DreamHost Review
If you are a web developer or web designer, then you must be looking around for best web hosting company to host your start-up business website for yourself or for your customers.
By now you would have realized that choosing right web hosting company is not an easy task as it would appear.
So, to choose the best hosting company you might have gone through various reviews and also compared prices because almost all web hosting companies claim they are best web hosting providers.
With this DreamHost review article, we will look forward to give an overview of DreamHost along with its pros and cons in web hosting services. And above all, our motto is provide enough information so that you can decide which web hosting company and which web hosting plans are affordable for your website without missing any interesting value added services.
To ensure you get enough information about DreamHost web hosting services, we reviewed DreamHost web hosting company by going through various aspects of web hosting features offered by DreamHost.
Hope this DreamHost review article is helpful in choosing right web hosting service for your website.
DreamHost Review: – Who is DreamHost?
DreamHost is a leader in the web hosting and domain registration services from LosAngels.
DreamHost got into the world of web hosting services from 1997.
DreamHost primary focus is on providing business related web hosting and cloud computing services to start-ups and business enthusiasts, DreamHost owned by a leading network called New Dream Network (LLC).
The founders of this company are Josh Jones, Dallas Bethune, Michael Rodriguez, Sage Weil, Mika Epstein.
DreamHost has its headquarters in Los Angeles, California, U.S.
The primary idea of DreamHost Company is to offer the stunning, affordable web hosting plans and services with incredible features along with the valuable customer support.
Currently, DreamHost holding over 1.5 million websites, blogs and other personal or business websites. It also serves over 400,000 web developers, entrepreneurs and also individual online users; this is all about the company’s story in brief.
Let’s peep into the features of DreamHost web hosting services; DreamHost is a more serious choice of web hosting for your actual online presence.
DreamHost Review: – Why DreamHost?
We all know, there are several web hosting providers available online to choose.
The peculiarity of DreamHost web hosting provider that makes us to choose is because of its reliability, flexibility, performance and speed.
The other interesting reason which attracts us is its affordable plans and price of all web hosting plans.
Let’s list out more exciting features, which validate our preference over the other web hosting services are,
- Foremost of all, DreamHost offers awesome customer support, which monitors your personal and business related websites to ensure your online presence through their web hosting services in more convenient way.
- All web hosting plans from DreamHost offers SSD based storage, so SSD storage definitely helpful in having high performance website.
- If you have website developed in WordPress, then DreamHost will support your WordPress sites with its managed web hosting plan called DreamPress.
- DreamHost provides you the 97-day money back guarantee,
You can raise a return request, when you are not satisfied with their services, which is appreciable.
- DreamHost offers all in one shared web hosting plan with unlimited resources along with unlimited domains and unlimited databases.
- Highly recommended web hosting services for experts in web design and web development, especially for tech-savvy users, programmers, and web developers, there is no doubt in it.
- You will get one free domain name along with shared web hosting plan.
- If you have no experience in web development or website design, then don’t worry, DreamHost also offers website builder, which you can use it to create website as you would like to.
- DreamHost website builder is suitable for both individuals and experts.
DreamHost Review: – DreamHost key features
Web hosting provider’s key features play a significant role in choosing the perfect web hosting provider for you.
DreamHost key features that make it stand out in the race of the web hosting provider is as follows,
- You will get a free domain registration; you can also host multiple domains on single web hosting plan at very affordable price.
- DreamHost shared plan supports various coding languages including the PHP5, Perl, Python, etc. You can also use multiple domains at cheap rates.
- With Dream Host unlimited bandwidth you can serve as many visitors as you would like.
- Dream Host helps you effectively through its award-winning customer support available 24/7/365. Customer care support is available through live chat, email, and Twitter.
- Dream Host used OpenStack and Ceph technologies to setup affordable and scalable cloud web hosting service.
- 1-click installation of WordPress and you can create your website in minutes using its free website builder tool.
- You can have unmetered email accounts associated with your shared web hosting plan.
- It offers the single click installation of ZenCart, that makes the shopping cart installation and usage simplified.
- Unlimited FTPs for all account, and you can get a unique IP address and have anonymous FTP account by paying some extra amount.
In addition, with the above-mentioned features, DreamHost also benefits your website with more traffic, value-added add-ons and plugins.
I know, you will ask if there are any free goodies.
Don’t sweat! You will also get the $100 Google Adwords credit for free.
DreamHost Review: – Web Hosting offers from DreamHost.
From the start of this article, we keep on telling that Dream Host web hosting plans are affordable and enriched with more interesting features.
So, now we would like to get into deeper and will review each web hosting plans or offers of Dream Host to provide detailed insights of the same.
DreamHost Review: – DreamHost Website Builder.
Creating a website of your own without any technical knowledge is a big deal.
In this case of a Dream Host website builder, Dream Host offers a flexible and easy to use website builder for you, they call it is Remixer.
