DreamHost Announces General Availability for DreamObjects Public Cloud Storage

Thousands of Users Find Value, Special Offers to Drive Large-Scale Use

LOS ANGELES, California—January 29, 2013—DreamHost®, a global leader in Web hosting and cloud services, today announced the general availability of DreamObjects™, its highly scalable, resilient, and cost-effective cloud storage service for Internet entrepreneurs and developers. With thousands of beta users, DreamObjects cloud storage is powering a wide range of customer uses, including application storage, Web site backup, content storage, disaster recovery, as well as a broad following in persistent personal backup of photos and videos.

DreamObjects’ storage capability is powered by Ceph, the massively scalable, universal storage system created by Sage Weil, co-founder of DreamHost, which funded and supported the Ceph project for many years. Ceph is now developed and supported by Inktank and a growing community of developers worldwide. Applying open source Ceph as a basis for DreamObjects gives DreamHost significant advantages in resiliency, scalability, and allows the company to offer industry-leading and cost-effective object storage to its customers worldwide. DreamObjects is compatible with Amazon™ S3 and Swift-based APIs, meaning that stored data can be moved flexibly between DreamObjects and other object storage services.

DreamObjects is an ideal cloud storage service for both casual users and savvy developers. Customer applications for DreamObjects range from personal backup of documents, photos and videos using a third party client like CloudBerry™Backup, Cyberduck™, CrossFTP™, or GoodSync™ to application storage and Web site backup. Application developers store data without needing to worry about storage capacity or provisioning more. Data is stored and accessed through RESTful API requests. Web site owners create backups and archive them to DreamObjects, either through an automated script or a plug-in (i.e., WordPress). Anyone needing to store content accessible via the Internet has a readily available storage service and can even take advantage of disaster recovery capabilities by storing a copy of data offsite in the event of the loss of other backup media.

As a foundational public cloud storage service, DreamObjects lines up with its associated computing service, DreamCompute, to deliver a unique blend of capabilities. DreamCompute is engineered from the operating system up to deliver the next generation cloud computing service that developers are asking for. With OpenStack™ virtual machine management, reliable and resilient Ceph block storage, and software-defined networking that fully isolates each instance in the infrastructure, DreamCompute sets a new standard for compute-as-a-service.

Pricing

Since its beta launch in October 2012, DreamObjects’ customer base has quickly grown into thousands of users. On the occasion of taking the service to general commercial availability, DreamHost is offering pace-setting promotions to drive DreamObjects and open source storage forward. Customers can sign up today for a 30-day trial and get 100GB storage and 100GB bandwidth out free for the first month. Thereafter, the low month-to-month price of 7¢ per GB of storage and 7¢ per GB of transfer out bandwidth applies. Even lower pricing is available when making longer-term commitments. For a limited time, all pre-paid storage plans will be discounted 50% for the first year of service. That is cloud object storage as low as 2.2¢ per GB per month.

Taking the DreamObjects offers to the next level, and demonstrating DreamHost’s commitment to security, customers who enable the free multi-factor authentication will receive 1GB of free storage for the length of their service. Additionally, DreamHost partner CloudBerry Lab will make an exclusive offer of up to 50% off of its suite of solutions for the DreamObjects cloud platform. Customers can stay tuned for more GB-free and other promotional offers from DreamHost and its partners in the near future to help them get the most of their DreamObjects experience.

“With the general availability of DreamObjects for entrepreneurs and developers worldwide, DreamHost is setting a new bar for value in public cloud storage,” said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost. “We believe that the current generation of innovators and content creators will thrive and prosper in an environment where feature-rich, reliable cloud storage can be utilized for pennies per gig. Developers are keen to work with companies like DreamHost that contribute significant code to leading Open Source software projects like Ceph, OpenStack and WordPress. We’re excited to be part of the Open Source software movement that is transforming the way big technology problems are solved and cloud services are delivered for the greater good.”

Supporting partner quotes:

CloudBerry Lab

“DreamObjects is a great example of how the secure and affordable public cloud storage service should be built and delivered to the market. Combined with CloudBerry Backup, DreamObjects can be easily integrated as the secure, reliable and affordable backup and disaster recovery solution. We’re also very proud to have DreamObjects supported in our other core products – CloudBerry Explorer and CloudBerry Drive.” — Alexey Serkov, Co-Founder and CTO at CloudBerry Lab.

Inktank

“Affordable and scalable storage is the next frontier in cloud computing, and it is exciting to see cloud providers like DreamHost turning to Ceph’s revolutionary storage technology to meet this growing need,” said Bryan Bogensberger, CEO of Inktank. “Ceph’s unmatched scalability, resiliency, and flexible open-source nature make it an ideal storage solution for cloud players looking to compete with bigger companies like Amazon. And because Ceph is self-managing, it provides a very low cost of operations, enabling companies to pass the savings on to their customers. With Ceph-powered DreamObjects, DreamHost has created a robust, easy to use, and highly cost-competitive cloud storage service that promises to change the cloud game, for the benefit of developers, enterprises, and even individuals simply looking to backup their photos online.”

Supporting customer quotes:

“I was a cloud storage user of Amazon S3, and I moved to DreamObjects. The pricing is easier to understand, and with DreamObejcts, you don’t need to worry about API usage. I use DreamObjects to backup my website data every hour via s3cmd, and access the data via ClouldBerry explorer. Since my website is hosted with DreamHost, using DreamObjects for backup seems to be a good choice.” — Vincent Wu, Komica

“I am a hobby/semiprofessional photographer and have accumulated about 150 GB of images in about six years which I backup to DreamObjects. I was really happy when DreamHost offered backup space for a reasonable price. I’ve had a few hard drive crashes before, yet was never as relaxed as I am now because my data is securely backed up. Web storage was something I considered before, but saw a big hurdle in signing up for Amazon S3 or other services because there was no real tutorial and the cost structure is quite complex. DreamObjects made it really easy, I was set up with a few clicks.” — Eugen Ruppert

For more information about the DreamObjects public storage cloud service, please visit the following site: https://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/storage

About DreamHost

DreamHost is a global Web hosting and cloud services provider with over 350,000 customers and 1.2 million blogs, websites and apps hosted. The company offers a wide spectrum of Web hosting and cloud services including Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, Domain Name Registration, the cloud storage service, DreamObjects, and the cloud computing service DreamCompute. Please visit https://www.dreamhost.com for more information.

About Ceph

Ceph, The Future of Storage™, is a transformative, universal storage system. Ceph is the first and only distributed storage solution designed to enable object, block, and filesystem storage in a single cluster with unlimited scalability. The platform is capable of auto-scaling to the Exabyte level and beyond, it runs on commodity hardware, it is self-healing and self- managing, and has no single point of failure. Ceph is in the Linux kernel; Ceph can be accessed natively via programming languages; Ceph can be accessed via the Swift and S3 APIs; Ceph is integrated with the OpenStack™ cloud operating system; and Ceph is integrated with the Apache CloudStack project. As a result of its open source nature, this portable storage platform may be installed and used in public or private clouds. Please visit www.ceph.com for more information.