Quick Facts & Checklist
Updated January 2022
| Speed | 531 ms (June 2021 to January 2022) |
| Uptime | 99.92% (June 2021 to January 2022) |
| Features | Unmetered bandwidth, Free Domain 1st Year, Free SSL Certificate, Free Website Builder, 97-Day Money-Back Guarantee |
| Hosting Plans | Shared, WordPress, VPS, Cloud, and Dedicated options |
| Support | 24/7 Live Chat, Phone, Email, Knowledge Base |
| Pricing | Plans start from £1.86 per month |
DreamHost Overview
What Is DreamHost?
At nearly 25 years on the market, DreamHost hosts an impressive 1.5 million websites. They claim that they believe in a world where people have the freedom to choose how their digital content is shared. Therefore, they foster this dream to success by providing an open web platform of choice.
So since their humble beginnings in their 1997 dorm room, their customer count has grown throughout more than 100 countries.
DreamHost supports the ever-popular WordPress. As we all know, WordPress is a powerful open source content management system for the web.
DreamHost is dedicated to this platform with huge aims to help make WordPress better with code, community collaboration, and expert-level leading industry support. If you are after website hosting with WordPress, this review will tick a lot of your boxes.
Recommended By WordPress
DreamHost is a recommended WordPress host
They have a straightforward belief about web hosting. They believe that when you put your dreams online—your words, photos, creations—you shouldn’t have to worry about your service provider mining that data for marketing purposes.
DreamHost’s open platform gives their customers the power to share their data and the freedom to control how it’s used. For the average UK business owner, this should be music to your ears.
Read on to find out if you should host your website with Dreamhost!
Looking to create your website with WordPress?
Speed & Reliability
How Fast Is DreamHost?
For the average business today, the speed test is becoming more critical to hosting providers than ever. So how does Dreamhost fare?
DreamHost Speed Test
From our research, we’ve found that DreamHost’s average speed has been consistently excellent. DreamHost recorded a 531 ms average loading time over the past six months.
Load Impact & Stress Test Results
Rather than just carrying out a single test of the website’s full load time, we also use K6 (formerly known as Load Impact) to carry out a stress test of their server.
The test sends 50 virtual concurrent users over 5 minutes to our test site to see how quickly the server can respond as visitors increase.
DreamHost K6 Stress Test Results
The above chart shows that as the visitor’s increase (the grey line), the response time (the blue line) also increases. This means that as more users access your website, your page loading speed slows down, which is not so great for your visitors.
DreamHost Shared Hosting Uptime
When assessing uptime, DreamHost has overwhelmingly glowing reviews online, setting it far above its competitors. First of all, DreamHost guarantees 100% uptime in their ‘Terms of Service’; however, keeping in mind that scheduled maintenance or user errors aren’t covered in this guarantee.
Our test site measured their average uptime as 99.92%, smashing industry averages from our research over the last six months.
Pricing & Plans
So, What About The Price?
DreamHost currently has two’ plans’ or pricing structures available. It ensures no matter where you are on your business journey. There is an option for both beginners and professionals. Their two plans are ‘Starter’ and ‘Unlimited.’
DreamHost’s Shared Hosting Plans
Shared Starter Plan
For ‘Starter,’ this will set you at £1.86 per month, a reasonable entry-level price to get your business off and running.
While it includes many exciting features at this price point, it is also essential to note that it consists of a money-back guarantee for the first 97 days. Which is the longest money-back period we’ve ever seen across web hosting platforms.
This plan includes one website, unmetered site visits per month, unlimited site storage, five subdomains, 6 FTP/SFTP/Shell Users, and 6 MySQL databases.
Unlimited SSD Storage
It also comes with SSD Storage, WordPress Pre-installed and Free Automated WordPress Migrations. The free DreamHost Automated Migration plugin helps you easily migrate your existing WordPress site over to DreamHost.
Finally, it also boats an impress WP website builder, free SSL certificate, automatic WordPress updates, automated daily backups, free domain privacy, a custom-built control panel and advanced features such as SFTP, shell access, WP-CLI and more.
Shared Unlimited Plan
The ‘Unlimited’ plan essentially doubles the cost and will set you back £2.19 per month. While it includes many exciting features at this price point, it is also essential to note that, as with the starter plan, it also has troubleshooting and support options.
This plan includes unlimited websites, unlimited bandwidth, email accounts using your domain and unlimited site storage. Also included are unlimited subdomains, unlimited FTP/SFTP/Shell Users, and unlimited MySQL databases.
