DreamHost portrays itself as an affable web-hosting site geared towards developers and entrepreneurs, and fabricated by nerds for the nerdy crowd. They’ve managed to hang in there, which is quite impressive. For 16 years, DreamHost has been offering reliable hosting services. The company is headquartered in United States on the west coast in California.
THE FINANCIAL ANGLE
Cost for using DreamHost services are fairly reasonable. They offer Dedicated, VPS, and Shared hosting together with a specially designed DreamPress service for WordPress users.
- Shared hosting will set you back $8.95 but you get a lot of goodies along with it like unlimited TB disk-storage, monthly bandwidth, domains hosted, MySQL 5 databases and more.
- VPS plans cost between $15 and $200 and includes unlimited TB of monthly-bandwidth, domains hosted, email accounts, full shell-SSH-FTP-SFTP, TB and 50GB backups disk-storage, and more.
- DreamHost.com offers six Dedicated hosting-plans, they include packages such as New Moon 2, Half Moon 2 and 4, Blue Moon 4, 8, and 16 at prices starting from $109 up to $249 with Blue Moon 16 being the most expensive. All hosting plans include Desktop-grade CPU, RAM, and adequate disk-space, and all the other unlimited additions like domains, email accounts, Debian-Linux operating system etc.
- Potential customers are offered a two-week trial free of charge. However if you cancel before the free trial is up, you must pay for your domain registration; however, domains are free if you take the package. The first year cost for hosting is $9.95 per-month and two-year hosting cost $8.95 per month.
FEATURES
- An e-commerce solution is offered, Cafe-Commerce, via a collaboration with WebAssist. This feature permits customers to list an unlimited number of products and images for each product for $30 per month.
- DreamHost has produced a One-Click installer for trendy software like Joomla and WordPress.
- Charitable organizations are offered free web-hosting if they are registered in the United States and members can join an affiliate program by referring friends.
- FTP access is accessible and may be operated on DreamHost’s shared-hosting; however, wildcard DNS for sub-domains is not available.
More interesting can be discovered at the DreamHost.com website.
EASE OF USE
The Dreamhost.com control panel is easy to navigate and use. All functions are clearly displayed. Signing up is hassle free. You only need to enter your personal detail, the domain you prefer, and you are on your way.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Contacting the company could be frustrating since there is no phone number only email. You can search through the website’s forum, receive info from the site’s Dreamhost Status Blog, or contact a techy via email.
However, if you want to shell out the $9.95 per month, it includes three callbacks per month. In order to receive a callback, you must login to your control panel and make a request.
SUMMARY
Overall, DreamHost functions as well as can be expected. There have been a few hiccups along the way. For instance, in 2007 the company became vulnerable to hackers, and in 2008 customers were over-billed an astonishing $2.1 million! DH promises 100% uptime and a 97-day guarantee. The company has managed to pull through 16 years, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t carry on 16 more years and beyond.
