DreamHost reviews – Page 5

Dreamhost... A mixed bag

Good feature list. Lots of storage. Reasonable price. SSH accesss. All of these are good, but downtime problems are a super buzzkill. What good are all these dreamy features when you can't really count on them????

Summary:
Dreamhost is cool if you really don't care of your site (or your customer's) is available at all time. Tell your clients that their site will be down for a couple of days now and then. In other words, Dreamhost is a satisfactory for amateur projects.

Biggest Pro: SSH access
Biggest Con: Downtime is a buzzkill

Dreamhost review

A lot of people tend to get over emotional after having a bad experience and start writing really bad comments or vice versa based on their experience.

I would however like to present a hopefully helpful review of this host for everyone to decide upon.

I have had my hosting account with Dreamhost.com for the past 2 years on their basic shared hosting plan which has been more than sufficient. I have hosted several websites, both live as well as test sites.

The Pros of this host are undeniably the huge amount of webspace that you get and the amount of bandwidth and unlimited SQL databases, subdomains and domains. This was extremely helpful for me since I was able to set up multiple websites with ease, each using its own database. It also allowed me to be able to test differen free scripts from around the net with ease.

Another good feature is the one click installs available which allow you to install popular web scripts with ease. Apart from this they offer streaming media options from your server and also allow you to be in full control of you DNS and MX (mail server) settings.

As far as the cons are concerned, there is quite a bit of downtime at different intervals. Dont get me wrong, its not like they are down all the time. But to give you an estimate, in a period of 6 months, expect atleast 3 to 4 days of downtime in total. Various reasons including power outages, attacks on servers, hardware failure are presented as the excuses. Overall it is not as bad as one would expect really, but it can be pretty frustrating at times. Especially when it coincides with the launch of a new site or produce on your website.

The customer support is over all OK. It takes up to a day for them to reply in most cases but you can expect an occaisional reply within the hour. But over all they do reply every single ticket and in majority cases present you with the solution. They also offer a support forum where you can ask questions. All that being said, I would also like to say that one of my queries was never solved however, in which case their reply was simply that they cannot figure it out at all. I let it go eventually because atleast they were honest about it. One thing I will say is that they are honest in their replies to you and dont make stuff up just to cover up.

Anyways, My over all rating for dreamhost is: Good

I would recommend it to anyone looking for a good cheap host offering tonnes of features, space, bandwidth and databses.

Dreamhost - web hosting provider for my own blog

I used paid web hosting services from Bulgaria and free web hosting services from around the world until I created my Dreamhost account with a promo code. I have no more downtime problems, since I got my account at Dreamhost about 5 months ago. I am impressed by their easy-to-use and advanced web admin interface.

Dreamhost offers three different servers for web hosting, mail exchange and MySQL databases. What about the technical support, I've received almost immediate support for all the difficulties that I experienced since my first day with their services. The offer toll free 24/7 online support via web form.

The only thing that makes me a little bit unhappy is that Dreamhost does not offer WHM and CPanel for easier reseller hosting administration, but their own admin panel seems to be more feature-rich than CPanel.

Biggest Pro: Cheap distributed hosting with 24/7 online support
Biggest Con: There is no WHM/CPanel ot Plesk

DreamHost, best host!

As the company has expanded rapidly, they've gone through their share of growing pains and made some changes... there have been some unexpected hiccoughs... and maybe it takes a little longer for tech support to get back to you.

But that's why they have the most amazing WIKI. Having administered sites on other hosts, I can say that no one has the quality forum and WIKI that Dreamhost provides. If it doesn't have your answer, then you can contact them. I've always had relatively quick and courteous responses. These guys get back to you, and not route the call to some center around the world! So a little patience is required.

I can honestly say that I have not had a single major problem (knock on wood), and certainly none of the near catastrophes that some of the reviewers seem to imply here.

My email has been consistent, and I have more problems with mail service on my cable-account (cablevision). The few times that emails have been slow are spotty. Based on my research, it seems to come down to how other servers treat email from a dreamhost SMTP... Because of the sheer amount of spam out there, some of the bigger companies like AOL or Verizon may treat your email as a spam source. It is, after all, your own email server and not one of their mega-providers. A simple email to the ISPs tech support will correct that. And again, the very informative WIKI explains why there may be mail delays due to some ISPs. People should do their own research and work before complaining.

A great page is simply called "Improving Mail Performance for Everyone!"

which explains why there may be delays in mail delivery (more often than not a user problem!)

And that's the basic point. There may be issues, and some may be valid - I haven't seen any. But in the end, many of the problems listed here could possibly be solved by doing a little homework and trying different things.

