DreamHost vs. WP Engine

If you're not too technical, don't want to spend time managing a server and want something quality while sticking to a budget, DreamHost is the best it can get. We may be able to save money by switching to something like AWS, but for our usage it doesn't totally make sense even with potential cost-savings and improved speeds. The support and ease of use cannot be overstated here.

Incentivized

New users to WordPress can rejoice with a very hands-off hosting approach. If 100% uptime is not essential, you can get breakneck speeds with minimal tinkering using their platform. If you need to get up and running quickly and scale as required, the cost-benefit is here, although you need to pay a lot to get the most from it.

Incentivized

• Dreamhost has very good hosting plans that can be matched for different levels of hosting needs and expected web traffic bandwidth.
• The hosting service is very friendly for coders and those needing to tinker "under the hood" with their sites.
• Great uptime service with limited technical issues.

Incentivized

• I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back.
• The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems.
• They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate.

Incentivized

• There was one instance where DreamHost support caused unnecessary downtime because they misread my request. Unfortunately I don't have access to that account anymore (it was an old employer) so I don't remember the details. To avoid this, make it very clear whether you're just asking a question or want support to handle it (they can be quite eager to fix the problem even when you've just asked a question), and be VERY clear what you need when doing the wrong thing may cause serious problems.

Incentivized

• The user interface is not very intuitive, which means new staff members require more training than I'd like.
• The way they manage production/development servers and FTP access is somewhere between nebulous and tragically unique.
• Their premium pricing is surely worthwhile, but it is significantly higher than virtually all of their competitors, without much obvious distinction in feature sets.
• Some very basic features like spinning up a second instance require a PHONE CALL to their BILLING department to enable. What is this, 1990?

Incentivized

We have every intention of staying with Dreamhost, but we are a tad concerned with the company's recent involvement in high profile litigation and controversial topics. While we don't take a position one way or another on what type of content they should host, one concern we have is that repeated attacks on their infrastructure have caused significant downtime during business hours for us, and that's something we'll have to take into consideration going forward.

Incentivized

I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers.

It took very little time to learn their dashboard for managing WordPress sites. Their built-in tools are really well done, and the addition of security and CDN tools is great.

Incentivized

Whether we're calling in on the phone, live chatting or emailing, we get immediate high-quality, native English-speaking support. This cannot be overstated when it comes to hosting, because support tickets are usually time sensitive and high stress. I've always had great experiences with the limited times we've needed to use DreamHost support. We've dealt with support for many other providers and no one comes close to DreamHost.

Incentivized

Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers.

Incentivized

We've tried a few other WordPress-specific hosts, as well as other shared hosting providers (Rackspace, WPEngine, and others). We have found that DreamHost gives the best balance of cost, performance, and features, for our needs. All vendors have their own pitfalls and shortcomings, and DreamHost isn't without its own, but it works for us.

Incentivized

For Acquia and AEM the major differentiator was the cost for WPEngine was significantly lower and we could use the more common WordPress CMS. AEM is better for large marketing sites that integrate with the Abobe Marketing Cloud and we didn't feel we could support Drupal on Acquia. AWS EC2 is a viable option if you are going to self support and maintain your own WordPress experts. We felt that the value from WPEngine was they handled the support and the WordPress security patches and knowledge beyond simple theme usage. Pantheon was the closest in matching but we felt with our large installs that the hosting model for WPEngine was more cost-effective than the Container architecture for Pantheon

Incentivized

• It's a great product for a relatively cheap price
• We can offer a simple hosting solution for our clients
• Even the VPS (virtual private servers) are very affordable and you can manage it as you wish (SSH access)

Incentivized

• Positive: We've been able to scale up more easily as adding new sites has been easier.
• Positive: The load speed improvements we saw were immediate and have not let up.
• Negative: Adding advanced security and other tools to a multiple sites is expensive.

Incentivized