DreamHost web hosting review
Shared Web Hosting
DreamHost's tierless shared Web hosting plan (starting at $10.95 per month, or $9.95 per month with a one-year commitment) offers unlimited disk storage space, domains, email, and monthly data transfers. DreamHost gives you your first .com, .net, .org, or .info domain for free, but you have to pay the registration fee for additional domains.Most competitors, including HostGator (the Editors' Choice for shared hosting), offer unlimited domains only as part of their higher-tier plans, making DreamHost particularly attractive. That said, HostGator is one of the few Web hosts that I've reviewed that offers Windows-based shared Web hosting. That's a big deal, as there are many businesses that require Microsoft's operating system to run specific software. HostGator also offers unlimited monthly data transfers, storage, and email.
VPS Web Hosting
DreamHost offers four Linux-based VPS Web hosting (starting at $15 per month) for businesses that need more power or expect higher traffic volumes. DreamHost's VPS plans offer unlimited monthly data transfers and domains, which is a nice perk. However, the base memory and storage is quite low; the $15 per month plan offers only 1GB of RAM and a 30GB solid-state drive. On the other hand, the highest configuration ($120 per month) maxes out at 8GB of RAM and 240GB of solid-state storage.Still, Hostwinds, PCMag's top pick for VPS hosting, has wallet-friendly, well-rounded VPS offerings that start at $7.50 per month for 1GB of RAM, 25GB of disk space, unlimited monthly data transfers, and unlimited email. Hostwinds plans scale to $129 per month for 18.5GB of RAM, 130GB of disk space, unlimited monthly data transfers, and unlimited email. Note: DreamHost lacks Windows-based VPS servers.
Dedicated Web Hosting
Dedicated server options (starting at $169 per month) on DreamHost aren't radically different from what many competing Web hosting services offer—you get 1TB of storage and can configure the servers with up to 16GB of RAM—but you get a highly desired feature: unlimited data transfers per month.Unfortunately, DreamHost lacks Windows-based dedicated servers; it's Linux or bust. If you want a build a website using Microsoft's operating system as the foundation, I suggest checking out Arvixe, PCMag's Editors' Choice for dedicated Web hosting, which offers Linux and Windows dedicated server options.
Dream Delayed
Signing up for DreamHost to build a test site was straightforward, but I was surprised that I couldn't get started right away. A banner message across the top of the account screen stated that DreamHost would contact me when my account was ready. I was perplexed that I had to wait about five hours before receiving an email confirming that my account had been setup and I could get started. Considering that most services, including Network Solutions and GoDaddy, let you start immediately, five hours is a long time to wait. Fortunately, it's a one-time thing.I like DreamHost's user interface—it's simple and well laid out and made getting started on my test site easy. 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 the settings for VPS and dedicated servers. I had no trouble finding the security options or the third-party app marketplace. What I couldn't find was a website builder. DreamHost doesn't offer one.
HostGator, Hostwinds, and even the overly simplistic One.com all offer some kind of website builder, so it is a little surprising that DreamHost doesn't, despite all its other advanced features. You have to create your site elsewhere and use FTP to upload it to your DreamHost account. At least the upload process is easy.
You have the option of installing third-party applications to your account such as MediaWiki, concrete5, GetSimple, Joomla, MODx Evolution, Pligg, Textpattern, and, of course, WordPress, to build your website. Piwigo is an available photo gallery application and Omeka is a Web-publishing platform for museums, galleries, and archive collections. So there are some options for building a site, but it's not like getting started with Weebly or most other website builders.
Once you have a site, however, you can use the Mobile Site Builder under the Domain menu to create a mobile-optimized site. That's a nice option.
WordPress Web Hosting
Like several of its competitors, DreamHost offers WordPress hosting, known here as DreamPress 2 (starting at $19.95 per month). In fact, DreamPress is managed WordPress hosting, a service that gives your website the white-glove treatment by auto-updating the popular content management system software, performing automatic daily backups, and providing WordPress-specific security. The single-tier DreamPress also comes with 30GB of storage, unlimited email, and monthly data transfers, as well as a variety of free WordPress themes.DreamPress 2 lets you install any plug-in that you desire; Pagely and WP Engine, on the other hand, restrict you from installing a small number of plug-ins that may impact your site's performance.
If you want to experience truly excellent WordPress hosting, however, check out 1&1, the PCMag Editors' Choice in the category. This Web host boasts a managed WordPress plan with unlimited email, unlimited storage, automatic malware detection and removal, automatic WordPress updates, and a curated list of recommended WordPress plug-ins and themes. It's great.
E-Marketing and E-Commerce
DreamHost offers the 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 that you have for sale.Along a $100 Google AdWords credit, DreamHost lets you track site traffic and analytics via Chartbeat. This is different from most other services, which tend to focus only on Google Analytics.
Security and Other Features
DreamHost offers antispam on its email, but no antimalware services. However, I like its attention to other aspects of website security. The control panel has an easy-to-find link for editing the .htaccess file to control access to the site or to set up a password. For parts of the site that shouldn't get 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. You will have to set up your own SSL certificates, though. Again, DreamHost is not for beginners.If you are a developer or manage a software development team, you will like the fact that DreamHost comes with Subversion to manage your source code files. Most Web hosting providers restrict you to whatever applications are listed on its software marketplace. Version-control tools such as Subversion rarely make it onto these marketplaces, so it's nice to see the option to set up your own repository. Of course, that's assuming you don't just use Git repositories for your code.
What if you don't really want a website or a blog, but just a place to store your files? DreamHost also offers DreamObjects cloud storage plans, starting at 95 cents per month for 40GB and going up to 20TB for $299.95 per month.
Rock-Solid Uptime
Website uptime is a vital element of the Web hosting
experience. If your site goes down, clients or customers will be unable
to find you or access your products or services.
For this testing, I used a website monitoring tool to track
my DreamHost-hosted test site's uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15
minutes, the tool pings my website and sends me an email if it is unable
to contact the site for at least one minute. The data revealed that
DreamHost is incredibly stable. In fact, of the Web hosting services
I've reviewed, only a handful went down less often. You can count on
DreamHost to be a rock-solid foundation for your website.
Customer Service
DreamHost offers email and ticket-based support, as well as online chat. I didn't see a way to make a phone call, which is too bad; sometimes you just want to deal with a human being. That said, the chat support is quite good. I tried it on a weekday afternoon and evening. In both instances, I waited less than a minute before someone fielded my questions.I asked about the differences between VPS and dedicated hosting. The representative gave me a thorough, satisfying answer. I also asked the representative how to import my WordPress.com setup into DreamHost and received a very helpful link with step-by-step instructions. Again, I was quite pleased.
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