The United States economy is in a funk. Food prices are up, oil is through the roof, real estate has collapsed, and credit is becoming scarce. Here are 12 signs to look for when the recession hits the Internet:

1. Digg.com moves their server over to Dreamhost
2. Jeff Bezos delivers his TED talk with a GoldenPalace.com tattoo across his naked chest
3. i can affordz cheezburger?
4. Drew Curtis switches to Pabst Blue Ribbon
5. For $20, Rick Astley will show up to do it in person.
6. Woot.com starts accepting payment in Flooz
7. Jeph Jacques sells all remaining ad space to Warner Music Group
8. Nigerian spammer steals your identity, only to return it 3 days later when he finds out your credit score
9. Scoble spruces up resume for sweet new gig as Hugh MacLeod’s intern
10. StuffWhitePeopleLike? Liquidity.
11. Guy Kawasaki trades in his MacBook for a Dell
12. You hire a PHP Developer for $12 an hour through elance.com, and it turns out to be Matt Mullenweg

The result was 25 new dreamhost customers who signed up through the link in that article.

Dreamhost then altered their terms of service to prevent this sort of thing, and made a big stink about it on their support site. I was willing to suffer through some of the downtime, the server chokes, the high load times and stick it out with them because of the huge bandwidth pipe and large dump truck they were offering.

Now, they’re limiting how we can use that bandwidth and data. Apparently, they didn’t really sell me a chunk of storage and a chunk of bandwidth, what they sold me was the ability to do one specific thing (host a website) up to a certain size and distribution load. What a load.

The new Terms of Service (TOS) now specify that you may not use Dreamhost for anything that’s not primarily related to one of your hosted websites. Here are some of the things I use my Dreamhost account for that, apparently, are no longer considered acceptable usage.

1. Off-site backup of my studio computer. Ok, I get it. This is a pretty big strain on your system. Even though it was one of my reasons for maintaining such a large account, I’ll quit doing this and find another solution.
2. WebDAV transfers between my students and I. I teach at a University, and I have a WebDAV folder setup for them to use to pass projects back and forth to me. It’s unclear to me why Dreamhost even offers WebDAV under the new TOS, since there’s no way to access that folder from an HTTP or PHP request. It is, by definition, unrelated to web hosting.
3. WebDAV synchronization of my iCal calendars between my wife and I. Our lives would be a mess if we couldn’t sync calendars. Again, not related to web-hosting, now an illegal use of Dreamhost.
4. FTP transfer of media files between my clients and I. I record and produce music, frequently music to video, which means I rely on the ability to transfer large media files to and from clients. One of the reasons I bought a Dreamhost account was to setup an FTP transfer account for this. Again, not related to web-hosting, not legal under their TOS.
5. Mirrored backups of sites hosted elsewhere. I host many, many websites with other hosting providers, in addition to my sites with Dreamhost. I do regular rsync backups of these sites to Dreamhost, complete with intact folder structures and database archives. If one of those other hosts goes down, I can switch to Dreamhost and take that backup live. Is this a violation? I’m honestly not sure. Until I actually make the DNS switch and serve the data from Dreamhost, the files sitting on the server are, strictly speaking, just backup data, the kind of thing explicitly prohibited by their TOS.
6. File Server for podcast files. I host a podcast with about 2,500 daily subscribers, and about 10,000 downloads per episode – I need it to be up 24/7, and Dreamhost seems to be able to provide about 22 hours at a stretch, before their central networking router goes down. So, I host the actual website at slicehost.com. There I have my own dedicated virtual server, no downtime, snappy response, it’s basically perfect. But the podcast uses about a terabyte of bandwidth a month, and that would be prohibitively expensive through slicehost. Instead, I host the actual podcast files on Dreamhost, and I reference them from the site on slicehost. Is this illegal? It sure seems to be, since I’m not hosting the site itself on Dreamhost, but I don’t know.

I think what the new Terms of Service boil down to is this: Dreamhost is no longer interested in working with power users. If you need to host a simple LOLcats homage site, by all means, come sign up with us. If you’re looking to actually USE the services we advertise though, like rsync between servers, WebDAV file sharing, FTP services, any backend sharing of data that doesn’t relate to your LOLcats site, then don’t bother. We’re not interested.

For those who feel unduly constrained by those limitations, let me be the first to invite you to Slicehost. Get your own dedicated bandwidth, your own chunk of harddrive, and then do whatever you want with it. Check out their Terms of Service: as long as it’s not illegal, hackerish, or spam-a-licious, they don’t care what you do with your server.

Come live the dream.

You know I’m in love with Slicehost, for all the wrong reasons (they tease me with wait lists to even sign up, then they hit me with the pure root goodness, and I’m jonesing for another hit). I’ve got my Debian VPS all setup to roll, just need to get my data from Dreamhost over to the new server.

Website files? No problem. I used handy old rsync, and even put together a little bash script that I reference from a cron job, to do regular syncing of the Dreamhost data until I’m ready to go live with the new site.

But what about the database? My websites are all database driven, which mean no MySQL migration = no website! I tried using the phpmyadmin interface first, and simply exporting / importing the database from one install to another. Well, the database file is about 30 MB (this is a pretty big blog we’re moving), so that’s right out!

What’s a noob server admin to do?

mysqldump

Command Line to the rescue! Shut down that phpmyadmin, and crank up ye olde terminal. SSH into your new server, the one you are migrating to, and run the following command. The username and password in the first part should be for the MySQL database you are migrating FROM, the second part of the command should use the username and password you are migrating TO. Everything in CAPS should be replaced with your own details. No line breaks, put the whole thing on a single line:

Now that is Easy Breezy Covergirl!

IP Access on Dreamhost

If you’re moving your database away from Dreamhost, you’ll need to do a little unlocking of the database first. Dreamhost restricts access to your databases by IP address (or the resolved domain name equivalent). This a good thing, a security feature, but it will thwart our attempts to use mysqldump from our new server. No worries, you can add access for whatever IP your new server is on. Here’s how it works.

From your Dreamhost control panel, hit Goodies >> Manage MySQL. Locate the database you’re migrating, then click on the USERNAME next to the database. It will take you to a page that lets you manage the privileges for that user. Toward the bottom, find the option for “Allowable hosts.” It will look something like this:

The %.dreamhost.com line should be there by default, allowing any dreamhost server to get at your data.

You will need to add a new line, containing the IP address (or IP range using wildcards) for the server you intend to migrate to. Note that the IP address they list beneath this is the IP address for your current browser connection to the control panel, not the IP address you need to use in order to allow server access from your new machine. Don’t be fooled!

If you are on Slicehost, you have a dedicated IP number that you can use here.

Save, exit, run the command line for mysqldump from your new machine, and you should get a clean import of your database into the new server.

Taste the Freedom!

PS. Don’t cancel that dreamhost account just yet, though. Sometime in the future, I’ll show you how I used .htaccess on my new server to treat my dreamhost account like a big ole’ hard drive for storing and serving large media files.

Make Dreamhost your bandwidth bitch!

Here’s the uptime report on the server that’s hosting the blog.
11:32:24 up 38 min, 3 users, load average: 266.63, 259.39, 230.23

For the uninitiated, that means that the current demand on the server is overloaded by 26,600%. It would take 266 servers to handle the load they’ve dumped on this one single wheezing box that my blog is sharing.

The end result? It just took 9 minutes for the main page of Command Line Idiot to load.