DreamHost: A Review

DreamHost is a California based company that was founded in 1997 by the same 4 college students who found Dream Network LLC in 1996.  Dream Network LLC owns DreamHost and the same co-founders are still involved actively today, and Simon Anderson is the CEO. The company did restructure, and created a new welcoming and friendly tone on for DreamHost’s homepage.

DreamHost provides extremely reliable VPS hosting services, however they are most known for their budget shared hosting plans though. They recently just launched a cloud service as well. DreamHost is one of the few hosting companies that provide a rather generous 97 day money –back guarantee ,and with that a two week free trial period for all customers.  To prove their generous attitude even further, they have cash back rewards and new domains with each new account. To top it all off, they are an environmentally friendly company that claim to be completely carbon neutral, even when hosting over a million domains.

Hosting Plan

DreamHost has a Debian Linux based shared hosting system and their whole target is to appeal to the budget market. They appeal to customers by offering low cost hosting options while still offering unlimited diskspace and bandwidth.

The VPS hosting system is also a Linux based one, where users are given a domain for free for the duration of one year. Independent servers have a dual core or quad core processor variety for the customer that DreamHost offers.  Customers have the option of running either Nginx or Apache, whichever they feel would fit best to their needs and budget.  DreamHost again proves it’s generosity by offering absolutely free web hosting for US registered non-profit charity organizations. These organizations have to first prove their registration to be able to be able to use DreamHost’s services.

Uptime/Downtime

DreamHost guarantees a 100% rate of uptime for all hosting, shared or dedicated and on VPS as well. If by some chance, you website, database or any of the sorts were to crash, DreamHost will offer compensation of free web hosting for every hour spent in downtime.

Information about uptime or downtime is not published on their main website, however a detailed status updates can be found on their supporting website: DreamHoststatus.com.

DreamHost operates from two data centers, both in Los Angeles. One of the data center is in downtown LA while the other one is near the LAX airport. The building and accommodations for its safety and operations are sure to be highly scalable. As an example, an interrupted 3 megawatt supply of electricity is supplied to the buildings.

Support

Support is where we can say DreamHost lacks when compared with its competitors. There is no telephone support. All support is through email and a ticketing system. A small fee can be paid to have a dedicated staff member to call you and or live chat with you as well.

VPS Hosting Plans

The VPS packages start at $15/month for 1GB ram, 30 GB SSD storage, and unlimited bandwidth. The most popular plan is $30/month with 2 GB ram, 60 GB SSD storage, and unlimited bandwidth. DreamHost is one of the few high quality VPS hosting provider that offers unlimited bandwidth for all of its VPS hosting plans.