web, hosting
for more than a decade I think? I have a shared Dreamhost account with ppl I don't even talk to anymore. for several years now it’s been free on my side (other than the domain name, which I pay on my own) thanks to "credits" that I didn’t understand well.
it gives me web, email, and a remote ssh, tho no root, no httpd configuration beyond .htaccess etc. I miss having those, I like sysadmining, but it’s hard to beat a price of 0€/year
web, hosting
now one old friend thought we'd have to pay something this year, so they contacted everybody, then it turns out we still don't.
then they looked closely:
way back in the beginning, some of us managed to invite more ppl to dreamhost. these ppl invited others.
we only host personal stuff in our shared account, but the referrals seem to host high-demand websites and pay a lot of money to DH.
the % that translates to our bonuses is consistently higher than our combined server costs.
fuchsiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
web, hosting
@f0x it’s not hard to get referral bonuses that actually give you a small discount I think, but it’s usually minimal.
we lucked out in that we only do small-scale things, blogs etc., and at the same, purely by chance, somebody seems to have invited ppl who pay a lot of money, tho we don't even know who is it that’s spending so much.