DreamHost Review

Dreamhost had been serving its customers since 1997. They had a humble beginning when 4 undergraduates started the company with only 1 server and without any capital. Though they had a rough beginning but because they aim to provide great service at a cheap price, they eventually started growing. Because they didn’t have a capital, they needed their creative juices flowing to maintain their customers and to keep them happy. Now, they have over 1,500 servers with high-tech data centers and they have employed over 100 employees.

Dreamhost is one of the leading web hosting companies in the world and they are hosting over a million domains and still counting. Because of the number of data centers they have, they realized how much carbon they emit and decided to do something about it. Now, they are buying Renewable Energy Credits and Emission Reduction Credits to erase their carbon footprint. They are also reducing their emission by conserving their resources as much as possible.

$10 Discount and Free Setup

Use coupon code topfive to save $10 on your web hosting registration and also receive a free setup when you register for one or two years.

The Packages

DreamHost is offering 3 types of web hosting packages. They have the DreamHost Shared, DreamHost VPS and the DreamHost Dedicated. Choosing which package to get really depends on what you really need from your web hosting subscription.

DreamHost Shared is priced at $8.95 a month. Since it’s shared web hosting you are sharing the RAM and CPU Resources with other customers. You will get unlimited MySQL Databases, bandwidth and domains hosted. With DreamHost, the operating system they use is Debian Linux. This type of hosting is best for personal sites or websites that don’t exactly have high demands.

DreamHost WordPress is a newer service they provide that includes an automatic WordPress installation, automatic daily backups, auto plugin updates and is hosted on a virtual private server. Besides the VPS being included, you should note that the majority of the features they are offer are already included with WordPress including the automatic plugin updates and daily backups can be done with a simple WordPress plugin.

DreamHost VPS is priced at $15 a month. What’s different about this type of package is that it’s not sharing the CPU and Ram resources. It’s like having a dedicated server but without spending too much for it. Virtual private servers are a mixture of the concept of shared web hosting and dedicated servers. 1 server is virtually divided into several servers and these sections are separate so what happens to one customer will not affect you though you only share 1 server.

DreamHost Dedicated is priced at $169 a month. CPU resources and RAM are yours alone. You get 1 server dedicated only to you and you get the MySQL from your own local server. The disk storage depends on your hard drive as well. This type of web hosting package is excellent for the more serious type of web designers and owners and for websites that are already established and runs with heavy traffic. Business websites are the ideal customers for this type of package.

DreamHost Pros

DreamHost is one of only few hosts we’ve seen that offers a 100% uptime guarantee which earns you partial credits any time you see your website down. A true business-class premium web hosting provider with unlimited everything included.

DreamHost Cons

Of course, with all the great features and amazing uptime guarantee, the downside is you’ll pay considerably more for hosting here at a $8.95 as the cheapest pre-paid price available. Is your peace of mind worth the cost? That’s for you to decide.

Shared Hosting Features

Dreamhost Features

As you can see, they offer all of the features most look for in their shared hosting offering including an amazing 100% uptime guarantee. This is the best guarantee we’ve seen a web host provide, most are 99.9%.

Customer Support

DreamHost Wiki is your first option. You can search your question through their documentation and most likely you’ll find your question already answered by one of their staff. If that does not satisfy you enough and you really want to talk to another human being then you can join their discussion forums. This is a great option as you can get in touch with their support team as well as other customers who are so happy to help out fellow customers. Technical questions can be emailed to them and they’ll try to send you a reply in 24 hours. You can even request a call back.

Price Value

DreamHost is known for giving high quality web hosting service for a great value. For $8.95 a month for their shared hosting package you’ll already get unlimited disk space, bandwidth, and many others plus backups.

You can even give them a try with their 2 weeks trial offer. When you cancel your account within the first 2 weeks then you won’t have to pay them for their web hosting. If you registered a domain then that’s all that you’d be paying for. It’s really a great deal from one of the web hosting pioneers and giants.

Ease of Use & Quality

Their intuitive control panel makes it very easy for a user to manage their website through a web browser. Just log in to their web based control panel and add scripts to make your site look attractive and comprehensive. You can add video or audio streams to your site with ease.

Alana Waters-Piper - December 16, 2014

I have several sites hosted with another provider and a handful hosted with Dreamhost.

I have had far, far too many issues with servers being down and getting hacked with Dreamhost. (more than 10)

In the past 3 years, my sites have not gone more than a month at a time without some sort of outage.

I have had 1 instance of my server being hacked with my other provider. That’s not including an infected site that I had to transfer from Dreamhost because they refused to repair the damage from their server being hacked.

In every instance of attack, Dreamhost has pushed the repairs resulting from the hackings onto me, the customer. They are rude, accusatory, and unprofessional. In my one instance with the same attack (SoakSoak) with the other provider, their response was, “Don’t worry, lots of folks are in the same boat. We’re already working to resolve it.” No fight, no pushback. They took ownership of the issue and had already come up with a plan to resolve it. THAT is customer service.

As things stand right now, I’m still getting pushback from Dreamhost to repair the damage done by the SoakSoak attack.