DreamHost Review
Do I strongly recommend this? Yes, indeed! DreamHost has become well-known for its generous and industry-leading 97-day money-back guarantee, low pay-per-month pricing, performance, speed, and security, all of which make DreamHost a web host worth considering
DreamHost's Background
Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez, and Sage Weil founded DreamHost as a group project at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California in 1997. DreamHost has since grown to become one of the most well-known and famous web hosting companies for its generous and industry-leading 97-day money-back guarantee, low pay-per-month pricing, performance, speed, and security, all of which make DreamHost a web host worth considering.
They now host more than 1.5 million websites, along with more than 750,000 WordPress installations. They have received the 2014–2018 Web-Hosting Service Business Choice Awards from PCMag.
These statistics alone prove that DreamHost is a major player in the web hosting industry.
How good, however, is their web hosting service? DreamHost, like most providers, offers a diverse range of web hosting options, plans, and services.
I'll give you a detailed breakdown of everything they have to offer so you can decide if DreamHost is the best web hosting service for your needs.
DreamHost, as one of the market's longest-standing web-hosting providers, knows a thing or two about hosting features, affordability, and customer service.
One feature that distinguishes DreamHost from the competition is the ability to pay monthly rather than yearly. When it comes time to renew, DreamHost doesn't increase the price. Besides that, their 97-day money-back guarantee provides complete peace of mind.
DreamHost has a plan for everyone, whether you need Shared, VPS, dedicated, or cloud hosting. But the real question is whether or not these plans are advantageous.
We're here to provide an answer.
We don't just want to help you get online; we want to make sure you have the best chance of being successful once you do. That's why we conduct our research on a variety of web hosting companies. And here’s our in-depth review of DreamHost
Shared Web Hosting
Shared web hosting is the way to go if you want to make a website but don't want to spend a lot of money. Shared hosting is a low-cost web hosting option in which your website shares CPU, RAM, and other server resources with other websites. As a result, it isn't a particularly powerful hosting tier; if you expect a lot of traffic, you should consider a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated hosting.
Furthermore, because the term "shared" refers to the fact that each server may host multiple sites that share the hardware's resources, you are at the mercy of your server mates to some extent.
DreamHost contains two shared hosting plans: Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited.: Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited. Shared Starter (starting at $4.95 per month or $2.59 per month with a one-year commitment) includes unlimited monthly data transfers and storage but does not include email. That's right, there will be no email. You'll need to upgrade to Shared Unlimited (starting at $10.95 per month, or $7.95 per month if you commit for a year). This plan includes email as well as unlimited website hosting.
VPS Web Hosting
For businesses that require servers with more power than shared hosting provides, DreamHost offers four Linux-based VPS web hosting plans (starting at $13.75 per month). When compared to shared hosting, VPS hosting puts your website on a server with far fewer virtual roommates.
The VPS plans from DreamHost include unlimited monthly data transfers and domains, which is a nice feature. The base memory and storage, however, are quite limited; the $13.75 per month plan includes only 1GB of RAM and a 30GB solid-state drive. The most expensive ($110 per month) configuration, on the other hand, comes with 8GB of RAM and 240GB of solid-state storage. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu Linux operating system is the only option for VPS plans.
Dedicated Web Hosting
You'll need a dedicated server if you want to get the most out of your web hosting. Your website will be hosted on its server, allowing you to take advantage of all of the system's resources. If your site is mission-critical and you don't want it to go down or slow down, you should consider dedicated hosting.
DreamHost offers a variety of dedicated server packages. The Blue Moon 4 plan, which costs $149 per month and includes 4GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, is the most basic. The Summer Moon SSD 64 plan, which costs $349 per month and includes 64GB of RAM and 240GB of solid-state storage, is the most expensive. Data transfers are unlimited on all DreamHost dedicated server plans.
Unfortunately, DreamHost does not offer Windows-based dedicated servers; it's Linux or bust in this case as well. If you want to build a website on the Microsoft operating system.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting, which distributes resources across multiple servers, is probably familiar to you (traditional hosting pulls resources from a single server). Cloud hosting enables sites to easily scale up their server requirements as needed. Fortunately, DreamHost offers three cloud hosting tiers in Linux and Windows: 512MB RAM Server, 2GB RAM Server, and 8GB RAM Server.
DreamHost offers a variety of affordable plans, starting at $4.50 per month (for 512MB of RAM, 100GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers) and rising to $48 per month (for 512MB of RAM, 100GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers) (for four CPU cores, 8GB of RAM, 100GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers). As a result of DreamHost's impressive specs, the web host is named co-editors Choice for cloud hosting services.
Hosting for Resellers
Reseller hosting is the way to go if you want to get into the web hosting business but don't want to deal with infrastructure issues. Unfortunately, DreamHost does not offer standalone reseller plans; however, you can resell your own server space if you add additional domains to your own. For more information, visit DreamHost's reseller FAQ page.
How to Get Started
To sum it up, I admire DreamHost's user interface; it's simple and well-organized, and it made setting up my test site a breeze. Rather than using cute, screen-cluttering icons like HostGator or iPage, DreamHost provides a tree of menu options on the left side of the screen. It's simple to access billing information, manage domains, and view VPS and dedicated server settings.
DreamHost now provides the Remixer website builder, allowing you to begin building your site right away. You don't have to wait a long time, as you did once, to have your Dreamhost account approved. It's a fantastic addition. Remixer includes dozens of themes that you can customise with its simple drag-and-drop functionality. It was a breath of fresh air to add photos (your own or from DreamHost's royalty-free gallery), text, and video. You can also add third-party apps to your account, such as concrete5, Joomla, MediaWiki, Piwigo, and, of course, WordPress.
