DreamHost Web Hosting Review

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February 08, 2022 March 28, 2022

DreamHost: DreamHost Web Hosting Review, Price & Deals

DreamHost Best Web Hosting, Best Web Hosting For WordPress

Pros

Strong security features
Excellent cloud hosting offerings
Unlimited data transfers per month
Generous money-back guarantee
Useful WordPress staging feature
Extensive domain-management tools

Cons

No email with Shared Starter plan
Lacks Windows-based servers
No telephone support

DreamHost Best Web Hosting

If you want to build a Linux-powered website, DreamHost should be one of the first places you look. The web hosting service has a rich feature set that meets many personal and business-related web hosting needs by offering shared, WordPress, Virtual Private Server (VPS), cloud, and dedicated plans. In addition, its website-building software gives webmasters simple tools to build attractive, flexible sites. As a result, DreamHost is an Editors' Choice award-winning web host, topping it with competitors such as HostGator, Hostwinds, and Liquid Web.

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DreamHost Shared Web Hosting

If you want to build a website but don't want to spend a lot of money, shared web hosting is the way to go. Shared hosting is an extremely low-cost form of web hosting that sees your site sharing CPU, RAM, and other server resources with other websites. As a result, it is not a very powerful hosting tier; If you expect your site to see a large amount of traffic, you should look into virtual private servers (VPS) or dedicated hosting.

Additionally, since "shared" in shared hosting refers to the fact that each server can host multiple sites that share the hardware's resources, you are somewhat at the mercy of your server peers. If one of them appears on the front page of Reddit, you may find that your site slows to a crawl as a result.

DreamHost has two shared hosting plans: Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited. Shared Starter (starting at $4.95 per month, or $3.59 per month with a one-year commitment) offers unlimited monthly data transfers and storage but lacks email. That's right: no email. For that, you'll need to upgrade to Shared Unlimited ($10.95 per month, or $4.95 per month with a one-year commitment). That plan adds email and unlimited website hosting. The low price for the one-year plan (previously $7.95 per month) puts it at a striking distance from the Starter option, making it a much better option than before.

That said, HostGator, an Editors' Choice winner for shared hosting, is one of the few web hosts we've reviewed that offers Windows-based shared web hosting. This is a big deal, as many businesses require Microsoft's operating system to run specific software. DreamHost, on the other hand, only offers Linux-based servers. HostGator also offers unlimited email across the board.

DreamHost VPS Web Hosting

DreamHost offers four Linux-based VPS web hosting plans (initially $15.00 per month, or $13.75 per month with a one-year commitment) for businesses that need servers with more power than shared hosting offers. Is. VPS hosting puts your website on a server with far fewer virtual roommates than shared hosting. As a result, there is more server power available to tap your site.

DreamHost's VPS plans offer unlimited monthly data transfers and domains, which is a nice advantage. However, the base memory and storage are quite low; The Basic plan (whose prices are quoted above) only offers 1GB of RAM and a 30GB solid-state drive. On the other hand, the highest configuration ($120 per month, or $110 per month with an annual contract) maxes out at 8GB of RAM and 240GB of solid-state storage. Unfortunately, the VPS plan only offers the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

Hostwinds, PCMag's top choice for VPS hosting, has better VPS plans. It has wallet-friendly, well-rounded VPS offerings. Take Managed Linux VPS plans, which start at $5.17 per month for 1GB of RAM, 30GB of disk space, 1 TB of monthly data transfers, and unlimited email, and $247 per month for 96GB of RAM, 750GB of disk space. 9TB monthly data transfers, and unlimited email.

DreamHost Dedicated Web Hosting

If you want maximum web hosting power, you need to get a dedicated server. With this setup, your website resides automatically on a single server, thus taking advantage of all system resources. If you're expecting to see an incredible amount of traffic from your site, and if your site is so mission-critical that it may not be down or slow at all, then you should look into dedicated hosting.

DreamHost has several dedicated server options. Offerings start with the standard 4 plan ($169 per month, or $149 for an annual commitment) that includes 4GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The options top out with the $379 per month Enhanced SSD 64 plan that has 64GB of RAM and 240GB of solid-state storage. Each DreamHost dedicated server plan has unlimited data transfers.

