DreamHost – They do more than Web Hosting

What is DreamHost ?

DreamHost is a Los Angeles-based web hosting provider and domain name registrar. Owned by New Dream Network LLC, founded in 1996 by Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil, undergraduates at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and incorporated by Michael Rodriguez in 1997. increase. DreamHost started hosting his sites in 1997 for his clients. In May 2012, DreamHost spun off his Inktank. Inktank is a professional services and support company for open source Ceph file systems. In November 2014, DreamHost spun off Akanda, an open-source network virtualization project . As of February 2016, Dreamhost has about 200 employees and about 400,000 customers.

DreamHost is one of those providers that you can find recommended everywhere. In fact, WordPress themselves endorses them. 

What Products Does DreamHost Offer?

Their offerings aren’t limited to shared hosting plans, so let’s take a look at other services available at DreamHost, such as dedicated servers, cloud hosting, and more.

Products provided by DreamHost :

1. Domain name
In addition to hosting packages, you can get a domain name with DreamHost. DreamHost offers over 400 TLDs (.com, .org, .net, etc.) or more exotic extensions (.club, .guru, etc.). His TLDs by country such as .es, .fr, .co.uk, .de are also available. A .com domain name renewal costs $17.99.

2. Shared hosting
This entry-level web hosting costs $6.99/month for the 1-site plan and $12.99/month for the unlimited plan – simple pricing. This type of hosting is great to start with, but if your project grows significantly (e.g. more than his 50,000 visitors per month), you may need to upgrade.

The DreamHost website also shows a hosting called “WordPress Basic”. It is divided into WordPress Starter and WordPress Unlimited, exactly the same as Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited above.

3. VPS
A Virtual Private Server (VPS plan) can be thought of as a shared hosting server divided into smaller servers. This means you can configure it however you want. Therefore, the website is hosted independently of other clients and does not share resources. VPS hosting plans at DreamHost start at $15.99/month and can go up to $114/month upon renewal.

The DreamHost website also shows a hosting called “VPS WordPress”. This is exactly the same as standard VPS hosting.

4. Dedicated hosting
However, if your website gets too big and needs its own dedicated server, you should consider getting a dedicated hosting account. be careful. They’re a little pricey: Dedicated hosting at DreamHost starts at $149/month to $279/month.

5. Cloud hosting
That’s not all. DreamHost also offers cloud hosting plans. Think of it as a series of interconnected cloud servers that host your website. This solution is ideal if you anticipate a spike in traffic, as you can add more resources (such as RAM and CPU) as needed. It’s hard to know what you’re paying because prices depend on the resources you need (RAM, storage, etc.). DreamHost cloud server plans start at $4.50/month.

6. Managed WordPress Hosting
Additionally, DreamHost plans also offer managed WordPress hosting plans. If you want automatic updates, a staging area, and dedicated WordPress support, you can choose a managed WordPress hosting account. It starts at $19.99 upon renewal (one site only). The focus of this DreamHost review is on the shared hosting plans, so we’ll refer to them from now on.

7. Dedicated web hosting
If you want to maximize your web hosting performance, you need a dedicated server. In this setup, the website exists alone on the server and uses all system resources. If your website is expected to see an incredible amount of traffic, and if your website is so mission critical that it can never go down or slow down, then you should consider dedicated hosting. I have.

DreamHost has several dedicated server options. The offering starts with the Standard 4 plan, which includes 4 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage for $169/month or $149 for an annual subscription. Rounding out the options is the Extended SSD 64 plan, which costs $379 per month and comes with 64GB of RAM and 240GB of solid-state storage.Each DreamHost Dedicated Server plan comes with unlimited data transfer.

Unfortunately, DreamHost does not have dedicated Windows-based servers. Either it’s Linux or it’s broken here too. If you’re building a website based on Microsoft’s operating system, we recommend checking out PCMag’s Editors’ Choice Dedicated Web Hosting, which offers dedicated Linux and Windows server options. AccuWeb also has powerful dedicated plans, including a $1,070/month package with 8TB of storage, 512GB of RAM, and up to 50TB of monthly data transfer.

8. Cloud hosting
You’ve probably heard of cloud hosting, which distributes resources across multiple servers (traditional hosting gets resources from a single server). Cloud hosting makes it easy for your website to increase server requirements on a case-by-case basis. Luckily, DreamHost offers 3 tiers of cloud hosting (512MB RAM server, 2GB RAM server, and 8GB RAM server) in Linux, BSD, and Windows flavors.

