Dream Hosting Review | Cost Effective Hosting Provider

Whether you need shared, VPS, dedicated, or cloud hosting, you can rest assured that DreamHost has the plan to suit you. But the real question is, are these plans good?

With an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5 in our hosting rankings, DreamHost ranks fourth out of 12 providers. Its best hosting type is shared hosting, which is tied for second with a score of 4.5 out of 5 . If you’re looking for an inexpensive provider, look no further than DreamHost as it has some of the best value hosting plans on the market with discounted prices starting at $2.95 per month and renewing at just $6.99/month!

While its shared hosting might be great value, the same isn’t true for its dedicated hosting, which sees a huge price hike compared to other packages. DreamHost also has no phone support, which isn’t good if you’re the type of person who likes to speak to real people about your problems.

At Website Builder Experts, we’re committed to helping you get online – and we want to prepare you for the best chance of success once you’re online. That’s why we independently research a variety of web hosting providers across different hosting types and industries.

pros and cons

ease of use

Setting up your web hosting with DreamHost is easy. However, before jumping in, you need to choose the type of hosting you want.

It depends a lot on what your website is, and what its requirements are. In most cases, personal websites and startups can use shared hosting. More established businesses may want to check out VPS hosting, while enterprise-level companies will want dedicated hosting plans.

Once you know what type of hosting you need, signing up for a DreamHost plan is a breeze.

Uptime and Performance

performance

In our testing, DreamHost has had its ups and downs with different hosting types, and its best performer in our research was managed WordPress hosting, with a score of 4.3 out of 5, which puts it in second place for performance.

Meanwhile, DreamHost’s worst-performing hosting type and overall worst-performing was VPS hosting with a score of 2.5 out of 5!

uptime

Essentially, uptime means the amount of time your website is up and working online.

But what is good uptime? Aren’t 99.00% and 99.99% both good? Why no provider has 100% uptime? These are valid questions, so allow us to explain.

Most hosting services offer an uptime of around 99.9%. For this reason alone, anything below that is considered poor. Simply due to the nature of the internet, no provider can physically have 100% uptime.

Dream Hosting guarantees an uptime of 99.98% for the websites it hosts. This means that, on average, your website will be online and in good working order for all but four and a half hours per year. This equates to about five minutes per week.

In our study, this worked out great! DreamHost actually holds the #2 spot in our overall ranking for all hosting types, with an uptime score of  4.5 out of 5  .

If that doesn’t sound good enough, DreamHost actually maintains a 100% uptime guarantee in their service contracts , which means that any downtime you log will result in:

DreamHost Credits are equal to Customer’s current hosting cost for every 1 (one) hour (or fraction thereof) of service interruption for 1 (one) day, up to a maximum of 10% of Customer’s next prepaid hosting renewal fee.

Hosting Types and Features

DreamHost offers shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud and managed WordPress hosting, the most powerful of which is shared hosting. It has an overall feature score of 4.4 out of 5, but ranks second for shared hosting , tied with Bluehost at  4.5 out of  5.

The great thing about DreamHost is that even though it covers a lot of hosting types, it doesn’t particularly underperform. Overall, DreamHost never scored below a 4 out of 5 in all of our research categories , which is impressive. Its worst hosting type is VPS, largely due to a rather poor performance score of  2.5 out of 5  (which we covered earlier).

It also has its own website builder , an online tool that helps non-technical people create their own websites — but more on that later.

feature

The features that DreamHost offers are largely consistent across all of its plans, but sometimes vary. It depends on two things: the type of hosting you have and the level of pricing plan you use.

For your convenience, we’ve broken down some of DreamHost’s key features, discussing what they are and what you get.

Backups and Domains

DreamHost offers free daily backups to all customers , no matter what plan they use. This is an excellent feature and really gives you peace of mind if something goes wrong.

If you still need to purchase a domain name, the first year is also free. To qualify, you need to register a domain name ending in any of the following: .com, .org, .club, .net, or .info.

SSL security certificate

A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate helps protect your visitors’ personal information. It’s indicated by a small padlock icon next to your URL, which tells people that your site is safe to browse.

It is also useful for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as insecure websites are often penalized by Google in search result rankings. DreamHost offers a free SSL certificate for every site it hosts .

bandwidth

Since DreamHost doesn’t track bandwidth or traffic, each plan comes with unmetered transfers . This means technically there is no bandwidth limitation.

Of course, if you experience huge traffic spikes, you may run into other issues, but you don’t have to worry about bandwidth throttling, which is a great benefit.

ram

Random Access Memory (RAM) is how all of a site’s information is stored on its servers. The larger your website, the more RAM you need to store and load it.

If you opt for a cloud hosting package, you can expect a RAM limit between 512MB and 16GB. However, on dedicated hosting plans, that jumps up to between 4GB and 64GB.

To give you some context, the RAM limit for dedicated hosting exists with the best providers around. However, the cloud limit for managed RAM is pretty average.

One-click installation and automatic updates

These features are specific to WordPress sites and act as real-time time savers. One-click installation allows you to set up your DreamHost account with a WordPress website – in one click.

DreamHost also automatically keeps an eye on any software updates WordPress rolls out , which means you don’t have to worry about staying up to date. However, with WordPress plugins, it doesn’t do the same, so you’ll have to manage it yourself.

help and support

DreamHost offers support through live chat, tickets, forums and their help center . However, you cannot contact DreamHost directly by phone. This did hurt DreamHost’s overall help and support score in our research, resulting in an overall score of 2.3 out of 5. In terms of hosting type, its best hosting score for Help & Support is Shared Hosting with a score of 5, and the worst is VPS with a score of 2.8.

If the prospect of not talking to a real person is too scary to even consider, DreamHost offers live chat support, 7 days a week, 5:30am to 9:30pm PT . If English is not your first language, you can also speak to Spanish-speaking support staff.

Fair warning – when DreamHost is inundated with support requests, the wait time can be quite long. However, in most cases, you will receive a response within a few minutes or so.

The ticketing system works by asking questions and submitting them as tickets. DreamHost’s support staff can then investigate your issue and respond. You’ll be alerted when your tickets are responded to, so you don’t have to waste time constantly refreshing the page.

DreamHost’s help center is an online resource where you can search for any query – kind of like typing a question into Google.

There are dedicated help articles and guides that contain useful information and teach you how to perform certain tasks. This should usually be your first port of call to avoid blocking live chat requests and save yourself some time!

Provide the same level of help and support to all customers. That’s fine if you’re on a cheap hosting plan, but it’s a little annoying that you’re not considered a priority if you pay a little extra.

pricing

Dream Host’s plans are worth the money! DreamHost ranks third in our overall value for money ranking, with an overall value score of 4.2 out of 5. Plus, it’s actually the #1 cheapest form of web hosting (shared hosting) with a Value Score of  4.4 out of 5!