Dreamhost is a popular web hosting provider that supports over 1.5 million websites. Dreamhost uses an open-source-based infrastructure.
With over 400, 000 customers and more than 750, 000 WordPress installation, we can say they are one of the biggest hosting companies in the world.
Dreamhost focuses on offering great customer support, easy to use tools, and high performance.
They offer both Linux and Windows hosting depending on your site’s requirements. This makes DreamHost a great choice for small businesses, developers and large businesses alike.
In this DreamHost review we will look at DreamHost Features, offers, and pricing.
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What is DreamHost?
DreamHost is among the most popular web hosting companies in the world. The company was founded by four friends in 1996 and has been growing steadily ever since.
DreamHost offers a variety of hosting plans for bloggers, webmasters and small businesses. They have a rich feature that work for both personal and business web hosting needs. Some of these features include
- Unlimited bandwidth,
- Unlimited data storage
- Free domain registration and
- Unlimited email addresses at your domain,
- Free SSL certificates,
- Unlimited sites hosted under one account
- Unlimited databases (MySQL)
- 99% up time guaranteed
- Data centers
- 97-day money back guarantee
- One click installs for apps (e.g. WordPress)
- Excellent customer support via tickets, or live chat. 24/7
- Excellent tech support (CGI, Perl, PHP, and Python)
Dreamhost also supports other developer apps like Ruby on Rails, MongoDB and Redis. This is you can launch using their cloud servers.
DreamHost Compared to the Competition
DreamHost is a reliable hosting option, they offer plans that can suite some who is starting a blog, to large businesses. DreamHost provides the basic features you want out of a hosting service.
They offer guaranteed reliability and performance. Dreamhost provides constant monitoring, redundant cooling and multiple data center locations.
They feature SSD storage, which is great if you want fast throughput and don't care about redundancy.
DreamHost has competitive pricing on their shared hosting options, including the one we reviewed here. It's not the best option on the market (no company can compete at this price range), but it's far from being bad either.
Its control panel is intuitive and easy to use. All these make launching a website easy for anyone even beginners. To top it off DreamHost like most webhosts offers, an easy to use WordPress builder.
Who is DreamHost Best For?
Due to its low prices and high quality performance, DreamHost is a great option for most website owners. It can work for small business, large businesses and even developers looking to launch their web application.
We can confidently say we host on Dreamhost, and have been for over 10 years and the service has been excellent. If you're not sure about DreamHost, here is a list of the types of people who would be happiest using DreamHost's hosting services.
Those with advanced needs - DreamHost offers a full-featured hosting service. If you need features like SSH access or private SSL certificates, DreamHost is a good choice.
Those who want control over their hosting environment. Since DreamHost offers VPS and dedicated server plans as well as shared web hosting plans, it's perfect for users who want to have more control over their hosting environment.
The more technical among us may find this option very appealing since they can upgrade when they need it.
Those looking for free extras. DreamHost isn't just cheap, it also includes freebies like unlimited disk space, email accounts and bandwidth with every plan.
One thing you can be sure about is DreamHost will offer you excellent support to keep your website running smooth.
DreamHost Hosting Products
Depending on your needs, you have a range of options to choose from to get the best out of hosting your dream. DreamHost offers the following hosting types:
Shared hosting. This is a great option for those who want a quick, inexpensive way to get their website/ blog off the ground.
Customers share space on one server with other users, which makes it an affordable option. However, performance can be impacted by other users and websites on the same server.
VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting. VPS customers are not sharing that much space with others, but they do share some resources like memory and processing power.
The upside is that these kinds of plans typically offer more bandwidth and customization options than shared hosting.
Dedicated server hosting. If you want complete control over your site and don’t mind paying for it, dedicated servers let you manage most aspects of your website yourself.
You have access to all the resources available to your site without having to share them with anyone else.
You will pay more for this level of service but you get what you pay for in terms of freedom and control over your website’s environment and performance.
DreamHost's Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most popular type of web hosting and is used for websites with lower storage needs. It allows you to host your website on a server that also hosts other websites.
DreamHost’s shared hosting, It’s a cost-effective option because you split server costs with other sites hosted on the same server.
With shared hosting, you don’t get root access to the server and hence the situation in which you get suspended or the server crashes will not be entirely up to you.
This can be one of the reasons why many people consider it as less secure compared to VPS or dedicated servers, but that is not entirely true.
When you have multiple sites hosted on one server, security breaches are highly possible as an attack aimed at any of these sites might also affect all others sharing that very same server.
But shared hosting has its limitations too — such as only some scripting languages supported (like PHP), limited disk space depending on your plan, no SSH access and so on.
Shared hosting plans come in 2 plans – shared starter and shared unlimited.
