Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

May 28, 2008

Hosting provider DreamHost has recently given its customers the rather unusual advice of telling them to choose Google's Gmail or Yahoo's similar e-mail service over its own hosting service.

DreamHost is effectively telling its customers that "email service is something Google can do better than we can." (!) (...)

DreamHost, which claims it hosts more than 700,000 websites, is suggesting its customers use Gmail, Yahoo Mail or MSN Mail for their email instead of its own mail servers!

Although DreamHost says it is continuing to support all its existing email offerings, co-founder Josh Jones wrote in his blog post a few days ago that email is NOT the company's strong suit.

Jones writes: "Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into 'simple' old email. And that's kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features... (!)

The post suggests that DreamHost cannot effectively handle its customer's email demands, and that it would be able to better focus on hosting websites than dealing with support calls concerning email issues...

Jones added in his blog post "it's just not something people are looking for from us, and it's something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google can do a lot better. In fact, as you've maybe already seen, we recently made it very easy to use Gmail for all your email hosting with us, still at your own domain!"

DreamHost recently announced in its March newsletter that it would stop providing mail-filtering tool Procmail to its users after years of offering the service, which upset many of its customers.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Source: NH News.