DreamHost reviews 2021: 7 things you should be aware of
There are hundreds of options when it comes to finding a web host for your business site, but we will help you choose the one that stands out from the crowd. DreamHost is one among the crowd that has been around for nearly 25 years and is one of the few web hosting providers that guarantee 100% uptime as well as a 97-day money-back guarantee on the hosting plans.
- Country:
- India
Creating a thriving online presence is not rocket science; you need a good web host to provide you with everything you need to build and run a successful website - performance, security, and 24/7 support. There are hundreds of options for finding a web hosting provider for your business site, but we will help you choose the one that stands out from the crowd.
DreamHost has been around for nearly 25 years, helping individuals and organizations accelerate their online business growth. With over 400,000 customers across 100 countries, the company currently powers over 1.5 million websites worldwide.
DreamHost offers a variety of web hosting products and services for all business websites- new and established. These include:
- Shared Hosting: Shared hosting involves the sharing of server resources among many websites. This is the most affordable hosting option, suitable for individuals or small businesses expected to experience low traffic levels.
- Virtual Private Server: Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting delivers higher performance and more control over server resources than shared hosting. It is an ideal option for websites that need more resources and better performance than shared hosting.
- Dedicated Server: On a dedicated server, resources are not shared with any other user, ensuring ultimate performance. This kind of hosting is more expensive than other options and is suitable for large websites that expect a high traffic level.
- WordPress Hosting: This form of hosting is built to be compatible with WordPress sites. WordPress is the most preferred CMS that makes it easier to establish an online presence with no in-depth technical knowledge needed.
- Cloud Hosting: Cloud hosting involves the use of multiple servers to reduce the chances of downtime. This form of hosting provides an excellent level of reliability and scalability. For instance, if one server goes down, your site will be quickly migrated to other available servers at no time.
DreamHost reviews 2021: 7 things you should be aware of
- Recommended by WordPress.org:DreamHost is one of the only three web hosting providers recommended by WordPress, the most popular and open-source CMS that currently powers a big chunk of the entire internet - more than 30 percent of the web.
- Linux based hosting: DreamHost is completely a Linux environment with all web servers running Apache on the Ubuntu operating system. Additionally, DreamHost's VPS and Dedicated servers can run Nginx, a free and open-source web server that delivers high performance and consumes fewer resources. Nginx powers several high-visibility sites, including Netflix, Pinterest, Cloudflare, GitHub, and MaxCDN, to name a few.
- Green hosting: Dreamhost provides green hosting solutions to minimize its environmental or ecological footprint. Its facilities are LEED Platinum and EnergyStar-certified and utilize advanced lighting control systems with occupancy sensors and balanced and highly-optimized HVAC plants. Additionally, its data centers are powered by renewable electric grids.
- Monthly web hosting: DreamHost offers the flexibility to pay monthly and cancel the plan at any time without spending extra money. All monthly web hosting plans provide the same functionally as the annual plans.
- Fast Solid State Drives (SSDs): DreamHost leverages SSDs to reduce load times and deliver extreme speed- claimed to be about 200 percent faster than the traditional hard disk drives (HDDs).
- 100% Uptime Guarantee: DreamHost promises to keep your website fully-functional around the clock with a 100% uptime guarantee. The company will compensate you if it fails to deliver its promise.
- No cPanel: While most web hosting companies leverage cPanel to manage web hosting, DreamHost uses a more intuitive custom-built control panel. Since the in-house DreamHost panel runs on separate servers, it doesn't consume any resources on your web server.
DreamHost Hosting: Plans, features, price, pros, and cons
DreamHost Shared Hosting Reviews
DreamHost Shared Hosting comes with so many robust features, including:
- Unlimited Bandwidth and Storage
- One free Domain name registration for one-year ( should be used within the first three months)
- Free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate.
