Dreamhost is an award-winning WordPress host that hosts more than 1.5 million sites for 400,000+ members. They’re recognized for being one of only four web hosts that WordPress endorses, which the company credits to their straightforward one-click installation process. The platform is capable of launching cloud servers quickly and supports a range of apps including Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, and Redis.
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based, Desktop Chromebook, Desktop Linux, Desktop Mac, Desktop Windows, Mobile Android, Mobile iPad, Mobile iPhone |
Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
I used it a few years ago, and even though it was a bit more expensive than their competitors they had so many good features for its value. I would describe it as the best hosting provider if using Wordpress or PHP. They have lots of one-click installation programs, and you don't really need much knowledge to install any popular script. I love unlimited aditional domains, subdomains, SQL databases, bandwidth and disk-space. What else can you ask for? Finally, and as far as I know they provide 100% up-time guaranteed in their hosting, which is rare, but it is amazing for this price.
When talking about Virtual Private Servers, I would definitely go for other service provider. I think they should be a bit cheaper. Let us be honest, right now if I had to hire a webpage server, I would go for a NodeJs, Django or Ruby On Rails solution. I guess their interface could be better, it is true, you can customize lots of things, but I feel a bit lost when playing around.
I had to host the typical university association webpage, so after studying all posibilities I decided to for this hosting service. The experience was great, I remember we hosted linux images, the webpage, some other personal files, photos, and I do not remember any problem during the whole experience.
Dreamhost's control panel allows you to customize and make changes for almost anything you ever need including handling domain records, web server configuration, etc. The customer service is excellent too, usually responding to major issues in a short amount of time without needing any kind of extra cost contract for quick responses.
The control panel looks archaic, it could use a little more redesign, maybe some options to hide advanced configuration for users that don't need to see everything. The monthly pricing for various services is good, but I think it could be lower these days with how much competition there is.
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Dreamhost is a pretty solid "classic" web host (by that I mean: Apache2, PHP, MySQL, FTP server). They give essentially unlimited space and bandwidth, and I've never noticed downtime (though I admittedly don't monitor it regularly). Now that most of my hosting needs are for dynamic apps not built with PHP, I largely use Dreamhost for registering and maintaining domain names and hosting custom-domain email addresses. This is easy and inexpensive with Dreamhost.
It's not the cheapest; I'm in the process of transitioning to different services (such as Github pages) for static files, and services like DigitalOcean for dynamic hosting.
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I love that I can keep everything in one place--domains, hosting, database management, etc. DreamHost's one-click installs are amazing. DreamHost provides free shared hosting and one free domain name to non-profits. DreamHost supports the new free Let's Encrypt ssl certificate authority. Generally speaking, DreamHost support is very good.
Setting things up in DreamHost can be tricky sometimes. Also, once I asked support to delete one of my virtual machines, and they deleted the wrong one. That was a really bad mistake.
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Their dashboard is completely custom and not cluttered like other systems like cPanel. Their navigation makes sense and generally allows easy customization for whatever I need with my shared hosting plan. You can enable specific IP(s) to connect directly with your (shared) MySQL database server. This is very useful for external applications and/or using your own database administration utility; large backups or restores, etc. You're allowed UNLIMITED sub-domains on any of your hosted domains. This is very useful for logical segmentation of your web application. Or binding a sub-domain like 'svn.yourdomain.com' to a freely hosted subversion repository. Which, is another great feature for anyone wanting their own private revision control system. Cron jobs are fully supported. Fair warning: it requires a little knowledge with Linux file system, being that everything is hosted in a Linux environment. It's not that difficult to figure out once you have something up and running. However, if you're getting nowhere fast, they do have a decent and somewhat consistently updated wiki that gives you basic instructions on how to setup virtually anything in your account. There is also a decent status dashboard page you can use to monitor degraded services or subscribe to their twitter support account for updates.
Whenever you setup a database host name, they force an instance of phpMyAdmin to load if a connection is established on port 80[/443]. This may be desirable for some novice users, but I see it as a serious security risk. This basically invites hackers to attempt a brute force attack on the ENTIRE shared MySQL database server(s). Sometimes settings are not fully applied to your account if you're making rapid changes to similar services. This may require hitting Save on some settings, again. This can be a pain when you're not sure if the changes not taking affect are because of a misconfiguration on your part or because of the aforementioned. Despite being on a shared hosting plan, service can still be somewhat slow. Response times are pretty quick, but overall system resources on the server processing any of my PHP scripts seems constantly taxed. So, it would seem that their could be more policing of other users that may be abusing shared resources.
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I started using DreamHost early on and found them reliable and good customer service.
I've found that site speeds lag a little behind the industry norm.
I use DreamHost's shared hosting to host a number of websites affordably.
