LA-based DreamHost has been providing hosting for 25 years and serves over 1.5 million web sites. It presents fairly a gamut of hosting providers, from cheap shared internet hosting to high-end devoted servers.
DreamHost review: Snapshot
DreamHost’s pricing is extremely aggressive. Performance is sweet, too, and plans are simple to know and full of value-adding options. Above all, DreamHost has a deal with privateness and safety not usually seen in most greater net hosts.
DreamHost could have lower than half as many purchasers as greater rivals Bluehost and HostGator, however it punches above its weight. It’s persistently cheaper than Bluehost and HostGator, but doesn’t skimp on an important options.
In our DreamHost review, we glance nearer on the hosting supplier’s options, efficiency, and pricing, so you possibly can resolve whether or not it’s the best web hosting service on your wants.
Score: 3.5/5
Read on for the total review.
DreamHost’s opponents
| DreamHost | Bluehost | HostGator | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Score | 3.5/5 | 4/5 | 4/5 |
| Pros | Privacy – and security-focused – Good worth plans | Excellent efficiency – User-friendly management panel | Flexible fee phrases – Support for a lot of programming languages |
| Cons | Email prices further on primary plan – No cPanel | No month-to-month plans – Constant upsell pitches | Expensive upon renewal – Uninspired managed – WordPress plans |
| Verdict | Great costs on feature-packed plans | Fast obtain speeds and high quality WordPress plans | Unlimited the whole lot plans with wonderful buyer assist |
| View offers | Visit site | Visit site | Visit site |
Key options
DreamHost presents a variety of internet hosting merchandise. These embrace shared internet hosting, VPS hosting, managed WordPress internet hosting, dedicated server hosting, and cloud hosting. We’ll deal with shared internet hosting and WordPress internet hosting right here, however keep in mind that DreamHost has you lined in case you have a bigger enterprise with extra exact internet hosting wants.
DreamHost consists of many options in its set plans that it is advisable to pay further for if you happen to select a funds net host as a substitute. Taking its most cost-effective Shared Starter plan for instance, you get limitless site visitors, unmetered bandwidth, limitless databases, a free SSL certificates, SSH entry, and a WP Website Builder device for making a WordPress web site.
You get automated day by day backups, and there’s a one-click installer for a wide range of pre-assembled apps. Even with this plan, your web site is hosted on quick SSD drives. The solely notable merchandise lacking from the Shared Starter plan is e-mail, which can price you $1.67 a month. Or, you possibly can improve to the Shared Unlimited plan, the place limitless e-mail is included.
Though DreamHost has a one-click installer for in style net apps, the checklist of accessible apps is shorter than most opponents. As it stands, there are 25 apps you possibly can set up, together with massive hitters like Joomla, Shopify, Squarespace, and Weebly.
We examined DreamHost’s safety by what safety features can be found on all accounts, and researching how properly its safety has carried out prior to now. DreamHost seems to contemplate safety and privateness a part of the essential specification of any hosting service, and consists of options that opponents usually cost a premium for.
Every web site will get its personal Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS certificates, so all information transferred between your web site and your guests is encrypted. Your login particulars might be protected with multi-factor authentication from Google Authenticator or Yubikey. DreamHost additionally makes use of ModSecurity on its Apache servers, which is actually a tried-and-tested firewall that may assist block denial-of-service assaults.
For an extra $3 a month, you possibly can add DreamShield, a malware-scanning device that checks your web site weekly for rogue software program and routinely removes it.
This part should include a caveat {that a} safety researcher discovered DreamHost recently left some client data exposed due to a server misconfiguration. However, the corporate responded rapidly and rectified the error instantly. It says that solely 21 web sites had been affected, and not one of the information uncovered included personally identifiable information or consumer passwords.
DreamHost: key options and highlights
All of DreamHost’s shared plans embrace WordPress, however it additionally has a number of managed WordPress hosting plans—DreamPress, DreamPress Plus, and DreamPress Pro. As the title suggests, managed WordPress plans shift a few of the day-to-day working of a WordPress web site onto the internet hosting firm.
DreamPress is likely one of the finest managed WordPress choices we’ve reviewed. Your WordPress web site is pre-installed on a high-performance cloud with quick SSD storage. Bandwidth is unmetered, and your WordPress set up will get a number of efficiency boosts like built-in caching, limitless CDN, and Jetpack.
Recently added to DreamPress is one-click staging, so you possibly can safely check tweaks to your web site on a draft model earlier than placing them reside. You now additionally get free automated WordPress migrations, making it simple to maneuver your web site to DreamPress.
Besides this, there’s devoted 24/7 ticket assist from WordPress specialists, with telephone assist accessible. DreamPress deserves consideration for providing all these options with out the huge bump in pricing that’s usually seen from managed WordPress options.
When evaluating the privateness options supplied by Dreamhost, we had been impressed that it consists of domain privacy as normal. This means individuals can’t discover out your title, deal with, and phone particulars just by looking for your area title. It’s one thing many hosts cost a small charge for, and we recognize that DreamHost doesn’t.
DreamHost additionally scores massive factors for customers involved with privateness as a result of it has stood up for its customers’ privateness prior to now. Most newsworthy was DreamHost’s 2017 refusal handy over the personally identifiable information of holiday makers to a political protest web site.
The Department of Justice took the case to the Washington D.C. Superior Court, however DreamHost fought for its customers in order that solely a extremely redacted checklist needed to be handed over.
What’s new?