- 1-click WordPress installer
- Automatic updates and one-click installs for WordPress sites
- Easy-to-use DreamHost Control Panel
- 24/7 support
DreamHost provides shared hosting in two tiers:
- Shared Starter
- Shared Unlimited
Features |
DreamHost Shared Starter |
DreamHost Shared Unlimited |
Introductory Price |
USD2.59/month (3-yr term) | USD3.95/month (3-yr term) |
Renewal Price |
USD5.99/month (renewal) | USD10.99/month (renewal) |
No. of websites |
One | Multiple |
Traffic |
Unlimited | Unlimited |
WordPress |
Pre-installed | Pre-installed |
WordPress Migration |
Free automatic migration plugin | Free automatic migration plugin |
WP Website Builder |
Drag-and-Drop editor | Drag-and-Drop editor |
Site Storage |
50GB | Unlimited |
SSD storage |
Available | Available |
Free SSL Certificate |
Available | Pre-installed |
Security |
Automated Daily Backups; Free Domain Privacy; Automatic WordPress Updates | Automated Daily Backups; Free Domain Privacy; Automatic WordPress Updates |
Email accounts |
1.67/month | Unlimited |
Domain |
Free | Free |
Subdomains |
5 | Unlimited |
Control Panel |
custom-built | custom-built |
Support |
24/7 Ticket; Live Chat; Phone Support Callbacks | 24/7 Ticket; Live Chat; Phone Support Callbacks |
Money-back Guarantee |
97 days | 97 days |
In addition to these basic features, DreamHost provides advanced features such as unlimited MySQL databases, support for PHP 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3, access to Raw Log Files, reseller and Sub Accounts, IPv6 Support, unlimited SFTP Users and Secure Shell (SSH) access, among others.
DreamHost VPS Hosting Review
DreamHost offers Linux-based VPS hosting plans with a 100% uptime guarantee. From new and small websites to resource-intensive sites, DreamHost VPS Hosting plans cater to the need of all types of websites. The plans are offered at four levels:
- VPS Basic: 1GB RAM and 30GB SSD storage (USD 10/month)
- VPS Business: 2GB RAM and 60GB SSD storage (USD 20/month)
- VPS Professional: 4GB RAM and 120GB SSD storage (USD 40/month)
- VPS Enterprise: 8GB RAM and 240GB SSD storage (USD 80/month)
Each of DreamHost's VPS Hosting plan allows for hosting an unlimited number of domains and websites. All plans include unlimited traffic; a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate, and unlimited email accounts. Apart from this, DreamHost VPS hosting consists of the following features:
Managed service
At DreamHost, you don't have to worry about managing your VPSs as its experts will keep your server running and up-to-date by installing security patches, operating system updates, PHP releases, and more.
Scalability
If your website is growing quickly, you can quickly upgrade your resources - RAM and storage - from within the VPS control panel within 10 seconds.
Apache or Nginx? Choose what suits your needs
While DreamHost's private servers use Apache as a default web server, VPS hosting customers have the flexibility to choose between Apache or Nginx. The latter is suitable for websites experiencing large volumes of traffic and subsequent performance/memory issues. It uses less memory and can handle a much larger amount of traffic than Apache.
One-click installation
You can use DreamHost's one-click installer to install various web applications, including WordPress, in just a few seconds.
Image Credit: DreamHost
Other advanced features included in the VPS hosting plan are- unlimited 24/7 support, an unlimited number of free IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, SSH access, Ruby Version Manager (RVM), OPcache, Phusion Passenger, Subversion Repository (SVN), access to Crontab, and password Protection (.htaccess).
DreamHost Dedicated Server Hosting Review
DreamHost offers a fully-managed dedicated server hosting with lightning-fast page load times and top-notch security. Its dedicated servers come with either HDD or SSDs, 24x7 DDoS protection, and 2N+2 power redundancy, ensuring that your site is always fast and secure.
DreamHost Dedicated Hosting plans are offered in two levels- Standard and Enhanced- and each plan can be customized as per the need of the customer. For instance, the Standard Plan allows you to choose from 4GB RAM to 16GB RAM, while the Enhanced Plan allows for choosing between 16/32/64GB RAM and 2TB HDD or 240GB SDD.
