Get Free Hosting from DreamHost

See the pun above? DreamHost is now offering free hosting with its beta DreamHost Apps. To be more accurate, it is not quite the same as your idea of usual free hosting, though.

DreamHost Apps is a free program for now. The great thing is that it will be free forever, for people who are lucky enough to sign up before they decide to close registration for free accounts. Previously, only about 100 or so people managed to get in and DreamHost has been getting massive number of requests to offer more free accounts since. I think they were busy checking their servers to make sure they could handle more users ... or not. Regardless what the people in DreamHost were doing between the first registration phase and the second, the good news is that now there are 10,000 new registrations allowed - each registered user allowed to send out 2 invitation codes to register for DreamHost Apps, indicating that they are prepared to support at least 30,000 new users.

DreamHost said that DreamHost Apps will probably cost about $50 annually once it is out of beta. I personally think this is a marketing strategy for them to offer massive budget hostings in the future. Hosting with no extra features required, just the basic popular apps and affordable to everyone.
So how does this free hosting differs from other usual free hosting?
Firstly, as its name goes, DreamHost Apps host your web applications for you. It is a weird move though, seems like they want to further limit the potential of shared web hosting, where only the most popular and safe applications and scripts are supported, even normal HTML webpages are unlikely to be natively supported (I am sure it can be done, but that's not the intention of DreamHost Apps, is it?).

For now, the supported apps are as follow. More applications will be added soon, supposedly.

• WordPress - wordpress.org
• Drupal - drupal.org
  
• ZenPhoto www.zenphoto.org
• phpBB - www.phpbb.com
• MediaWiki - www.mediawiki.org
• Google Apps and GMail

You have 3 domain options with your DreamHost Apps account, you can use subdomain provided by DreamHost, use your own registered domain or register new domains with DreamHost. For now, there seems to be no limit on the amount of domains allowed to be used with DreamHost Apps and the resources available (bandwidth and disk space) are not explicitly defined, which I would read as unmetered until further notice.

I think this is a great offer. You could have your own blog running forever, without any cost at all, or if you would like to have your own dot com, the fee is only about $11 yearly. If you are a business owner and would relish some web presence, I suggest you invest the amount above to register a domain and start getting attentions and attracting potential customers from the Internet today. If you need advise on setting up a proper website with DreamHost Apps, I am available for consultation, just get in touch with me.

Lastly, do not be too excited about the free offer, though. There are some limitations, there will probably be no FTP access, SSH access, email and technical support unless you sign up for the paid plans. That is OK for me, I have no complaints for free stuff, do you? Now if you would like to have a DreamHost Apps account, do negotiate with El Diablo below (at present, there are still over 9000 accounts up for grabs).

http://www.dreamhostapps.com/
(Well, did I not mention that DreamHost is run by some mad entrepreneurs with some good sense of humour?)

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