DreamHost Pros and Cons
Pros
- No Penalties - Users can cancel monthly plans without incurring penalties.
- Money Back Guarantee - DreamHost’s 97-day money-back guarantee enables users to get a real feel for the product before committing.
- Unlimited Bandwidth - Its plans come with unlimited bandwidth and disk space, enabling capacity for large sites.
- Scalability - DreamHost allows users to scale sites with just a few clicks to fully meet a user’s increasing needs.
Cons
- Limited Communication Channels -Its customer support has only two communication channels: a ticket-based system and live chat.
- No Free Migration Services - For this service it charges $99, which will be refunded if DreamHost isn’t able to successfully migrate your content.
DreamHost Prices and Payment Methods
DreamHost’s plans are affordable, if not some of the cheapest plans on the market. Shared hosting plans start at $2.59p/m which includes 50GB storage and unlimited bandwidth
Its shared starter WordPress plan comes with automatic daily backups and updates, which also starts at $2.59p/m.
Advanced users can avail of its VPS hosting from a low of $13.75p/m. This comes with 1GB ram and 30 GB SSD storage. Dedicated host customers secure a higher level of protection from $169p/m.
Payment methods include all major credit cards and PayPal.
DreamHost User Experience
With its intuitive custom cPanel, DreamHost is extremely easy to work with, allowing users to make changes quickly and efficiently.
Its website builder is user-friendly with a lot of design variety. Users can benefit from DreamHost’s knowledge base of articles, guides, and tutorials to resolve any issues.
Customization of the backend is straightforward for advanced users, thanks to its suite of diverse developer tools.
DreamHost Load Times & Reliability
According to research by Google, 53% of mobile users leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load.
In my response test time, DreamHost’s load times on average were 1300ms. Unfortunately, this is much slower than its competitors.
On a positive, DreamHost guarantees 99.99% uptime and true to form its readings are consistently on or above the threshold.
DreamHost Main Features
- Security - DreamHost provides users with free SSL certificates, creating a secure link for user sites.
- Cloud Hosting - Its Cloud plan includes PostgreSQL, the most advanced open-source database around today, crafted carefully for superior performance.
- Unlimited Bonuses - All shared hosting plans come with unlimited bandwidth, disk space, and databases to satisfy user needs.
- Languages for Webmasters - DreamHost’s plans give webmasters access to coding languages like Python and Perl, configured to ensure maximum performance for scripting.
DreamHost Customer Support
If there’s one real drawback to DreamHost it’s its customer support. The only way users can make contact is via the ticket-based system or through its live chat option.
DreamHost doesn’t offer phone support.
However, its website is full of tutorials and guides to bolster knowledge and there’s also a frequently updated blog.
DreamHost For Free
DreamHost includes a 30-day free trial on some of its plans.
My Conclusion About DreamHost
With a huge assortment of features and tools, DreamHost presents well-rounded basic and advanced plans for both beginners and advanced users.
These include an intuitive website builder, a generous money-back guarantee and unlimited storage, bandwidth, and domains.
On the downside, its slow response times may be a turn off for some, especially when compared to its competitor Verpex, which is designed for high performance and speed.
Its limited customer support channels leave a lot to be desired and weaken the brand. Also, it’s outclassed by HostPapa, that offers 24/7 multilingual support.
