DreamHost Review 2023: Expert Rated 4.6/5

What Are the Pros and Cons of DreamHost?

While DreamHost offers some of the best features in the web hosting market, such as one-click installation, unlimited data storage, and bandwidth, unlimited sites, and a 100% uptime guarantee, it does have a lot of upcharges and premium features that you have to pay extra for.

Before choosing DreamHost as your web hosting provider, consider the following pros and cons.

Custom control panel

DreamHost’s packages come with a custom, easy-to-use control panel. The layout and options in the cPanel make using DreamHost’s services more effortless. Through the control panel, you can get admin access to everything you require to run your website.

Award-winning support

With DreamHost, you’ll have a smooth time building and managing your website, even if you’re a newbie. With a robust team of tech veterans to answer your questions and resolve your issues, DreamHost can support you however and whenever you need.

DreamHost’s in-house support team is available 24/7.

One-click installer

DreamHost allows you to make attractive websites, even if you don’t know any programming. With pre-assembled apps available in DreamHost’s packages, you can create a website from scratch in just a few clicks.

100% uptime guarantee

All of DreamHost’s hosting packages provide 100% uptime with data center locations, redundant cooling, emergency generators, and consistent monitoring. Your hosting website will be available to serve traffic all the time. DreamHost guarantees 100% uptime and offers compensation for every hour of downtime.

Solid state drives (SSDs)

DreamHost provides its customers with many technologies to improve speed and response time. With the SSDs DreamHost offers, your website, caching, and database queries can run 200% faster than HDDs.

Free SSL certificate

All hosting packages at DreamHost offer a free SSL certificate that will protect your site with HTTPS by encrypting traffic and instantly boosting SEO with Google.

Additionally, DreamHost provides other privacy features that will mask and safeguard your personal information at no extra cost.

Free domain

With DreamHost, you can claim a unique, easy-to-remember address for your site. The domain name feature comes free for one year with all of DreamHost’s hosting packages.

Pre-installed WordPress

You can use DreamHost’s one-click WordPress installer to set your WordPress site up instantly. No matter the size of your business, you can easily create and manage all kinds of websites on WordPress.

Uptime and reliability

I ran several tests to check DreamHost’s uptime and reliability. According to my results, DreamHost servers had an average uptime of 99.8%over the past year. DreamHost’s all-time uptime is 99.76%, less than its competitors.

Site response times

DreamHost’s servers offer impressive site response times. I tested the site multiple times and got an average response time of 1.57s. If you use DreamHost to run your site, it’ll load quickly.

However, this is just the speed at which DreamHost’s servers respond to a web request. Your actual site’s load time will be influenced by how you build your site. With DreamHost’s cloud computing hosting packages, you can further enhance your site response times.

Managed WordPress Hosting

DreamHost also provides its customers with Managed WordPress Hosting packages. These packages offer fast, secure, and high-performance solutions that’ll help you configure and optimize your WordPress site to be stable and load quickly all the time.

SSL certificates

All of DreamHost’s packages have a free SSL certificate that authenticates a website’s identity and authorizes an encrypted connection.

SSL is an encrypted link between a web server and a web browser that’s created and followed when sharing information. It ensures that the data being transferred is not intercepted by unauthorized parties.

Other security services

Other than an SSL certificate, DreamHost provides its customers’ sites with the following security services:

• Malware remover: A tool to discover and fix malware on websites
• Free domain privacy: Protects customers’ data in the WHOIS records
• Mod_security: A web application firewall for apache that helps safeguard websites from various attacks
• HTTP/2: A standard security protocol that’s encrypted by default
• Lua-resty-waf: A high-performance, reverse proxy web application firewall (WAF) built that enhances security by redirecting all client requests to a protected backend server.

While DreamHost offers technical support 24/7 year-round, you can’t call the support team on a high-priority basis. You can, however, schedule a callback for a fee. You can also contact the support team via email, open a ticket, or live chat, so you won’t have trouble getting the help you need. No matter how you contact the support team, you will get premium quality help.

DreamHost also has an extensive knowledge base and an active forum where you can find useful information.

Compare DreamHost Alternatives

While DreamHost offers top-of-the-line web hosting services, you can look at alternatives to gauge which one best fits your requirements. I used, researched, and analyzed each web hosting service objectively to help you find the one that suits your needs the best.

See how DreamHost compares to some of the other popular hosting services recommended by the team here at Digital.com:

How I Rated DreamHost

I test web hosts based on the following factors:

• Plan value: What plans are available, and do they offer a good value?
• Ease of use: Is the dashboard easy to navigate?
• Support: How fast can you get help when needed, and is support genuinely helpful?
• Features: What features does the host offer, and how do they compare to similar competitors?
• Security: Does the host offer SSL certificates, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection, backup services, and scans for viruses and malware?
• Speed and uptime: Does the provider offer a fast, stable environment for your website? How does it perform in tests, and what kind of servers does the hosting company use?
• Recent improvements: What has the host done lately to update its technology and services?

Learn more about our review methodology.