Used to be good. Not anymore

I have been a customer with DreamHost for 5 years. My lead Web site has been online since 2000 and gets about 1000 visitors per day. I presently use the account to host five minor domains.

Dreamhost used to be great. I looked forward to Josh's monthly newsletter, and loved the ease of use of the admin panel, which is clearer and more user-friendly than cPanel.

But about a year ago, the company had major downtime problems. Because they had been so good before, and because of the pain of transferring domains, I stuck with them.

But overall, the service has generally deteriorated.

I've had significant problems with Dreamhost recently. In particular, the site has been down because of server throttling. Dreamhost claims that the throttling automatically kicks in once traffic exceeds certain thresholds to avoid compromising service for other domains on the shared server. But I see no increase in traffic, either on the hosted stats or on Google Analytics. The throttling began very suddenly. One day everything was fine, next day throttling hit my site, down, down, down. If the traffic theory is correct, wouldn't it be gradual? And even if I was linked to by Huffington Post causing a buttload of traffic, why isn't that in my stats?

Generally support had not been very helpful in getting me to the source of the problem.

Dreamhost's first suggestion I try a private server. I was annoyed that they tried to upsell me rather than solving the problem.

I am not looking for perfection, just reliable service and reasonable value.

As I have only used Dreamhost, my comparisons may not be fair. But I wanted to share this experience with anyone considering Dreamhost as a hosting option.

Biggest Pro: Admin panel
Biggest Con: Downtime

Down, down, always down.

I have lost vastly more money from downtime with this host than I have ever paid them for their service. There is no telephone support and email support is spotty. I've had times where they don't even respond.

I initially liked their irreverent attitude, but that approach only works if one is at the top of their game. I can't count how many times I have been down for an hour or more without warning and sometimes without admitting anything is wrong. I double-check remotely before contacting support and they had the audacity to tell me nothing was wrong and it must be something on my end. This puts them in one of two categories; igorant or liar. Either one means a new host for me.

Biggest Con: downtime, less-than-professional approach

fatal flaw - they shut down all your websites!

I had no problems other than slow/poor service for over a year - then suddenly one day all 10 of my websites stopped working! It turns out I had violated one tiny section of their "spam policies" (I NEVER sent any spam) but the real reason is one of their support people was getting revenge because I asked to speak to his manager.

They cut off my entire business without warning.

They cut off access to all my data.

There was no way to talk to a supervisor or get it back.

If you can't trust your host to be on your side, what good is the rest of their promises? AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE.

Dreamhost nightmare. Strongly recommend against using it.

I initially joined Dreamhost because they were offering a heavily discounted plan. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for and it was one of my worse decisions in my life. The website was initially plagued by excessive downtime and there is no telephone customer service support. Customer service is non existent and a constant merry go round of endless e-mails. I have wasted a lot of my precious time trying to get things fixed that should be done right in the first place.

When I went to renew, my payment went to a wrong account and it took endless e-mails to try to sort it out and my billing still isn't correct as they charged me for services that I did not request. I just sent an e-mail requesting to close my account immediately and I got back an e-mail with a link to do it myself. It is customer service at it's worst!

Biggest Pro: none
Biggest Con: customer service, excessive downtime.

Worst Host Ever

The worst hosting company in the HISTORY of mankind. PLEASE stay away. It only gives you headaches. They never answer your email, they never fix the problem and your website will just not work. Nothing ever works.

Did you ever want to use a hosting company and have it just, work? That's not Dream Host. Dream Host is known as Dream Disgrace. Possibly the worst hosting company on the face of this earth. I'm losing to other Yankee bloggers because I couldn't post anything for 5 hours. NEVER use Dream Host.

Biggest Con: support, uptime, mysql

Dreamhost is a Nightmare!

Over the past year Dreamhost has become a night mare -- email issues galore and downtown has spiked up... last week my sites were down for over 4 days and customer service was impossible to reach -- apparently thousands of sites were down (again). This is the 5th problem in less than 18 months. We will be moving our sites this week.

Don't Waste Your Money

I really wish Dreamhost had good hosting - their customer service is great, I love the control panel, but my sites were down so often it was ridiculous. You're much better off to go with Hostgator or something similarly priced with a decent uptime.

I actually find it hard to believe a hosting company can stay in business with that much downtime. Even their own website was down a lot when I was a customer.

Biggest Pro: Control Panel, Customer Service
Biggest Con: Constant Downtime

A great host

I have been with dreamhost for over a year now, I signed up durning a time when Dreamhost had poor reputation for up time, the reason I signed up with them was because I knew a few sites that had been running with them for a few years and the owners of those sites had said Dreamhost had a great deal going.

So I registered and sure enough they had some down time, but when my site went down I emailed and within a few hours it was running again.

But Dreamhost quickly turned it around, meaning their response time to emails are sometimes counted in minutes rather than hours and so is their fixing time.

Their prices have gone down, while their service and online time has gone up.

The uptime is great and so is the reliability, a normal month sees my site going down... never. I have had one down time in the past few months, because of a scheduled move of my cluster to another server.

Their billing would have gotten a 10 from me, but because they charged me twice for last year's bill (and fixed within 10 hours, I didn't even notice... it's the principle) they get an 8.

Biggest Pro: Customer Service, response time to queries

Dreamhost Is Great

My experience with Dreamhost has been good so far. The support team is very helpful and I've only had to send about two tickets this whole time I have been with them. The uptime is excellent but the speed of the server is a bit slow. At times it will go great but then there are those days when it is not. The prices are very reasonable, and I do believe they give you for what you pay for. Overall I think this host is great, it's not excellent but it is a good host.

Biggest Pro: uptime
Biggest Con: speed

Great Host, Just A Few Problems

Well, Dreamhost has a generally negative reputation among long time webmasters ....(this is really more for beginners-mid level webmasters) it's brilliant for everything else. They do have some extra features that really want to make you go for the plan, like jabber, however, they do lack a few features compared to cPanel (I can't exactly tell what, but you get to understand it after a while). Generally they're pretty good. ESPECIALLY if you're new or want cheap, reliable hosting. I don't think I ever experienced that much downtime. Overall, if you want every sing feature and you're a long time webmaster, Dreamhost isn't recommended, but for beginners to intermediate, it's fine.

Biggest Pro: Very flexable...
Biggest Con: Not the fastest at doing things.....some problems.....perhaps non-standard