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Introduction

While it might lack the name-recognition of the likes of Bluehost or HostGator, DreamHost is quickly gaining a reputation among the professionals for providing an impressive amount of bang for a surprisingly small amount of bucks. Founded in LA in 1996, they’ve been in the hosting game for a long time and there’s a lot to recommend them – but do they have enough to lure potential customers away from the big names?

Plans and Pricing

Shared Hosting

DreamHost offers two Shared Hosting Plans, Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited. Neither is particularly expensive:

With each plan, you can expect the following:

– Shared Starter

• $2.59 per month over three years ($4.95 month-by-month/$3.95 over one year)
• Offers 1 Website with free domain.
• Free SSL Certificate.
• Unlimited Bandwidth and Storage.
• Option to add email for $1.67 per month.

– Shared Unlimited

• $4.95 per month over three years ($10.95 month-by-month/$4.95 over one year)
• Offers Unlimited Websites with free domain.
• Free SSL Certificate.
• Unlimited Bandwidth and Storage.
• Unlimited email.

Renewal Rates:

If you take the month-to-month pricing the starter package and unlimited packages will have a promotional period of 3 month, there after you’ll pay $6.99/month for the starter and $11.99/mo for the unlimited.

Plan	Promo Price	Renewal Price
Starter (monthly)	$4.95/mo	$6.99/mo
Starter (yearly)	$3.95/mo	N/A
Starter (3 years)	$2.59/mo	N/A
Unlimited (Monthly)	$10.95/mo	$11.99/mo
Unlimited (yearly)	$4.95/mo	$9.95/mo
Unlimited (3 years)	$4.95/mo	$7.95/mo

Opinion

DreamHost delivers great value for money on both their shared hosting packages. At $2.59/mo for a single website that makes a full year of hosting just about $31 dollars! The unlimited package is great value too, at $4.95/mo a full year comes to about $60 dollars during the promotional period. Even after the promotional pricing has ended you’re only paying about $95 for one year of hosting! Although the starter plan does NOT include e-mail, it’s not going to break the bank by adding it, as a years worth of e-mail comes to about $20 dollars.

Managed WordPress Hosting Plans

For more serious developers, Dreamhost also offer a number of packages that are optimised for WordPress:

Note- These packages are for 1 WordPress site, you will have to contact Dreamhost to inquire about special WP hosting for multiple sites, or use their managed VPS hosting.

Prices are quite a bit steeper than the Standard packages, but for large websites having that extra support is essential. With each plan, you can expect the following:

– DreamPress

• $16.95 per month over one year ($19.95 on a month-by-month basis)
• Can optimally run a website of up to 100k visitors.
• Pre-installed SSL Certificate.
• Unmetered Bandwidth and 30 GB SSD Storage.
• On-demand and Daily Automatic Backups.
• Unlimited email.
• Free automated WordPress migration and WordPress Website builder.
• 24/7 WordPress support.

– DreamPress Plus

• $24.95 per month over one year ($29.95 on a month-by-month basis)
• Can optimally run a website of up to 300k visitors.
• Pre-installed SSL Certificate.
• Unmetered Bandwidth and 60 GB SSD Storage.
• On-demand and Daily Automatic Backups.
• Free automated WordPress migration and WordPress Website builder.
• 24/7 WordPress support.
• Unlimited CDN (Content Delivery Network)

– DreamPress Pro

• $71.95 per month over one year ($79.95 on a month-by-month basis)
• Can optimally run a website of up to 1 million visitors.
• Pre-installed SSL Certificate.
• Unmetered Bandwidth and 120 GB SSD Storage.
• On-demand and Daily Automatic Backups.
• Unlimited email.
• Free automated WordPress migration and WordPress Website builder.
• 24/7 Priority WordPress support.
• Unlimited CDN.

BreakDown and Features:

We’d like to elaborate on why these plans cost more than a shared hosting plan. First of all the resources of each package are “isolated” similar to how a VPS works. That translates to better performance, and virtually no downtime. On regular shared hosting, it’s possible for another user who is sharing the resources with your website to have a spike in traffic and cause your website to lose resources and possibly go offline. This is not the case with DreamHost’s managed WP plans, as the resources are “virtualized” or isolated to each website. Furthermore, the plans are hosted on a cloud hosting service, offering better speed and overall performance.