Dream Host let you to try it for free.
You can try Remixer here. Remixer helps you in setting up your websites as like a pro. Your pro websites will be built in seconds with the use of professionally designed themes, royalty free image library.
Remixer let you customize your site and launch a website with a single click.
It is as easy as you think. If you are a newbie, no problem, within no time you become webmaster for your site.
DreamHost Review: – Shared Web Hosting Plans.
Surprisingly DreamHost offers only one shared hosting plan; you can get this plan as cheap as for $10.95/month. Though it’s not cheap shared hosting plan out there, but you will get all most all required tools to setup your business or startup website.
When you opt for DreamHost web hosting plan, you will get the benefits as follows,
You will be offered one free domain for a year with annual subscription.
With shared web hosting plan DreamHost provides you Free SSL/TLS certificates that can be installed and activated using DreamHost panel.
With SSL certificate your website communication happens over secured connection, so your client information will be safe even if they do any transactions using your website.
DreamHost also offers free virus scan, so that your hosting space is protected from malware and other threats.
You likely to enjoy the benefits of the unlimited disk space, storage, bandwidth and free domain offered with DreamHost web hosting plan.
DreamHost Review: – DreamPress Managed WordPress web hosting.
DreamHost offers managed WordPress web hosting, as you would expect they named it as DreamPress, catchy huh?
With DreamPress managed WordPRess plan, DreamHost offers pre-installed and pre-configured WordPress website, if you compare with WpEngine managed WordPresss web hosting plan, DreamPress is lot cheaper.
One more advantage with DreamPress is they allow you to install any theme or Plugin, but incase of WpEngine, they restrict your plugin or theme installations because few plugins cause performance issues.
But, we never know which plug-in is important to our business website, so DreamPress gives complete flexibility in theme and plug-in installations.
DreamPress is suitable for the WordPress / blog hosting experts who would like to reap maximum benefits from a managed WordPress web hosting plan. If you know how to manage a WordPress website, then you can enjoy DreamPress web hosting plan.
DreamPress managed WordPress web hosting plan is not only feature rich but also goes easy with your pocket, you will get all WordPress managed web hosting features for $16.96/Mo.
Apart from pre-configured WordPress instance, you will get pre-installed SSL certificate along with one private IP, so that you can use DreamPress to host your e-commerce website.
As you know, security is important feature for any e-commerce website, so pre-installed SSL along with private IP ensures that your customers can safely do online transactions without any issue.
Apart from SSL certificates, DreamHost also ensure DreamPress is safe from malware and other virus attacks by deploying a WordPress specific firewall in DreamPress.
With the help of the solid-state drives (SSDs), as well as the Virtual Private Servers, you the web developers enjoy the benefits of more power, speed, and stability as desired.
Another great thing about DreamPress is average response time is low compared to other managed web hosting providers managed WordPress plans.
DreamPress also ensures your WordPress website deployment and management is easy by offering pre-installed wp-cli along with Git.
So you can easily manage your WordPress website from command line and have version controlled website development.
DreamHost Review: – DreamHost VPS web hosting.
Though DreamPress high performance web hosting service for reasonable price, you can’t host website which is not developed using WordPress.
Since, DreamPress is managed WordPress web hosting plan, you can host only WordPress website.
So, if you have website, which is developed in other language (Java or Ruby etc) or using framework (Rails or angularJS etc) then you need a server which can support different languages.
Dream Host offers Virtual private servers so that you can host your website on your own server.
DreamHost VPS plan starts for $15/Mo with 1GB RAM along with 30GB SSD storage.
If your do not familiar with VPS and why is the VPS hosting preferred over shared web hosting? And if you wonder Is VPS web hosting service needed for everyone?
For such questions, I would say, this VPS web hosting plan is for designers and developers who build custom e-commerce sites or other business website or apps from scratch.
The VPS web hosting plan from Dream Host is the better choice to attain the speed and performance of your e-commerce or business website.
VPS web hosting from DreamHost comes with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, though Ubuntu 12.04 release has official long term support from Ubuntu, it would be good if Dream Host offer Ubuntu 14.04 along with its VPS web hosting plans.
Since VPS plans from DreamHost are managed web hosting plans, Dream Host takes cares about the security updates and provide support on issues related to your web hosting server.
With DreamHost custom control panel, you can easily manage your VPS server; you can add or remove RAM or storage etc.
As I mentioned earlier, you will have the full pledged award winning customer support available 24×7 in case if you are stuck with some issue.
DreamHost Review: – DreamHost Dedicated Server web hosting.
If you already receiving huge traffic with thousands of active users, then most likely VPS web hosting doesn’t suit you.
To handle thousands of visits and for complete isolation of your website, you can try dedicated web hosting service.