- Shared starter is a great place to get started with hosting your website if you are new to the world of webhosting. Prices start from $1.99/month if you subscribe for 3 years. It comes with 1 website, a free SSL certificate and you have to buy a domain (.com for $7.99), also you can add email for $1.67/month.
- Shared Unlimited can work well for you if you have more than 1 website. Prices start at $2.99 for unlimited website, unlimited traffic, WordPress pre-installed and unlimited emails. You can get your .com domain for $7.99.
All shared hosting plans are on fast SSD storage.
WordPress Hosting
DreamHost’s WordPress hosting is well known, you can even say it’s the most popular product offering at DreamHost. They have optimized their WordPress hosting servers, for a seamless user experience, high speed and excellent performance.
Should you choose DreamHost WordPress hosting, your website will be transformed, and I am saying this from experience. They are always working towards making your hosting environment better. What makes it a great choice when it comes to WordPress hosting is their intuitive and easy to use control panel.
For basic WordPress hosting prices start from $2.59 for a 3year hosting commitment.
There are some features to not of this service:
- Free privacy protection
- Free domain on annual plans
- Free emails hosting
- An advanced and easy to use control panel
- Automatic backups and
- Automatic back ups
On top of the basic WordPress hosting plan DreamHost offers DreamPress (their version of managed WordPress hosting) and VPS WordPress hosting.
Here are some details on the managed WordPress hosting plan;
DreamPress – Managed WordPress Hosting
Dreamhost offers managed WordPress hosting with built in caching, high speed performance a free migration and unbeatable 24/7 support. When you compare DreamPress with WPEngine, and Kinsta it comes with a competitive range of features at a much lower price.
DreamPress is built for websites with up to a million + monthly visitors, and SSL certificates pre-installed. Jetpack professional comes standard with this package. You also have the DreamHost drag and drop WordPress builder to launch your website quickly.
Your hosting is fully managed, that’s why you get a 24/7 WordPress expert in your corner. And the experience, it’s just awesome knowing you don’t need to worry about the technical aspect of WordPress hosting.
If you are a business or a blog driving high traffic, this option might be best for you. DreamPress comes in 3 packages or plans,
- DreamPress: $16 /month for 30GB SSD storage, unlimited emails, 100k monthly visitors, on demand and daily backups, and a Jetpack free pre-installed.
- DreamPress plus: $24/month for 60GB SSD storage, unlimited emails, 300k visitors a month, on demand and daily backups and Jetpack professional preinstalled.
- DreamPress Pro: $71.95 for 120GB SSD storage, unlimited emails, a million+ monthly visitors per month, on demand and automatic backups, and Jetpack professional preinstalled.
DreamPress plus and pro come with unlimited CDN.
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting allows you to control your resources just like a dedicated server, without the added expense of owning and managing that server. DreamHost’s Virtual Private Servers come with managed performance, security and updates.
You get root access to your virtual machine and the ability to add and modify components at will. These resources are great for WordPress websites, ecommerce sites, or any resource intensive site.
DreamHost VPS hosting is flexible enough to meet the needs of nearly any type of website. DreamHost’s VPS is the highest rated on PCMag, for likelihood to recommend, support, and reliability.
In my experience, DreamHost VPS performance just wows you from the beginning, it’s easy to use, and manage your websites. Scaling up or down is easy, and with their 3year discount deals on all plans, it’s easy to save money.
One thing that stands out is their $5/ month for PHP support, but it can be avoided by keeping your website up to scratch with the latest PHP.
The fact that they are fully managed and with excellent support makes it easy for us to focus of building websites and writing content. We never have to worry about our site being down.
The Solid State Drives (SSD) make DreamHost an attractive host, they are 20X faster than the standard SATA disk drives. Our website performs just as you wish, and remember Google loves high performing sites.
Dreamhost VPS Pricing starts from $10/month to $80/month. Plans range from 30GB to 240GB storage, 1GB RAM to 8GB RAM and all have unlimited websites, traffic and emails.
DreamHost Dedicated Server Hosting
Dedicated hosting is a great choice if your website gets enough traffic to justify the cost. For one thing, it provides you with exclusive access to all of the resources that the server has available.
If you're not familiar with how this process works, when multiple websites are hosted on a single server they have to share those resources.
In contrast, dedicated hosting allows you to use all of the server's power for yourself and only yourself.
You can also expect an improved level of security with a dedicated host from Dreamhost since there will be fewer people accessing and using your server resources.
DreamHost’s dedicated servers are fully managed, so you don’t need to worry about the technical part of managing your server.
The dedicated server standard plan comes with Intel Xeon 4 core and 8 thread processors, 4GB RAM and 1TB HDD storage and 100% uptime guaranteed. Your server is monitored 24/7 including tech support and DDoS protection.
