Instead of guessing how many resources you will need when signing up for DreamHost’s VPS-ish service “DreamHost PS”, they now have a handy solution to help you decide how much memory you will need.

By giving new sign-ups a free week with the maximum amount of resources, DreamHost can then figure out exactly how many resources a customer will need and set their “PS” server automatically to that configuration.

If you have been considering using DreamHost PS, this is a great incentive to give it a try.

You can read more about DreamHost PS on their website, and existing customers can enable DreamHost PS service from the Web Panel > Private Servers > Enable DreamHost PS

One of my favorite features as a happy DreamHost customer is their proprietary web panel.

When I was scouting for a new host to use as a secondary server ( I run 20ish websites, and don’t like to have all my eggs in one basket) I almost disregarded DreamHost because of my distaste of proprietary web panels. Ones that I used in the past were featured clumsy user interfaces that liked to crash and produce headaches.

A friend convinced me to give DreamHost’s web panel a try and allowed me to log into his account to check it out. After a few clicks I realized that the web panel was well designed and easy to navigate — I signed up for DreamHost a few minutes later.

But, if I didn’t have a good friend who could be foolish enough trust me enough to fiddle with his DreamHost account, I wouldn’t have been able to test it before signing up. Because up until now DreamHost didn’t offer potential customers a demo of their web panel.

Now they do:

DreamHost Web Panel Demo

It’s about time.

If you have ever had to set up an SSL cert, I am sure you had experienced a bit of frustration and/or confusion over the process from purchasing the cert to having it working on your host’s server.

DreamHost in their ever-expanding arsenal of making life easier features recently announced they were taking out of the pain of SSL certs:

…we’ve now integrated our panel with GeoTrust’s API for creating/renewing SSL certs with them, so if you get a certificate from us, it’s no more emailing back and forth and linking around, and all that gw bush league stuff. It just works how you’d sort of expect it to based on how the rest of our panel works…

To set up an SSL cert, check out your web panel under Domains > Manage Domains and click the “edit” link for the domain you want to use. Easy peasy.

Guess I’ve had my head in the sand, because I didn’t even know that Google was working on their own web browser. The big G released the beta browser on Sept. 2nd, you can read the official blog post here.

According to Google:

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

Google also put together a comic book explaining Chrome. You can check it out for yourself and download here.

I interned for a small hosting company in the early 00’s. My job was to answer any support questions I could, and forward others to the appropriate support staff. I learned a few things from this job:

1) Not that I disliked the job or company, but it was the most stressful working atmosphere I have ever experienced.

2) 80% of support questions are “emergencies” in the eyes of a web hosting client. The other 20% are considered “disasters” from a web hosting client’s point of view.

3) I will never work in the web hosting industry again.

And maybe some of the folks involved in our recent feature “The Five Greatest Web Hosting Disasters of All Time” have chosen alternative career paths as well.

Just ran across this post about the 7 must-have plugins available for Wordpress. The first featured plugin is the All In One SEO Pack - which is a needed plugin if you want to have more flexiblity in optimizing your blog for search engines.

Check out Tubetorials Video about the All In One SEO Pack:

I thought it was a well-done and informative tutorial — if you dig it, check out the rest of the videos in the series.

Every DreamHost account features unlimited auto-responders. Which give you the option to create an automatic response email for every email address you host with DreamHost.

This can be very useful for vacation messages, and a variety of other applications. Log into your web panel and see the Auto-responders features under Mail > Autoresponders.

DreamHost makes it easy to add, edit and delete auto-respond emails and you can create messages in plain text or HTML formats. Fancy that!

If you’re looking for more sophisticated auto-responders, the DreamNut team use Aweber.

Looking for your error logs for a DreamHost hosted site? We found them and thought someone else out there might eventually be lost looking for the same thing.

To view your error log you will need to log in via FTP to: logs/yourdomain.com/http/

Logs are rotated every night so that access.log and error.log only contain today’s logs, while error.log.0 and access.log.0 contain yesterdays. After two days, log files are deleted.

You may specify to save log files for as long as 31 days from your web panel.

Looks like Olympic Gold Medalist Nastia Liukin is hosted at DreamHost.

When she won the gold, her website was flooded with traffic — read the full story on the DreamHost blog about how tech support responded to keep the site running while it was being slammed with traffic.

In other news, DreamHost was named as one of only 25 companies worldwide to be recognized as having a democratic workplace by the WorldBlu Organization.

The blog post explains some of DreamHost business practices that make them a unique company to work for.

Want to work for DreamHost? Check out their current job openings.

Who Do Rockstar Bloggers Host With? is an interesting read about the top 100 blogs and who they use as their hosting provider.

A DreamHost customer, Jauhari.net made the list at #23 — Congrats Nurudin!

Who is Hosting This? conducted the study based on technorati ranks and their own spiffy widget that allows you to look up the hosting company for any website.

Dan Rouse from Problogger mentioned the article and commented “…keep in mind that many of the blogs in the top 100 are in networks so they just go with who everyone else is with in their network and some of the services that the bigger blogs use are probably out of the range of what most bloggers can afford.”

Good points, but the study does show interesting trends even if the results are a little skewed.

Check out the post to see who the top bloggers host with, and which hosting companies were the most popular.