DreamHost Review

About DreamHost

DreamHost is a popular award-winning hosting company, and one of WordPress.org’s officially recommended hosts. They offer domain registration and web hosting services, including managed WordPress hosting. Their platform offer everything you need to grow your website, whether you’re a new blogger or an established business.

Dreamhost prides itself on being an award-winning WordPress host. Considering that Dreamhost hosts over 1.5 million sites for 400,000+ members and they’re one of only four web hosts that WordPress itself endorses, they have good reason to be proud.

Dreamhost is also an OpenStack Foundation Gold Member. Their commitment to Open Source comes in the form of financial backing, coding contributions, and community leadership.

Their unique relationship with WordPress, thanks to over 750,000 one-click installations, should put Dreamhost on your hosting shortlist if you’re starting a small site. See our expert DreamHost review to decide if it’s the right choice for you.

What is DreamHost?

DreamHost is a Los Angeles-based web hosting provider and domain name registrar. It is owned by New Dream Network, LLC, founded in 1996 by Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil, undergraduate students at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and registered in 1997 by Michael Rodriguez. DreamHost began hosting customers’ sites in 1997. In May 2012, DreamHost spun off Inktank. Inktank is a professional services and support company for the open source Ceph file system. In November 2014, DreamHost spun off Akanda, an open source network virtualization project. Currently, Michael Rodriguez is the Dreamhost CEO. The company hosts over 1.5 million websites and has more than 400k+ members in 100+ countries around the world.

Entrepreneurs and small businesses can’t afford to be offline for long so it’s worth highlighting Dreamhost’s unique 100% uptime guarantee.

For every hour that your website is offline, they’ll credit you a day’s hosting service. Since Dreamhost is willing to spend its own money on downed sites, it’s a good bet that yours will stay online.

Choose your web hosting solution and make the perfect website! From shared hosting and domains to VPS – DreamHost have all you need for online success.

Award Winning Hosting, Easy to setup, Simply fast websites, WordPress made easy, From micro to large-scale, User-Friendly Control Panel, 97 day money-back guarantee. Launch your website in 1 click, Easy 1-click install tools, Custom control Panel, Daily backups.

Pricing

Pricing need to know

More often than not, you’ll come out with an amazing deal if you choose DreamHost. But their terms change a lot and to get the best possible deal requires some analysis.

So let’s break it down.

Pros and cons

Dreamhost offers a bouquet of web hosting services including shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) hosting, cloud hosting, WordPress Hosting, and even Dedicated Server hosting. The platform also has its own native drag-and-drop website builder.

Most of DreamHost’s packages come with free SSL encryption, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, free domain for a year, and email accounts along with lots of other package-specific features.

The company has state-of-the-art technology including powerful solid-state drives and high-end firewalls with responsive customer care that’s available 24/7 (Chat: Every Day 3:00AM-9:30PM PT) and can be accessed through live chats or tickets. 

Benefits of Using DreamHost Web Hosting

We found DreamHost to be fast and reliable. They have flexible hosting plans and friendly technical support. That being said, let’s get into the detailed DreamHost review so that you can compare our test results and make your own mind.

Integration

Is DreamHost a good host?

DreamHost is the most inclusive web hosting service for both small and large businesses working on different sized projects. This is because it has a high enough performance speed, customer support, and reliable uptime for most website owners.

With its low price and high quality, DreamHost is an excellent option for most website owners.

In our testing over a two-week period, DreamHost proved itself a reliable web hosting service. In fact, our test site didn’t go down once during the 14-day observation period. The company guarantees a 100% server uptime rate, so, you should be able to count on DreamHost to keep your website online.

Hosting management – Is DreamHost easy to use?

DreamHost’s control panel looks modern and has a clean design. You can access all the options from the left sidebar. It’s not cPanel-based, and perhaps some may find that a couple of advanced options are missing.

DreamHost is easy to use, with the main focus on WordPress hosting. While it is possible to host other applications, the users of WP are benefiting the most. Starting with an easy yet a little slow WordPress installation, 2 builders, and an intuitive custom-built control panel, it’s a workhorse for a great user experience.

Once you sign up, you’ll see this screen right here:

You might need to wait a couple of minutes until server space is allocated for your account, but this is the main setup screen. You’ll be able to install WordPress with literally one click of a button (Install WordPress Now). It’s really the only hosting provider I’ve come across whose 1-click WordPress installation is actually 1-click.

By the way, the SSL certificate was automatically installed for me. So it took no more than 10 minutes (most of which was waiting for the WordPress installation to load), and I had 3 of the most important parts of the website setup done – WordPress installed, SSL activated, and a professional email account created. This is all that most web hosting users will need.

How DreamHost Panel look like?

You can access your website’s DreamHost Panel with just a few clicks. Start by logging into your Login Area, then you will be presented with DreamHost Panel interface.

cPanel is a popular commercial web application that many major hosting companies use to manage hosting. Many customers with previous web hosting experience who are new to DreamHost are familiar with cPanel.

cPanel is not available at DreamHost. Instead, DreamHost uses a custom-built panel to manage your websites, databases, email, and billing. Most tasks performed on cPanel can also be completed using the DreamHost panel.

Many customers find that the DreamHost panel is more intuitive and easier to use than cPanel. In addition, the DreamHost panel runs on separate servers and doesn’t take up any resources on your web server.

cPanel offers the option to backup all of your data in a .tar.gz file. This contains all of your sites, databases, and email accounts. Without cPanel, you must manually import the contents of this file to your DreamHost servers.

