20 Years in Tech: DreamHost’s Timeline of Fortunate Events

Twenty years in tech. That’s a long time! DreamHost is almost old enough to rent a car!

We’ve been through a lot over the last two decades, and those events have helped shape who we are today. Life moves fast and, like a blue shell in Mario Kart, there’s no stopping it.

We may have started as a simple web hosting company, but we’ve grown to offer even more advanced services like managed WordPress hosting and powerful cloud computing and storage options.

We’re taking a nostalgic look back at the last 20 years of DreamHost because we’re proud of who we are! After all, if you can’t love yourself, who can you love?

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Back to the Start

1997

• DreamHost is born! Our four founders register DreamHost.com on September 23, 1997.
• We sign our first lease in a data center, not a dorm room!
• Bandwidth pricing was insane by today’s standards. We paid $1000 per megabit on a shared T1 line!

1999

• Move into our first office building in Huntington Park, California. It’s featured in the seminal Tony Danza classic, She’s Out of Control.
• Desks are old doors laid across filing cabinets. Real desks are expensive!
• We throw our first Halloween party — the DreamHost party of the year!

2001

• We are growing and need to scale! We migrate our backend to entirely new infrastructure, which we call “DH2.”

2003

• We ramp up marketing in a big way with some crazy sales and limited-time pricing. Customer count starts to climb!

2004

• We move out of East Los Angeles and open offices in Brea, Downtown Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

2007

• Resource constraints begone! UNLIMITED disk space, storage, and transfer make their debut to eager customers.
• Move to a new office in downtown Los Angeles, 50 stories up.

2008

• We are named to the WorldBlu list of democratic, freedom-centered workplaces!

2008–2010

• Move away from network storage and start storing data locally on customer machines. Site performance improves overnight for thousands of customers!
• We define our acceptable use policy. We support the Open Web and all of the thoughts and opinions that come with it.
• DreamHost is named to the OC Register’s 2010 list of Top Workplaces!

2011

• A company-wide vote leads us to select Simon Anderson as our first CEO!
• We sign on to join the OpenStack Foundation!
• We publicly denounce SOPA to defend free speech.

2012

• DreamHost partners with Cloudflare to bring the power of a free CDN to our entire fleet of customers.
• We begin to sponsor WordCamps and team with City Year for a company-wide Day of Service!
• DreamHost launches DreamCompute and DreamObjects.
• Our uber-popular Reach Out & Touch You Tour takes us on the road to meet and celebrate DreamHost customers!

2013

• DreamHost launches DreamPress, our premium managed WordPress hosting offering.
• We partner with eNom to handle domain registrations and renewals for us.
• We announce our support of the Open Invention Network and its mission to promote the open sharing and usage of royalty-free software patents to Linux-users everywhere.
• The inaugural DreamHost user conference, DreamCon, takes place in downtown Los Angeles.

2014

• DreamSpeed CDN launches, bringing the power of a global CDN to DreamObjects users worldwide.
• Redhat acquires our spin-off company, Inktank, for $190 million.
• Dreamhost wins 2014 Business Choice Award from PCMag.com
• DreamHost rebrands with an all-new logo and website.
• DreamHost joins Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition).

2015

• We declare February to be “International Open Source Appreciation Month.”
• We release our first ever Transparency Report.
• With our SSD rollout, we bring ultra-fast hard drives with no moving parts to shared hosting, DreamPress, and dedicated servers.
• We expand our data center footprint to Hillsboro, Oregon, and sign a lease for an office in Portland!

2016

• Let’s Encrypt brings HTTPS to everyone, and DreamHost is a proud launch partner with fully integrated support.
• We move our documentation from a wiki to a real knowledge management system and take the wraps off of our own automated Malware Remover called DreamShield!
• Email at DreamHost got better as we partner with atmail and Vade Secure for better performing, less spammy inboxes.
• DreamPress receives support for git and multiple domains!

2017

• We build and launch Remixer, our click-to-edit website builder.
• DreamHost is named to the 2017 WorldBlu list of Freedom-Centered Workplaces for the 10th consecutive year!
• We challenge the Department of Justice on an overly-broad records request in the interest of user privacy.