DreamHost Reviews & Product Details

I can manage quite a lot through the dashboard -- including domains and subdomains,, email accounts, FTP site, and much more. The user interface is fairly intuitive. Above all, the price is very reasonable.

There are some things you just aren't allowed to do. I couldn't for example have multiple DNS servers. And there are occasional outages that are more than annoying if you're trying to conduct business with Dreamhost-hosted domains and email accounts.

Hosting of web sites, management of many email accounts, creation of FTP and SFTP sites.

The ease of use of setting up a mail account and getting shell access to a server

I feel like there are too many features that I don't actually need

It provides simple database and file hosting as well as me never having to configure an email server

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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Great prices, great custom control panel

Sometimes support is slow. Shared webhosting website load times are a bit average or below average.

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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’ve only used their shared hosting option. File access through FTP is slower than what I’d like, and their clusters seem to go down every couple of months or so. I scored a bunch of free credit from them a while ago when they were having major issues with the file server my account was on (it was down more than it was up for a good month or so). Customer service is actually easy to deal with, and they are surprisingly helpful. The best feature is the shell access though. For shared hosting, this is rare.

It’s a little on the pricier side (a few $ more a month compared to others). They get you to bite on the new customer deals, but once those expire you are stuck with an above-market rate.

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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.