MightyMu is hosted there. mconnor is hosted there. Jesse Ruderman is hosted there. But I prefer month-to-month plans usually, and DreamHost charges a $50 set up fee for monthly accounts. Setup fees went out with $70 domain names and useful information at GeoCities. Everything else there was tops, great bandwidth, great storage, great features. But they seem to like the setup fee (so much so you still have to pay it if you change from a yearly setup-fee-free plan to a monthly plan), so I never switched. Until now.

I used to be at Total Choice Hosting (TCH for short), which was great at the time. Unlimited email addresses, unlimited FTP accounts, unlimited MySQL databases, etc. It started at $4 a month, with no setup fees. Support was great. Everything was groovy. but recently I’ve seen an uptick in my site’s popularity, which is cool, but in March my bandwidth came within a few megs of the limit. So I bumped up a buck to the $5 plan to get 850MB of storage and 20GB of transfer a month. In April, the growth rate kept up, I used 14GB with a general trend showing each day increasing over the last. In May I would have hit probably 20GB, and would have had to upgrade again, or start pulling content. I hate to pull content off, because then what’s the point of having a site?

Then Jesse mentioned DreamHost was having a sale back in December. They were celebrating 7 years of business, and had a promotional code to get a discount. It made the price 77 cents per month for 12 months, for a one year total of $9.24. How could I pass that up? Turns out they throw in a domain name with each plan, and it was good on this offer also. Well, it became no contest. Despite TCH being a great host, one I’d recommended before, I couldn’t pass this up with all that bandwidth to spare. So now I’m hosted here at DreamHost. Thanks, Jesse. And everyone who loves my Shared Media directory thanks you too. (It’ll look better soon too, as I’ll be playing with Apache tools to spruce up this stuff.)

Update:I forgot to mention, the site seems a lot faster now too. The server I was on at TCH was getting a little crowded, with ~90% memory in use, high load averages, etc. But here it’s zippy all the time, so added bonus! Woo!