Web host encourages clients to use Gmail

You might think that as one of the largest web hosts in the United States, DreamHost would want its customers to use its own email service. You’d be wrong to think so, however. Since May 2008, the company has encouraged its users to switch to Gmail for their email needs.

In a blog post, Dream Host co-founder Josh Jones stated, “Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email… 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 better.”

So rather than improve its own email system to make it more user friendly, DreamHost has opted to outsource it to Google. This is a great cost-cutting measure and it’s nice that the company is giving its customers more options. But I think the real underlying problem here is that DreamHost isn’t as user-friendly as it could be.

The company may have improved since I switched to a different host several years ago, but from my experience, the DreamHost control panel is hard to use. I remember it being very slow and arranged in a very illogical fashion. As DreamHost half-heatedly admits, their email service wasn’t easy to set up. Instead of copping out by switching to Gmail, the web host should fix what was broken in the first place.