DreamHost Review

I have been using dreamhost for over a two years. When using wordpress, phpbb, zen-cart, or oscommerce dreamhost is great. Even with standard html or xhtml webpages, dreamhost is excellent.

However, when using Joomla or Drupal (intense mysql database driven software) dreamhost fails. The servers will crash and you will see a 500 Internal Server Error message on your website. This is unacceptable in todays environment.

So, If you want to host standard websites and softwares use dreamhost. However, if you require the use of Joomla, do not use dreamhost. There shared servers are poor and the uptime is around 90%.

I remain a dreamhost customer, however I will be moving my Joomla sites to another webhost.

A word advice: Keep Away From Dreamhost! The only way to describe Dreamhost’s tech support team is that they are incompetent.

Dreamhost is the worst hosting company I have ever dealt with. I’m responsible for number of websites and by mistake I choose Dreamhost for the newest client (askdivine.com)!

They have disabled my website which is only two weeks old, and it is offline for well over 24hrs because of a security threat!

Apparently a phishing page was uploaded to the account. After removing the threat they also have disabled the website, which was absolutely unnecessary!

Their excuse was that the old versions of WordPress, PHPBB, etc. are the common causes for this sort of thing – the irony is that I have never used any of them!

Anyway, I went through the files and told them everything is OK and 10 hrs later came up with a new excuse that our web software itself is the threat – and we need to update Joomla. According to them Joomla 1.5.11 has potential vulnerabilities.

Cut the story short, I have upgraded to Joomla! 1.5.12. and the website is still down! I have submitted a new ticket support over 7 hrs ago and no response yet!

6 days in the row, the site is down, and they can not fix that, after they say it is fixed, the site only up for less than 5 minutes and down again

Having been with DreamHost going on 1.5 years now - I'd have to say they are the best hosting providers I have ever dealt with. I usually juggle about 4-5 different hosting providers at any given time due to the volume of sites that I run, including VPS, a dedicated server, Godaddy hosting, and a couple of other providers. For the price and sheer volume of material that can be hosted on DreamHost - nobody can beat their package.

Every support ticket I have submitted has been responded to quickly. They have an extensive how-to wiki, and the support forum has scores of members always willing to lend some help.

Uptime was a bit of a problem not too long ago, however, it appears that their are getting their system into a more fine-tuned mode where any downtime occurrences are minimal or hardly noticed.

I am a Cpanel fan and I do have to say that it took some time to get used to the DreamHost user panel. It can be confusing at first, but once you've worked with it a few times, it becomes more logical. I especially appreciate the ability to create a new domain and seamlessly assign different functions, like Gmail and Google Apps, to the domain.

The worst hosting company in the HISTORY of mankind. PLEASE stay away. It only gives you headaches. They never answer your email, they never fix the problem and your website will just not work. Nothing ever works.

Did you ever want to use a hosting company and have it just, work? That's not Dream Host. Dream Host is known as Dream Disgrace. Possibly the worst hosting company on the face of this earth.

I'd like to give a very-very positive review of DreamHost, here is what I had to say:

I have been with DreamHost since the middle of 2007, so up till now it's pretty much 1,5 years experience with them.

I'd give it a 10/10 to them. Below is a breakdown of the review.

Pros:
1. Excellent wiki documentation for non-techie users to quickly implement and deploy things up and at the same time learn something useful.
2. The open atmosphere is really unique at DH, cause they have honestly posted on their status blog virtually everything that would have been nightmares for both hosters and hostees - outages, server changes, even human errors.
3. Also, they have a user forum open for any discussions.
4. Unique admin panel makes it easy to do everything on your own.
5. Full-around hosting features which I'd say, rarely any other hosting companies can match.

Cons:
1. Service response time varies from just 1 minutes to 5 hours - which is a little bit longer than industry average.
2. Large user base makes it hard to maintain stability for everyone. There's constantly user complaining about outages. While it may be true, I observed few of them.

Many of the users tend to get very upset and emotional after having 1 or 2 bad experiences. For the last 1,5 years with DH, I believe the downtime and outages are quite acceptable. After all, they offer all this huge package at such a cheap price.

DH is overall a rather good hosting company, worth living with.

Uptime was a huge problem, the cluster spunky I was on was always breaking and then they randomly started deleting files from my site and suddenly I was blamed for making their server slow (They disabled my site and found it wasn't me). They would not move me to another cluster (Someone else I know is on a cluster that works so they do have some clusters that work). I only ever hosted one website with them and only ever used 100gb of the 3010 gb I amassed during the 6 months I was hanging in there.

Customer services never answered in less than 2 days and when they did they were sarcastic, their community is biased towards the company, huge problems like billing everyone for a few years worth was made into a huge joke and then they pointed the blame at one of their employees!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/15/dreamhost_bills_customers_years_worth_of_trouble/

Rubbish company, nice features but I averaged 95% uptime which in this day and age was rubbish.

They have been a pretty good host. On a couple of occasions the site has been down, customer support was aware of the problem but that does not help my uptime. Other than that they have been a good host