DreamHost has continued to make enhancements to its management panel. In 2020, the central hub of the consumer interface acquired an entire overhaul that made it simpler so as to add new options. It grew to become simpler to alter your area, and free WordPress migrations had been added. The DreamHost web site additionally grew to become accessible in Spanish for the primary time.
In February 2021, it added a DNS Propagation Checker that reveals you, in real-time on a world map, the standing of any new area title you buy. This offers you a greater concept of how lengthy it takes for a brand new area to go reside throughout the entire web.
Pricing
DreamHost presents month-to-month, one-year, and three-year plans. On shared plans, the low cost for paying for 3 years directly is an enormous 63%, however on different forms of plans, the low cost is modest. It’s nice to see an online host with a no-commitment, no-contract month-to-month plan.
Like most net hosts, DreamHost presents a low introductory price on your first time period to attract you in, beginning on the equal of $2.95 a month. After the preliminary time period, the speed will increase. But DreamHost’s normal charges are typically cheaper than the competitors, so it makes for a sensible choice if you happen to’re in it for the lengthy haul.
DreamHost additionally presents an enormous 97-day money-back assure, making it the chief within the trade on this regard.
| Shared Starter | Shared Unlimited | DreamPress | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per thirty days* | $7.99 | $13.99 | $19.95 |
| Cost per 12 months* | $83.88 | $155.88 | $203.40 |
| Unmetered bandwidth | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Unlimited web sites | X | ✓ | X |
| Unlimited web site storage | X | ✓ | X |
| 1-Click staging | X | X | ✓ |
* Undiscounted month-to-month charges
** Undiscounted one-year charges
Testing DreamHost
In order to comprehensively evaluate DreamHost to the competitors, we analyzed its server response occasions.
How does DreamHost carry out?
To check DreamHost’s efficiency, we ran a primary WordPress web site for 14 days, and continually checked uptime over this era utilizing Uptime.com. In whole, we accessed the web site over 4,000 occasions, and every time, the location was accessible. This is usually to be anticipated with a check over such a brief interval, however it’s promising nonetheless.
DreamHost additionally goes additional than most hosts by providing a 100% uptime assure. This is streets forward of the standard 99.9%. If any of your providers (web site, e-mail, and many others.) go down due to a DreamHost system failure, you’ll be compensated in the future of internet hosting for each hour your service is unavailable.
What’s DreamHost’s response time?
We examined DreamHost’s response velocity by loading a primary WordPress web site hosted on DreamHost each 5 minutes for 2 weeks, from computer systems located in Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York.
Website hosts usually reply inside 200 to 400 milliseconds. DreamHost did OK right here, too, averaging 374 milliseconds all through our assessments. Once each few days we skilled highs of as much as 1.96s, however these slower response occasions by no means lasted greater than 5 minutes.
Note, too, that these efficiency outcomes are a baseline, as DreamHost presents many dearer packages. We’d anticipate to see even higher efficiency when utilizing its cloud, VPS, and devoted servers.
The competitors
DreamHost’s checklist of shared internet hosting, VPS internet hosting, devoted servers, and cloud internet hosting is analogous in scope to high opponents Bluehost and HostGator. In our testing, Bluehost websites had been marginally quicker than DreamHost’s websites, and HostGator’s buyer assist was higher.
But DreamHost’s introductory costs are very aggressive, and issues get even higher when you think about its modest normal pricing. Its introductory supply isn’t the bait-and-switch you get with most suppliers, and its normal charges are significantly better than these of Bluehost and HostGator. This means DreamHost ought to be considerably cheaper in the long term.
If you need to study extra about these two competitor net hosts, learn our Bluehost review and our HostGator review to search out out what we manufactured from them.
| DreamHost | Bluehost | HostGator | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Available | Included | Included | |
| Site storage | 50GB | 50GB | Unmetered |
| Support | 24-hour chat; telephone call-back prices further | 24-hour chat and telephone | 24-hour chat and telephone |
| Basic plan | $7.99 a month | $9.99 a month* | $10.95 a month |
*No month-to-month plan; value primarily based on annual plan
The verdict
DreamHost is a tremendous hosting supplier, notably if you happen to’re on the lookout for a comparatively easy net host that offers you the whole lot you want with out throwing in costly bells and whistles.
There are not any thrilling advertising and marketing instruments included, for instance. You should pay further for e-mail on the most affordable plan, and DreamHost doesn’t supply free 24/7 telephone assist. Servers are all US-based, too, which implies DreamHost isn’t ideally suited for customers in different areas, and the checklist of apps you possibly can one-click set up is fairly brief.
While the dearth of all these options could postpone some individuals, these simply on the lookout for a strong, reliable net host would possibly discover the lower cost interesting. As famous, DreamHost does prominently promote its introductory price, however it’s not the setup for a bait-and-switch pricing mannequin. Its renewal pricing is honest and persistently cheaper than that of its high rivals.
We additionally like that DreamHost presents a month-to-month plan. Many rivals require annual plans, or make their month-to-month charges exorbitantly costly. And if you happen to’re on the lookout for a managed WordPress resolution at a great value, DreamHost is good.
Our efficiency testing confirmed DreamHost is quick sufficient for nearly all makes use of. You get a 100% uptime assure, too, which is excellent. And we’re impressed at DreamHost’s confirmed dedication to holding consumer particulars personal and out of presidency palms.
Overall, we advocate DreamHost most to customers whose high issues are pricing, privateness, and dependability.
