It was a very long time ago, but I had a long running account that was in the $5-10/month range that I used to host my email, a blog, and a self-hosted picture sharing app. IIRC, the plan either had unlimited space, or the space limit grew every month. I had 100's of gigabytes of photos that were accessible via the photo app, and I had some small % of files in a folder named backup that wasn't publicly accessible to the internet.
Apparently backups of any kind were not allowed by the TOS, but this was buried somewhere deep in the TOS, and once they made the decision to shut me down there was no recourse. I had something like a week to move everything away from dreamhost. I believe my account was targeted because I was using a large amount of disk space (for TOS legitimate purposes) and they wanted to find any reason to let me go.
Mine wasn't quite the same. I hosted some PHP scripts when I was learning to code.
After some spat with a forum troll on another site, he sent some kind of complaint to Dreamhost.
In retrospect, I suspect this was a DMCA notice, either way DreamHost never really explained to me why they shut down my account, but they did so _immediately_ without any notice, they wouldn't let me download any of my data.
They offered very cheap and generous disk space, but only for the purpose of serving web content... not personal backups. Obviously they were counting on most people not using it all.
They ended up specifying a percentage of your quota you could use for any sort of backup or personal storage to try settling the matter.
Newdream is a great memory! The exploding of new media/design zines of in the late 1990s was really something. Newdream of course, but Lockjaw, K10K, Kiiroi, Newstoday, Uploading...man, that was a cool time.
I loved that ethos. It just seemed like it was group after group of really talented teenagers with pirated copies of Photoshop putting together these elaborate projects and releases, sort of like the demo scene in Europe or the elite ANSI group artpacks from the BBS days.
I haven’t thought about it or them in forever, but Lockjaw was my favorite. Whenever they’d have a release, it may as well have been my favorite band releasing a new album. You could just see how quickly the modern aesthetics (and what people figured out they could do with JavaScript) were changing.
I worked part-time for a design studio back then (eventually bought by Razorfish, which should really date my story to a specific era!) and it was just so visibly obvious that the print designers weren’t going to be able to catch up. The new wave took over so fast, and it was all these cool punk kids who could design it and code it at the same time.
I hesitate to call it “better” because there was nothing even close to frameworks or version control or anything back then. But it was certainly more original.
Nice to meet you! I was a paying customer about 9 years ago. Enjoyed the service. It was the best hosting platform I could find at the time that served my needs. I remember calling in support one time, a guy answered, and I thought "gosh, sounds like someone working out of their bedroom". Congratulations!
