DreamHost Reviews with all Features, SPEED, Performance, Unlimited Sites, Storage, Emails, FREE Domain, Website setup, Customer Support by ExcellentOpinion.com

What is DreamHost

DreamHost hosts over 1.5 million websites, and the company is nearly 25 years old.

The main shared hosting plan of DreamHost comes with popular applications such as WordPress, website builder options, including their own, and others such as Wix or Weebly. There are unlimited bandwidth and disk space in these plans. And to test out the service, you get a full 97-day money-back guarantee.

However, their customer support is a bit limited. Migrations are also a pain, not allowing any imports and charging you $99/each from other cPanel sites.

If you want to create a Linux-powered website, one of the first places to look should be DreamHost. The web hosting service has a rich feature set that, by providing shared, WordPress, virtual private server (VPS), cloud, and dedicated plans, serves both personal and business-related web hosting needs. Furthermore, its website-building program offers basic tools for webmasters to create appealing, versatile pages. As a consequence, DreamHost is an award-winning web host from Editors’ Choice, racing to the top alongside rivals such as HostGator, Hostwinds, and Liquid Web.

Features of DreamHost and why to use DreamHost?

Awesome Uptime

A critical part of the web hosting experience is website uptime. Customers or customers will be unable to reach you or use your goods or services if your site goes offline.

By using a website tracking tool for this test to track the uptime of my site over 14 days. The tool pings my website every 15 minutes and sends out an email if the website can not be reached for at least one minute. The details show that DreamHost is extremely robust, and during the test time, it did not go down. Really, in many, many months, there’s been been a single, fleeting setback. As a consequence, You can rely on DreamHost to provide your website with a rock-solid base.

Unlimited Quotas for Storage Space and Network Transmission

In their pricing and schedules, DreamHost lists several “unlimited” attributes, including storage space and bandwidth.

This means that as your site gets famous, you don’t have to think about disk storage or network transfer.

This strategy has a few caveats, but it’s largely legit.

Your site needs to be professionally constructed, first and foremost. Instead, if it’s hogging server capacity and having trouble with other pages, they might threaten to switch you to their private servers.

This unrestricted strategy would not come under DreamPress, VPS servers, and email.

Just 2 GB caps are limited to text, although MySQL databases still need to remain under “a few GB in size.”

In other words, for very tiny locations, DreamHost’s shared servers are fine.

No higher price rise for renewal

If you pre-pay for three years vs. either one or two, DreamHost has a lower monthly price.

That, too, is achieved by most web hosts.

The last bit of good news, though, is that when it is time to upgrade, DreamHost does not lift the price.

For instance, for the first few years, some other hosts could give you a special discount of a dollar or two per month.

But when it’s time to upgrade your contract automatically, on the lowest plans, the price could move up to somewhere from ~$7-10/month.

But you’re spending two to three times more for the same service overnight.

DreamHost doesn’t do that, in contrast. For the same amount that you first signed up for, the contract will be renewed.

This means that in the first few years, you could not save a lot, but you might save hundreds of millions over the long term instead.

Options for e-Commerce

The free ZenCart is provided by DreamHost, which you can access from the One-Click Install menu. Users will easily check out the items you have for sale with this open-source online shopping cart app. It also offers support to Woo Trade.

DreamHost helps you to track site traffic and metrics via Chartbeat, in addition to a $100 Google AdWords credit. This varies from most other systems, which tend to rely solely on Google Analytics.

Designing a Website on DreamHost

Overall, we like the user interface of DreamHost-simple it’s and well thought out, and it made it easy to get started on my test site. DreamHost includes a tree of menu choices on the left side of the screen instead of navigating through the HostGator or iPage path with cute, screen-cluttering icons. The settings for VPS and dedicated servers are easy to locate billing records, control domains, and display. We had no problem locating the security solutions or the marketplace for the third-party app.

The WP website creator is now available from DreamHost, which helps you to start designing your site right away. When your DreamHost account gets accepted, you no longer have to spend a long waiting period, as you once did. It’s a terrific addition. Using its basic drag-and-drop features, WP Website Creator comes with hundreds of themes you can modify. We found that adding photographs (my own, or those from the DreamHost royalty-free gallery), text, and the video was refreshingly simple. You can also install third-party apps, such as concrete5, Joomla, MediaWiki, Piwigo, and, of course, WordPress, into your account.

DeamHost Webhost is carbon neutral

Among the number of web hosts that are striving to be more environmentally friendly, you should include DreamHost.

They are going beyond and above merely offsetting their servers’ carbon footprint, however.

Their data centers provide cooling and processors with “high-efficiency.” To leverage natural energy, they are also active in state-level ‘clean wind’ projects.

Their offices are LEED and EnergyStar-certified and are also energy efficient, from lighting to HVAC systems.

