I stumble on this interesting headline while browsing technorati. Beth’s (afrogtokiss.net) is having a minor problem with his wordpress for not receiving earlier notifications on new comments post. After a few comparison he discovered that GMail Has Greylisted DreamHost.. The reason is still unclear, reading what beth’s posted earlier on it seem like Dreamhost Team will not disclose it on open yet.

dreamhost official blog

Hoping that I could get more clear view on this issue I did some more checking on dreamhost official blogs. Unfortunately It doesn’t fudge any relevant news. Their official webblog seems more like a casual blogs full with party pooper.

I spend few minutes fiddling around in their archives before I get on “Are you older than fifth grade”. Its actual content is much more interesting that the crappy headline. Josh Jones (Dreamhost Co-Founder) write a historic trackback of Dreamhost since 10 years ago. The below screenshot has lots thing to says about their business model.

The 9o’s tag clouds is much larger than today’s. So I’m sure you looking at the cloudy links. There is package for Adult site hosting. This is what Josh’s has to say regarding DreamHost early days marketing strategy.

Excerpt from are-you-older-than-a-fifth-grader

It took about a week before we realized that unlimited bandwidth plus adult content equals not good. Some of these people were using over a GB a day of transfer.. and according to an early email from michael, we needed to be making $200/GB to stay afloat! We immediately had to re-negotiate with some of those early adopters.. one guy began paying $700/month, and others left.

We did learn an important lesson though, and that was that some of those $100/month adult sites used hardly ANY bandwidth at all! And thus, the truth about overselling was realized!

(Ha, if you thought having a dedicated adult hosting plan was crazy, before dreamhost.com launched we had a dedicated warez hosting plan!)

We also had “colocation” options back then

10 years ago this guys are crazy (for money, we all do). Back in 97′ google is still in lab (and its not even called google they name it backrub). Search engine projects is still in early phase. So nothing to worry about adult hosting. After ten years I hope they do honest business and not making any high risks strategy.As getting cheap hosting is not a trends anymore.

In my opinion hosting companies should take more wider steps on building trusts based on standard web policy for hosting industry. Being graylisted by google wont make them very famous, nobody want to be on that lists. Dreamhost should resolved this issue immediately (pronto) or risked losing more customers. It would be a waste of 10 years glory.

This could be the worst case for dreamhost . Hopefuly they can clear beth’s and their Google problem. We dont have to see web hosting provider being banned as they new trends just right after recent controversy over “paid links & payperpost” issue.