Dreamhost Review

My first wehost was/is Dreamhost. I've loved their service, and their panel.

What I like the most about Dreamhost is there http://www.dreamhoststatus.com, which is great for customers who are curious what really happens when their servers go offline.

Dreamhost uses there own custom panel, with even more features than cPanel, it seems. They also just updated there customer support function, and you can see events that happened with your server in the last week, (such as restarts and errors) before you submit your ticket.

The only thing I can complain about for the price is the response time of my webpages that utilize MySQL. They seem to take anywhere from 4-10 seconds to load!

Biggest Pro: Great Panel, Great Support
Biggest Con: Slow Response Time

Great hosting for personal / media related sites

I've had my site hosted there for almost two years now, and I must say, with exception to last year's crazy string of downtimes, their service is great if you know what you're doing. The shared plan offers tons of bandwidth, so even if you have a site with lots of videos and images, you're unlikely to approach the limit. It also offers ssh access, so you can edit things really quickly on the live site w/o having to download anything via FTP and then re-upload it etc. You can also fine tune a lot of the options from ssh. However, ssh access is a double edged swrod, and down side to that is if you have re***ds on your server, they can easily mess things up or eat lots of resources until the server runs out of resources (and cause your site to go slow). You can, however, ask them to move you to a lower concentrated server, and if you're diligent about it, they will do it for you as they've done for me.

Perhaps because I work with Jelsoft/vBulletin support so I have high standards for response time; but I feel that their support is a bit slow... Whenever I had serious problems and need to get a hold of them, I usually get a response from them anywhere between 24 hours to 48 hours. Most of the time, the problems I've contacted them -- high loads, ftpd process down, etc. -- are long resolved by the time I get back from them. I haven't had the need to contact them for other reasons and so I guess you'd probably need to know what you're doing before hosting with them.

Generally speaking, they're pretty well rounded host, especially with them polishing up their downtime issues this year, I'd say they're pretty good.

Biggest Pro: Lots of resources available for use
Biggest Con: Downtimes, not so much now...

Dreamhost Review

Dreamhost are one of those companies where i always feel there has to be something wrong..maybe it's there presentation..but it just feels cheap.

However saying that i have been generally pleased over the last few months especially since i'm currently running more than one site on my server.

From what i can remember here hasn't been any downtime however there is the odd slow response. Another thing that i'm not too fond of either is there cpanel..it just seems too tacky, but i guess it's all about preferance.

If you're not too bothered about presentation and just want a place for hosting dreamhost is great..there pricing is superb, that's if you use a voucher of course ;D. Can get a large chunk off for quite a good server with large space and bandwidth that's updated weekly!

Biggest Pro: Price

Great Marketing, Great Prices, Not-so-great Hosting

Dreamhost is really popular, and I figured that getting virtually unlimited storage and transfer for about 20 bucks per year, including a free domain, was worth a shot.

So I took the plunge, and have been relatively happy. It's not great. My e-mail won't connect a lot of the time, my site takes a while to load, but for the price it's pretty good.

Their support wiki is easy to read, and I'd prefer cPanel, but their own panel isn't too bad.

Overall, I'd give them a 9/10, though if I were paying full price it would be more like a 2.

Biggest Pro: cheap with lots of bandwidth/storage
Biggest Con: slow to load pages

Cheap, but slow..

I work with Dreamhost for a long time.. Everything is fine except loading pages late.. Especially when there is 200+ online visitors on my site, it sometimes takes a minute for loading.

But support and value for money is fine enough..

Biggest Pro: Cheap
Biggest Con: Slow

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