DreamHost Review: We Found 11 Pros And 6 Cons To Signing Up

Digital.com’s Rating for DreamHost

Our Editor’s rated DreamHost 5 / 5 based on user ratings, pricing, and features offered.

DreamHost: Quick Overview

Dreamhost prides itself on being an award-winning WordPress host. Considering that Dreamhost hosts over 1.5 million sites for 400,000+ members and they’re one of only four web hosts that WordPress itself endorses, they have good reason to be proud.

Their unique relationship with WordPress, thanks to over 750,000 one-click installations, should put Dreamhost on your hosting shortlist if you’re starting a small site.

If you want to move beyond blogging, Dreamhost has features that will appeal to developers. They can launch cloud servers in 30 seconds and they support apps like Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, and Redis.

Dreamhost is also an OpenStack Foundation Gold Member. Their commitment to Open Source comes in the form of financial backing, coding contributions, and community leadership.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Dreamhost?

The bottom line: is DreamHost any good? Here’s a summary.

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What Makes DreamHost Stand Out?

Dreamhost is built for WordPress. They have been hosting WordPress websites and blogs for 20 years now providing services for over 1.5 million websites. DreamHost offers aspiring website owners a great starting place. Their shared hosting has a user-friendly interface and flexible options to fit a beginner’s needs. They offer round-the-clock support, regular updates, and valuable resources.

Optimized for performance and preconfigured for easy maintenance, DreamHost’s services ensures that every website is up and running fast and are specially designed for ideal WordPress operations. DreamHost offers a variety of platform-specific packages that make managing a WordPress site stress-free.

Dreamhost is an employee-owned company that focuses on the unique need of its users to find success online. DreamHost jumpstarted in their green hosting journey as they make a conscious effort to reduce their impact on the environment with optimized facilities and policies that put respect for natural resources at the core of what we do.

Dreamhost Hosting Types

DreamHost offers a wide range of hosting solutions tailored for e-commerce, WordPress, and other small businesses.

Shared Hosting Plans: Low-Cost Option

Shared hosting is the most affordable hosting option for most small businesses that don’t receive high levels of traffic. Shared hosting means your website is stored on a server along with other websites.

These plans are suitable for blogs, database-driven sites, personal and business sites and portfolios.

• You get one free domain name and you can host unlimited domain names.
• Unlimited bandwidth and storage.

VPS Hosting Plans

If you have a larger business, use e-commerce, are a designer or a developer, then a VPS plan might be ideal for your needs. Virtual Private Servers give the advantages of a dedicated server without the higher price tag.

• Up to 8 GB RAM
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Customized control panel
• 30 GB- 240 GB SSD storage

Dedicated Server Plans

Have a large business or get heavy traffic? You may need a dedicated server.

It can be fully managed for you and is ideal for apps and sites with a lot of traffic as well as resellers and agencies. This is the most expensive type of hosting.

Dedicated plans come with:

• Unlimited bandwidth
• 4 GB- 64 GB RAM
• Up to 2 TB HDD storage or up to 240 GB SSD storage
• Full shell and root access
• New SSDs (solid-state drives)
• A web-based control panel

Managed WordPress Hosting

WordPress is one of the most popular website builders on the web. If your small business is using WordPress, you’ll want to explore DreamHost’s WordPress plans. You can have your site fully optimized for WordPress and blogs.

WordPress specific plan features include:

• VPS hosted
• Free site migration done within 48 hours
• Automated daily and on-demand backups
• 1-click staging
• Up to 120 GB SSD (solid-state drive) storage
• A free pre-installed SSL certificate
• Automatic installation of WordPress and updates to the core.
• Able to use any WordPress plugin or theme.
• PHP versions 7.1.30 to 7.3.6 are pre-installed on Dreamhost’s servers.

Cloud Hosting

Dreamhost’s Cloud hosting is called DreamCloud.

DreamCloud is comprised of DreamCompute (public cloud computing service) and DreamObjects (scalable storage solution).

DreamCompute is much better than VPS because you can deploy and customize your cloud servers. With DreamObjects, you’ll have a completely scalable storage service for all your data and you can access it any time.

Dreamhost Plans and Prices

Dreamhost has a range of hosting solutions to choose from; shared, VPS and dedicated servers, to WordPress and cloud hosting. Here below is an overview of their plans and current price list. For the latest and most up to date prices visit DreamHost’s website.

