Dreamhost Web Hosting

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Dreamhost has a laundry list of features to satisfy your personal- or business-related Web hosting needs. The company's shared Web hosting plan offers unlimited disk storage, domains, and email accounts—it's great for those who have meager hosting needs. Should you need business-class Web hosting muscle, Dreamhost's Linux-based dedicated hosting and virtual private server (VPS) hosting have the resources to handle a highly trafficked site. Unfortunately, newcomers who haven't previously built or maintained a website may find Dreamhost intimidating, because the Web host doesn't do much hand-holding. Such users may be more comfortable with the more novice-friendly Arvixe, our overall Editors' Choice for Web hosting services. That said, if you have the appropriate site-building capabilities, you'll find Dreamhost's robust and flexible packages quite appealing; in fact, we liked it so much that the service is our Editors' Choice Web host for people with more advanced needs and skill sets.

Dreamhost has an amazing money-back guarantee policy. According to its terms of service, you can cancel your shared Web Hosting service within 97 days of the initial signup and have the money promptly refunded. Considering most places offer 15 to 30 days, this flexibility is welcome, and it even one-ups Arvixe's 60-day guarantee.

Shared Web Hosting Packages
Dreamhost doesn't bother with tiers for its shared Web hosting plans (starting at $10.95 per month, or $9.95 per month with a one-year commitment). Everyone gets unlimited disk storage space, domains, email, and monthly data transfers. Dreamhost gives you your first .com, .net, .org, or .info domain for free, but you have to pay the registration fee for all others. Most competitors, including Arvixe, offer unlimited domains only as part of their higher-tier plans, making Dreamhost particularly attractive. But if you want a month-to-month option, be prepared to dig for it a bit (we didn't even notice it the first time around), or just hop over to Arvixe, where it's easy to find.

Virtual Private Server Packages
Dreamhost offers Linux-based VPS Web hosting (starting at $15 per month) for businesses that need more power or expect higher traffic volumes. Dreamhost's VPS plans offer unlimited email, storage, and monthly data transfers, which is a nice perk. However, the base memory is quite low; the $15 per month plan offers only 300MB of RAM. On the other hand, the highest configuration ($249 per month) maxes out at 16GB of RAM. Of the VPS Web hosts we've reviewed, only Media Temple offers more RAM (64GB).

Still, Arvixe just edges out Dreamhost to reign as the PCMag Editors' Choice for VPS hosting. Like Dreamhost, Arvixe offers unlimited email, storage, and monthly data transfers, but the pair difffer in an important way: Arvixe has Windows-based servers. If you plan to create (or migrate) a site constructed on an ASP.NET framework, then you'll appreciate Arvixe's Windows-based VPS option.

Dedicated Web Hosting Packages
Dreamhost's dedicated server options (starting at $169 per month) aren't radically different from what many competing Web hosting services offer—you get 1TB of storage and can configure the servers with up to 16GB of RAM—but you get a highly desired feature: unlimited data transfers per month. That's a huge deal for people or companies with highly trafficked sites. Not even HostGator, the PCMag Editors' Choice for dedicated server Web hosting, can boast that.

Unfortunately, Dreamhost lacks Windows-based dedicated servers; it's Linux or bust. If you want a build a website using Microsoft's operating system as the foundation, we suggest checking our HostGator, which has Linux and Windows dedicated servers.

Dream Delayed
Signing up for Dreamhost was straightforward, but we were surprised that we couldn't get started right away. A banner message across the top of the account screen stated that Dreamhost would contact us when our account was ready. We were perplexed that we had to wait about five hours before receiving an email confirming that our account had been setup and we could get started. Considering that most services, including Arvixe, Network Solutions, and GoDaddy let you start immediately, five hours seems an excruciatingly long wait.

We like Dreamhost's user interface—it's very simple and well laid out. Instead of going the HostGator or iPage route with cute, screen-cluttering icons, Dreamhost offers a tree of menu options on the left side of the screen. It's easy to find the billing information, manage the domains, and view the settings for VPS and dedicated servers. We had no trouble finding the security options or the third-party app marketplace. What we couldn't find was the website builder to get started building my site. That's because Dreamhost doesn't offer one.

Arvixe, HostGator, and even the overly simplistic One.com all have some kind of website builder, so it is a little surprising that Dreamhost doesn't, despite all its other advanced features. You have to create your site elsewhere and use FTP to upload it to your Dreamhost account. At least the upload process is easy.

You have the option of installing third-party applications to your account such as MediaWiki, concrete5, GetSimple, Joomla, MODx Evolution, Pligg, Textpattern, and, of course, WordPress, to build your website. Piwigo is a photo gallery application and Omeka is a Web-publishing platform for museums, galleries, and archive collections. So there are some options for building a site, but it's not like getting started with Weebly or Arvixe.

Once you have a site, however, you can use the Mobile Site Builder under the Domain menu to create a mobile-optimized site. That's a nice option.

