Dreamhost Review

Dreamhouse is ginormous that claims about 400,000 active clients and hosting more than 105 million sites. This is actually  a lot! It won’t be wrong to call this hosting company ancient as it was founded back in 1996 by undergraduate students from Claremont College in California.

No doubt it is respect well among the consumers and bagged the home PCMag’s best web hosting service award for the second year in a row. This is not it Dreamhost go so far as to offer stuff like a 97-day money back guarantee and an uptime of 100%.

We wanted to test this hosting service and see for ourselves if it really lives upto the hype. Our purpose was also to know if it is better than HostGator, SiteGround, and Bluehost. We set up a basic wordpress test site in June on the shared plan of DreamHost. Here is the review of performance statistics that also include speed and uptime.

Pros of Dreamhost Hosting

There are umpteen things to like about DreamHost. It promises an amazing customer support and uptime. It even throws in freebies to turn your experience great. These are some of the best features that Dreamhost has to offer.

1. An Uptime of 99.92%

Its fairly easy to say that DreamHost stands strong by its uptime. The hosting company is quite confident that it provides an extra service day for each downtime hour that the site experiences.

It doesn’t happen for their accounts very often fortunately (note that 99.92% is less than 10 minutes of per month downtime).

During the period of our 12-month review process, Dreamhost successfully delivered an uptime of 99.92% hence placing itself as the industry leader (13% better than industry average). However, there are several more cheaper and stable web hosting options like SiteGround, HostGator, and A2 Hosting.  

2. Time for page load-26.0% faster than the competition

The page loading time at DreamHost did not disappoint us either. The time clocks in at 834 ms over the period of 12 months. On average, this is 26.0% faster than 1059 ms we often see in analysing other hosting services.

3. Friendly, Knowledgeable Support

The fastest and best uptime means nothing without an amazing support to back it up. DreamHost excels here. Within the duration of 5 minutes, we were connected to live chat and got a detailed response after a few seconds.

They do not outsource their supposed which is apparent from the help we received. There is however no phone support.

4. Free Days for Downtime

In the industry, you get the longest money back guarantee with DreamHost that comes in at 97 days for shared hosting plans.  But wait, this is not all. You also get a credit of a day’s service for each hour of interrupted service. What they claim is not just words but they actually stand behind their service which is awesome. We made the most of that perk when our uptime was lower than promised (99.89%).

5. Unlimited Bandwidth

Almost all web hosting companies say they provide unlimited hosting but most actually don’t.  DreamHost really offers an unlimited bandwidth and transfer of data to their Unlimited Policy terms.

This service is quite rate for the reason of cost so here are a few exceptions.

• Copyrighted content to which the users have no distribution rights
• Upload, sharing, backup. Archive, distribution, and mirroring of sites.
• A development of site to drive traffic to another site.
• Making account resources available to the public.

Cons of Dream Hosting

This is a perfect choice for most people, but there are a few pitfalls which are the real deal breaker for others. Let’s start with cost.

1. An expensive option

For most web hosts, five bucks a month is more than enough provided you are signing up for one year’s worth of service atleast. Else the on year plan will set you back $9.95 per month.

2. One size fits all policy

Tons of various hosting plans are offered by several web hosting services which make it difficult to tell apart what each provides and what is the best option? dreamHost offers just a single shared hosting plan and it appears easy to choose, but it also means a beginner with a simple site is going to pay the same as an expert who get more 300,000unique views monthly.

3. No cPanel

There is a control panel owned and offered by Dreamhost that provides a streamlined version for non-techies. But the professionals who are accustomed to using Plesh will not really like this approach.

4. Probability of a delayed setup

Verification of the new customer accounts is mandatory before activation. This means while registration is quick, provisioning may take some more time. Now factor that into your new launch plans to get up and running as soon as possible.

5. Overview of Hosting Plans

Shared Hosting: Dreamhost offers a simple shared hosting plan unlike most other web hosts. This plan costs about $7.95 per month. They do not use the three tiered approach and it makes it simple for users to make a decision.

Managed wordpress hosting: their wordpress costing is for $19.95 per month which is billed manually. It comes with a SSD storage of 30GB. There is no limit to wordpress hosting and the customers can boast it to 2.1 million visits monthly. It comes with a support for unlimited email accounts and a dedicated IP address.

VPS Hosting: The VPS hosting begins at $15 per month up to $120 per month. All their VPS plans are available with an unlimited bandwidth and allow support for domain names.

Dedicated Hosting: the dedicated server begins at $149 per month and goes up to $379 per month. For $149 per month, clients get 4 crores, 4GB RAM and 1TB HDD. Their dedicated servers come with a full root and shell acaiabilitt, unlimited bandwidth, wordpress installer, and DDoS protection.

Quick Facts

Signup ease:  the signup process is long and complicated.

Free domain: The Domain is free for the first year on all annual plans.

Payment method: Paypal. Check, checking account, money order, and credit cards are a few payment methods.

Hidden clauses and fee: None!

Upsells: A few

Account activation: account activation can take a while.

Dashboard and control panel experience: There is a custom dreamhost control panel. This is a little difficult to use but maybe you’ll like it because it’s all about personal preferences.

CMS and Apps Installation: There is a one click installer for CMS, wordpress, and other apps.

Should you get DreamHost?

Dreamhost may cost you twice as much as other options, but it’s worth it. It is super reliable and offer a money back guarantee if you experience any hiccups or downtime. You also get an exceptional support and they throw in a couple of freebies which can offset the higher sign up cost in the first place. If you value support and reliability, Dreamhost is second to none. So you don’t need to look further. If you would like to see the hosting providers that rank above Dreamhost, check our best performing hosts here.