When choosing a web hosting company, you really have to do your homework. This is the reason I chose DreamHost to host all of my web design projects. They are reliable, fast, and have great customer service. one is to expect this from any hosting service, however DreamHost takes things to a whole new level.

As a professional designer/content developer, I started out working for a local company who used their own closed source CMS system to develop websites. Although it was a great place to work, I would often times find myself feeling guilty for referring my friends who needed websites because of very high hosting costs and design fees. I had no idea what was actually available other than GoDaddy. I had only used GoDaddy for my BBQ sauce website, http://www.bbqberry.com, and although they were very inexpensive, I found their admin services to be very confusing and often misguided.

After I began taking Software Engineering I & II in the Computer Science curriculum at Arkansas State University, I began to explore other options for web design and hosting. We were assigned a project that involved and eCommerce solution as well as accurate documentation. The idea was to redesign our BBQ site and actually make it sell and ship BBQ sauce. IrishNinjas was the name of our group and BBQberry.com was our project.

A few weeks went by and we decided to use my current employer for the CMS and hosting since hosting was free for employees and I knew the CMS very well. We worked for hours on the design and functionality of the site and got a working model up and running by January of 2009.

A few months passed and the stress of school really set in. I was not happy with my performance in school and I grew weary of my job. I decided over spring break, March 2009, to quit working at my job and pursue my career as a student of Computer Science.

The employer I was working for had a very negative morale amongst my colleagues and everyday we felt threatened by termination, not to mention the fact that keyloggers had been placed on our machines, and my project then became the focus of certain scrutiny and accusations of moonlighting at work. I was weary and began to look for alternatives to using my current employer for CMS and hosting.

I began to research Drupal and Dreamhost as alternatives to my current provider. I knew that once I quit working there, my site was in jeopardy of being shut down. IrishNinjas.com started as a designer blog for my rants and raves about certain design elements and ideas and was now under the microscope of my former employer. BBQberry.com and it's documentation needed to be transferred/ported over quickly and presented in early May 2009.

I signed up for DreamHost on a plan designed for my specific needs, or anyone's for that matter. Unlimited everything with no end in site. I was completely happy. My referrer, who had seen my struggle, complimented me with 2 free domains and a partially waived setup fee. I was happy. Both IrishNinjas.com and BBQberry.com now had a new home. BBQberry.com was finished and is pretty much how it looks today with minor content and product updates, and IrishNinjas.com was a migration over from a personal employee based design blog, to a fully designed design blog / web showcase and has not stopped evolving.

Dreamhost was like a magical dream come true. The tech support guys spoke with such confidence and jargon that only a gamer / geek could top them. I was having conversations with the tech support team about everything from One Click MySQL installs to which areas of programming (in game design) were hot right now, and how DreamHost could help me and my colleagues with our school projects.

I was hooked. I began touting DreamHost to all my friends. I had been invited to a culture of geeks that liked to share ideas and make money. The guys at DreamHost helped me out with various small tasks in FTP user setup, hosting, MySQL Management, Referrals, Rewards, etc... I could not ask for better service, and with all the bandwidth, I was baffled.

I began to explore the opportunites of being a full time freelancer. Since I began, I am now hosting 14 domains, 8 subdomains, 18 MySQL databases, various open source projects such as ProjectPier, vTiger, EyeOS, and PHPMyAdmin (Included w/ DreamHost).

I have had very little downtime, and I have been happy. I have also referred friends of mine to DreamHost and saved them lots of money and time. I have had clients from Network Solutions, and GoDaddy that I have switched over to DreamHost, and they are blown away by its ease of use.

I know for myself, you can't ask for a better hosting service to use for FTP access. Other Hosting services I have used were often complicated when setting up FTP and folders. DreamHost uses form fields and check boxes with plain English to ask what you want to do. There are not cryptic server addresses for FTP. For example, with GoDaddy or Network Solutions, you may encounter FTP addresses like this jfksleikjf.j9iww009.godaddy.com. That means nothing to me. FTP with Dreamhost is direct and to the point. They use your domain name for your site and there is no manually linking the domain name to a folder. It is done when you fully activate hosting on the domain with one click.

DreamHost offers several one click installs for novice and advanced users such as the following:

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla
• MediaWiki
• Zenphoto
• phpBB
• Gallery
• OpenX
• ZenCart
• MySQL Databases
• Trac
• WebCalendar

This is not a complete list, but it does encompass a lot of the things you can do right out of the box with a DreamHost account.

Another thing that is nice to know is that DreamHost likes to pay money to people who refer their services. They allow you to create your own alpha-numeric promo codes to give to your friends and colleagues so that they too can enjoy DreamHost at a low low price.

The possibilites are endless with DreamHost. If you are interested in Dreamhost, give me a shout on Twitter, and I will see what I can do. If you are interested in hearing more about IrishNinjas.com and how we came to be, go ahead and follow me on Twitter.