I guess I'm never paying DreamHost back
2025-11-18
About twenty years ago, after a a tumultuous life, Big.McLargeHuge - the shared server of several other Abnibbers and I - finally and fatally kicked the bucket. I spun up its replacement, New.McLargeHuge, on hosting company DreamHost, and this blog (and many other sites) moved over to it (At about the same time I moved Three Rings over from its previous host, Easily, to DreamHost too, in order to minimise the number of systems I had to keep an eye on. Oh, how different things are now, when I've got servers and domain registrations and DNS providers all over the damn place!).
Screenshot of a web page listing domain names hosted on big.mclargehuge.
I only stayed with DreamHost for a few years before switching to Bytemark, with whom I was a loyal customer right up until a few years ago (Bytemark have rapidly gone downhill since their acquisition by Iomart a while back, IMHO.), but in that time I took advantage of DreamHost's "Refer & Earn" program, which allowed me to create referral codes that, if redeemed by others who went on to become paying customers, would siphon off a fraction of the profits as a "kickback" against my server bills. Neat! (Nowadays, this blog (and several of my other projects) is hosted by Linode, whose acquisition by Akamai seems not to have caused any problems with, so that's fab.)
A year or so after I switched to ByteMark, DreamHost decided I owed them money: probably because of a "quirk" in their systems. I disagreed with their analysis, so I ignored their request. They "suspended" my account (which I wasn't using anyway), and that was the end of it.
Right?
But the referral fees continued to trickle in. For the last seventeen years, I've received a monthly email advising me that my account had been credited, off the back of a referral.
Collection of monthly emails from DreamHost advising of referral rewards of between $2.40 and $5.16.
About once a year I log in and check the balance. I was quite excited to discover that, at current rates, they'd consider me "paid-up" for my (alleged) debt by around Spring 2026!
I had this whole plan that I'd write a blog post about it when the time came. It could've been funny!
But it's not to be: DreamHost emailed me last night to tell me that they're killing their "Refer & Earn" program; replacing it with something different-but-incompatible (social media's already having a grumble about this, I gather).
So I guess this is the only blog post you'll get about "that time DreamHost decided I owed them money and I opted to pay them back in my referral fees over the course of eighteen years".
No big loss.
Links
One of the first times Big.McLargeHuge broke under my watch
Another time Big.McLargeHuge broke under my watch
Abnib - a community of folks who used to live in Aberystwyth and are still friends