You can also upgrade Resources on the same plan for example increasing RAM. All this you get for $149/month.
DreamHost Cloud Hosting
DreamHost offers a few cloud hosting options. DreamCompute is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) solution that lets you launch and deploy as many cloud servers as you want.
You only pay for what you use, not for anything permanent. DreamObjects presents an Amazon S3-like storage solution that pairs nicely with DreamCompute.
They also support popular web servers such as Apache 2.4, NGINX 1.10 and Lighttpd 1.4 for those building web applications from scratch in Python/Django or PHP/Laravel frameworks.
DreamHost supports industry standard distributions such as CentOS 6 or 7, Ubuntu 14 or 16 LTS releases, Debian 8, FreeBSD 10 or 11 and even Arch Linux via their custom panel.
There is also a standalone DreamHost Cloud Storage offering, and if you just need to spin up a virtual machine in the cloud, there is a simple "Cloud Images" product for that purpose as well.
What are The Pros and Cons of DreamHost?
What is the Advantage of Using DreamHost
DreamHost is a high-quality web hosting service that offers a lot of great features and benefits for an affordable price. You can get started with DreamHost for just $4.95 per month, which is the cost of the entry-level shared hosting plan.
This makes DreamHost one of the most affordable web hosts in the industry, especially considering all that you get with your plan. With any of Dreamhost's hosting plans, you'll also enjoy:
- Affordable pricing
- Automated integrations
- Extensive customer support
- High-quality performance and speed
Affordable pricing: DreamHost is one of the most affordable hosting providers on the market. Its basic shared hosting plan costs less than $10 per month and even its VPS plans are competitively priced.
The pricing offered by DreamHost is fairly reasonable compared to other web hosts in the industry. It provides unlimited bandwidth, storage space and email accounts on all of its shared web hosting plans.
Automated integrations: With DreamHost, you can set up automated processes to help you with everything from website backups to email management tools. You can even create a script to automatically install WordPress for you (and it's free).
Extensive customer support: You can contact DreamHost support 24/7 via live chat or phone call. And if your issue isn't urgent, you can send an email or submit an online ticket; it'll take longer to get a response, but the information is accurate and thorough.
High-quality performance and speed: No matter which plan you choose, you'll get optimal performance in terms
DreamHost has a reputation for being one of the more developer-friendly providers on the market, thanks to its automated integrations with popular programming languages like Python, Ruby on Rails, Perl, and PHP.
The company's customer service is also very good, which means you can get help as soon as possible when you need it.
What does DreamHost lack?
Although DreamHost is a great company, it still has some downsides. Here are the main ones:
No phone support. You can contact DreamHost via live chat or email, but there’s no phone support available. This isn’t a huge deal because their customer service responded quickly to my inquiries and they have a large help center with helpful articles and guides.
Limited server locations. While DreamHost offers shared hosting plans in New York, Amsterdam and Portland, Oregon, you can only access VPS hosting in the U.S., which may not be an ideal option for international users looking for a more local server location.
In Summary: DreamHost Review
DreamHost is a hosting service that has been in the business for years. It is also a big name in the industry, so you can be sure that you are getting quality for your money.
In summary, DreamHost is a good choice for most website owners who want to avail high-performance hosting services at an affordable price. We are one of the DreamHost users that can vouch for it and say, it is an excellent host, our dream is certainly hosted well.
This service offers many features, some notable ones being its fast adaptation to new technologies and its one-of-a-kind fully managed cloud VPS hosting plan.
Finally, if you need more than just web hosting services, DreamHost does offer several add-on options for things like SSL certificates and domain registrations once you've finished signing up for your account.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is DreamHost a good company?
If you're looking to build a website, Dreamhost is one of the best companies out there. They have highly-rated plans that don't break the bank, and their customer service is top-notch.
Dreamhost has won awards for web hosting, and they're rated incredibly high on Trust Pilot. If you're looking to build a website, DreamHost can help you get up and running quickly, and affordably.
Why is DreamHost Best?
DreamHost also has superior customer support. Their support staff is available 24/7 to answer any question or solve any issue you may have. Dreamhost offers better value and a lot more security features for no additional costs. You won't get such comprehensive protection from other providers.
What are Pros of Dreamhost?
- Unlimited Data Storage.
- Unlimited Bandwidth.
- Host Unlimited Sites.
- Unlimited MySQL Databases.
- Unlimited Sub Domains.
- Free Domain with Whois Privacy.
- One Click Software Installation.
- Live Chat is Available (After Logging In)
- 100% Uptime Guarantee
- WordPress Website Builder
- Recommended by WordPress.org
- 97 Day Money Back Guarantee
- Optimized WordPress Hosting Available (Additional Fee)
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