DreamHost reviews – Page 2

13 hours and 30 minutes...

That's how long 3 of my sites have been down since early this morning. When i signed on in 2006 everything was smooth as butter. But as grew so did dreamhost. last year they convinced me to sign up with VPS service to kill the errors my database was receiving. since then i've had frequent downtime. and when i mean downtime, i mean down for hours.

I could type forever. the rests of the reviews will sum up the details. i'm off to find a new host.

Biggest Con: a 13 hour outage in 2012, is unacceptable

I switched to dreamhost from pair because of cost

For a while I had my main site on pair.com (and I can't say too many nice things about pair.com, but it was expensive, I'd just lost my job, and our websites don't make money) and throwaway domains hosted on godaddy. Godaddy was absolutely horrible.

dreamhost offers unlimited everything (within reason) and the price was right, so I moved everything over to dreamhost. I'm a programmer, but I don't do much web-based business, so I didn't really care that much about how fabulous my site was as long as it was there.

Fast forward a few years and I found out about a really neat new service called cloudflare (I strongly recommend it). Cloudflare essentially sits between your server and the rest of the internet (using DNS magic) and optimizes your site on-the-fly. Among its many cool features is that it provides free and painless integration with pingdom, which keeps tabs on when your site is up or down and emails you notifications.

I'd always known dreamhost wasn't rock solid in terms of reliability, but it's ridiculous. My dreamhost sites all go down, often multiple times in one day, with no warning from, notification by, or apology from dreamhost. They just hope you don't notice, I guess.

Now, I've frequently made use of their tech support and they're fast, friendly, and helpful. But it doesn't matter if the site is falling over constantly. I'll send in a support request and they'll tell me that yup, sorry, it's down. Blah blah. And then it will be back up in half an hour or an hour.

Lots of stuff about dreamhost are good. They claim to offset carbon emissions, their control panel is great (if a bit slow), and when I've had to restore stuff from backup it Just Worked. That's all great. But the sites keep falling over.

Back when I switched, dreamhost was, for what it offered, pretty cheap. Now it's not even especially well-priced.

I'm figuring out which site to switch to, and I wanted to provide a balanced review rather than rate them all zeroes because I'm in a bad mood or I tried to use them to host my porn site and got banned, which is what I take away from the idiotically negative reviews.

Biggest Pro: Control Panel
Biggest Con: Downtime

Hosting Review of Dreamhost

I am very upset with their hosting services. They delete my complete account with giving me reason and they never refund my payment of remaining 2.5 years .. i was hosted on their host first time for 1 year and i was happy after that i submit payment for 3 year and after few months they start telling me you need to remove zip files then i remove all files and after that they send me email that they are going to remove my service and they told me that i accept term and condition that they can remove my account any time.

So my recommendation please not this account they make you frustrated and eta your money.

Thanks

Works great. Just have some idea what you're doing.

I've been with Dreamhost since 2001, and the service they provide has been rock-solid for me.

My original shared plan provided me with many years of virtually trouble-free service. On rare occasions, automated processes would fail, but support would always fix things right up. At one point, demand did seem to exceed their capacity, but over time, they overhauled their network, eliminated points of failure, and eventually upgraded all their hardware and relocated to a new data center. Since then, I've had zero problems.

Shortly thereafter, they launched the Virtual Private Server offering, and since signing up for that, I could hardly be happier. My memory and CPU usage is clearly defined, and I can use as much as I want within those parameters without worrying. If I need more or less at any given time, I can scale it up and down easily. I also have full root access, to use at my own risk of course, which enables me to run specialized software for particular clients, something few hosts allow. If I screw it up, they have a magic wand that restores everything back to the original configuration. So long as all my sites use the one-click installs, they are restored to factory-fresh condition and otherwise never miss a beat. Sites that don't use one-click installs are easily restored from my own backups via SFTP. It's everything I would want in a VPS.

I'm comfortable giving up phone support and other niceties, given the quality of service and the price. I feel like the huge allocations of bandwidth and disk space make up for it, together with unlimited domain hosting. On my one account, I'm able to run 48 sites of varying load, with my chief site pulling several thousand hits per day. My own site monitoring software puts uptime for the past year at 99.998%, and since 2001, 99.987%. Those numbers I can definitely live with at this price.

When I look for other hosts that would allow me to do what I do with Dreamhost, I find I might wind up paying far more than what Dreamhost costs me.

But at the same time, I read the fine print before I buy anything or rely on promotions or guarantees. I do actually read the service agreement, because that's where they spell out exactly what they will do and how they will do it, so that I can make an educated decision. I make my own backups, and I treat my data and scripts as my own responsibility.

In other words, I view Dreamhost as a partner, not a babysitter. And they've always held up their end of the deal.

