Dreamhost Review

Founded by friends Michael Rodriguez, Dallas Bethune, Sage Weil and Josh Jones (while they were still undergraduates) in 1997 in Claremont, California, Dreamhost is one of the oldest hosting companies in existence. The company was originally registered as New Dream Network LLC. In the present day, Dreamhost hosts over 1.5 million websites and WordPress blogs and applications for small businesses, designers and developers, and the customer count has risen above 400,000!

The company has over 200 employees, multiple data centers and a number of products and services such as DreamCompute (cloud computing service), DreamPress (Dreamhost is one of the few hosts recommended by WordPress) and DreamObjects. The company also offers 4 types of web servers that the customers can use to host their websites such as Dreamhost VPS, shared, dedicated and cloud.

Dreamhost has stood hand-in-hand with the development of OpenStack, committing financial backing, community leadership and code to the project and is an OpenStack Foundation Gold Member. Consequently, they also spun off InkTank (which has now been acquired by RedHat) and Akanda (a separate company), both open source projects. In 2017, Dreamhost won a challenge against the United States Department of Justice, who was asking for personally identifiable data and IP addresses belonging to DisruptJ20, a blog that helped organize anti-Trump protests.

In this review of  Dreamhost web hosting, we will see if the company lives up to all the hype.

Customer Support

Dreamhost offers many support options that includes trained staff that is available 24/7 to its customers. Existing customers can raise a ticket request through their control panel, or they can use a form available on the website.

Live Chat

Dreamhost has a chat functionality, but unfortunately, it is only available to existing customers and mostly available when their ticket system is not available. The chat functionality is available perpetually to paying customers and they claim that no problem is too basic or too complex.

Phone Support

Dreamhost offers phone support, but the catch you yourself cannot call them up unless they offer a call back. And this option is available for a small fee. They do not display a telephone number on their website unlike a few other hosting companies.

Forum

Dreamhost has an excellent customer forum where you can virtually find solution to almost any problem you may come across. The forum has been in use for many years and is well maintained and active. Quite a lot of users are experts in their fields and are quick to respond to queries.

Twitter

They are 0n Twitter, and have on the platform. Existing customers who are in a hurry to get answers to their queries can use this platform for quick and timely responses.

Key Features

Dreamhost’s features just go on to say that even after being so many years in business, the hosting provider is still keen to prove that it is among the best. Let’s take a look at the feature set:

100% Uptime Guarantee

This is one of the most important feature if uptime is what you seek and the company guarantees it. Their terms of service states that failure to provide a 100% uptime will result in customer compensation of one day of service for each hour the service is down.

Remixer

The “remixer” is an easy-to-use website building tool that does not require the user to have any coding skills. It is great for those who are just getting into website building.

Money Back Guarantee

Dreamhost offers a full refund on shared hosting plans if you cancel your plan within the first 97 days of opening your account. This is one of their selling points and one of the longest guarantee periods you will find with any hosting company.

Independently Owned

Dreamhost has remained privately owned since its inception, so that means their core operating values have not changed and they have maintained the commitment to the community of their customers.

Support for Open Source

They have always been a big supporter of open-source software and try to provide open source solutions to their customers whenever possible.

1-Click Installer

You don’t have to look for documentation for your installations, WordPress, Joomla and other such apps are installed with the click of a button.

Pricing Plans

From a company that has been around for this long, one can expect a lot of pricing plans and Dreamhost does not disappoint. Dreamhost web hosting offers shared, VPS, dedicated and cloud hosting. It also offers shared and managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting. Let us take a look at some plans:

Shared Hosting

These plans are what you would need if you are just starting up. The company is also offering a free domain with the purchase of a yearly starter plan where a Dreamhost promo code can be applied at checkout for further discounted rates. The offer is for a 1-year registration.

All these plans come with a 100% uptime guarantee (owing to the redundant cooling, emergency generators, constant monitoring and multiple data center locations), an advanced, modern control panel (to quickly gain admin access to your website), a powerful 1-click installer, solid state drives (which are 200% faster than HDDs) and unlimited email access.

VPS Hosting

All the plans come with an easy-to-use custom control panel (you can have your site up within minutes), unlimited traffic and bandwidth, RAM and storage that is expandable (this can be done under 10 seconds), security, updates and performance that is managed, along with US-based VPS. Resources are allocated so that only your website can use them. All plans are also available on a yearly basis.

You also get automatic software updates such as security patches, the latest versions of WordPress, Ubuntu OS updates and PHP releases. You can also grant access to people you trust with unlimited SFTP. Choose between Apache or Nginx, availability of PHP7, Perl and Python, futureproof your account with unlimited number of free IPv6 addresses and you also have SSH access.

Dedicated Hosting

You get charged for only 25 days in any given month and free bandwidth and 100GB block storage are standard with these plans. For more information on prices, head here.

Cloud hosting provides you with unmatched speed (the servers are ready for SSH in less than 30 seconds thanks to next-gen processors and accelerated networks and are fully scalable any time). There are also virtually no limitations on the choice of software versions and operating systems (they can be based on MS Windows, BSD or Linux).

The DreamObjects plan is discounted for larger storage and comes with a pay-as-you-go option:

Priced at 2.5¢ per GB of storage per month, you get reliable redundant servers, S3 + Swift compatibility, free API requests and uploads, fully scalable storage and 24/7 email and chat support. What’s more is that Dreamhost is offering a 30-day free trial on this.

Security Features

Dreamhost lets you enable extra security for domains. You can find details about them in their knowledge base and we will list some of these for you:

Mod_security

By default, this is enabled for free with your account, but this can be disabled/enabled under the “extra web security” option in the control panel. It is a web application firewall that can block malicious HTTP requests such as remote file inclusion, SQL injection, cross-site scripting, brute force and remote execution.

Multifactor Authentication

This is an evasive measure for that extra layer of security for your account and helps you protect it from hackers or website hijackers. You are provided the choice of Yubikey or Google Authenticator app.

SSL Certificates

You can purchase a professionally-signed certificate for $15, or you can use an unsigned (free) certificate. You can get a complete tutorial on how to do this here. Dreamhost offers free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates as well. WildCard certificates are not supported.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

Conclusion

Dreamhost has been around for quite some time and it is apparent from their services why they are a success story. It offers great features, competitive prices and transparent hosting plans that should go a long way in running a fairly-sized website. If you are a blogger or run a WordPress site, Dreamhost would be a perfect companion for you with their tailor-made plans. On the other hand, lack of phone support and cPanel could be a deterrent to some potential customers.