WordPress Web Hosting
DreamHost, like most of its competitors, provides WordPress hosting, regarded as DreamPress (starting at $16.95 per month). DreamPress has managed WordPress hosting, a service that gives a white handle to your website with the automatic updating of popular content management software and daily automatic backups.
The entry-level DreamPress package also includes 30GB of SSD storage, unlimited email and monthly data transfers (as long as your monthly visitor count does not exceed 100,000 people), and a selection of free WordPress themes. DreamPress Plus (starting at $24.95 per month) doubles the storage, bumps the visitor count to around 300,000, and includes a content delivery network (CDN) for faster site loading. The top-tier DreamPress Pro plan (starting at $71.95 per month) includes 120GB of SSD storage and a visitor limit of 1,000,000.
DreamPress allows you to instal any plug-in you want; Pagely and WP Engine, on the other hand, limit you to a small number of plug-ins that may negatively impact your site's performance. DreamHost recently added staging to its WordPress offerings, allowing you to test new site features on a separate site instance without affecting your live pages.
E-commerce and e-marketing
DreamHost provides free ZenCart, which can be accessed via the One-Click Install menu. This free and open-source online shopping cart software allows users to quickly browse the products you have for sale. It also works with Woo Commerce.
DreamHost, in addition to a $100 Google AdWords credit, allows you to track site traffic and analytics with Chartbeat. This is in contrast to the majority of other services, which tend to focus solely on Google Analytics.
Security and Other Benefits
DreamHost provides antispam protection for its email but no antimalware protection. Aside from that oversight, I appreciate its focus on other aspects of website security. The control panel includes an easy-to-find link for editing the. htaccess file to control site access or to create a password. You can block spiders from indexing parts of your site that should not be indexed by search engines. DreamHost also provides free secure-socket-layer (SSL) certificates, which are a must-have for anyone selling products online.
If you are a developer or manage a software development team, you will appreciate DreamHost's inclusion of Subversion, which can assist you in managing your source code files. Most web hosting companies limit you to the applications available on their software marketplace. Version-control tools like Subversion are rarely available on these marketplaces, so it's nice to have the option to create your repository. Of course, this assumes you don't just store your code in Git repositories.
What if you don't need a website or a blog, but simply a place to store your files? DreamObjects cloud storage plans are also available from DreamHost, with prices ranging from 95 cents per month for 40GB to $299.95 per month for 20TB.
Incredible Uptime
The uptime of a website is a critical component of the web hosting experience. Clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services if your website is unavailable.
DreamHost guarantees a 99.9% uptime rate, according to their terms of service. If they don't meet that standard, you'll get a one-day credit for every hour your site is down.
That credit, however, will be limited to 10% of your next prepaid hosting renewal. This means you'll get a credit toward your next bill rather than a refund for what you've already paid. It's also worth noting that this guarantee excludes any scheduled maintenance or user errors that cause downtime.
Besides, I use a website monitoring tool to track my site's uptime over 14 days for this testing. The tool pings my website every 15 minutes and sends me an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least one minute. According to the data, DreamHost is extremely stable. It’s one of only a few web hosting services I've reviewed that has never gone down. You can rely on DreamHost to provide a solid foundation for your website.
Customer Support
DreamHost provides email, ticket-based, and online chat support. DreamHost does not provide a way to contact customer support, which is unfortunate because there are times when you just want to speak with a live person. Having said that, the chat support is quite good. On a weekday afternoon and evening, I gave it a shot. In both cases, I had to wait less than a minute before someone answered my questions.
I inquired about the differences and similarities between VPS and dedicated hosting. The representative provided me with a thorough and satisfying response. I also asked how to import my WordPress.com setup into DreamHost and was given a very helpful link with step-by-step instructions. Again, I was pleased with the responses. DreamHost also has a Knowledgebase where you can find answers to many frequently asked questions.
Renewal rates are low.
It's common for web hosting companies to offer low introductory rates, then raise the prices when the contract is up for renewal. Those costs can nearly double depending on the web host. However, DreamHost is one of the few hosting companies that does not employ this pricing strategy. When you renew your contract, the price does not automatically increase.
Eco-friendly
DreamHost is an "environmentally friendly" web hosting company, which means they care about the environment. Although this may not have a direct impact on your site's performance, it is still an important factor to consider.
DreamHost uses LED and low-mercury lighting, as well as optimised HVAC plants, to reduce their carbon footprint. DreamHost data centres use high-efficiency cooling systems, renewable energy sources, and in some cases, “clean wind” programmes.
Money-back guarantee
A 30-day money-back guarantee is something we've seen a lot of web hosting companies offer. So, if you're not satisfied with your service after the first month, you can get a refund. However, in terms of a money-back guarantee, DreamHost goes above and beyond anything we've seen. DreamHost offers a very good money-back guarantee. You can cancel your shared web Hosting service within 97 days of signing up and receive a prompt refund, according to the terms of service.
But the fact that a hosting company offers something like this tells me one thing: they stand behind their services. They would not have set up this policy if they believed that the majority of their customers would request refunds.
This guarantee lowers your risk and increases your confidence in your purchase. I'm always more likely to purchase services from companies that stand behind their products. Given that most hosts only offer 15 to 30 days, this flexibility is greatly appreciated.
Another factor to consider
Site migrations are not free. Many web hosts will offer free site migration as an incentive to switch to their service. But with DreamHost, that's not the case. You'll have to pay $99 for this service unless you have a managed WordPress hosting plan.
While moving one site may not seem like a big deal, if you manage websites for clients, this can quickly add up. Migrations are also subject to some restrictions. They may be unable to move multisite WordPress or website builder sites.
On their website, you can find a step-by-step instruction guide on how to do this manually, but it is not an easy task. If you're a beginner, I wouldn't recommend this process.