Unfortunately, DreamHost lacks Windows-based dedicated servers; It's Linux or bust here too. If you want to build a website using Microsoft's operating system as a foundation, we suggest checking out AccuWeb, PCMag's Editors' Choice for dedicated web hosting, which offers Linux and Windows dedicated server options. Is. AccuWeb also has powerful dedicated plans, including a $1,070 per month package with 8TB of storage, 512GB of RAM, and up to 50TB of monthly data transfers.

DreamHost Cloud Hosting

You've probably heard of cloud hosting, which spreads resources across multiple servers (traditional hosting pulls resources from a single server). Cloud hosting allows sites to easily scale up the server needs when the situation requires it. Fortunately, DreamHost offers three cloud hosting tiers - 512 MB RAM servers, 2 GB RAM servers, and 8 GB RAM servers - that come in Linux, BSD, and Windows varieties.

DreamHost has excellent packages that start at $4.50 per month (for 512MB of RAM, 80GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers) and $48 per month (for four CPU cores, 8GB of RAM, 80GB of storage, and more. for unlimited monthly) are on top. data transfer). As a result, DreamHost's powerful specs make Web Host the co-editor's choice for cloud hosting services.

If you're a corporate customer who wants world-class cloud hosting, 1&1 Ionos is the way to go. This is the Co-Editors' Choice for the category that boasts incredibly powerful cloud hosting packages.

DreamHost Reseller Hosting

If you want to enter the web hosting business but don't want to deal with infrastructure matters, then reseller hosting is the way to go. Unfortunately, DreamHost does not offer standalone reseller plans; You can resell your own server space, but only if you add other domains to your own. See DreamHost's Reseller FAQ page for more information.

If you're looking to try your hand at reseller hosting, we recommend Hostwinds, the Editors' Choice for this category. Hostwinds plans, starting at $3.29 per month, offer unlimited email, storage, and data transfers. There are both Linux and Windows dedicated and VPS packages on offer, as well as shared hosting, which is limited to Linux. Servers have the same RAM and storage amounts that Hostwinds supplies directly, which is not always the case. Hostwinds lets you apply your branding to the servers you rent, and it also provides 24/7 technical support.

DreamHost Building a Website

Overall, we like DreamHost's user interface - it's simple and well designed, and it made it easy to get started on my test site. Instead of going the HostGator or iPage route with cute, screen-cluttering icons, DreamHost offers a tree of menu options on the left side of the screen. It's easy to find billing information, manage domains, and view settings for VPS and dedicated servers. We had no trouble finding security options or third-party app marketplaces.

DreamHost now offers a WP website builder, so you can start building your site right away. You no longer have to wait as long as your DreamHost account is approved, as you once did. This is a wonderful addition. WP Website Builder comes with dozens of themes that you can change, using its simple drag-and-drop functionality. We found it refreshingly simple to add photos (my own, or from DreamHost's royalty-free gallery), text, and video. You also have the option of installing third-party applications to your account, such as Concrete 5, Joomla, MediaWiki, Pivigo, and, of course, WordPress.

DreamHost WordPress Web Hosting

Like many of its competitors, DreamHost offers WordPress hosting in three different categories: WordPress Basic, DreamPass, and VPS WordPress. DreamPress is the standard option with managed WordPress hosting, a service that gives your website the white-glove treatment by auto-updating popular content management system software, performing automated daily backups, and providing WordPress-specific security.

Entry-level WordPress Basic (starting at $4.95 per month, or $3.95 for a three-year commitment) comes with 50GB of SSD storage, purchasable email similar to shared Webhosting, and unlimited monthly data transfers, as well as a variety of freebies. WordPress theme. Moving up to the initial DreamPress option (starting at $12.00 per month), it starts with 30GB of SSD storage, unlimited email and monthly data transfers, and support for up to 100,000 monthly visitors. DreamPress Plus (starting at $24.00 per month) doubles the storage, increases the number of visitors to nearly 300,000, and adds a content delivery network (CDN) for faster site loading. The top-tier DreamPress Pro (starting at $71.95 per month) offers 120GB of SSD storage and a 1,000,000 visitor limit.

