DreamHost Shared Plan - the non conservatives

Hello,

Here's my review of DreamHost.com .

I've been using their shared account for about 6 months now it's all good. I paid 19$ a year for this plan (special promo) and I get 200GB of Space and 2TB of BandWidth (this increases each month). For the price it's great, their customer service is brilliant. Sure, you might have to wait a couple of hours until you get a reply, but they're still very helpful and well, non-conservative. They let you do pretty much whatever you want, as long as it isn't illegal. If I have an issue, I usually find the answer in their wiki or on google. Another plus is that they are carbon neutral.

On the cons, well, the only thing that I can complain about is that I get a slow connection speed, it's alright for a website, but not too good for downloads. Another thing is that my site has been download a couple of times, but they fixed that promptly. They allow you to host unlimited domains and databases as well, which is good.

Overall, it's great host if you have many personal sites or small business sites.

Biggest Pro: Price
Biggest Con: Speed

Great hosts, great price

Recently I decided to open a new site and wanted a fresh start with another server host so after some research I decided on Dreamhost. Signup was simple and their linux plans blew alot of the competition out of the water with prices and what they offer. Getting acustomed to the control panel takes all of an hour or two. Once you have the hang of it administering all parts of your site is simple. Whether its putting in htaccess protection on folders, to creating new dbases, or ftp accounts. Even a person with little administrative experience can navigate and get things done easily in the panel. When you do run into a problem their prefered method of resolving them is via email. Their email support is fast and they get problems resolved quickly. Depending on which plan you pick you may get phone support for free. All in all I say great company and am pleased with their ability to keep my site up and running smoothly.

Biggest Pro: all you get for the price
Biggest Con: none that I can think of

Stat away from Dreamhost

I started using dreamhost for my actual website...until the problems started. Right now it is just being used to park some of my domains.

Sure they give you massive amount of storage and a massive amount of bandwidth. However you won't get a chance to use it. As soon as I was signed up and activated...my MySQL server was down. Okay, I can understand it being down, but it was down for 4 days.

The very next month, my entire server was down and didn't come back for 3-4 days. So that establishes that the reliablity here isn't quite there. They have to have a status blog to report their outages and problems. Sure other hosts have this blog as well, however dreamhost has to update it every single day because there are always problems.

The customer support isn't any good either. I had a simple question about how to add a 'A' record. Its a very simple questions, however I didn't get a answer for 66 hours. Not even a reply letting me know they have acknowledged my question.

Their price and features lead me to believe they are overselling. MASSIVELY OVERSELLING. I think this is the biggest problem with this host.

The only decent thing this host has going for them is their control panel. It is a pretty feature rich easy to use control panel that is custom to them.

Overall, just stay away from Dreamhost. Massive Overselling...highly unreliable.

Biggest Pro: Control Panel
Biggest Con: Reliablitlty...servers and support.

Has its good moments and its bad

It's a lot of space and bandwidth for the money, and the control panel is great. It has random downtime at times, but most of the time it's posted on their blog and it updates you on their status and how soon it'll be back online. Not recommended for business websites you 100% need to be up at all times, but if you want a server you can just throw your stuff up on, then Dreamhost is the place to be.

Biggest Pro: easy to use
Biggest Con: downtime

Dreamhost - Good Inexpensive Host

I've been with DreamHost for almost a year now and my overall impression is that they are an excellent value for the price you pay. All Dreamhost plans offer a huge amount of bandwidth, which surprised me at first. I did some research and some people reported that they had some issues with dreamhost's speed and uptime. However, in my own personal experience, Dreamhost speed has been acceptable and uptime has been what I expected for the price. I have had some relatively short periods of downtime during the year I've been with them, but overall uptime has been good. Another interesting aspect of Dreamhost's service is that every week your bandwidth limit increases. This is a pretty interesting concept and I have been happy that my bandwidth limit has grown with my site.

One thing that I disliked about Dreamhost is there control panel. All previous hosts I have used have had cPanel installed. Dreamhost has its own panel, and I found if more difficult to use than cPanel. The stats offered in the dreamhost panel are harder to navigate and overall the tools in cPanel are easier to use.

I mainly chose dreamhost because I was searching for a very inexpensive host that offered a lot of bandwidth for my site. Although it does have some things it could improve on, overall it as exceeded my expectations

Biggest Pro: Inexpensive for the resources offered
Biggest Con: Control panel is harder to use than some others

Dreamhost: Great reliable and supportive host

Being with Dreamhost.com for over a year and a half, its hard for me to say anything that is unsatisfactory about them. Dreamhost is a great company that offers really great service with lots of space, traffic, and almost any feature a customer would want. One thing that caught me when I was choosing between several hosting companies was the unlimited number of domains that could be hosted through them. Dreamhost also provides a start of 200GB of space and 2TB of traffic which grow every week. I have come some ways in these limits, but have not had problems from their staff that I am using too much traffic.

Like any host, their uptimes are also limited to only 99% of the time and being with them since January 2005, there has been only one downtime for about ten minutes. Dreamhost is fast at redistributing their networks in case of problems so downtimes are very minor, even though problems may occur. Even at times of problems, the Dreamhost Support team answers questions quickly with reliable and very satisfactory answers. Dreamhost's other con is they don't provide cpanel, but use their own custom panel which is just as good and they allow to use your plan as reseller hosting with no need to purchase special hosting.

In conclusion, Dreamhost has not only lived up, but exceeded my expectations and surpassed other hosting companies service.

Biggest Pro: Great support, great service