About Dreamhost

DreamHost was launched in California in 1997 by Miguel Rodriguez, Dallas Kashuba, Sage Weil and Josh Jones when they were at college. The company has grown from its humble beginnings to now host over 500,000 websites on 1500 servers. DreamHost’s co-founder Dallas Kashuba insists that their roster of 70 employees is more of a large, tightly knit family than a group of people working together. Their stated focus is “on providing quality customer service and the absolute best web hosting packages in the industry.”

Vist DreamHost!

Plans and features

With DreamHost’s shared hosting, you are entitled to 500 GB of storage and 5 TB of monthly bandwidth. In addition, your storage limit is automatically increased by 2GB and your bandwidth by 40GB every week. According to DreamHost, this is their way of saying "Thanks for stickin' with us!"

As if this wasn’t enough, you are also allowed unlimited MySQL databases, email and FTP accounts, autoresponders, and can even host unlimited domains on your account! All this costs $10.95/mo and a $49.95 set up fee. If you choose to prepay for a year or more, the setup fee is waived. There are also discounts for prepayment viz. $9.95/mo for 1 year, $8.95/mo for 2 years, $7.95/mo for 3 years, $6.95/mo for 5 years, and $5.95 for 10 years.

All hosting plans are backed by DreamHost’s 97-Day Money Back Guarantee.

Hosting Environment

DreamHost, unlike most others, do not offer cPanel as your account administration software. Instead, you’re presented with a “homegrown” admin panel completely exclusive to DreamHost. Engineered using the latest of web technology including CSS and AJAX, you will find it very responsive and interactive. From within this panel, your entire account can be configured along with email accounts, databases, mailing lists etc. You can even customize DNS settings from this area, meaning you can assign other servers of your own to handle aspects of your DreamHost account for you.

Unlimited MySQL databases are allotted for you and all your databases are automatically backed up every day. If you should so desire, you can configure your databases to access them outside of your account.

Joomla Specific Features

DreamHost offers excellent support for Content Management Systems (CMS). This is especially true with Joomla! which you can find listed on their One-Click-Install section along with MediaWiki, ZenCart, phpBB and WordPress among many others. As the name implies, these can all be installed with a single click and you don’t even need to soil your hands!

Tech Support

It wouldn’t be an overstatement for me to say that DreamHost sports one of the biggest technical support systems in the industry. As far as the industry standard is concerned, you can always email them or call them up.

But, apart from this, they also have a special limited ‘callback’ option through which you get a set number of callbacks every month. All you have to do is leave a request and tech support staff will call you back and work with you. There’s also a DreamHost support Wiki which is very extensive and will walk you through a great number of things wiki-style. Finally, there are the discussion board and the status blog which allow for user discussions and technical-issue related updates respectively. All of this can be accessed easily through your control panel.

Conclusion

If there’s one host in the world that lives up to its name, it’s got to be DreamHost. The sheer amount of features and support they provide is such that most others can only dream of them. What’s better, once you sign up with DreamHost, you’re never treated like a customer; you’re treated like family. And, what with their unsurpassed 97-day money back guarantee and all, DreamHost is definitely more than a viable choice for your Joomla site.