Using Dreamhost to Store Personal Files

Dreamhost offers free personal storage with every webhosting account! My wife and I have decided to use this instead of options like Carbonite or Dropbox, due to it being free with every Dreamhost account. It didn't use to be this way..

Turns out that back around 2008 Dreamhost had a huge issue with people using their standard webhosting user accounts to store personal files (music and other media etc) and made it against their Terms of Service which states that "It is against DreamHost policy for you to use your DreamHost file storage space on a web server for personal file storage that is not related to one of your websites."

This limitation is still in effect, however, Dreamhost has graciously given every hosting account a free Backup Account which can be used for storage of personal files. The backup account comes with 50 GB for FREE and any extra space can be purchased at $0.10 / GB (inexpensive!). I am thrilled to have found this and have already started a ~6 GB ftp upload from my wife's computer.

All you have to do is activate your backups user from your Dreamhost panel here:

After that you are given a new ftp server, user login, and password. The process will be familiar to anyone that has connected to an ftp server before (and most of you with a Dreamhost account have).  I like to use FileZilla:

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