I just received this email from DreamHost:

Dear Jason,

Our system has noticed what seems to be a large amount of "backup/non-web" content on your account (#xxxx), mostly on user "xxxx" on the web server "xxxx".

Some of that content specifically is in /home/superjason/Backup (although there may be more in other locations as well.)

Unfortunately, our terms of service (http://www.dreamhost.com/tos.html) state:

The customer agrees to make use of DreamHost Web Hosting servers primarily for the purpose of hosting a website, and associated email functions. Data uploaded must be primarily for this purpose; DreamHost Web Hosting servers are not intended as a data backup or archiving service. DreamHost Web Hosting reserves the right to negotiate additional charges with the Customer and/or the discontinuation of the backups/archives at their discretion.

At this point, we must ask you to do one of three things:

* You can delete all backup/non-web files on your account.
* You can close your account from our panel at: https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=billing.accounts (We are willing to refund to you any pre-paid amount you have  remaining, even if you’re past the 97 days. Just reply to this email after closing your account from the panel.

OR!

* You may now enable your account for backup/non-web use!

If you’d like to enable your account to be used for non-web files, please visit the link below. You will be given the option to be charged $0.20 a month per GB of usage (the monthly average, with daily readings) across your whole account.

We don’t think there exists another online storage service that has anything near the same features, flexibility, and redundancy for less than this, so we sincerely hope you take us up on this offer!

In the future, we plan to allow the creation of a single "storage" user on your account which will have no web sites (or email). For now though, if you choose to enable your account for backups, nothing will change (apart from the charges).

If you want to enable backup/non-web use on this account, please go here:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/backups.cgi?g=xxxx

If you choose not to enable this, you must delete all your non-web files by 2008-06-29 or your account will be suspended.

If you have any questions about this or anything at all, please don’t hesitate to contact us by replying to this email.

Thank you very much for your understanding,
The Happy DreamHost Backup/Non-Web Use Team

Admittedly, the primary reason I chose them was because they’re a great backup solution. I didn’t realize that it was against their terms of service, in fact, there is a ton of information out there about using rsync to backup your files to them. I’ve been doing it for well over a year now, and I’ve been recommending the service to others.

I had heard many bad things about DreamHost, but they were working great for backups. Now you can’t use them for that, what do they have going for them? I can’t imagine many users have 400GB+ websites that their hosting. If they are, I have a hard time believing they’re using cheap shared hosting!

Now I’m looking into other backup solutions, and it’s looking pretty grim. Since my server and laptop both run Windows 2008, there aren’t many solutions available. For example, Mozy requires you to use their business version, which is ridiculously expensive.

Another option is JungleDisk, which uses Amazon’s S3 service. I would be looking at paying $30/month to backup around 200GB.

Does anyone have other ideas? The solution has to be automatic, so that I don’t have to count on remembering to do it. It also has to be off-site, because I don’t want to lose all of our photos of our house burns down.

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror had an interesting post about sites that ask for your email password to lookup contacts in their system. He suggests that they stop doing that immediately, and long-term, find a more secure solution.

I can understand where he’s coming from. He doesn’t want to hand over the keys to all of his information.

I see things a little differently, because I’ve been on the other side of the fence. Imagine that you’re writing a site and your #1 goal is to make it easy to use. Jeff himself is a huge advocate of usability. The problem is that developers don’t have an unlimited amount of time. The quickest way to make something easy to use at this point is to simply ask for the information, grab the addresses, and be done with it.

I agree that if the major email providers provide a more secure way to access the data, it’s certainly worth investigating.

The second point I’d like to make is that Yelp probably doesn’t care that Jeff won’t give his personal information. It’s an optional step to save him time, and even if he doesn’t use the service, he probably represents only 1% of the users that use the service.

I’m very paranoid when it comes to passwords. I have automatically generated random passwords for every site that I use. I still have been trusting enough to give sites like Facebook my Gmail credentials to go check my address book. I should be changing my email password on a regular basis anyway.

The fact is that 99% of users will happily give over any information that you ask for.

When I do computer work on the side (which I’m trying to avoid these days), I’ll ask for a certain password and strangers will happily give me all of their personal information. Bank account passwords, email passwords, work passwords, etc. I try to tell them they shouldn’t do that, but you’re not going to change everyone’s attitude overnight.

Remember, more than 70% of people would reveal their password in exchange for a bar of chocolate!

