DreamHost Hosting Review

Are you considering DreamHost as your hosting provider? Let’s find out if it will be a good fit for your site. I’ll walk you through its pros and cons, and we’ll have a look at what to expect from its performance.

Welcome to Bloghills.com, where we help you launch your website. Founded in LA in 1996, DreamHost has been around forever. Since then, it’s become a really popular host, powering more than 1.5 million sites and claiming to have 400,000 happy customers. But let’s find out if it’s for you too.

Pricing

In this article, I’ll be looking at DreamHost affordable shared plans. Be aware, though, that it offers higher-performing products too. Its shared hosting packages are simple as they only have 2 tiers: 

1. Shared Starter Plan

The shared starter plan is suitable for those looking to host only 1 website and don’t need more than 50GB of storage. Bear in mind that email storage isn’t included in this plan. You will need to pay for it separately if you need it.

Features:

• 1 Website
• Free Domain included
• Unlimited Traffic
• WordPress Pre-Installed
• Free Automated WordPress Migrations
• WP Website Builder
• Fast SSD Storage
• Free SSL Certificate
• Add Email as low as $1.67/mo
• 3 Year, 1 Year & Monthly Plans

 

2. Shared Unlimited Plan

The shared unlimited package comes with unmetered storage, web sites, and email. Pretty generous. All plans allow for unlimited traffic, come with free SSL Certificates, 24 hours support, and a free domain name for a whole year.

Be aware that DreamHost offers large discounts when committing for one or even three years, but you could also pay monthly if you wanted. It’s up to you. 

Features:

• Unlimited Websites
• Free Domain included
• Unlimited Traffic
• WordPress Pre-Installed
• Free Automated WordPress Migrations
• WP Website Builder
• Fast SSD Storage
• Free SSL Certificate
• Unlimited Email @ Your Domain
• 3 Year, 1 Year & Monthly Plans

When you get started now, you can get the Shared Starter Plan for just $2.59 per month, and the Shared Unlimited Plan for just $4.95 per month.

User Management

Even if the DreamHost system looks simple, it still has some powerful features. For example, I love that you can give access and define roles for other users, meaning that I don’t need to share my login and password with colleagues. Let me show you a couple of DreamHost peculiarities. 

1-Click Installations

Like most hosting providers these days, it comes with One-click installs, but only for a couple of CMS’s like WordPress or Joomla. If you’re planning to use a different CMS, like Magento or Drupal, you’ll have to install them manually. 

Installing WordPress

Just click and decide where to install WordPress. After a couple of minutes, your website will be up and running, and you’ll get a confirmation email with the site’s information.

DreamHost has a solution that will make WordPress set up process more comfortable if you are a beginner. For example, it comes with several plugins, free themes, and security improvements. Not a bad add-on. 

Backups

DreamHost keeps daily backups of your websites for about 2 weeks, so you can always contact them if you have an emergency. On top of that, from the backup section, you can create temporary backups to download.

Sadly, there isn’t a more advanced on-demand backup system integrated. In, but you could buy it as an affordable extra via its DreamObject cloud storage.

Security

As one would expect, DreamHost takes security seriously. All its hosting plans come with free SSL certificates via let’s encrypt, and the domains you register with will always come with domain privacy enabled for free.

Its servers support HTTP/2, which is encrypted by default. Additionally, it has firewalls in place. It also uses the latest version of PHP to avoid using unsafe code.

On top of that, enabling multi-factor authentication will add an extra layer of security to your account. You won’t be able to log into your DreamHost account without your smartphone. 

Performance

• Uptime

Unlike similar shared hosting providers, DreamHost doesn’t neglect its uptime. We monitor several DreamHost sites, in the uptime has always been higher than 99.95% impressive. But, of course, you also want to know how good DreamHost’s speed is. 

• Speed

Truth to be told, its speed surprised me in my first performance tests. To push it to speed further, it uses a combination of hardware and software. For example, it uses SSD drives, HTTP/2, and PHP7 for faster websites.

Note that they only have servers in the US, which may not be ideal if your website’s main audience is outside North America. However, it does provide other hosting plans with CDN services included to solve this. 

Money-Back Guarantee

DreamHost’s shared hosting plans start at $2.59/mo. Despite the low price, they scored highly on our website load time and traffic load tests even compared to way more expensive hosts.

DreamHost is one of our top recommendations for reasonable web hosting services, and that they are at the highest of our unlimited inodes hosting rankings yet.

Restrictions: the money-back guarantee only applies to shared hosting plans. If you buy WordPress hosting, VPS, or dedicated servers, you won’t be ready to request a refund.

How to claim: if you paid to employ a credit or revolving credit, simply cancel your subscription from the admin panel within 97 days of constructing a sale, and you’ll receive the refund automatically.

If you paid using PayPal or a special payment method, you’ll have to contact DreamHost’s billing department after canceling and request a refund.

Refund wait times: PayPal payments are usually refunded within some hours, while card payments take up to 5 business days.

Support

DreamHost support is available via live chat in a ticketing system powered by email. I always prefer contacting them via chat. In my experience, support agents were friendly and helped me solve my issues. The waiting times weren’t too long, either. 

Conclusion

So that’s all! But let me summarize the main pros and cons: 

Pros:

• Good speed.
• Decent support.
• Affordable.
• Good user management.
• Easy to use and intuitive.

The performance is excellent, both for uptime and speed. The support is fast and helpful, and its dashboard is easy to use and good for managing users. 

Cons:

• Only US servers.
• Missing some 1-click installs like Drupal.
• Missing advanced backup features.

However, its servers are exclusively located in the US, it’s missing some 1-click installs like Drupal and doesn’t integrate advanced backup functionality for free.

I hope you found this DreamHost review useful, and please leave a comment if you still have any questions.