Bluehost vs. Dreamhost

Updated


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Bluehost and Dreamhost are two great web hosting platforms, both of which ranked highly on our list of the best web hosting services.

Bluehost has more options and a lower first-year price than DreamHost but a higher renewal price. DreamHost has a monthly plan and a cheaper ongoing cost than Bluehost. Both have 24/7 ticket support, but Bluehost also has live chat support. Bluehost has a higher uptime average than DreamHost, while DreamHost has more customer complaints of outages.

Which host should you get? Let this Bluehost vs. Dreamhost face-off help you make that decision.

Bluehost logo

Bluehost

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Starts at $2.95 per month

  • Shared
  • WordPress
  • WooCommerce
  • VPS
  • Dedicated

Basic Plan Features

  • 1 website
  • 10 GB SSD storage
  • Custom WP themes
  • Free domain for 1 year
  • Free SSL certificate

Best for: Local small businesses, entrepreneurs, e-commerce, and personal website builders

Dreamhost logo

Dreamhost

Read Full Review

Starts at $2.95 per month

  • Shared
  • WordPress
  • WooCommerce
  • VPS
  • Cloud
  • Dedicated

Basic Plan Features

  • 1 website
  • SSD storage
  • Unlimited traffic
  • Free domain for 1 year
  • Free SSL certificate

Best for: Small businesses to large e-commerce websites

Our bottom line: While Dreamhost is never very far behind, Bluehost has the edge on almost every metric and easily takes the win.

Learn how we evaluated Bluehost vs. Dreamhost, and check out our top-rated web hosting services below:

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Hostinger

The easiest option

Starts at $2.49 per month

  • Fail-proof setup
  • Great for beginners
  • Free AI tools

Bluehost

For new WordPress sites

Starts at $2.95 per month

  • Guided onboarding
  • Recommended by WordPress
  • 24/7 support

HostGator

Best security and scalability

Starts at $3.75 per month

  • All types of hosting
  • Enhanced security tools
  • Affordable as you grow

Plans & Pricing

At first glance, Bluehost and Dreamhost seem to cost the same amount per month for a starter plan with both coming in at $2.95 per month. However, both prices increase after the initial promotional period. Bluehost’s basic plan reverts to its regular price of $11.99 per month once the promo is up, and Dreamhost reverts to $6.99 or $12.99 depending on the starter plan you choose.

If you’re looking for ecommerce hosting, Bluehost’s hosting plans for online stores start at just $6.75 per month, whereas DreamHost is nearly double the price. Both share similar features like free domain, free CDN, and free SSL, but Bluehost’s basic plan customers will also get custom WP themes to get started.

While they’re both great services at a great rate, I prefer Bluehost’s pricing and various plans.

Winner: Bluehost wins plans and pricing by offering more plans at rates that are more stable.

Features

Both Bluehost and Dreamhost offer similar features such as free domain, SSD storage space for a single website, SSL certificates, and unlimited bandwidth. They also have their servers in the US, with average speed for Dreamhost at 231ms and Bluehost at 361ms . Dreamhost offers Cloud Dedicated hosting while Bluehost supports WooCommerce and dedicated hosting.

Bluehost CPanel screenshot

However, only Bluehost offers a free professional email for your marketing. At the end of the day, Bluehost offers more bang for your buck.

Winner: Bluehost offers users more features even at the starter and basic plan levels.

Performance and Uptime

Both Bluehost and Dreamhost have a similar uptime rate of around 99.8%, which is pretty standard for the industry. Bluehost servers had an average uptime of 99.854% over the past 30 days, while DreamHost servers had an average uptime of 99.8% over the past year.

DreamHost’s uptime and reliability

Bluehost wins this comparison for the simple fact that Dreamhost offers customers a 100% uptime guarantee and don’t deliver on this guarantee, being up 99.8% of the time. However, the guarantee ensures you’re compensated for any downtime through a rebate on the billing cycle.

Winner: Bluehost wins by not offering an uptime guarantee that they can’t, well, guarantee.

Security

Bluehost and Dreamhost offer similar security features such as free SSL certificates. DreamHost offers DreamShield for $3 a month while Bluehost offers SiteLock ranges from $6.99 a month to $29.99.