I love their affordable pricing. You can host unlimited amounts of domains for about ten dollars a month. With that you have unlimited memory so you load as much information as you want. You also have unlimited email for your employees etc.
I dislike the fact that you can't talk directly to a person, you have to email them your problems. Instead of it taking minutes to walk through you have to go back and forth, they usually respond within 24 hours but still it can be annoying. Also sometimes the email service doesn't work, so you will get blips of no service.
Unlimited website hosting for ten bucks a month, when I tell people how cheap it is for me to hosts all my website they find it hard to be believe, they usually think hosting has to be super expensive and also that they have to pay individually for each site, but you dont.
Dreamhost is an excellent place to start out in terms of hosting when you're pretty new to it. Their customer support in general (as well as response time) has gotten much better - I remember it severely lacking years ago. If you're an average Joe looking for a quick one-click install with nothing too fancy, Dreamhost is an excellent option for you. It's also simple enough to figure out if you don't have that much experience with hosting. Their customer service has stepped up their game as well should you need the help.
I had issues with the shared hosting in terms of speed, downtime and other people in the same cluster getting DDoSed which ended up making me switch for a little while years ago. They seem to have fixed all of those issues more recently though, so I would take that comment with a grain of salt.
Dreamhost was my host for a long time and they have definitely stepped up their game since ~2008. They've been a good host for the smaller sites I manage.
I liked the fast support I received when having some difficulties during our rush time in verge of releasing a game that would connect to our php back-end
I disliked the user interface they had at the time and the troublesome way for handling payments
I'm developing games and we were working on a client-server game when we were using the service
I have used a few different hosting providers and Dreamhost is a decent option. They offer good domain registration and hosting. It is nice to be able to do both in the same place if possible, and their system makes it easy enough to do just that. Their control panel is easier to use than some providers, but it can still be a little complicated at times.
I personally like buying domains from GoDaddy or Network Solutions and I'm currently using BlueHost to host my domains. While there are pros and cons to each, that's just the setup I have going right now.
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Installing is easy. Getting support is easy. One-click apps are great to have, but when you don't know what to do with them they become kind of uncool, but I got all the support I needed from their team as well as their online wiki. I've been using their basic services to host a small startup company and we do get all we need at a very low price
Email is not their best feature, they really have to get that part working better. Sometimes my emails won't get to people, or go to the spam folder automatically. Also the interfaces they provide are not cool.
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I like the different hosting plans that they offer, there is multiple tiers depending on your needs and your expect web traffic bandwidth. Also if you are pretty comfortable with coding dreamhost makes it easy for your change the coding for your websites.
If you are somewhat new to websites then it can be a hinderance, when I try to get other people to modify the site on my behalf there is a lot of confusion as opposed to other hosting sites like Blue Host where is it super user friendly. And my main issue with them is you can't reach customer service by phone. They have chat but only during limited hours and email. If you get disconnected mid chat you'll have to explain what happened sometimes all over again.
Dreamhost has great packages and this definitely fit out needs when it came to hosting needs. All of our sites are running smoothly after a couple kinks that had been worked out and we haven't had issues since. So we are enjoying the speed of their hosting sites.
Very extensive control panel, with one-click-installs, shell access and multiple ftp users. While still shared hosting, the fine-grained access on several levels at once, made it very flexible in multiple scenarios. Practically unlimited bandwidth and web space and databases. Very generous storage and usage restrictions. Cheap price (at the time), including one domain name. So good value-for money.
Extensive control made the control panel very complex and detailed. Often had to look around to find what I needed and when changes occured, it wasn't always clear how to get to certain sections. I could literally get lost in the control panel at times. Speed issues: Hosting a Drupal site with the majority of users from EU showed that page load times were considerable. I learned that it might be due to quite DB-intensive nature of Drupal and the fact the DB and web pages were running on different machines. But since the DB and site were fairly small, this was concerning me, as it would hold-down possible growth.
Me and my brother have shared a Dreamhost package for a while. He used it for his website development business and I had my personal domain and a few smaller sites. While the functionality was extensive with good control, for a low price, I had problems with Drupal hosting and especially website response time. Eventually, we stopped the account and moved to a local hosting company, which is somewhat more restrictive in storage and bandwidth, but which helped us and had a more usable speed here in EU.
When I used Dreamhost, I just migrated from GoDaddy and purchased hosting for a year for $20. Dreamhost at the time provided a good incentive with that particular sale, considering the amount of GB space that came with the hosting plan.
My dislike was the extreme prices Dreamhost set for the upcoming year when I still hosted my website with them. I felt that I could get more storage for a fairer price elsewhere and ended up choosing Bluehost. Dreamhost also did not have the best customer service response or user interface for their FTP.
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Straight forward integration for Wordpress site hosting.
Not great for keeping emails synced across devices, or for simple things like deleting emails from a phone.
Hosting for website and email