DreamHost Reviews & Insights

As an independent web developer, I often inherit the use of platforms selected by my clients. I have one long-term client who came to me with a couple different websites hosted on DreamHost. I utilize the DreamHost administrative panel for database and file management as well as configuring email accounts and forwarders.

DreamHost is well suited for the novice website developer who needs an intuitive interface for File Management. Most web designers rarely need to access the server at all. But when it comes to providing comprehensive technical support, it is often necessary to access File Management tools or create FTP accounts. DreamHost makes this simple, though I personally prefer the standard cPanel interface.

I just needed a landing page to direct traffic. DreamHost was an affordable plan to do just that.

I had zero problems or complaints with DreamHost until out of the blue they notified me that my monthly rate is going up 300% after one year, though they advertized that the rate would not change. I see lots of people shocked by this in the past few months. Not inclined to stay with them as there are now less expensive options for what the product offers.

We use DreamHost to host our static websites - content WordPress websites, corporate one-page websites, etc. Because these websites are mostly informational and don't directly drive any revenue, we valued a hosting provider that could keep our overhead costs and time to a minimum. DreamHost's managed hosting solutions fit our needs perfectly and we've been happy using them.

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.

Dreamhost is our main hosting solution, since 2006, and we're offering their services to our clients as well. We have dozens of websites and it works really well for us.

It works really well for small or even medium scaled projects. If you need something fast and easy to use, it's great. You're able to host how many sites you want, create users and use some tools like Wordpress with "one-click" installs.
But if you need some scalable solution for a big project, maybe it's not as good as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, since their pricing policies are much better for those cases.

Dreamhost is used for hosting a Drupal based CMS site. The site is a public portal for services and information resources. The hosting service helps provide a solid presence with limited downtime or security problems with its Linux based servers.

Dreamhost is really well suited for different types of web hosting. Its unlimited data bandwidth plans can really help a company with an e-commerce site flourish without fears of limited bandwidth. The service also provides free SSL certificates for added security. It is also great for web developers that want to create a specialized site using coding tools such as Subversion.

I'm using Dreamhost myself since 2008. I started my first blog there by using their WordPress service with one click installation. At the time, I wanted to start sharing my knowledge but did not have too much time to set up my own infrastructure for blogging. It was really easy to get my blog with custom domain up and running.

If you need something that they already have a one-click installer for, and is not that mission critical for your business, I would really recommend starting with DreamHost. I have no regrets about starting to blog using their WordPress service some years ago. With some clicks, I got my domain, email, and blog up and running.

At Francis Lewis High School we use dreamhost to host a large number of student run websites. It is being monitored by me, the teacher, but 90 students have access to updating and revising the website and re-uploading new files to update the website. We use dreamhost both for hosting and for registering new domains.

The business problem it addresses is the issues that students run into each year. Our seniors need personal websites for themselves for their future resumes, to host video introductions and portfolios. In addition, students utilize the the websites in their classes. Many classes have a website that illustrates the content covered, displays the curriculum and shows student work. Dreamhost provides the platforms for hosting those sites and using plug-ins for Wordpress our students can effectively manage their own websites daily.

DreamHost is well suited for small businesses. As an art director that needs to manage multiple websites and client domains, it is important to use DreamHost for structure and organization. When working with clients, it is important to be able to manage each client individually. You can have private servers, allow each website to redirect to any other site desired, and each can easily be given multiple emails. When working with various clients, being able to be quick to update the website for clients is important, DreamHost provides that.

Dreamhost currently hosts my company's website on a virtual private server using the Wordpress platform. We've also used Dreamhost as our web host of choice for client websites. Dreamhost has provided us fast and reliable space on the web for prospective customers to find us, for eCommerce and online payments, and other web-based integrations and applications.

Lately they've been off their game in a lot of ways. I have six websites with them, and five of those sites have had major issues in which my clients have experienced major downtime or data loss. Their support staff has been unable to answer tickets in a timely manner, sometimes taking days to respond I assume because of the volume of tickets. They've gone from being a steady force in the web hosting world to an unreliable average provider trending downward.

Dreamhost was previously a great web host with reliable service and top-notch features, but I can no longer recommend them. If you're looking for web hosting on a Linux platform (such as running PHP or platforms like Wordpress, Jooma, or Drupal), with simple pricing services, then this is the great service for you. One big downside is lack of phone customer support. This is especially frustrating because of their many issues the last few weeks, which aren't easily resolved or addressed by their team.

At the college and academy where I worked, we used DreamHost to manage our main web presence and domain name registration. This allowed for us to have one place to manage everything related to our web presence. DreamHost's one-click installs allowed us to spin up new projects quickly. It's automatic WordPress updates allowed us to spend less time worrying that we were missing an important security patch. DreamHost generally has very good support, which allowed us to spend less time troubleshooting.

DreamHost is well-suited to people who have moderate to high levels of experience in web administration. It has all the tools you need to get the job done, plus some (like one-click installs) that can make your job much easier. It's also very convenient to have everything (including email config, databases, and domain registration) within one dashboard. DreamHost is also good for a beginner who wants to learn. The learning curve is real, but support is always helpful, and, again, having everything in one place is a plus for the learner. If a beginner just wants to throw up a website and isn't interested in learning the technical details of website administration and DNS, DreamHost is not the best solution. Such a person would be better served by finding a fully-hosted and managed software-as-a-service solution, such as WordPress.com, Weebly, SquareSpace, etc.

We use DreamHost for deploying WordPress sites, exclusively. Utilizing DreamHost's "DreamPress" offering allows the flexibility of a self-hosted installation (install whichever plugins you like, have direct access to the site code and configuration) while getting some of the optimization features of a hosted WordPress platform (eg, varnish caching, optimization, resource allocation, etc).

DreamHost's services are best targeted towards personal sites or small to medium sized business sites for businesses that don't have a full-time IT staff to manage WordPress or the infrastructure that goes along with it. If the requirements of the web site/application exceed that of a simple webserver and mysql database (eg, memcached, redis, etc, or other custom services), DreamHost's services are likely to be lacking. Which is not to say you couldn't use those services with the DreamHost deployment, just that they're unavailable from the same vendor, and as such there will be a performance penalty when utilizing them cross-vendor.

More technical natured folk who want to get into optimizing performance of their site on the server level (beyond the software that DreamHost provides, and the actual application software) will want a more robust solution. Larger deployments of sites (WordPress or otherwise) where the deployment is more advanced than a simple application server, will likely also want to look elsewhere.