Dreamhost is not a service that does it for you. It is a service that provides low-cost hosting with all the bells and whistles. But as a trade-off, you have to actually play your own site-admin (imagine that!) rather than allowing some faceless entity to baby you through it.

Good while it lasted

During my tenure of hosting from these guys, a total of 2 years, I used their 7.99/domain and 9.99/month hosting. It provided me an absolutely huge amount of bandwidth and storage. Neither of which I could use up and trust me, I tried. The only downfall to this company was when I went back to them after my hosting expired and they refused to provide me a backup copy of my site and everything I had on the site because I had lost all my data previously. They do keep an eye on illegal file hosting such as warez and mp3s because they found some mp3s I had hosted on there. There were only 5 or 6 but since they were using a little bit more bandwidth than the rest of my site they were noticed.

DreamHost

DreamHost are normally pretty expensive, working out at around $120 a year; however due to their ten-year anniversary they are offering a one year hosting plan for $9.4. As I'm new to the whole hosting business I jumped at the chance, and after a few days of using it am content with their service. They offer unlimited domain addons as well as a free domain with purchase; the one bad thing about them is their panel, which is different from the standard cPanel. Although it looks complicated in the beginning, it is fairly simple to use. As for technical help, I had a problem with their panel so sent off an email to support- it was promptly answered within five hours.

Biggest Pro: Price
Biggest Con: Control Panel

DreamHost isn't for Serious People

I've had DreamHost hosting for more than a year now. I have a "Code Monster" account. Well, I did until they changed everything on me again. They're upping the limits of their hosting yet again. 500 GB of space and 5 TB of bandwidth, as if anyone can really use those sort of resources on a shared server hosting anything else.

My experience with them was mediocre. My site often loaded slowly, there were issues when the MySQL server was down, and oftentimes another user on my server was abusing the resources, preventing my site from loading.

Their control panel is unique and quite good, but that's really the highest point. That and you can get shell access to the server your site is on.

They offer a lot for the price you pay, and unfortunately, they can't follow through on some of the most basic aspects of web hosting. All of their bells and whistles try to hide that fact. I ended up getting so disgusted that I went and invested in a dedicated server elsewhere.

Biggest Pro: SSH Access
Biggest Con: Unreliable

Dreamhost: A Beginner's Dream

I've noticed that most of the other reviews here have mentioned Dreamhost's reliability, speed, and various issues (though I personally think some may have been a bit overboard), and custom panel. I want to elaborate in this reveiw on one of the best features Dreamhost's panel can offer *anyone* just starting out owning their own sites.

Under the "Goodies" section, there is a page for "one-click installs." This is, by far, the easiest automated method I've come across to install any number of applications on your website. The most noteworthy of the available software is, without a doubt, Wordpress. Many first-time site owners are bloggers these days, and there couldn't be a simpler way to "get up and go."

One-click install runners up would be PHPbb (forum software), Gallery (image album software), and Joomla! (for content management).

A few "cons" would be for those used to CPanel, Dreamhost's panel might be a bit confusing at first, their pricing tends to lean towards the higher end, and their help wiki could be a bit more user-friendly.

Regardless, in this reviewer's opinion, the pros far outweigh the cons. Dreamhost is an excellent way to go for the beginner and the intermediate site owner.

Biggest Pro: One-click Install option, perfect for beginners.
Biggest Con: A bit pricey.

Dreamhost, a definite starting point!

I've been using dreamhost for about 2 years and have 3 separate accounts with them.

For anyone looking for shared hosting at a small price, dreamhost is the way to go. You will receive more disk space and bandwidth then you will most likely ever use. You will also get the best customer service that i've come to find.

And the perks! One click installs of many web softwae packages like the infamous blogging/cms platform: wordpress. as well as ActiveCollab and even MediaWiki. Even a Subversion setup!

You also get great benefits when referring other customers ($97!).

And on top of all that... hourly backups. Never loose your website and files to hackers again.

For shared hosting- dreamhost is your best option for the price.

Biggest Pro: Price
Biggest Con: Still Shared Hosting

Great Host

I haven't had a single problem with Dreamhost after using it for almost a full year. I have the basic plan, and it easily handles the traffic I get on my sites that don't get over 100 visitors a day. I host multiple domains through it, which is easy to set up through their control panel. The speeds seem fast, but not quite as fast as I have seen on some other servers. I have only experienced a very tiny amount of down time when they switched the location of my server.

All in all, a great host for small sites. (At least for their smallest plan)