10 Reasons Why We Use Dreamhost Hosting
September 2nd, 2006DreamHost Webhosting offers the best web hosting service. Our site is hosted with them ever since I switched to Wordpress and is highly recommended. At that time though there were several good webhosting deals, I primarily chose Dreamhost due to the cheap webhosting yet powerful feature rich package they offered. But over time, I have come to love dreamhost for several more reasons I want to share with you…
Photo by JohnSeb
1. Excellent Customer Support
Dreamhost has an excellent mechanism of addressing customer complaints. Whenever my sites were down, I just had to lodge my complaint in their automated support, or fill in the support form which takes into account the severity of the errors (to sort the urgent issues first) and what your expertise about the subject is (so they do not feedback professional webmasters and sysadmins like novices).
I needed customer support twice over the last 5 months, once the sites were back up in 5 minutes and the other time in 1 hour. After that there is an email informing you of the fix and a follow up survey about your feedback regarding the customer support guy. You can keep track of all your support history. There is nothing worse than having a site down and not having any response from your webhost.
They let you chat with other DreamHost Customers (sometime official DreamHost representatives drop by) or visit the DreamHost Customer Discussion Forum to find the answers you need. And then there is the huge customer-contributed repository of DreamHost knowledge at their wiki!
2. Unlimited bandwidth and Storage Space
I do not know of any other webhosting service which will offer you Unlimted Storage and Bandwidth! 5TB (terabytes!) of bandwidth per month and that too increasing by 40GB every week. I remember my first site I hosted on Geocities, it had a miserly bandwidth of few MB per day and the site used to offline any day there was a traffic spike. Monthly Bandwidth is very important because a link on Digg or slashdot can drive huge site traffic your way and finish your limited bandwidth in a few hours, leaving you to pay to let your site stay online. They even allow bandwidth throttling to save bandwidth.
Don’t be put off with the words “Unlimited”, they are not overselling and they explain what unlimited is really about. We get over 650,000 pageviews a month and the site runs smoothly on a shared hosting server (with WP-Supercache of course).
3. One click Installations and Upgrades
This is yet another wonderful feature that lets you start your own blog (wordpress), forum (PhpBB), wiki (MediaWiki), image album (Gallery), store (ZenCart), CMS (Joomla) etc in a matter of a few minutes. Initially I created a forum, wiki and wordpress blog in 10 minutes. Imagine uploading each package and configuring it on your own if you had no prior experience with it.
Dreamhost currently supports following 1 click installs (both PHP4 and PHP5) – WordPress, phpBB Forum, Gallery Image Album, ZenCart Store, Joomla (Mambo) CMS, activeCollab Collaboration, OpenX, MediaWiki Wiki, Advanced Poll and WebCalendar Calendar.
If you use multiple wordpress blogs, they can set it up in minutes and upgrade them too. That goes for all tools they install automatically.
4. Host Unlimited Domains, Subdomains, Databases
Most other good webhosts will allow you to host a few domains and subdomains, but definitely not unlimited. Now you can create as many subdomains as you like, host all your domain names on one account and pay no extra charges for it. Imagine the ability to host hundreds of domain names for the same prices (of course it is shared hosting). And top it up with unlimited free databases on each domain!
5. Make Money with Dreamhost Affiliate Rewards
You will never need to pay for webhosting again as they let you use your affiliate earnings for your yearly fees. Make money via the Dreamhost affiliate program and encash it via Paypal. Provide discount promo codes to help your visitors get cheap webhosting deals.
6. Neat and Easy Control Panel
Even a person who is hosting his personal site for the first time will find it easy to navigate around the panel. It is simple and helps to easily track all your hosted domain names. Simple help explanations and warnings prevent you from doing something foolish and make even techies feel comfortable. Simplicity does not compromise on the powerful features and functions you can perform with the simple interface.
7. Maximum Power Features You Need
The package meets the demand of the the newbie personal site creator and the professional webmaster alike. It comes power packed with CGI, PHP4 & PHP5, Ruby on Rails, SSI, Jabber chat server, Quicktime streaming, frontpage extensions and numerous other powerful tools I know less about and might never use. But it is great to know you can expand your web services to new levels, when you require without paying more, or looking for another service to host them.
8. Dreamhost Status Notifications
The Dreamhost status pages keeps you aware of what exactly is the problem going on in different web servers, what is the cause of downtimes and when scheduled upgrades are expected. You can subscribe their feed for every anouncement on Dreamhost Status. They are willing to truly convey their problems.
9. Dreamhost Blog and Newletter
It is not the usual corporate style impersonal newsletter that is sent out every month. Nor does the Dreamhost blog has that faceless feel to it. They have a friendly and humourous tone to what they do, and the fact that they love webhosting and Dreamhost customers comes thorough.
10. 97-day money back guarantee on all plans
If you are unsatisfied with Dreamhost for any reason, they assure a full refund if notified within 97 days of signing up for hosting. If you have taken advantage of the free domain registration service, that will refund of $9.95 is not possible, and you may transfer it to another host if you’d like. Now that is an incentive worth trying out for.
11. Top company hosting 850,000 domains
They are now hosting over 850,000 domain names and is in the top 11 web hosting companies worldwide. You can also join these sites and be part of the Dreamhost experience.
Still thinking? Sign up for a Dreamhost account now (includes $50 discount code). For as low as $5.95 a month, with a 97-day full refund guarantee, tell me about a better deal…
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I use Dreamhost, too; I agree, they’re excellent. There have been a few outages recently, but they’re honest and prompt about dealing with it, which I appreciate, despite the inconvenience of inaccessible websites.