Backups & Name of Domain

DreamHost gives free regular backups to all its clients, regardless of what schedule you’re on. This is a great feature, because should things go wrong, it also gives you peace of mind.

That’s also free for the first year if you do need to buy a domain name. You’ll need to register a domain ending in either of the following to apply for this: .com, .org, .club, .net, or .info.

Certificate of SSL Protection

A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate helps safeguard the sensitive details of your guests. It’s symbolized by a tiny padlock icon next to your URL that informs users that it’s safe to browse your web.

It’s also good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) since Google typically punishes unsafe websites in search results rankings. DreamHost supplies any location it hosts with a free SSL certificate.

Bandwidth

Since DreamHost does not track bandwidth or traffic, the unmetered transmission comes with any plan. This suggests that there is theoretically no limit on bandwidth.

Of course, if you encounter a massive surge in traffic, you might run into other problems, so it’s a nice bonus that you don’t have to think about bandwidth restrictions.

One-Click Automatic Updates and Downloads on DreamHost

These functions are exclusive to the websites of WordPress, which function as a real time-saver. One-click installs allow you to set up your WordPress site with your DreamHost account with only one click.

Hosting on the Cloud

You may have heard about cloud hosting, which spreads assets across multiple servers (traditional hosting pulls resources from a single server). When the situation calls for it, cloud computing helps sites to quickly expand domain needs. Fortunately, DreamHost offers three levels of cloud hosting: 512 MB RAM Server, 2 GB RAM Server, and 8 GB RAM Server in the Linux, BSD, and Windows ranges.

DreamHost has great packages that start at $4.50 a month (512 MB of RAM, 80 GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers) and top out at $48 a month (for four CPU cores, 8GB of RAM, 80GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers).

Dedicated Webhosting

You need to have a dedicated server if you want the full web hosting capacity. Your website lives on a server all by itself with this setup, thus leveraging all the resources of the system. If you expect your site to see an incredible amount of traffic, you should look into dedicated hosting, and if your site is so mission-critical that it can not go down or slow down.

There are several dedicated server options at DreamHost. The offerings start with the Standard 4 plan that includes 4 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage ($169 per month, or $149 for an annual commitment). The options complement the $379 per month Enhanced SSD 64 plan with 64 GB of RAM and 240 GB of solid storage per month.

Consequences of Using DreamHost

Paid migration website

On their shared hosting plans, DreamHost does not offer any free migration of sites.

They’ll instead charge you a one-time fee of $99 to switch each site. If you’re trying to move several customers or company accounts at the same time, this can add up.

In terms of how their paid migration services work, there are a few other limitations.

WordPress multi-site pages will not be relocated. Transfers from WordPress.com can only snatch material inside articles or sites. So the theme and plugins will have to be reinstalled and set up.

Neither will any website designer pages, on Wix, Weebly, or SquareSpace, be moved.

Average Uptime Not the Best (99.62 percent)

The 12-month average uptime of DreamHost is still little to brag about, 99.62 percent with over one day of downtime.

That’s poor and could probably mean missed traffic and benefit for you from website users.

The positive news, though, is that DreamHost has a promise of uptime. As with most hosts, if the monthly average goes below the threshold, you can earn a service expense discount.

The majority of uptime promises we’ve seen may linger around the 99.98% mark. But these hosts believe and stand by their programs, but if usual fluctuations strike, they’re just allowing themselves a little wiggle room.

Weak support for Live Chat

The mandatory knowledge base and discussion boards are offered by DreamHost to help customers solve their problems.

They also say to have “24/7 in-house support.” However, the contrary was discovered by our studies.

There’s a tiny messaging button in the lower right-hand corner of their phone. Tap on it and you have to pick from a few pre-set responses instead of being presented with an open box.

Live talk with DreamHost

In other words, with something that mimics a phone tree, they’re trying to simplify the live chat process.

We also attempted to circumvent these options to get a sales rep as quickly as possible. But no one was available at the time we attempted.

So, not “24/7” necessarily, then. In most time zones of the U.S., these hours (Monday-Friday, 8-4 PM PT) coincide with working hours, but not if you are in other parts of the country.

During those hours, we had to return later to test the procedure all over again. It took a couple of minutes to join a sales rep, and they were both professional and friendly.

It is unfortunate that to get access to someone in the first place, you have to jump through hoops (show up at particular hours).

While the uptime and speed of DreamHost have deteriorated over the past year, not so long ago they still showed reliable results, which makes us think that the current poor performance is just a temporary setback.

Conclusion

In comparison, their default plan caps are pretty high, selling a lot of storage space, bandwidth, and more ‘unlimited’ options. And we also liked the fact that when your hosting contract is extended, there is no price rise.

On another note, during the week, customer service was pretty limited to only a few certain hours. And paid migrations can add up, especially if no cPanel is provided to transfer sites yourself automatically.