Leaving Dreamhost After 1475 Days

My Dreamhost account was opened on February 6, 2011. It was their SuperBowl XLV sale which offered cheap hosting for a year and one free domain registration, two resources a budding web developer would need procure eventually. There was a lot of excitement in finally becoming the proud owner of www.thornycrackers.com which you can still visit today albeit nothing actually functioning exists there. That url served as a digital playground where I learned the basics of shell commands and what the hell vim was and how it worked. Other topics/projects that spawned having a shared server were:

• Basic bash scripting and .bashrc configuration
• Git subdomain with webdav authentication
• Python and virtualenv installation

At the time it never occured how these lessons would become useful in the future but they still get used to this day. When you don’t know anything about managing a server having a shared server is a blessing, but after many hours of managing servers and the abundance of cheap VPS services it doesn’t make sense to have shared hosting. It’s crazy to see how much has changed in 4 years but it’s sad to see my first hosting solution go. I wonder how much things will change in the next 4 years.