• Staging environment
• Automated daily backups and on demand back ups
• Built in caching
• Jetpack and Jetpack professional
• Premium WP support staff
• SSD storage
• e-mail
• WordPress Command Line Interface

Opinion

The SSD, automated back ups, and staging environments are awesome features which give the plans a lot of value. If you’re looking to run one site for yourself or your business it’s hard to beat these plans. Nevertheless, many developers, bloggers, and online PROs tend to manage multiple sites and would be better of with the VPS offerings from DreamHost, as they allow you to host unlimited domains.

VPS Plans and Pricing

Many bloggers may wind up needing to use a VPS type service. Running multipule sites, especially resource intensive sites will require either dedicated or VPS options. In our opinion DreamHost offers some of the best, if not the best VPS hosting options on the market today.

Features:

• Fully Managed
  • Dreamhost team will update your servers with the latest security patches, operating system updates, and more
• Custom easy to use control panel
• SSD storage
• Unlimited e-mail
• SSL certificate(s)
• One click installer (for WP and other applications)
• 100% uptime guarantee
• No root access, as it’s fully managed
• Scalable RAM and storage

Opinion

We’re very impressed by DreamHost’s VPS packages. We believe the VPS offerings from DreamHost are some of the best, if not the best in the market at this time. Although other companies may offer root-access, which Dreamhost does not, most customers won’t need this level of access. These types of plans are designed for people with high traffic, or resource intensive websites that want a shared type hosting platform but with the power, scalability, and resources of a VPS plan. You may not get the most RAM on these plans, but for $10/mo we can’t see how you can go wrong. Furthermore, what you see is what you get; no sneaky renewal fees.

Dedicated Hosting

If you need root access or even more robust hosting options, Dreamhost has got you covered.

Features/Breakdown:

• Option for HHD or SSD storage
• 24/7 DDoS protection and 2N+2 power redundancy
• 100% uptime guarantee
• Root Access
• Custom control panel for easy management

Advanced Configurations

There are a lot of HHD and SSD configurations on offer, so here’s a convenient table to let you have a look

Opinion

We’re once again impressed with DreamHosts dedicated plans. We love the easy to use and intuitive control panel. We also like there are a lot of different options for configuration, and the 100% uptime guarantee might be needed for some businesses who can’t afford any downtime. Nevertheless, we’re a little off put by the HHD storage, and somewhat expensive plans; although some may consider the money well spent for that sweet 100% uptime.

Pros:

– 97 Day Money Back Guarantee

DreamHost’s 97-day money-back guarantee is much more generous than the 30-day industry standard. With three whole months to decide, there’s no need to feel locked-in when you sign up for a DreamHost account. The majority of reviewers have also reported that the company is willing to honour the guarantee in the majority of cases – however, refunds are only offered via credit card payment.

– Excellent Speed and Uptime

DreamHost compares favourably with other hosting services, providing above-average speed and uptime. According to data accrued by Hosting Facts, DreamHost ranks 5th overall for speed and uptime, with an average load time of 648.7 milliseconds and 99.94% uptime.

– Value for Money

Although not the cheapest hosting service out there, DreamHost does provide a lot of bang for your bucks. You get truly unlimited storage and bandwidth even at the lowest tier of pricing, as well as a free SSL certificate. And unlike many hosts, DreamHost’s payment plans are fully transparent – no surprise renewal fees.

Cons:

– Migrations Can Be A Pain

With free migration services only offered with the higher-end payment plans, transferring your site over to DreamHost can be a tricky business. WordPress installations can be transferred over, but it’ll set you back a hefty $99 to do so.

– No Free Email

Although DreamHost’s cheapest plan offers a lot, one thing it lacks which many other hosting services offer is free email. Admittedly it doesn’t cost a lot to add email yourself ($1.67), but it may put some customers off.

– No Phone Support on Some Plans

Reviews of DreamHost’s customer support are genuinely positive, with customer service agents trained to Tier II before being set loose on customers. However, support is only offered through live-chat or ticketing, with no option to phone through to a customer service agent. Not the end of the world, but some customers might prefer the old-fashioned method of communication. There is an option for phone support to call you back, on some of the higher tier plans.

Wrap-up

Overall, DreamHost provides a lot for a very reasonable price. With unlimited storage and bandwidth at even the lowest price bracket, it’s a great choice for novice developers, and its Managed WordPress Plans provide a lot of extra services for professionals without breaking the bank. Plus the exceptionally generous 97-day guarantee means there’s no pressure to commit to the service. With all this in addition to excellent uptime and speed, we can recommend DreamHost as a provider without hesitation.

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