DreamPress lets you install any plug-in you want; Pagely and WP Engine, on the other hand, prevent you from installing a small number of plug-ins that can affect your site's performance. Recently, DreamHost added staging to its WordPress offerings, so you can test new site features on another site instance that won't affect your live pages.

As impressive as the DreamPress is, PCMag is an Editors' Choice in the Linux-backed A2 category. A2 boasts an optimized environment that is known to be up to six times faster than a traditional hosting environment. Plus, A2's WordPress plans offer unlimited storage and monthly data transfers across most of their options. For more information on the fantastically popular content management system, you can read our story on how to get started with WordPress.

DreamHost E-Commerce Options

DreamHost offers free Zencart, which you can access from the one-click install menu. This open-source online shopping cart software lets users quickly check out the products you have for sale. It also supports WooCommerce.

With a $100 Google AdWords credit, DreamHost lets you track site traffic and analytics via Chartbeat. This is different from most other services, which focus only on Google Analytics.

DreamHost Security and Other Features

DreamHost offers antispam on its email, but no antimalware services. Beyond that, we like its focus on other aspects of website security. The Control Panel has an easy-to-find link to edit the .htaccess file to control access to the site or to set a password. For those parts of the site that should not be indexed by search engines, you can block spiders. You can set up cron jobs (automated batch jobs) to schedule tasks and monitor processes on the site. DreamHost also offers a free secure-socket-layer (SSL) certificate, which is a must for people selling products online.

If you are a developer or manage a software development team, you will love the fact that DreamHost comes with Subversion, which can help you manage your source code files. Most web hosting providers limit you to any number of applications listed in their software market. Version-control tools like Subversion rarely come into these markets, so it's good to see an option to set up your repository. Of course, this is assuming you don't just use Git repositories for your code.

What if you don't want a website or blog, but just a place to store your files? DreamHost also offers DreamObjects cloud storage plans, which start at 95 cents per month for 40GB and go up to 20TB for $299.95 per month.

DreamHost Terrific Uptime

Website uptime is an important element of the web hosting experience. If your site is shut down, customers or clients will not be able to find you or access your products or services.

For this test, we use a website monitoring tool to track our site's uptime of more than 14 days. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings my website and sends us an email if I am unable to contact the site for at least a minute. The data showed that DreamHost is incredibly stable, and did not go down during the testing period. There has been only one, brief failure in many, many months. As a result. You can count on DreamHost to be a solid foundation for your website.

DreamHost No Phone Support, Excellent Chat Support

DreamHost offers email and ticket-based support as well as online chat. It also has a robust knowledge database. Unfortunately, DreamHost lacks phone support, which is pretty bad; Sometimes you just want to deal with a human being. That said, the chat support is pretty good. We tried it on a weekday afternoon and evening. In both cases, we waited less than a minute until someone entered my questions.

We asked about the difference between VPS and dedicated hosting. The representative gave me a thorough, satisfactory answer. We also asked the rep how to import my WordPress.com setup into DreamHost and received a very helpful link with step-by-step instructions. Again, we were quite pleased with the answers. DreamHost also provides a knowledge base that answers many commonly asked questions.

DreamHost has a very good money-back guarantee policy. As per its terms of service, you can cancel your shared web hosting service within 97 days of initial signup and get your money back immediately. Considering the 15 to 30 days offered by most hosts, this flexibility is welcome.

DreamHost A Power User's Dream

Thanks to its comprehensive tools including useful website-building software, security options, a generous money-back guarantee, unlimited storage, monthly data transfers, domains, and email, DreamHost is a top pick and a PCMag Editors' Choice for cloud-based. web hosting services. That said, if you are a corporate customer who wants world-class cloud hosting, 1&1 Ionos is the way to go. It's the Co-Editors' Choice with DreamHost for the category and boasts incredibly powerful cloud hosting packages.

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