Free Automated WordPress
It also comes with WordPress Pre-installed and Automated WordPress Migrations to help you easily migrate your existing WordPress site over to DreamHost.
Lastly, the starter plan also boats an impressive WP website builder, free SSL certificate, automatic WordPress updates, automated daily backups, free domain privacy, a custom-built control panel, and advanced features such as SFTP shell access.
DreamHost’s Alternative Hosting Packages
Help & Support
How Good Is DreamHost’s Support?
Customer support levels can be the difference between a good web provider and a very poor one. Every business can’t go without, and DreamHost has an exciting approach to managing their customer’s expectations.
DreamHost has a helpful knowledge base
First, there is the DreamHost Help Bot which is available 24/7 through the chat widget. If you want to chat to a ‘real human,’ you can also do this (however, not open 24/7).
The customer support chat line is available every day 5:30 AM –9:30 PM through the customer panel.
DreamHost has a variety of support channels
They’ve done their best to provide 24/7 support through their Help Bot. However, it is unusual that a web hosting provider of such high caliber as DreamHost doesn’t offer their customer support lines available 24/7.
This will undoubtedly be a turn-off for prospective customers. Especially if your business is UK-based but sells or interacts with a global audience.
Suppose your customer is based in Australia and can’t access your site, and you need to resolve the issue. In that case, the limited support line could mean you have the potential to lose this customer.
Does expert help matter to you?
Features & Products
What Features & Services Do DreamHost Offer?
One of their DreamHost’s most significant features is their claim to be experts at WordPress. Since DreamHost has been hosting WordPress websites and blogs since their beginning. Their customer service team is well-trained WordPress experts.
DreamHost Shared Hosting Features & Comparison
| Main Features | Shared Starter | Shared Unlimited |
| Websites | 1 | Unlimited |
| Storage | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Free Domain Name | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Free SSL Certificate | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Daily Backups | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| 24/7 customer service | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
| Money back guarantee | ✔︎ | ✔︎ |
DreamHost would work best for you if you are looking at a web hosting platform with this kind of feature, boasting over 750K WordPress installations on their platform.
Free Website Builder
DreamHost’s WP Website builder lets you create stunning websites in minutes
Finally, for their relatively small price tag, they seem to offer a lot. As mentioned, this web hosting platform makes for a great choice, such as unlimited storage and bandwidth, backups, 24-hour support (albeit no live chat options), and even free SSL certificates.
Security & Protection
Security & Protection
Is Your Website Secure With DreamHost?
DreamHost has recognised the challenges that online businesses face. They believe that keeping their customers’ websites and servers safe from suspicious people and groups online is a huge priority.
Security & Encryption
Their team of security engineers, internally known as ‘Nightmare Labs’, is leading their efforts to make sure all the customers, no matter how big or small, have a worry-free experience.
DreamHost also offer free & paid SSL security certificates
Across their two plans, there are different levels of security available. Some of these features include the following:
Pros & Cons
What We Like & Dislike About DreamHost
DreamHost Pros
Affordable – DreamHost is one of the cheapest shared hosting providers around. Some customers will highly regard this cheap host option.
Unlimited storage and bandwidth – all accounts come with genuinely unlimited bandwidth and generous storage. Unlike their competitors, where some entry-level web hosting plans typically start at 20GB storage.
Clever interface and modern backend – their backend looks very clean and accessible. It may take a bit of time to master those used to cPanel dashboards, but it is worth the persistence.
97-day money-back guarantee – they’ll refund you if, after 97 days (yes 97, I know it is enormous) of using them, you are unhappy with their service. No questions asked.
What Are The Alternatives To DreamHost?
Bluehost #2 Rated Cheap host
A2 Hosting #3 cheap Hosting
HostGator Great value option
iPage Great Features
Final Thoughts
Do We Recommend DreamHost?
Yes, we do. Despite relatively slow loading times compared to some of their competitors, DreamHost’s performance exceeds the expectations of other hosting companies in almost every category.
In terms of a value-for-money service, it is tough not to look past their incredible 97-day money-back guarantee.
In my research, I’ve never seen such an offer from any web hosting platform. The best I’ve seen across similar competitors has been a standard 30-day money-back guarantee.
In this instance, it is hard not to recommend DreamHost. If you haven’t found your dream web hosting platform after 97 days, you possibly never will.
Ready to give DreamHost a try?
transparent pricing, backed by an unbeatable 97-Day Money-Back Guarantee. What’s not to like about Dreamhost!
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