DreamHost Hosting Plan Features

1. 100% uptime guarantee for all plans
2. SSDs (solid-state drives) on shared and VPS plans for increased speed and reliability
3. Choose unlimited domain names from over 275 extensions
4. 24/7/365 support
5. Unlimited bandwidth
6. Unlimited storage of data
7. Unlimited number of email addresses
8. Cloud storage for easier access and security
9. 1-click install for popular web apps like WordPress, Joomla! and others
10. Over 750,000 WordPress installations
11. Easy to use proprietary control panel

Is There a Money-Back Guarantee?

Yes, DreamHost offers one of the longest money-back guarantees in the hosting industry, it’s 97 days which is very generous. If you cancel within 97 days of joining, you get a refund.

However, this comes with a couple of caveats; it only applies to shared hosting and you must have bought your hosting with a credit card or used Google Checkout.

Month-to-Month Billing Option

Starting for just $4.95 a month, you can choose the monthly billing option with DreamHost. This allows you to cancel at any time (with no additional fees!) and provides the same great features as the annual plans.

If you are not able to make a large payment for the annual plans or if you aren’t sure how long you will need your site, this is a great option that not all web hosts offer.

Keep in mind, the per-month fee is higher, but it may be worth it if you need the flexibility of monthly billing.

For Small Business: E-commerce Hosting Features

If you are looking to run an e-commerce store on DreamHost, you will be delighted to see a number of useful features aimed at keeping your store fast and secure.

• Easy installation of applications such as Magento
• Free SSL Certificates via Let’s Encrypt come pre-installed
• WooCommerce integration (for users of WordPress)
• WordPress users can get a storefront pre-installed
• Server-level caching for speed
• Built-in WAF security to prevent malware attacks
• Automatic updates for security
• 24/7 customer support and technical support
• Dedicated hosting options with root access
• “Remixer” — an easy-to-use website building tool. No knowledge of code is required.

Are There Any Bonuses or Extras?

Because DreamHost has won the best hosting site twice in a row, the company is offering a 30% discount on some plans. 97-day money-back guarantee. $100 worth of credits for Google Adwords.

Limited Deal

Looking for a DreamHost coupon? Save up to 72% with our coupon code.

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How Is DreamHost’s Performance and Uptime?

Having a great-looking and informative website means nothing if it’s too slow for your visitors. Long loading times and poor performance could impact your bounce rate and bottom line negatively. Entrepreneurs and small businesses can’t afford to be offline for long so it’s worth highlighting Dreamhost’s unique 100% uptime guarantee. DreamHost has managed to deliver will there 100% uptime. They have built reliable infrastructure in place and are ready to compensate its users in case of interruption.

For their users running on modern VPS and dedicated server platforms, the Lua-resty-waf, a web application firewall for Nginx, built on OpenResty has a high-performance design that allows for the detailed processing of hundreds of thousands of requests per second. This is one of their built-in features that satisfies the demand of website owners for greater levels of performance and scalability. Every hour that your website is offline, they’ll credit you a day’s hosting service. Since Dreamhost is willing to spend its own money on downed sites, it’s a good bet that yours will stay online.

How Does DreamHost Keep Your Site Secure?

Dreamhost built a tool to help discover and fix malware found on customer websites. This security feature comes with free and opens SSL/TLS certificates by a not-for-profit certificate authority including free domain privacy.

DreamHost Multiple Layers of Privacy Protection

• Shielded Personal & Contact Information
  DreamHost’s Proxy Protection replaces their client’s contact information with their own contact information.
• Protected from Email Spam & Phishing
  Emails sent to the proxy address are automatically (and silently) forwarded to their clients’ true email addresses which remains secret.
• Shielded Personal & Contact Information
  Unwanted callers reach an automated recording advising them to contact the proxy email listed.

Does DreamHost Handle Site Backups?

DreamPress, their managed WordPress hosting solution, makes it easy to protect and restore your site with automated and on-demand backups. DreamHost helps you make changes with confidence as they automatically create a daily backup of your site, and you can also create an additional manual backup once per day.

DreamHost stores backups for up to two weeks (automatic or manual). If needed, you can restore a backup within your panel. DreamHost offers a regular, reliable backup to protect your website investment from unexpected disasters.  You can get additional  ‘Backup & Restore’  features for free with any of their DreamPress plans.

How Is DreamHost’s Help and Support?

Although support is offered 24/7/365, you can’t actually ring the DreamHost support team. However, for a fee, they offer to ring you.

Other customer support options include:

• Live chat (mainly available when there are not many support staff handling the tickets). Chat is a permanent option for customers who pay a monthly call-back fee.
• An active forum.
• Support via Twitter.
• Many of the team are WordPress experts for people needing that specific knowledge.

What Are Some Good Alternatives to DreamHost?

• SiteGround Review
• HostGator Review
• GoDaddy Review
• Bluehost Review

Try DreamHost. 97-day money-back guarantee.

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