Dedicated web hosting is ideal for the individuals or a business web master who is seeking for a stable and high performance server which can handle more traffic without any issue.
Dream Host dedicated web hosting plans start from $149/month.
If you compare with BlueHost or HostGator dedicated web hosting plans it’s clear that Dream Host dedicated web hosting plans aren’t cheap, but DreamHost offers more powerful servers compare to HostGator or BlueHost.
Another major difference is Dream Host offers SSD hard disks instead of normal disk spinning hard drives; with SSD hard disk you can easily 3X more performance.
With Dream Host starter dedicated web hosting plan you will get 4 cores, 4GB RAM with 1TB HDD and unlimited bandwidth.
The other benefits that associates with Dream Host dedicated web hosting services are in a row as
- With dedicated server plans Dream Host permits you to access the server resources and customize it as per your website needs.
- With dedicated web hosting plans Dream Host assures you that, no noisy members disrupt your website by consuming all resources.
- Dream Host monitors your site’s performance around the clock 24×7.
The noteworthy features that are provided are full root and shell access, unmetered MySQL storage databases, RAID-1 storage, Ubuntu Linux, 1-Click WordPress installer, unmetered bandwidth and DDoS protection.
DreamHost Review: – PROS and CONS of Dream Host web Hosting services.
After carefully analyzing the pros and cons of Dream Host hosting services we can say that Dream Host services are bit costlier than other web hosting service providers plans, but Dream Host promise to deliver high performance hosting, and they are very confident about their services, so they are offering 97 days money back return guarantee.
So, let’s go through all pros and cons of Dream Host web hosting services, so that you can choose appropriate web hosting plan for your website.
DreamHost Review: – PROS of Dream Host web hosting services.
By going through pros of Dream Host, you can decide if whether Dream Host web hosting plans are suitable for your website requirements or not. You can certainly choose best web hosting plan based on these advantages listed below.
- DreamHost, takes the challenge of offering 100% uptime guarantee, instead of just giving 100% uptime guarantee, Dream Host goes one step further and offers an additional day of service for every hour of your site downtime experience.
- Dream Host is known for their customer service, customer service is responsive and providers 24/7 service through chat and email.
- Dream Host automatically takes the backup everyday and notify if there are any issues with backup.
- Without any additional charges, you can transfer your existing sites and blogs hosted on other web hosting provider to DreamHost, free website migration is offered with all plans.
- You will be amazed by Dream Host faster page load times, thus it will increase google ranking and more traffic to your sites.
- DreamHost offers 97 days money back guarantee, not many web hosting providers offer more than 60 days money back guarantee.
So, money back policy is one of the reason you can try Dream Host without losing anything from your side.
DreamHost Review: – CONS of Dream Host web Hosting services.
Dream Host is a perfect choice for most of the webmasters who seek for their online presence. However, there are few drawbacks, which may or may not be a deal breaker for you.
- If you are looking for very cheap web hosting, then Dream Host is not for you!
- DreamHost shared web hosting plan is costly when compared to iPage or BlueHost.
- Phone support is surprise omission from Dream Host.
DreamHost claims that all support employees are Dream Host employees, so we can expect quality support, but Phone support is required if you wanted discuss and fix issues quickly.
Except Phone support, Overall Dream Host customer support is great, you can contact Dream Host over chat or through email.
- If you are fan of cPanel, then you may find difficulty in managing your site with custom control panel, but you should get used to it quickly.
- Dream Host offers only one shared web hosting plan, so if you don’t need security certificate etc advanced features, then you may end up paying more with Dream Host.
DreamHost Review: – Conclusion and final thoughts.
It shoots a line to have many features, which are not provided by other web hosting providers.
Its key features including PHP, WordPress installation, Unlimited MySQL databases, Perl, Webmail support, and POP3 Support are really amazing.
DreamHost’s Uptime guarantee and free credits offer is certainly attractive.
Overall, if you know how to manage a website and looking for the best hosting service, then you can try DreamHost web hosting services for your site for its speed, reliability, performance and flexibility.
I conclude my review by stating that the DreamHost is one of the best web hosting providers suitable for developers or webmasters who is looking for reliable web hosting company.
With added services and generous money back guarantee, its ideal choice for web developers who believes in performance and value for money.
[wpsm_column size=”one-half”][wpsm_pros title=”PROS:”]- 100% uptime guarantee, offers an additional day of service for every one hour of downtime.
- DreamHost is known for their customer service, customer service is responsive and providers 24/7 service through chat and email.
- Automatic backup at server level.
- Free website migration service.
- 97 days money back guarantee, best in class.
- Faster average page load time, 3x faster websites with SSD based storage.
- Custom control panel, cPanel fans my get disappointed.
- All in one shared web hosting plan.
- No telephone support, 24/7 mail and chat support.
- Shared web hosting plan is costly compared to iPage or BlueHost.