Here's is the breakdown of all the available DreamHost Dedicated Hosting plans:
Dedicated hosting Plan |
CPU Cores |
RAM |
Storage |
Price |
| Standard 4 | Intel Xeon 4-Core 8-Thread | 4GB RAM | 1 TB HDD | USD149/month |
| Standard 8 | " | 8GB RAM | " | USD189/month |
| Standard 16 | " | 16GB RAM | " | USD229/month |
| Enhanced 16 | Intel Xeon 12-Core 24-Thread | 16GB RAM | 2 TB HDD | USD279/month |
| Enhanced 32 | " | 32GB RAM | " | USD329/month |
| Enhanced 64 | " | 64GB RAM | " | USD379/month |
| Enhanced SSD 16 | " | 16GB RAM | 240 GB SSD | USD279/month |
| Enhanced SSD 32 | " | 32GB RAM | " | USD329/month |
| Enhanced SSD 64 | " | 64GB RAM | " | USD379/month |
Every dedicated server hosting plan includes:
- 100% uptime guarantee
- 24x7 Tech Support and Server Monitoring
- RAID 1 Storage
- Unmetered bandwidth
- custom-built panel
- OPcache
- Node.js
- Full Root and Shell Access (SSH)
- Local MySQL Server with Full Root Access
DreamHost WordPress Hosting Review
As already mentioned, DreamHost is recommended by WordPress.org, and its WP hosting services are optimized to deliver high-level performance and pre-configured for easy maintenance. With a high-performance cloud server environment and isolated resources, DreamHost ensures that your WordPress site provides extreme speed and performance.
DreamHost WordPress Hosting comes with:
- WordPress Pre-installed
- Unlimited bandwidth and storage
- Daily automatic backups
- Free SSL Security and privacy protection
- WP Website Builder -quickstart wizard, 200+ design themes, and a drag-and-drop editor
- Free WordPress Migration
- 24/7 WordPress experts
WordPress hosting at DreamHost is available in three forms and comes with a lot of platform-specific features. These include:
WordPress Basic / Shared WordPress
DreamHost WordPress Basic is the most affordable plan, and it is the same as DreamHost's shared hosting that includes the starter and unlimited packages.
Starting at USD2.59/month, the Shared WordPress Hosting plans are backed by a 100% Uptime Guarantee and 97-Day Money-Back Guarantee. Shared WordPress hosting is ideal for small websites that don't expect large amounts of web traffic.
DreamPress Managed WordPress Hosting
As the name suggests, DreamPress Managed WordPress Hosting is a fully-managed service, which means the company will take care of site migration, WordPress installation, security and updates management, server performance optimization, and backups so that you can focus only on your core task, i.e., growing your business and website.
Managed WordPress Hosting is suitable for medium to large business website owners who don't want to perform site maintenance and need WordPress-specific support.
DreamPress Managed WordPress Hosting comes with advanced features like:
- 1-Click Staging: With 1-Click Staging, you can create a staging site to safely test and preview changes - new content, themes, and plugins - before making them live on the actual site for visitors
- Built-in Caching: With server-level caching, you don't need to install any other caching plugin to increase your website's speed and performance
- Bulletproof Backups: Every DreamPress plan includes automated, on-demand backups and one-click restore to protect your website from unexpected events.
Image Credit: DreamHost
Backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee, DreamPress Managed WordPress Hosting is offered in three levels:
- DreamPress - USD16.95/month
- DreamPress Plus - USD24.95/month
- DreamPress Pro - USD71.95/month
Here's the comparison table for DreamPress Managed WordPress Hosting plans:
Features |
DreamPress |
DreamPress Plus |
DreamPress Pro |
| No. of websites | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Visits/month (uncached) | ~100k | ~300k | ~1M |
| Visits/month (cached) | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Storage | 30GB SSD | 60GB SSD | 120GB SSD |
| CDN | - | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Jetpack | Free | Professional | Professional |
| Security | Automated Daily Backups; On-Demand Backups & 1-Click Restore; Free Domain Privacy | Automated Daily Backups; On-Demand Backups & 1-Click Restore; Free Domain Privacy | Automated Daily Backups; On-Demand Backups & 1-Click Restore; Free Domain Privacy |
| WordPress Specialized Support | 24/7 Ticket; Live chat | 24/7 Ticket; Live chat; Phone Support Callbacks | Phone Support Callbacks; Priority Support |
WordPress VPS Hosting Review
WordPress VPS Hosting is the third type of WordPress hosting offered by DreamHost. If you want to host multiple WordPress sites or more control over your WP resources, then DreamHost WordPress VPS Hosting is an ideal option for you.
