Jimmy ParkerDreamHost
DreamHost is an excellent web hosting company with a wide range of features to choose from to suit your needs. It offers reliable web hosting plans, fast loading times, and a wide range of support options to make sure your website runs smoothly. It also offers a variety of tools and features to make website design and maintenance easy.
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Pros
- 100% Uptime Guaranteed
- Fast loading times
- Reliable hosting plans
- Wide range of support options
- Affordable prices
- 97-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Cons
- Renewal rates are a bit higher
DreamHost is an excellent host! We really like the simplicity of their offerings, the epic 97-days money back guarantee, and the great support.
They also have a very transparant pricing system with no price jump when you renew. And for WordPress fan, their DreamPress product is incredibly good and will make your WordPress site run super smooth. While some might not like the fact that they’re using their own control pane, and not cPanel, it’s actually quite intuitive and worth a try.
We would like to see free migrations instead of having to pay for it, but then again, compared to other affordable hosts that increase prices on renewals, this is a way better option in the long run. DreamHost gets a big thumbs up from us!
Table of Contents
About DreamHost
If you’re looking for a long-standing, reputable web hosting provider, DreamHost can be one of your options. It was founded in 1996 but actually begun its operations in 1997. It is, therefore, going on for more than 20 years now (and counting).
As a US-based company, it currently has 3 offices located at Los Angeles and Brea (both in California) and one in Portland, Oregon.
Owned by New Dream Network, LLC, DreamHost is also a registrar for domain names. You can, therefore, use their services alone to create your website (you basically need a domain name and hosting provider to put up a site).
Should you decide to pick DreamHost as your web host, you’ll be among their hundreds of thousands of customers (they have over 400,000 customers to date). Their current number of sites (now more than 1.5 million) is also growing every day.
Pricing
DreamHost has a really simple pricing system. In fact, while most hosting companies offer 3 options, they only have two.
1. Shared Starter
Pay upfront for 3 years and your monthly charges will only be equivalent to $2.59 per month. You can also opt to pay yearly and your monthly charges will amount to $3.95 per month. Of course, you can also choose to pay monthly – and pay $$4.95 per month.
You’ll be given a free domain for the first year when you go for their annual or triennial plan. Yes, you’ll need to pay for the renewal fees every year after the first year. Now, if you’re paying monthly and don’t have your own domain name, you can buy one from them for $9.99 per year (their price for .com extension).
With DreamHost’s Shared Starter plan, you’re only allowed to have one website on your account. Note, however, that you’ll get unlimited SSD storage, bandwidth and MySQL databases with this package.
You’ll also get these with the plan:
- Pre-installed WordPress
- Free SSL certificate
- Free domain privacy
- 1-click installer (for WordPress and other popular CMS platforms)
Their Shared Starter pack is intended for new websites as well as old business sites that want to transfer to their hosting plans.
2. Shared Unlimited
As with their cheapest plan (the one above), you also get the most savings when you decide to pay for 3 years – your monthly rate will only be $3.95 per month. You’ll also save on their yearly plans with this package as your monthly bill will only be equivalent to $6.95 per month.
As with the previous plan, you’ll also be provided with 1 free domain name when you pay for 1 year or 3 years (valid only for the first year, as you’ll need to pay for yearly renewals from the second year onwards). Also, if you’re paying monthly and don’t have a domain yet, you can purchase one (or more) for $9.95 per year (price for .com domain extension).
DreamHost’s Shared Unlimited plan comes with unlimited websites, SSD storage, bandwidth, and MySQL databases. One of their main difference with the Shared Starter plan is that you can host an unlimited number of websites with this package.
Plus, you’ll also get the following:
- Pre-installed WordPress
- Free SSL certificate
- Free domain privacy
- 1-click installer for WordPress (and other CMS platforms)
As you can already tell, this plan is suitable for hosting 2 or more websites. It also has the power to run small businesses and online shops.
Note that DreamHost is giving you a choice between 2 very flexible options. Both their plans also come with 97-day money-back guarantees – however, the said guarantee is only applicable to credit card payments.
Oh, and here’s our favorite – they’re giving their customers a one-of-a-kind 100% uptime guarantee (and you thought 99.9% is great, huh?). It works by giving you back a 1-day free hosting service for every 1 hour of downtime experienced on your site. Just keep in mind that you’ll need to report your site’s downtime/s for these to be counted. Also, your total compensation is capped at a maximum of 10% of your hosting payment. Still, that’s good enough for us, right?
And remember, you want to stay online all the time – refunds and compensations are simply there to not make you angry. But don’t worry, you barely need to worry about downtimes with DreamHost anyway. They have the following measures to make sure that all the sites they’re hosting are always online (and refunds/ compensations are not really good for business, and they want to avoid that):
- Datacenter locations in different parts of the US
- Cooling systems
- Emergency generators
- 24/7 monitoring of their facilities
- Support team
Support
DreamHost has customer support available 24/7 through different avenues. First of all, they have an extensive knowledge base of articles on their site. These are constantly updated to stay relevant and helpful. And FAQs can be easily searched on their pages.
They also have a ticketing system – and this is their main avenue for providing help and support to their clients. Aside from e-mail, you can also send them a ticket through their control panel. They also have a form that you can use right on their website.
Their live chat is, of course, very helpful if you want instant answers. DreamHost people are very friendly and knowledgeable once you reach them. Just don’t expect them to be available 24/7 as they have a limited live chat feature. You can contact them via live chat only from 5:30 AM to 9:30 PM PT (and this feature is only available to their customers).