My only concern is that they’re located in earthquake-prone California.
I too use Dreamhost and I use them only to read their newsletters :)
I also use Dreamhost for about two years now. I know they have had their problems. All tech support has problems at one time or another. Much better then my provious hosts. I have not lost any data and yes once I could not get tom my sites. But over all I’m very happy with thire service.
Jody their building the Garland build is rated to with stand an 8.4 earth quake.
They’re great but not the greatest. You’ll often see downtime of 1-2 hours per week. Look like they oversell, 2TB of bandwdiths cost like more than 100 bucks a month.
The thing I dont like with dreamhost is the ftp server name. It goes like bart.dreamhost.com. I can’t set it up to display my main site name to give to my client who has an add on domain in my account…
if you can pls answer my queries regarding hosting wordpress blogs at dreamhost (or any other)
1) what happens to the interface of posting data, do we post entries through our normal login ourblog.wordpress.com/wp-login.php
2) do we continue to get benefits like our post also appearing in wordpress/tags
3) what happens to our wordpress stats etc.
4) our blog appearing in wordpress top blog / top post …
5) our site getting automatically pingged to technorati
Or do we stand to lose some of these if we host our own …
Good review and very helpful. I’m trying to decide on moving a couple of my blogs away from a nasty web host and this explanation helped. I’d like to know if there is a limit on database access? That’s what’s killing my other web host. They lowered the database hit level so I publish a post and it brings down the database. Stupid limit.
And to answer Jay’s questions for you:
Your web host does not have any influence over the interface of WordPress. You are talking about moving from the free WordPress.com version to the full version of WordPress.
The web host has nothing to do with WordPress statistics on full version WordPress blogs, though if they provide a statistics package, there are some WordPress Plugins that will allow you to read those statistics from the Administration Panels.
The blog of the day and top posts of the day are features of WordPress.com blogs. There are WordPress Plugins that will display those on your blog (for your blog’s most popular content) but a full version WordPress blog is not connected with WordPress.com features.
Your full version WordPress blog will automatically be listed in Google and other search engines and Technorati will automatically come visiting and find all your categories and tags. The happen with pings, you don’t have to do anything.
By switching from WordPress.com to a full version WordPress blog you don’t “lose” anything, you actually gain. Statistics change but you get to choose your own version of how you want to see those statistics. And a full version WordPress blog opens you up to the exciting world of WordPress Plugins.
I hope that helps.
finally I moved to dreamhost , and I am agree with you qot , dreamhost is really powerful and great.
I have also got one Dreamhost Package after reading your views.
lets see how it goes.
Excellent review.
Thanks Lorelle, I am seriously considering moving to dreamhost. Unlimited domain hosting feature is also interesting, I guess I can host multiple domains, mydomain.com, mygadgets.com, eworld.com, all with the same hosting plan that I purchase.
i’ve been thinking of changing my webhost. it seems that i might switch to dreamhost after reading this ;)
I’ve been considering moving to Dreamhost as well, and this post is likely the push that i needed. I’ve been using 1&1 up until now, but it’s not the best…Thanks for the info!
Wow Nice Hosting Review
dreamhost is the beat, all services support good..
sorry my bad english =.=
I’ve been with Dreamhost for a few months now and they are awesome!
At first I was dubious, I thought it it was too good to be true, but it is definitely true.
That said, they did have an administrative problem recently that saw many people being erroneously billed. Full credit to Dreamhost though, they dealt with the matter with honesty and speed.
Thumbs up!!
i hv been using Godaddy..
it works great, either.
just want to know, Are you using the dedicated server or shared server on dreamhost.com…for me I am using the services since 4 months(on shared server ) …out of which past 1.5 month, up time of my sites has been pathetic..inspite of 15-20 mail follow up with them , they are not able to solve the issue…I want to know (if u r using shared server), whats the uptime you have experienced with them?
We are on a Dreamhost shared server. Uptime is great.
I use dreamhost and they are fantastic. They have a mindboggling array of features including a huge monthly bandwidth allocation. I couldn’t be happier.
I know a web host that offers more bandwidth.
Hostgator.com offers 6 TB at a reasonable price.
Oh, man, can you really use the 5TB traffic? Thats only a trick, who can really use that while the CPU usage below 2%? Be honest, be good seller!
i am using it for last one year, they have typical tech problems, some times you see service unavailable on my sites…..
i am using the most popular godaddy web hosts, i am happy with that
Well when my site (hinduismnet.com) receive the same page views as you get, I will surely move to Dreamhost:) But for now, I don’t think that may be needed.
i am currently using bluehost.com It seems like a decent host. Let me see if i encounter any problems, then dreamhost would be my next choice.
regards
thinkjayant
I have heard good things about Dreamhost and I think they are pretty reliable.
I dint know about that 50$ coupon
I will try that out
Nice review for Dream Host. Just a thing about bandwidth, disk space and unlimited domain offer on shared hosting packages. It’s very Misleading when web hosting companies say that.
In their TOS they clearly mention that we CanNOT go above specific (very miserly) resource usage. It’s impossible to use stated large bandwidth (in gbs or tbs), disk space and host dozens of sites on the same shared account.
All of the exaggerated figures are just marketing tactics.
Only dedicated servers can serve that kinda recourses.
now, they offer unlimited diskspace and unlimited bandwidth. :)
I am with them for 2yrs, i like their newsletter more than their hosting!