DreamHost Reviews

DreamHost is one of the older ones out there and it was created by four college students back in 1997. They wanted to develop something top-notch that helps individuals and businesses build up an online presence while sticking to only open-source software. Since the team moved out to San Diego to establish a serious business, they accumulated over 400,000 clients while keeping almost 1.5 million websites alive. The company claims that hey host over 750,000 WordPress websites on their servers, therefor the WordPress optimized hosting plan can’t be missing from the above mentioned already long hosting plan list.

DreamHost wanted to reach everyone with their plans including the smallest businesses, freelancers, web designer teams, content creators and such. The reason why they succeeded is because they kept in mind that not everyone has the same technical abilities, so they strived to make a web hosting that is simple and works seamlessly.

We are going to go through the various web hosting plans and features that DreamHost has to offer. By bringing up some reasonable pros and cons and explaining how this provider works, it will be much clearer for you whether it’s worth to invest in one of their plans. Web hosting providers can greatly differ and even DreamHost might not suit everyone’s needs.

DreamHost Overview

First of all, DreamHost is recommended by WordPress which is the CMS that runs the most websites in the World. This obviously tells a lot about how successful this independent company is, especially when it comes to specialized WordPress hosting. DreamHost was always good in shared hosting but now their WordPress plans come with lots of additional benefits.

For an additional layer of security, they added a firewall strictly for WordPress that is a great solution for all the weaknesses that come with the platform and also provides protection against brute-force attacks. They ensure a solid 100% of uptime so online businesses don’t need to worry about losing money because of occasional downtimes.

DreamHost is also particularly generous as you can get your money back within 97 days if their service doesn’t fit your needs. Plugins or themes for WordPress websites are also not limited at all, you can use whatever you prefer using. There is no need for manual updates, the provider also installs them automatically so there is another thing you don’t need to care about.

At DreamHost, you can find a wide range of plans that might be suitable for both smaller blogs and business websites with huge traffic. Although shared hosting and WordPress is their specialty, there are other solid plans as well for VPS hosting, dedicated servers and cloud hosting.

Resellers might also find DreamHost useful but we will explain later why it won’t be the usual reseller account. First of all, let’s go through the plans and pricing of this web hosting company.

DreamHost Plans and Pricing

If you are a WordPress user, DreamHost offers you two options: their shared hosting service and DreamPress. The latter one is a solid managed hosting plan that ensures automatic updates, high-level security and a team of WordPress professionals behind it for an affordable price.

Of course, if you are looking for a dedicated server, VPS plans or Cloud services, DreamHost can offer some great deals for you. Let’s go through their plans and pricing so you can see whether it’s a good deal or not to host with DreamHost!

Shared Hosting

You can choose to play monthly, yearly and every three years with DreamHost. There is just one single plan with a set of features and the price only depends on the time you sign up for, as simple as that. Disk space, databases, websites and email account have no cap.

There is only a policy that prevents you from the unfair use of this plan. The monthly fee is $11.95 while signing up for a year is $9.95 monthly and their 3-year plan gives you the best value of 7.95 per month. If you want to set up a simple site with moderate traffic, these plans will surely satisfy your needs.

Managed WordPress Hosting

This hosting plan is fully optimized for WordPress. It comes with automatic updates, a strong technical support and you can use unlimited plugins and templates. Here you can choose from three different plans that offer different hardware specifications and features.

They have Basic plan for $16.95 per month, a Plus for $24.95, and an Advanced plan for $35.95 monthly. You will get a Professional Jetpack plugin for the Plus and Advanced plans and a free version for the starter plan. All three are based on a Cloud Platform, have a pre-installed WordPress and also provide automatic updates.

The Basic plan is indeed pretty basic with 10GB of disk space and one website, but the other two offer additional features such as Off-site Backups and Daily Malware Scanning & Repair. Phone support is also not available with the first package.

With the Advanced plan, you can have 3 websites tops and a 30GB of disk space which you can expand to 80GB per site if you want.

VPS Hosting Plans

The prices of DreamHost VPS plans only depend on how much RAM and SSD you need. You can choose from four options, ranging from 1GB RAM to 8GB and the SSD storage starting with 30GB and scaling up to 240GB. The first one costs $15 a month while the biggest plan is $120 per month.

With these VPS plans, you will also get access to unlimited bandwidth, a dedicated IP address, unlimited domains and the promised uptime with a reliable tech support. These are absolutely recommended for high-traffic websites and applications.