DreamHost WordPress VPS Hosting plans / Image Credit: DreamHost.
DreamHost Customer Service Reviews
You can hit up DreamHost experts anytime. Depending upon the hosting plan you have purchased, you can request your issue via:
- live chat (5:30 AM - 9:30 PM PST)
At DreamHost, there is no call-in phone number for technical support. However, it does have an option where you can separately add Call back requests. Except for the DreamPress Plus and Pro plan users who get 3 and 5 free callbacks per month, respectively, the company will charge you extra for call back service.
- One-time only - USD9.95
- Three callbacks every month - USD14.95/month
Further, there is a community forum and a comprehensive Knowledge Base that makes it easier to quickly find answers to all your questions - whether basic or complex. The knowledge base features FAQs about web hosting, general tips, recent updates from DreamHost, and hosting web basics for newbies.
For DreamPress customers, the company provides 24/7 WordPress specialized support. Additionally, "Priority Support" that includes expedited support from a highly-trained, in-house WordPress team, proactive monitoring, and advanced troubleshooting is available for DreamPress Pro users.
DreamHost Pros and Cons
Here are the pros and cons of hosting your website at DreamHost:
Pros
- Monthly plans: You can pay your hosting fees every month and cancel them at any time. No feature or functionality will be removed if you purchase monthly hosting plans from DreamHost.
- Money-back guarantee: Like many other web hosting service providers, DreamHost also offers a money-back guarantee - 97-day for shared hosting (only on credit card payments) and 30-day for Virtual Private Server and Managed WordPress Hosting plans. If you aren't satisfied with their services, you can cancel your hosting plan within the first 97 days of sign up, and the company will fully refund your hosting fees.
- 100% Uptime Guaranteed: With all its hosting plans - whether shared, WordPress, dedicated, or VPS - DreamHost offers a 100% Uptime Guarantee. If a DreamHost system's failure makes your site, databases, email, FTP, or other services unusable, the company will compensate you. However, it does not include scheduled maintenance, coding/configuration errors on the customer's part.
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): In addition to the username and password, you can secure your hosting account with a second layer of security by adding MFA that requires a one-time passcode gain access to the account. You can either use the free Google Authenticator app or a Yubikey, an affordable hardware authentication device, to secure your DreamHost account.
- 24/7 server monitoring: DreamHost in-house experts regularly monitor dedicated servers to ensure that your site is available and accessible all the time.
- Intuitive Management: DreamHost's customer control panel allows you to easily and quickly manage everything - websites, domains, or email accounts - from one place. The easy-to-use control panel also allows you to reboot / power-cycle your server when it is required.
- Free SSL Certificate: DreamHost provides a free SSL certificate through Let's Encrypt that will help your website with HTTPS.
- Automated and on-demand backups: DreamHost automatically backs up all WordPress websites every day while its DreamPress Managed WP Hosting plans include on-demand backup with 1-click restore option.
- Free Privacy Protection: While most web hosts charge extra fees for this service, DreamHost offers free privacy protection to prevent your personal data from being publicly accessible.
To know the pros and cons of each type of hosting and which form will be best for your site, read our previous post on"Top 10 Best Web Hosting for Small Businesses".
Cons
- Paid migration: For sites built on WordPress, you can use the automated migration plugin to migrate your site to DreamHost for free. For non-WordPress sites, DreamHost offers a paid migration service that will cost you USD99. The company will refund the amount if it fails to migrate your content successfully.
- No cPanel: cPanel is the most widely used control panel in the web hosting industry. However, DreamHost uses its custom control panel, making it difficult for users familiar with cPanel to manage their hosting account.
- No Phone support: DreamHost support is available mainly via live chat or email; there is no call-in phone number for technical support.
- No Windows-based hosting: DreamHost's web hosting services run on Ubuntu, a Debian-based Linux operating system. The company does not have Windows hosting options.
Conclusion
To briefly recap, DreamHost has been around for more than 20 years and is one of the few web hosting providers that guarantee 100% uptime. Further, the 97-day money-back guarantee allows you to try their services without any risk.
Overall, DreamHost is a reliable web host for all size business sites.
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