DreamHost’s phone support is optional. It comes in the form of callbacks – and it’s something that you need to pay for if you want the said option.
So, yes, you can surely reach DreamHost’s support team 24/7 – if not by live chat, through e-mail. They’ll surely get back to you at the soonest time possible.
Pros
1. 100% uptime guarantee
We already told you that this is one of our favorite features from DreamHost as they’ll really strive to keep your site online 24/7/365. While they’ll surely work hard to keep on their promise (so as not to be liable for refunds), you should also do your part by monitoring your site of downtimes and reporting these accordingly.
2. Speed is good
DreamHost has data centers in different locations of the US and they’re monitored round the clock (which is great people looking for hosts for the USA or web hosting services for Canada, though the servers are powerful enough to easily service other countries around the world like the United Kingdom, Singapore or Malaysia). They also use SSD servers which are way faster than the standard HDD ones. You can expect fast-loading pages when you choose DreamHost as your hosting provider.
3. Generous money-back guarantee
While other hosting companies are offering 45 and 30-day money-back guarantees, DreamHost is giving its customers 97 days to fully test their services and see if they really REALLY like it. Just note that you can only get a refund (within 97 days) if you paid through a credit card (and not through their other payment options). Also, note that payments for third-party services like SSL certificates, domain names, etc. are non-refundable.
4. Lots of payment options
While DreamHost’s money-back guarantees only apply to credit card payments, we can’t help but like the fact that they have a lot of payment methods to choose from. Aside from using your credit card, you can also pay through PayPal, money order, and checking account. Everyone has at least one of those and can get their hosting services from DreamHost, you see.
5. Built-in website builder
DreamHost has its own website builder called Remixer. You, therefore, have the option to use this feature if you have absolutely zero knowledge on creating a website. It’s really the fastest way to put up a site because it uses artificial intelligence that does everything for you.
6. Lots of unlimited features
Their cheapest plan, which will only cost you $2.95 per month (if you’re paying for 3 years), already comes with unlimited storage and bandwidth among others. It doesn’t cost this cheap to get unlimited anything with other hosting companies, you know.
7. They’re super green
We don’t know about you, but we’re quite conscious about the current state of our environment. And so, we appreciate the fact that DreamHost is eco-friendly (not many hosting providers are, at this point). They have clean wind features, renewable energy programs, and energy-efficient facilities as well.
8. Clear and transparent pricing system
Just look at their pricing page and you’ll see that they have everything there for you – yes, they’re very transparent with their prices (be it monthly, yearly, or triennially). And you’ll know exactly what you’ll get with each plan and payment method. Of course, you’ll get the biggest savings from their 3-year plan as the low price is your incentive for paying them in advance.
9. No price increase on renewals
Still on their pricing system, we’d like to confirm that they’re not increasing their prices when you renew your plan. You might find this hard to believe, that’s why we’re confirming it (lol). We know that other hosting providers double or triple their renewal fees once they get you with their very low introductory prices – but DreamHost doesn’t do this. Their plans are always the same when you decide to renew – so you can always get their 3-year plan and pay as low as $2.95 per month for many years.
Cons
1. Customer service is not perfect
While DreamHost has a good customer service overall, know that they’re not perfect in this area. In fact, we can say that their 24/7 commitment may not be really the 24/7 that we expect. Sure, you can contact them anytime via e-mail and live chat but their response time will depend on the availability of their people support.
2. No cPanel
DreamHost is one of those hosting providers that have their own panel for accessing site features. We really don’t think that this can be a big deal for first-timers who don’t have experiences with standard cPanels – but for advanced users, it can take some getting used to.
Not having a cPanel can also prove to be troublesome if you want to migrate your site from another hosting provider. To be able to accomplish said task, you will need to manually transfer your site content and files via FTP and SQL databases.
3. No free site migration
As previously mentioned, you’ll need to manually migrate your site from your previous hosting provider to DreamHost (should you decide to go with them). This can be very hard and time-consuming even if you’re an advanced user. The only time that they’ll help you with the migration process is if you pay a one-time fee of $99 (per site). So, if you’re getting their Shared Unlimited plan to transfer 2 or more of your websites from another hosting company, it will cost you $99 per site just for the migration alone. Keep in mind that other hosting providers are offering this service for free (for at least 1 website migration). Also, for WordPress websites, you’ll need to reinstall your site’s themes and plugins.
Conclusion
All in all, we like DreamHost and it’s one of our highly recommended web hosting providers. It comes with very powerful shared hosting packages – and even their cheapest plan already comes with unlimited storage and bandwidth.
Looking at the pros and cons, it’s quite obvious that their pros greatly outweigh their cons – after all, no hosting company is perfect. In fact, DreamHost is almost perfect with just a few cons. Their worst con is their migration policy, but know that they do provide extensive documentation on how to do this on your own.
We’re more excited about the pros we listed above as some of their best features are not even offered by more popular hosting companies. They have a guaranteed uptime of 100% and their site speed and page-loading times are remarkably fast (good for SEO and customer experience).
Their prices are also noteworthy. Their plans are not only affordable and flexible, but they also don’t have a price increase on their renewal prices. Frankly, their prices alone should convince you that DreamHost would make for a great choice as a hosting provider.
Yes, yes, we’re recommending DreamHost. Sign up and start building your site!