Setting Up a Managed WordPress Blog
Like several of its competitors, Dreamhost offers a preinstalled version of WordPress, known here as DreamPress (starting at $24.95 per month). Dreamhost takes care of installing and updating the popular content management system software, so users enjoy automatic daily backups. DreamPress also comes with unlimited email, monthly data transfers, and storage, as well as a variety of free WordPress themes.

DreamPress lets you install any plug-in that you desire; managed WordPress hosts Pagely and WP Engine restrict a small number of plug-ins that may impact your site's performance.

If you want to set up a non-managed WordPress site, then you'll need some patience. After installing WordPress, we had to wait about ten minutes for an email confirming that the content management system had been installed. The email had all the links we needed to create an administrator account, instructions on how to import an existing blog from WordPress.com or a different platform, information on how to get started with our first post, and tips on fine-tuning the blog by adding themes and blocking comment spam. Since this wasn't a managed WordPress installation, we had to sign up for VaultPress to enjoy daily website backups.

Email for the Power User
If you are setting up a website for your business, why wouldn't you take the logical step and create email to go with it? Dreamhost lets you create as many email addresses as you want. The terms of service clearly state that if the domain is being used for spamming, Dreamhost will shut you down. But other than that, whether you need 10 email addresses, 100, or 1,000, you are set. Arvixe and iPage also provide unlimited email accounts.

Setting up an email account is a breeze. You don't set up an account during the Web hosting sign-up process as you do with Arvixe. Instead, you sign into the control panel, click on Mail, and then start creating each address. While there is no nifty bulk-email tool like the one Network Solutions has to create multiple addresses at once, Dreamhost has a way to create multiple forwarding addresses at once. The email creation process is also very thorough, as it lets you set up account alerts, mailbox quotas, and mail archive rules.

Once you have created your email addresses, you can create discussion lists, announcement lists, and message filters. Dreamhost has one of the most robust email management tools we've seen. Dreamhost offers antispam protection using the email blacklists from Spamhaus.

E-Marketing and E-Commerce
Dreamhost offers a 14-day trial with CafeCommerce (for the discounted rate of $21.05 per month with a one-year shared Web hosting account with Dreamhost) to build an online store. This plan lets you create pages for unlimited number of products, manage inventory and orders, customize templates, and even generate coupon codes. Or you can just install ZenCart from the One Click Install menu and get started for free.

Along with $100 Google AdWords credit, Dreamhost lets you track site traffic and analytics via Chartbeat. That is different from most other services, which tend to focus only on Google Analytics.

Security and Other Features
Dreamhost offers antispam on its email, but no antimalware services. However, we like its attention to other parts of website security. The control panel has an easy-to-find link for editing the .htaccess file to control access to the site or to set up a password. For parts of the site that shouldn't get indexed by search engines, you can block spiders. You can set up cron jobs (automated batch jobs) to schedule tasks and monitor processes on the site. You will have to set up your own SSL certificates, though. Again, Dreamhost is not for beginners.

If you are a developer or manage a software development team, you will like the fact that Dreamhost comes with Subversion to manage your source code files. Most Web hosting providers restrict you to whatever applications are listed on its software marketplace. Version-control tools such as Subversion rarely make it onto these marketplaces, so it's nice to see the option to set up your own repository. Of course, that's assuming you don't just use Git repositories for your code.

What if you don't really want a website or a blog, but just a place to store files? Dreamhost also offers DreamObjects cloud storage plans, starting at $0.95 per month for 40GB and going up to 20TB for $299.95 per month.

Slow, Thorough Customer Service
Dreamhost offers email and ticket-based support, as well as online chat. We didn't see a way to make a phone call, which is too bad since sometimes you just want to deal with a human being. The chat support is decent. We tried it on a weekend evening and a Monday afternoon. We waited about 10 minutes when we tried in the evening and about 30 minutes during the day. These longish wait times aren't ideal. Arvixe offers both 24/7 telephone support and webchat and has shorter wait times, so if you think are going to need a lot of support, Arvixe may be the better option.

During our night-time chat, we asked about the differences between regular Web hosting and optimized WordPress hosting. The representative gave us the same information we'd already seen on the site, but also mentioned that Dreamhost took care of installing more themes and plugins by default if we went with the hosting option. He also touted the benefits of having automatic backups, as opposed to my signing up for the service separately if we just used regular hosting and installed WordPress myself. That's good support.

During our day-time chat, we asked the representative how to import our WordPress.com setup into Dreamhost and received a very helpful link with step-by-step instructions. The representative also clarified the setup fee for monthly plans. Again, we didn't like the wait, but we were fully satisfied the representatives knew what they were talking about.

A Power User's Dream
If using your own tools to build your website, or building it elsewhere and FTPing it to a server, sounds like something you can handle, you should consider Dreamhost. Less-experienced users should take a look at Editors' Choice Arvixe, which offers considerably more hand-holding and support. However, considering that Dreamhost gives you a full 97 days to explore its service, you've got nothing to lose by trying it first, and potentially quite a lot to gain. Thanks to its extensive tools and security options, unlimited storage, bandwidth, domains, and email, and generous money-back guarantee, Dreamhost is a PCMag Editors' Choice for Web hosting services.

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