Biggest Pro: Ample resources at modest cost
Biggest Con: Squirrelmail. (Use Google Apps instead)

A dream to host.

I've hosted on their site for about a year. They're actually quite legit, despite **** other people say. I hosted my blog along with personal files on their site with no problems. The fact people crying because they can't understand the fact that their site is not a VPS is beyond me.

Overall, the biggest con is the exorbitant prices charged by them. They have promotions going around major holidays with $10/y (plus the domain if you decide not to renew) unlimited hosting plans though so it kind of cancels it out. I don't really know support since I haven't needed it.

Another major con is no cPanel. I think they have an option to import it but I've never adapted to their control panel. Their "advanced" one-click installs are easy and give you access to modify the installed software as you want, unlike the "easy" one-click installs, which lock you out from any modifications.

I stopped using Dreamhost a few weeks short of the domain/hosting expiry date and am expecting a fee for the domain that I hosted with them. No problems other than me being suspicious that the charge is going to pop up whenever it feels like.

Rating: A solid A-. Bonus points for extremely cheap unlimited hosting and points taken off for no cPanel and ****** one-click installs.

Obviously not paid by Dreamhost, and neither paid by any other hosting company. If you want a good host, google one.

Biggest Pro: Great deals going around
Biggest Con: No cPanel

I love dreamhost!

I'm not sure why there are so many bad comments about Dreamhost. Since I had very good experience with them, I thought of defending my ex-hosting provider. Though I don't host with them anymore (because I felt they were expensive), my domain is still registered with them.

I use to host my blog with dreamhost for almost 2 years. It's really a dream hosting with them. To be very honest, I never had any downtime nor did I notice any drop in connection speed.

I love them the most because of their Control Panel. It's the best I have experienced so far. (To be honest, I have experience with only 2 hosting companies). Their control panel is simply amazing and you can do most of the stuff without even contacting their support team.

What more, they offer you ssh access, django/rails support which is great if you are web developer. I hardly contacted their support team, but in few times I contacted them, they were very responsive. They also have an extensive knowledge base in the form of wikis and forums.

I made one of the biggest blunder in my life by moving from them to Just Host. Yes, you read it right, Just Host. Like most of them who moved to Just Host, I moved to them because they offered cheap hosting. I was paying around $9/month at Dreamhost and the offer of around $4 was simply irresistible for me.

I use to host just my wordpress blog then and I found I was not effectively using my blog so I thought of saving some money by moving to Just Host. Hmm..now I think I should have moved to Blogger which offers free custom domain hosting.

Now I'm learning python/django and when I checked with Just Host regarding that, they told me they don't support django on shared servers. For SSH access, Just Host asked me to pay $19/year extra. Contrast this with Dreamhost, all of these are bundled in. So in actual sense, the pricing of Dreamhost looks ok for me now.

It was only after moving foolishly (without reading the reviews here) to Just Host, I felt the importance of Dreamhost. I simply love you Dreamhost and looking forward to come back to you after getting rid of Just Host.

Please don't think that I'm paid by "dreamhost" to write this review. I have no affiliation with them except having hosted my blog with them before. I'm not disclosing my current blog address because I still host it with Just Host.

Biggest Pro: Control Panel, Knowledge Base
Biggest Con: None

Never never never use dreamhost

Never in my life have I hated anyone or any business as much as this dreamhost. If just the server down often, it is technical problem, you just move on to do your business elsewhere. With dreamhost, since they provide daily backup I did not do my own backup. One day, they closed my account without warning, saying there was too much load. Ok, I will move my business elsewhere, however they will not give me my own scripts back. Without a live phone support, they do not answer email, so no matter how much you hate them, they are not answering your email. I would curse dreamhost for the rest of my life. If you use them, you are not just warned, you are cursed as well.

4 year client review

Read Adam's review - same thing happened to me.
All of the sudden all of my websites went down, I was in a short vacation. People calling in, what's going on, why are all the 100+ websites down? Well, Dreamhost decided to close them all off.
Asked why, they sent me general wikipedia pages on subjects like TOS or host policies. Asked again - "SEO black hat tactics". I still have no idea WHY.

Went through hell to move all my domains (including the actual domain names).

I would not recommend them to ANYONE.

For the sake of your online business, KEEP AWAY from them!

DreamHost would have been the best of cheap webhosting if their servers do not crash and go down so frequently. It's absolutely a nightmare. Their control panel is great, support not bad too, but what do these matter if the server is down for 1/5 of the time?! We need uptime! That's essentially what makes a great web host! But on the contrary, DreamHost is way beyond a bad host in uptime.

Absolutely NOT recommended, even with a small budget you can find better uptime services elsewhere.

Biggest Pro: control panel
Biggest Con: uptime

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