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DreamHost Review  Hot

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Editor's rating
6.8
out of 10
Average user rating: 7.5 
2 User reviews
Plan Features
Price: $5.95
Disk Space: 500 GB
Bandwidth: 5,000 GB
Domain Registration: Free
Domains Hosted: Unlimited
Money Back Guarantee: 97 day
MySQL Features
MySQL Databases: Unlimited
PHP MyAdmin: Yes
Support Options
Email / