What is DreamHost?

DreamHost offers web hosting, website builders, and email hosting all under one roof. They currently host over 1.5 million websites and almost half a million customers. Their venture started in 1997, which has now grown into a full hosting service.

When you put your dreams online—your words, your photos, your creations—you shouldn’t have to worry about your service provider mining that data for marketing purposes

Visit DreamHost.com (£2.05/Month)

DreamHost have made a name for itself, as well as establishing a solid and reliable business model. However, we all know that what companies say about themselves may not actually be the truth. It was time for me to pull the sheets off and find out what customers like YOU have been saying about them.

DreamHost have nabbed themselves an EXCELLENT status on TrustPilot. With a 4.5 star rating, I wanted to see what people really thought about this web host.

Across the whole first page of DreamHost’s TrustPilot reviews, I only came across one poor review, with a rating of 2 stars. The customer encountered various issues regarding their disk space and bandwidth usage and felt their journey had come to an abrupt end.

I also checked out DreamHost’s Twitter account to see what people were saying. Although they seem to update their feed quite regularly, I saw a distinct lack of response to customer tweets.

DreamHost Server Speed & Uptime

DreamHost are one of the FEW hosts that offer a magnificent 100% uptime guarantee. As you can imagine, I wanted to test this with my own account and show you the results I achieved.

With multiple datacenter locations, redundant cooling, emergency generators, and constant monitoring, we are able to offer our 100% Uptime Guarantee.

I’ve been monitoring my test website with DreamHost for sometime now. Above is a snapshot of the AWESOME uptime I’ve been getting. Their uptime guarantee didn’t let me down, my site had a 100% uptime total which is absolutely great.

My website’s response time on DreamHost’s servers had a few spikes. However, the average was just under 700ms which is absolutely fine with me! As long as this number doesn’t exceed 2-3 seconds, you’ve got yourself a solid and reliable web host.

Visit DreamHost.com (£2.05/Month)

DreamHost Features

DreamHost have a lot of standard features that you’d see with most web hosting companies. However, they also have a few added extras that make them standout from the crowd.

Some of the features I’m particularly excited about include:

Free domain name
Unlimited traffic
Unmetered bandwidth
Free SSL certificate
Free WordPress install

Considering the price, I’d say the above really makes me want to sign up to DreamHost. There’s a lot of web hosts out there who are great like Hostinger, but they don’t offer a free domain or free SSL certificate on all of their plans.

As well as the above, other awesome features include:

• Custom Control Panel: DreamHost’s custom control panel is naturally intuitive. You can see all of your DreamHost products and services in one place, making it easier to manage them. You can update your personal information, domain names, and more.
• 1-Click Installs: If you’re looking to create a website with WordPress, you can easily do so for FREE with DreamHost. 1-click installs are available for popular CMS platforms like Joomla, Drupal, and more.
• SSDs: DreamHost ensure your files can be accessed quickly using their SSDs. Caching and database queries are notoriously faster with an SSD. DreamHost claim these can be accessed 200% faster compared to a standard HDD.
• Support: DreamHost’s support is available 24/7/365. They claim their support is award winning, so we’ll be testing the waters in this area later on.

DreamHost Customer Support

I mentioned earlier that DreamHost’s award winning support is available 24/7/365. As a U.K. customer, this is always exciting to see. DreamHost have a variety of support platforms including a forum, knowledgebase, blog, contact, and system status page.

DreamHost’s knowledgebase is incredibly useful. There’s LOADS of topics and categories to search through, and it’s easy to do so. They also have an announcements section for any upcoming news or alerts.

Having a forum to access is a great tool. Sometimes advice from other people in a similar situation can really help. Their forums seem active and have a wide variety of discussions going on.

DreamHost do have a live chat service, but’s it’s only available Monday to Friday 8AM-4PM (PT). This is a little frustrating for U.K. customers and those outside of the U.S.

DreamHost Pros and Cons

So far, DreamHost seem to be pretty good. Their performance, uptime and speeds appear to be VERY solid. At least they were in my tests!

Their customer feedback is REALLY good too. It’s been hard to find many bad points, including my own personal experience. However, as with all web hosts, no company is absolutely perfect. Let’s take a look at DreamHost’s pros and cons from my own perspective.

Pros

Uptime: I was very impressed with DreamHost’s uptime guarantee of 100%. I tested this on my own website hosted with DreamHost and was pleased to report 100% uptime! Alongside this, my site’s response times were great too, even though their servers are located in the U.S.

Unlimited Disk Space: DreamHost offers unlimited disk space and unmetered bandwidth. Whilst some hosts are a little ambiguous about their policies, DreamHost’s seem pretty legit and fair.

Green Hosting: DreamHost are consciously trying to make an effort by reducing their carbon footprint. Their data centers are using high-efficiency servers and cooling/processors.

Cons

Live Chat: Although DreamHost’s live chat is an option, it’s only available during certain times. This is disappointing for customers outside of the U.S. Instead there are pre-defined answers available from their chatbot.

No cPanel: DreamHost doesn’t offer the industry standard cPanel. However, they do have a customisable control panel which is just as easy to use and intuitive.

DreamHost Pricing

DreamHost have a variety of options when it comes to their web hosting plans. Above, I’ve outlined a snapshot of their shared, WordPress, and VPS servers.

The host do offer 2 shared web hosting plans (starter and unlimited), 3 WordPress plans (DreamPress, DreamPress Plus, and DreamPress Pro), and 4 VPS plans. For those wanting a simple shared hosting plan, prices start from just £2.05 per month and offer unlimited traffic and bandwidth.

With a FREE SSL certificate and domain name, you can’t go too far wrong!

Do I Recommend DreamHost?

The long and short of it is, I DO recommend DreamHost.

My experience with them has been nothing but great, and I feel a lot of their customers echo this notion. Their server’s performance and speeds are second to none. Whilst they may not use the conventional cPanel, DreamHost offer a lot of awesome FREE features and a flawless level of service.

Here’s a quick summary of DreamHost:

Solid uptime (their SLA is 100% and my tests show the same)
Unmetered traffic and bandwidth (no need to worry about what you’re using)
Great response times (even though I’m based in the U.K., my response times were less than 1 second)
Positive customer testimonials (lots of great reviews and feedback from other customers)

Live chat is only available during certain U.S. times
No free migrations