx_df_0428video.html

- Daniel

It appears though that Youtube are not welcome in their datacenter…

Hello Daniel,

I’m super glad you know what you need, and you have a modest laptop that suits your needs, nothing more. I’m thrilled that you realize you only need a web hosting plan with 100MB of storage on the high end. Our customers demanded “unlimited” plans. Customers who are on our older plans and are using .001% of their allotted space/bandwidth regularly write in, absolutely indignant that they aren’t getting the latest unlimited promo. I agree. It’s crazy. It’s silly. It’s greedy. I chuckle every time I get one of those…then I switch them over, knowing they feel better about themselves, supposedly “getting more” for the same price. But it’s exactly what our customers want. And guess what? New customers want the same thing (or better) than current customers.
“Unlimited” is becoming the standard in webhosting, and offering an absurdly high, nigh unattainable, but finite number isn’t high enough to compete with “unlimited”.

And no, we wouldn’t host Youtube because we don’t offer unlimited bandwidth (in the networking sense. Since “transfer” and “bandwidth” are so often incorrectly swapped in the hosting world), so they’d be constantly saturating our connections. We don’t offer unlimited CPU/Memory, so they’d be constantly crashing our servers. We don’t offer a whole lot of other unlimited things that have nothing to do with the storage and bandwidth (transfer) you seem so hung up on.

Look, we could keep arguing with you all day, but I have customers to support, and you obviously already have us pegged for a dishonest, deceitful, slippery host. If you really want to argue with someone (folks with more objectivity and credibility than a paid Dreamhost goon), you should go pick a fight on our message boards at http://discussion.dreamhost.com .

We don’t censor negative comments, and I welcome you to call us out on our “dishonesty” on this issue. Banter back and forth to your heart’s content. Unfortunately though, I can’t spend any more time arguing over the semantics and technicalities of a marketing campaign, of which 99% of our customers understand fully…and want it anyway!

Have a great week!

Thanks,
Jeff H

All of the above emails have been reproduced verbatim.

Now they don’t even want to talk to me anymore… Apparently I’m not fine enough to be worthy of their attention. It’s an excellent way of ending a discussion. “We think X and Y, and if you don’t agree then we don’t want to hear about it.” Nevertheless, I respected his wishes of not being contacted and I did not send any further emails.

I am not quite sure what kind of bandwidth they are selling if it isn’t “network bandwidth”. The amount of data you can transfer is directly proportional to the speed of the connection. If you have a 1 Gbps outstream connection then you can send only one gigabit per second. I would’ve thought that it should be pretty clear, but apparently it isn’t to DreamHost.

I find it funny how they can sell an infinite amount of something when they do not understand the concept of infinity. MC Hammer describes it well: “U can’t touch this”

The rejection of hosting Youtube is also ludicrous. If you will be serving a lot of data then you will at the same time be utilizing a lot of other system resources such as RAM and CPU time. Those things, however, are restricted and that makes it impossible to use all the unlimited stuff you’ve purchased. You are not allowed to use your infinite amount of storage for backups either, so that further limits your unlimitedness. Basically, anything that could result in using a lot of bandwidth and disk space usage is prohibited per their “Unlimited Policy“.

Not surprisingly, DreamHost heavily defended their business model, which is of course quite understandable. If they were to begin doing honest business now then they would have to shut down. If we say they have 5,000 clients then they would need 5,000 · ∞, but the result of any arithmetic operation with infinity as an operand will still be infinity (so my calculator says at least). I suppose scamming is a profitable business model though…

Seeing as they are based in the home country of ridiculous lawsuits, USA, it’s a wonder that they haven’t been sued an infinite amount of dollars yet.

I got a bit tired of Debian so I decided to take a backup of my VPS, wipe the HD and put Gentoo on it instead. Especially that Debian’s repos are always outdated annoys me a lot. People claim it’s for stability, but I think it’s really annoying having to wait for new features that I need. For instance, Doctrine (an excellent PHP ORM) requires PHP 5.2.3+, but Debian’s repos are stuck at PHP 5.2.0. Using Gentoo I’ll have more recent versions of software. Installing things take quite a lot more time with Gentoo because it has to compile everything itself instead of getting binaries from an external repository, but once everything is setup then I shouldn’t have to install things too often, so I don’t think it’s a major problem. Anyways, I somehow managed to screw up my Debian install, so I figured I might as well put Gentoo on it seeing as I had thought about it for a while.

Right, so I have this VPS and I have this domain… Until now I haven’t really used it for anything at all. Initially I thought about writing my own ultra-lightweight blog software using either Zend Framework, django or Ruby on Rails. As a matter of fact, I started doing it with all of those frameworks but I never got really far. Ultimately I went with a Wordpress installation and right now it’s even using the default theme. I’ll probably end up using a pre-made theme as well, but chances are that I’ll take a stab at creating a layout myself.

Anyways, this will be a place where I will write about anything I might find interesting (so that means anything could pop up here). Furthermore, I’ve occasionally been applying for freelance web development jobs and in relation to that, people have often asked for a kind of portfolio. A such one does not exist so I will probably extend this site to include a such one when I actually have something to put on it.

Actually, I start a lot of projects and the vast majority of them are, unfortunately, never finished. This blog is another of these “projects” and I hope I’ll be able to keep it going by regularly posting information here.