Dedicated Servers

The dedicated hosting plans at DreamHost provide top-notch hardware, security and great features. You can have up to 1TB of disk space, high-end CPU, automatic managed backups, top performance with the multi-core processors and root access. This is a great option if your website outgrows the shared hosting plan and needs some more powerful and reliable.

Dedicated plans start with $169 per month and you get 4GB of RAM for the price. The second one is $209 for 8GB and there is the most powerful plan for $249 with a whopping 16GB of RAM. DreamHost doesn’t require you to be committed to their dedicated plan, so the payments are always billed monthly.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud servers can be launched in less than 30 seconds with DreamHost. Their SSD Cloud servers guarantee that you can quickly set up and run your applications. The SSD hard disks, accelerated networks and high-end processors guarantee a speed that you can hardly find anywhere else.

They even have a special offer: you can use their Cloud server as much as you want while only paying for up to 600 hours a month. It’s 100GB of free space and unlimited bandwidth and you can even save some money if that Cloud server is constantly needed for your business.

You can choose from a 512MB RAM, 2GB RAM and 8GB RAM Server. The price for their Cloud servers is billed in hours, but they have a maximum for each of them. The first one costs max $4.50 a month, the second one $12 and the strongest plan is max $48 per month.

DreamHost Hosting Features

Being in the industry since 1997, DreamHost surely knows how to satisfy their customers. They are without doubt one of the most successful web hosting providers out there with plenty of experience. If you take a look at the list of features they offer, you will be most likely convinced into choosing one of their plans. Now let’s see what DreamHost has to offer that might come into handy for your business:

• Advanced functionalities, such as full access to CGI, subversion repository and cron jobs
• SSD hard drives for better performance on all of their shared hosting plans
• You can seamlessly upgrade to VPS and dedicated servers
• App developers can benefit from the cloud hosting plan
• Solid knowledgebase and guides
• DreamHost always takes care of updates
• Unlimited resources when it comes to disk space, domains, bandwidth and email accounts
• Reachable staff working at their datacenters
• Improved page load speeds for WordPress users
• Unlimited plugins, themes and customizations
• MySQL VPS add-on for their VPS plan that places databases on their own server, improving load times

DreamHost Customer Support

The DreamHost support team is part of the company and they are constantly available if clients need any help. They can be contacted through tickets or on their website where you can fill out and send a form.

As a customer, you will always have access to a live chat through the account panel as well with rapid response. The assistants there are experts in WordPress and web hosting in general, they can solve any kind of software problem in that field. They are skilled, polite and ready to explain your questions in a way that even a beginner can understand.

Unfortunately, the DreamHost team can’t be contacted via phone, only if they offer a callback and you accept it. Also, it’s not free so they only call back those members who have paid their upgraded service. In that case, they can call back until it reaches the limit which is three times a month.

If you face any issue or something is not clear, you can also check out their knowledgebase for instructions or solutions. Their forum for customers is full of information with all the threads available that have been accumulated in the past years.

Pros and Cons of DreamHost

Web hosting providers can focus on many different things such as WordPress users, offering many specific plans, working on customer support, providing stronger hardware and so on. There is no perfect provider, but you can surely find one that satisfies your needs. In the next two lists, we are going to go through the most notable pros and cons that you can face by joining DreamHost:

What attracts the most customers to DreamHost is that they guarantee your money back within 97 days if their service is not suitable for you. It gives you plenty of time and also looks great because there are not that many hosting providers with such long guarantee periods.

DreamHost ensures you a 100% uptime and a nice compensation if the servers are down, but there are some strict rules you need to keep in mind. They will pay 1 full day for every hour of downtime, but only up to 10% of the hosting fee. Also, downtime doesn’t begin when the server shuts down, it begins when you submit your support ticket so you need to be quick.

DreamHost Review Conclusion

Every web hosting company has its own disadvantages but if you add up everything, DreamHost is an excellent choice if you need those types of plans. Reviews like this one can help you decide whether their plans and features are appropriate for your business. If you like them and they also provide your money’s worth, then you will be highly satisfied with DreamHost.

They are simple, independent and very helpful overall so you won’t have a problem with that for sure. For those prices, the features and specifications they offer are pretty much affordable compared to most providers out there.

WordPress users will be most likely satisfied with DreamHost, considering that they are one of the biggest WP geeks and supporters in the industry. Considering that 28% of the websites on the internet are running on WordPress and it’s the most popular CMS, it clearly pays off for DreamHost to put so much work into it.

Hopefully this review provided you some valuable information about whether you should host your website on a DreamHost server or not.

David Cross

David is the chief editor at WebHostingMedia right from the beginning. He has a great passion for building and managing websites and creating helpful content. He is also interested in programming - currently learning python.