However, Dreamhost also offers a bunch of other great security features to keep your website secure which are included at every plan level, including A high-performance, reverse proxy web application firewall, HTTP/2, A standard security protocol that’s encrypted by default, and Mod_security, A web application firewall for apache that helps safeguard websites from various attacks.

Your site is in good hands with Dreamhost.

Winner: Dreamhost has a lot more security features enabled by default and even the premium security features are less expensive.

Support

While Bluehost has been dominating these matchups pretty handily up to this point, support is where both Bluehost and Dreamhost drop the ball a bit. 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. Other support options are available for free, but paying to have a call returned left a bad taste in my mouth.

Overall, Bluehost’s support seemed good. However, its support chatbot made it difficult to reach a live person, and when I finally got into the queue for a support representative, it took a long time for a support rep to come online to help. In one instance, it took almost an hour over two chat sessions before I could connect to a support technician.

They could both use some work in the support department, but Bluehost was a little more responsive than Dreamhost and won yet another category.

Winner: Bluehost wins, but only barely — reaching a rep via live chat worked and they were responsive, but, it could be a lot better.

Recent Improvements

Of course, Bluehost and Dreamhost put a lot of work into keeping the services they provide competitive and up-to-date. Both have deployed a bevy of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements over the years and are clearly committed to giving customers as good of an experience as possible.

However, I was particularly impressed with some of Bluehost’s recent improvements such as the launch of Bluehost WordPress Academy, a set of online tutorials to help new users get the hang of how to host and build a website on WordPress.

This isn’t to say that Dreamhost isn’t also doing a lot of work behind the scenes, I just found Bluehost’s improvements to be more helpful overall.

Winner: While it’s close, Bluehost pulls ahead for a win in the final category.

Final Thoughts

Bluehost and Dreamhost are both popular web hosting providers that offer similar features such as free domain, SSD storage space for a single website, SSL certificates, and unlimited bandwidth. They both also have their servers in the US, with average speed for Dreamhost at 231ms and Bluehost at 361ms.

Although DreamHost offers a great balance of server performance, dedication to security and privacy, and 100% guaranteed uptime, Bluehost is the web host that we would highly recommend to most.

Ultimately, whichever hosting solution you choose depends heavily on your needs and preferences — you can’t really go wrong with either.

Bluehost logo

Bluehost

Read Full Review

Best for: Local small businesses, entrepreneurs, e-commerce, and personal website builders

Dreamhost logo

Dreamhost

Read Full Review

Best for: Small businesses to large e-commerce websites

Hosting Packages

  • Shared
  • WordPress
  • WooCommerce
  • VPS
  • Dedicated
  • Shared
  • WordPress
  • WooCommerce
  • VPS
  • Cloud
  • Dedicated

Basic Plan Features

  • 1 website
  • 10 GB SSD storage
  • Custom themes
  • Free domain for 1 year
  • Free SSL certificate
  • 1 website
  • SSD storage
  • Unlimited traffic
  • Free domain for 1 year
  • Free SSL certificate

Plans & Pricing

Starts at $2.95 per month

Starts at $2.95 per month

Features

  • Technology to support fast page load times
  • Free Cloudflare integration
  • Advanced security options
  • 100% uptime guarantee
  • SSDs
  • Free SSL certificate and domain

Performance & Uptime

No uptime guarantee, but testing shows 99.9% uptime

100% uptime guarantee

Security

  • Free SSL certificate
  • RAID 1 storage
  • 24/7 network monitoring
  • Daily SiteLock scan for all plans above basic
  • Free SSL certificate
  • Malware remover
  • Free domain privacy
  • Mod_security
  • HTTP/2
  • Lua-resty-waf

Support

  • 24/7 chat support
  • 24/7 phone support
  • Help center
  • 24/7 support via email, help ticket, or live chat
  • Help center
  • Community forum

Recent Improvements

  • Bluehost WordPress Academy
  • Partnering with Yoast
  • New website design tools
  • Maestro to manage multiple sites
  • Dreamhost Academy
  • Better website management
  • Full Spanish language support
  • Upgraded web servers

How We Evaluated Bluehost vs. 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.

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