You’ll find it equipped with all the goodies you need. From easy auto installations and DNS zones configurations to email accounts, a file manager, and MySQL databases, it’s all very similar to what cPanel offers.

DreamHost is committed to its control panel. So much so that the provider is constantly updating Panel to make it more intuitive and more comfortable for users. So, if it’s going to change a bit while you’re using it, don’t be surprised.

The main things that you’ll be doing in dreamhost Panel are: reaching file manager, installing applications, checking databases, and adding domains as well as email accounts

Looking in detail, everything is well-organized. Every tool has a place in a very logical category. For example, you’ll find auto-installers (for WordPress, Joomla, and other content management systems) under the Website category, together with options to import or migrate a website.

What Types of Web Hosting DreamHost Offers?

DreamHost offers several different types of hosting plans that work for all website hosting needs.

Shared Hosting:

Shared hosting is the most affordable option, but it does have its limitations. Shared hosting customers share the server’s resources with other customers. If another website on the same server is receiving large amounts of traffic, or using a lot of the server’s limited resources, it’s possible that your site may run slower as a result.

While DreamHost works hard to make sure all sites on a shared server never disrupt other sites, this is always a possibility due to the nature of the product. That’s why we recommend that you look at our more powerful options if you’re expecting to experience high traffic levels on your site.

What can I host on shared hosting?

Shared hosting is perfect for blogs, portfolios, personal/business sites, and database-driven sites.

Learn more about shared hosting

WordPress Hosting (DreamPress)

DreamPress is DreamHost’s managed WordPress hosting. It’s a scalable service that allows users to manage their WordPress sites worry-free via automatic updates, caching, daily backups, and a content delivery network (CDN).

Learn more about DreamPress

VPS

DreamHost’s Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is a premium solution that runs faster than our shared hosting. It’s available as an add-on to an existing DreamHost plan, but also as a standalone service.

DreamHost’s VPSs use Linux-VServer to create a “virtual machine” that protects a user’s resources from others on the same physical machine. This allows for a more powerful solution.

Shared vs VPS Hosting

On a shared server, resources are shared by other users. On a VPS, these resources are more isolated which improves performance and helps to maintain stability. You also have the ability to control how much RAM your server uses.

What can I host on a VPS?

A virtual private server is ideal for websites that require more resources than a shared server can provide, but may not need the full power of a dedicated server. VPS is ideal for businesses, ecommerce websites, designers, and developers that need unhindered performance.

Learn more about VPS

Dedicated

A dedicated server is a server that only contains your files on it. You also get full root access: a major benefit if you’re looking to customize your server to fit your specific needs. Please note that DreamHost support cannot assist if any errors occur as a result of a customization.

Another benefit of a dedicated server is that your MySQL server is on the same server, allowing for faster access. With all other hosting plans your MySQL database is on a separate database server.

What can I host on a Dedicated server?

Dedicated servers are fully-managed, business class servers. They are perfect for resource-heavy apps and giant websites.

Learn more about dedicated hosting

Cloud

DreamHost offers two different cloud hosting products.

Object Storage

DreamObjects is a cost-effective cloud storage service, which you can use to host static data for your websites, store backups, or develop the next big thing. You can access DreamObjects in your panel using the built-in interface, programmatically via standard APIs, or with a growing library of applications. DreamObjects is compatible with the Amazon S3 API.

Cloud Computing

DreamCompute is a highly scalable cloud computing service built to power:

• Web and mobile applications
• Digital media and e-commerce websites
• Big data
• Testing and development environments

All instances can be managed through the DreamCompute’s dashboard built off of OpenStack’s Horizon.

Performance – DreamHost Speed Test

No one likes a slow website. A faster website is crucial for a better user experience and SEO. Speed and uptime, that’s what we’re looking for. We can safely say that DreamHost is an example of how web hosting performance should look like. No matter what you pay for it. This host is stable, fast, and can handle quite some traffic even on cheap plans.

We did 3 types of tests to see if there’s anything at all that would make this provider flinch.

DreamHost uptime and response time

For an easy first test, we ran the website speed test. For this test we used Pingdom and and left it running for 1 weeks. During this time, Dreamhost had avg response time 335 ms and scored a performance grade 95.Here are the test results:

Our test site loaded in less than half a second, which is excellent. However, this test alone does not show the full picture because our test site has no traffic at all.

DreamHost speed

A website’s speed has a significant influence on its traffic and reputation. It’s also one of the most important factors required to rank high on search engines. Moreover, a slow website deters visitors from continuing to browse the website.

Thus, monitoring your web page speed is essential. Conducting a website speed test can shed some light on the performance of your website and any weak points that need improvement.

However, doing a proper website speed test can be a tricky job. To get meaningful results, website owners need to understand the key metrics and the correct testing method.

DreamHost stress testing

Next, we wanted to see how well DreamHost handles website traffic during peak hours. To measure this, we used a tool called K6 (formerly called Load Impact). Do these page loading speed results mean that there’s nothing to worry about?

We gradually built up to 50 unique visitors at once to see how the server would handle increased requests from multiple connections at the same time. Heavy traffic is called heavy for a reason. It puts a significant load on the server, often causing it to slow down or, in some cases, shut down completely.

But, the results show a different kind of story. DreamHost has managed to pass our test with no issues.

DreamHost Servers

All data on servers is protected by multiple levels of fail-safes, RAID-10, daily or weekly backups.