DreamHost Reviews

I appreciate the openness of their customer facing communications. I’ve personally experienced excellent uptime. Their services are feature rich and easy to use. I’ve been with them for about two years and look forward to future years!

I’ve been using DreamHost as my cheap secondary server for over a year now. For the price and features, DreamHost has the best value of among bargain shared hosting providers.

My server with DreamHost is not as fast as my VPS… but it only costs a fraction of the price of my “good server”.

I use DreamHost as my secondary server, it’s where I grow my sites before they have decent traffic — especially blogs because DreamHost makes it so easy to set-up WordPress blogs and easy upgrades.

For me, support has been fantastic — but I haven’t had many problems except the occasional downtime. I know other DreamHost customers have had issues with major downtime, but I’ve only had 5-10 minutes of downtime a handful of times over the last year.

I would recommend DreamHost to anyone who does not need 100% uptime. Honestly, most mom and pop websites would be perfect here…no one will notice if Bob’s local handyman site is down at 1am for 10mins.

Also: DreamHost’s control panel is better than cpanel.

I have a few websites (photos, blogs, small ecommerce…) with Dreamhost.
Having all my sites and domains under one roof is very handy. They have been helpful when I had technical issues.

They are also very good value for money. I would recommend it for personal use and pro-am. I would however not recommend it if your business depends on your website.

You’ve hired your l33t team of hackers. The VC funding has arrived, and your San Francisco office is full of nerf guns and improbable chairs. All set with the start up? Great.

All you need now is a room full of servers and a bearded gentleman who considers English his third language after Unix and Klingon. Save yourself the effort, cash and difficult personal hygiene discussions.

Sign up with Dreamhost and you’re good to go. I consider myself an experienced server admin and programmer. So, when I started my business I considered Dreamhost a stepping stone to the sort of setup described above.

I’ve never needed it; Dreamhost has always come through. Source control system? SVN is setup with a few clicks from the control panel. Easy creation of databases with PHPMyAdmin access? All there. Full shell access, lots of disk space, and a response time speedy enough from all the countries I’ve tried it.

DreamHost are not completely comprehensive; the more advanced you get, there will be esoteric (or not so esoteric but difficult to install: I’m looking at you, Trac) applications that you find you need. In these cases, somebody with decent Unix chops will still need to get their hands dirty at the command line.

Their support will back you up as they can, and I’ve always found responses to be very speedy. There will be times when the answer comes back ‘cant be done on a shared server’ but they will generally do their best and propose a word around to achieve the same goal.

Twice I’ve had fairly complex problems that required their direction intervention on my shared server, and they have fixed them within a couple of hours. Frankly, I have employees that don’t match up to that.

On top of their professional support, Dreamhost’s popularity means that whatever you’re trying to do, somebody will already have done it. Hopefully, they’ve also posted it to the Wiki or the support forums to enlighten you, too.

They’re far from perfect for every business. A reputation for downtime is not entirely undeserved, so if you’re working on a web-based nuclear facility manager, I’d go elsewhere.

If you don’t need five nines, I’d seriously consider accepting the occasional drop in service in exchange for the value for money and ease of use they’ll give you.

Equally, remember you’re on a shared host with hundreds of other users. If your site hits Digg and Slashdot simultaneously and regularly, or you’re solving the Riemann hypothesis using Python’s excellent math libraries – sorry, Dreamhost isn’t for you.

Then again, if you’re at that stage in your project you can probably afford that lavish server room and a WoW guild’s worth of geeks. Until then, Dreamhost it.

I have used DreamHost for about 6 months now, its really simple. The one click installs are a nice time saving feature. Unfortunately they don’t have the latest version of PHP on their servers so its been a bit restricted for me lately. Can’t complain about downtime as I haven’t seen any.

If you need 100% uptime or high performance look elsewhere, but if you want cheap server space and lots of features DreamHost is pretty amazing.

I have two dedicated servers with Dreamhost plus another bunch of sites in the shared environment, and while they might not be the most reliable in terms of uptime, the customer care is generally very good (you won’t receive copy & paste responses that don’t answer your questions), and this means I’m inclined to forgive them for hosting that is less-than-100% solid. It’s probably not the best place for mission-critical stuff, but it’s cheap and cheerful and undoubted value-for-money.

I’ve been using DreamHost for a few years now. While they’re not ideal for high-traffic, database driven or CPU intensive sites, they rock for quick ‘n’ dirty hosting for staging sites, microsites etc. And I’ll take their homegrown control panel over cPanel anyday.