DreamHost has great packages starting at $4.50/month (for 512MB RAM, 80GB storage, and unlimited monthly data transfer) and ending at $48/month (4 CPU cores, 8GB RAM, 80GB storage, and unlimited monthly). I have. data transfer). As a result, DreamHost’s powerful specifications make the web host the collaborators’ choice for cloud hosting services. For corporate customers who want top-notch cloud hosting, 1&1 Ionos is the right choice. This is a collaborators pick in the category that offers incredibly powerful cloud hosting plans.

9. Reseller hosting
If you want to get into the web hosting business but don’t want to deal with infrastructure issues, reseller hosting is for you. Unfortunately, DreamHost does not offer standalone reseller plans. You can resell your server space, but only if you add other domains to your server space. For more information, visit DreamHost’s Reseller FAQ page(Opens in a new window). If you want to really dig into reseller hosting, we recommend Hostwinds, our editors’ choice for this category.Hostwind’s plans start at $3.29 per month and include unlimited email, storage, and data transfer. Dedicated and VPS packages for both Linux and Windows variants as well as shared hosting limited to Linux are offered. The servers have the same amount of RAM and storage that Hostwinds ships directly, but that’s not always the case. Hostwinds also allows you to apply your own branding to your rented servers and offers 24/7 technical support.

Pros of using DreamHost

• Affordable
  DreamHost is an affordable web hosting service. Even the best shared hosting plans are cheaper than most alternatives.
• Unlimited bandwidth and ample storage space
  All accounts come with truly unlimited bandwidth and ample storage space. Unlike others, there is no inode limit.
• Modern backend
  Your backend is very modern. For those familiar with cPanel dashboards, it may take some time to master.
• No upsells and upgrades
  Too many competitors are pushing you to buy add-ons with aggressive offers. DreamHost is a breath of fresh air.
• 97-day money-back guarantee
  DreamHost offers a money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied with the service after 97 days (yes 97) of use.

Cons of using DreamHost

• Performance
  DreamHost performed poorly in this year’s speed and uptime tests, with his 99.83% uptime being the second worst. Also, page load times weren’t impressive compared to other web hosts.
• Fewer one-click installs
  There are only automatic installations for some CMS (such as WordPress).
• US locations only
  There are no servers outside the US. These may not be suitable for users in other regions (such as Europe or Asia).

DreamHost Performance Test

Is DreamHost slow or experiencing regular service interruptions?

Before you commit the “health” of your website to a new web hosting provider, you should evaluate its performance.

Of course, I don’t think I have time to test 5 or 6 hosting providers over the course of a few weeks. To make your life easier, I recently tested DreamHost’s performance and compared it to its competitors.

DreamHost web host speed test

No one wants a website to take forever to load. This can hurt your user engagement metrics (like conversion rate) and ruin your organic (search engine) rankings. And, of course, a fast hosting company is a fundamental factor in making your website load faster.

Unfortunately, DreamHost did particularly poorly in his web host speed tests this year compared to its competitors:

Security and other features

DreamHost provides email spam protection, but does not provide anti-malware services. I like the attention given to other aspects of website security apart from this page. The control panel has easy-to-find links for editing .htaccess files to control access to your site, set passwords, and more. You can block spiders on parts of your website that shouldn’t be indexed by search engines. You can set up cron jobs (automated batch jobs) to schedule tasks and monitor processes on your website. DreamHost also offers a free Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate which is mandatory for anyone selling products online.

If you’re a developer or software development team leader, you’ll love the fact that DreamHost comes with his Subversion to help you manage your source code files. Most web hosting providers restrict you to all applications listed on their software marketplace. Version control tools like Subversion rarely show up in these marketplaces, so being able to set up your own repository is great.

Dreamhost Review:

Yes, we recommend DreamHost.

In fact, Tooltester uses Dreamhost for apptooltester.com on the DreamPress plan because it’s a WordPress website. Overall, our experience was really positive with only one minor issue. I preordered DreamShield, a security add-on that protects you from malware. Nevertheless, we were hacked! A spammy link was inserted into the navigation menu, which was only visible on the mobile version of the site. To my disappointment, DreamShield didn’t protect us from that. However, to be fair, it’s the malware detection systems that are unlikely to work in this type of attack.

Dreamhost is a good option for many people. Fair pricing, solid support, and a very generous unlimited policy (disk space and bandwidth) are very attractive perks. They’re a particularly good option for WordPress users looking for good value for money, and in fact, we found them to be the cheapest WordPress hosting in our testing.