Carolyn E. Cooper Communications

Dreamhost offers great Wordpress hosting, excellent autoresponder capability and advanced features at terrific prices. Check out the exclusive discount I created for my readers!

I have a client who has had some amazingly horrible web site hosting experiences. To say these folks are a little gun shy now, is an understatement. They have been through the wars from web “developers” who provided hosting and then held their site for ransom when they tried to move because the site was down more than it was up to the Asian hosting service that lost their entire web site! They have also paid over $15K in the past 3 years for site design and maintenance for a very basic site in a highly upscale and competitive industry.

So when they were referred to me, one of my primary goals was to make the entire experience positive. No ugly surprises or hidden costs.

In the preliminary interview, I discovered that a) their current “emergency” hosting service could not support Wordpress or any other CMS solution and b) they absolutely, positively needed reliable, easy-to-use autoresponders for all of the email accounts. While Westhost could handle all their other needs, the autorepsonders have some limitations that would not work for this client. So I started looking for another hosting service that would fit all of my criteria and all of their needs. I happy to report I found it in Dreamhost. (Check below for a special discount rate I arranged!)

I purchased a basic Dreamhost account and even used them for the domain registration — something I normally do not do because a) I like to make certain I am in control of my domain licenses and b) I get a discount from my domain registrar, Dotster, because I have several domains registered through them. The Dreamhost domain registration and sign up went perfectly smoothly. They use their own custom web control panel for managing your entire account, everything from billing to email to files to databases to your robots.txt and .htaccess files. Great for Wordpress SEO! And, of course, this being me, I made certain I had unlimited email aliases and accounts. They also  allow you to use Google Gmail or other email server instead of just their own. And for the power users, there are some incredible features, but we’ll get to that later.

Naturally, I first tested how well it supports the new auto-upgrade and plugin installation features in Wordpress 2.7. I wanted these people to have a fabulous experience with their new Wordpress-based site. Everything passed with flying colors — and very fast! Speaking of  performance…

Dreamhost offers somes options for installing Wordpress that can affect your site. First, they offer 2 versions of the One-Click installation. The One-Click Easy Mode will handle your installation, upgrades and basic maintenance, however, you cannot access the files so you are limited to the themes, plugins and features Dreamhost provides. The One-Click Advanced Mode allows you to install your own themes, plugins and customization, however, it will run your PHP as CGI which means it’s is fine for most small sites, but can be slow with large sites or sites that need a lot of bandwidth because of video, images, flash, etc. It also means that you can’t control the PHP within your .htaccess file. Not a big issue for most people, but some folks use .htaccess to redirect and enhance their SEO.

So I did a manual install of Wordpress using ftp to upload the files. This is how I prefer to install Wordpress anyway. Wordpress is not really difficult to install (Darn easy, although not exactly 5-minutes!) once you get comfortable with creating a MySQL database and modifying the config.php file. Be sure you change the config.php file MySQL hostname from ‘localhost’ to WHATEVERYOUNAMEDYOURDB.yourdomainname.yourtld. Normally, the Wordpress config.php file looks like this:<code>

/** MySQL hostname */
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

</code>

This is fine for most web server set ups, however, for Dreamhost you need to designate your MySQL host. You create this when you create your MySQL database. For example, if I designated the MySQL database host to be ‘cooper’ my config.php will read:

<code>define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘cooper.carolynecooper.com’);</code>.

You can then use all of your SEO techniques, including custom .htaccess php directions, as well as custom themes, plugins and so forth. And there’s lots of “so forth” included with a Dreamhost account. Along with the usual open source suspects like phpbb, zen cart and so on, there are one-click installs available for dotproject (project management), Web Calendar, Advanced Poll, Media Wiki and more.

Oh, and about that web hosting discount..

One of the great things about the Dreamhost referral program is that it lets me create my own promotional discounts for my readers. And since the Dreamhost account offers so much in the way of disk space and bandwidth, I thought the best bonus I could give my readers was a price break.

So click here to receive US$20 off on an pre-paid annual account!

That’s a normal US$119.40 1-year of web hosting for only  US$99.40!

I am genuinely delighted with my Dreamhost account and think you may be as well. I didn’t even get around to talking about all the advance features for Perl programmers, Ruby on Rails developers and more geeky, nerd account features.