I’m sure those services in question would like to have a better solution for accessing the data, but it’s probably at the end of a long list of potential features. The only way that’s going to change is if they start losing a significant number of customers over it.

The entries for the free software contest were a bit disappointing. Only 14 entries. I guess you all have MSDN accounts!

Out of those entries, only one added a backlink to the site. His username is Akbar. By default, he gets first choice at what he wants. The challenge is that he lives in India, so I’m working with him to see if there is a way to get it to him. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll choose someone else randomly.

Choosing the second winner was a little harder. I had to come up with a way to generate a random number between 1 and 14 (the number of entries). Random.org to the rescue. I used their site to generate a table of random numbers. To make it even more random, I decided to use the 8th value in the first column of values (100 numbers were generated). I figured if the previous winner or a trackback was chosen, I would generate another set.

So the winner with second choice for the software is….

Entry #5, which is "Federiko".

Congratulations to both of you!

I was asked how I insert code snippets with Windows Live Writer. I actually did it the hard way. I wrote a Windows Live Writer plug-in, and then I found out someone had already done the same thing.

I originally got scared away from it because when I switch to the HTML view in Live Writer, it shows up like this:

<div class="wlWriterEditableSmartContent" id="scid:812469c5-0cb0-4c63-8c15-c81123a09de7:19d17d14-ac74-45e7-9276-5c6a3031b09d" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; float: none; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px"><DIV class=dp-highlighter>
<DIV class=bar>
<DIV class=tools><A onclick="dp.sh.Toolbar.Command('ViewSource',this);return false;" href="about:blank#">view plain</A><A onclick="dp.sh.Toolbar.Command('CopyToClipboard',this);return false;" href="about:blank#">copy to clipboard</A><A onclick="dp.sh.Toolbar.Command('PrintSource',this);return false;" href="about:blank#">print</A><A onclick="dp.sh.Toolbar.Command('About',this);return false;" href="about:blank#">?</A></DIV></DIV>
<OL class=dp-xml>
<LI class=alt><SPAN><SPAN>test&nbsp;&nbsp;</SPAN></SPAN></LI></OL></DIV><PRE class=xml style="DISPLAY: none" name="code">test</PRE>

That is just unacceptable. Fortunately, I realized that it just renders that temporarily, so that you can see a better preview of what it will actually look like on your site.

When you post it, it still has the annoying div above the pre, but I can live with that. All of the other added tags are not there, and you just get your code wrapped in a nice pre. I’m assuming it’s there so that it recognizes that as a code block if you want to edit it later.

I like the SyntaxHighlighter code because it uses JavaScript to parse apart the code and add in the appropriate styles. It’s a nice separation between content and presentation.

I do recommend that if you use the SyntaxHighlighter, that you combine the JavaScript files into one, and then run it through a JavaScript compressor. That will minimize file sizes and page requests.

For example, in this blog, I simply include this in each page:

<link href='http://www.young-technologies.com/sh/SyntaxHighlighter.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>
<script src='http://www.young-technologies.com/sh/sh.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

Before the body tag, I then use this code:

<script type='text/javascript'>
	dp.SyntaxHighlighter.ClipboardSwf = 'http://www.young-technologies.com/sh/clipboard.swf';
	dp.SyntaxHighlighter.HighlightAll('code');
</script>

This has been working great on my site. Hope that helps you out!

I have some free software that I’d like to give away! Here is your chance to win one of the following:

• Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition AND Windows 2008 Enterprise (64-bit and 32-bit) – Including the virtual keys.
• Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1

These copies are fully functional, unused full versions. Microsoft asks that you stop using them after a year, but they have stated that there is no technical limitation that would keep you from using them past that date.

There is no purchase necessary to enter. There are 3 ways to enter:

• Add this site (http://www.ytechie.com) to your blogroll.
• Subscribe to the RSS Feed.
• Post a comment to this post

If you add this site to your blogroll, or subscribe, make sure you post a comment or send me an email so I can enter you.

The site that sends me the most unique visitors according to my logs will get first pick at which one they want. The other winner will be chosen randomly. That will give everyone a chance at winning, but gives some incentive to link to our site.

The good news is that this isn’t the most popular site on the Internet, so you might actually have a shot at winning!

The contest ends May 31st, and I’ll pick and announce the winners in a blog post on June 1st.