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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How many visitors do you receive per day ?
Are you on a shared plan with DH ?
Have you ever been dug(g)/slashdotted ?
We are also on a shared hosting plan. We get over 600K pageviews a month. We get Dugg sometimes. A smooth traffic and WP-supercache are secrets of staying on a shared server.
I will consider about this information. Thanks a lot.
Dreamhost’s most clever marketing idea is their free sub accounts.
E.g., my friend let me establish jidanni.org,
radioscanningtw.jidanni.org, taizhongbus.jidanni.org, all on a sub
account of his. But then one day I wanted to establish
transgender-taiwan.org, and that was too much for him, so I ended up
buying my own account.
Plenty of fun newsletters though, e.g.,
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/V7.10_October_2005 .
i have registered a web with dream host this is my first experience with them, but one thing i haven’t understand, first they say that a registration and hosting will cost more than 100 dollars and again they tell you to use a coupon and get more than 90 % off i mean whats that either u r getting compromised somewhere.
Great review! I got signed up with dreamhost and forgot to get the WP-Supercache going before it caused problems lol. The staff on my shared server just reminded me to get it going and now all is fine.
DreamHost is not the first hosting I am hosting my sites with. Actually DH is the third hosting company I have tried. I changed to DH over my previous two hosting company because those did not satisfy my requirements.
From May 2007, I was impressed by world wide web and I wanted to make some money online. Now for making money online, you need to have website. In the August 2007, I was looking for Linux web hosting company. I was looking for web hosting which provides lots of space, lots of data transfer limit, unlimited domain name hosting, unlimited mails and ssh users. So if I want to make any changes in any page, I can do that over ssh prompt. Since I was about to start online business, I was looking for service which provides very high up time and good technical support. I also wanted all these features at very cheap rate.
I researched a little bit at that time and found that DreamHost is cheap and provides all the features I wanted. I did more research about service and support. I found many good reviews. I also found some bad reviews. I read all reviews and I wanted to go for DH but after reading bad reviews I could not make my mind. I searched more but didn’t find any hosting service which provides all needed features at cheap rate. Finally, I thought there always will be some bad reviews on any service and decided to give a try to DreamHost. Since I was on a limited budget, I didn’t have many choices. So on 17th August 2007, I finally registered service with DH.
I just left Dreamhost because of their inadequate customer support. I want unlimited 24-7-365 phone and live chat support which dreamhost doesn’t provide. Wading through their articles or hoping they reply to an email doesn’t cut it.
I have never use them and this is a great info for me. Keep it up pal, thanks for this one, just bookmarked your blog and will come again later :)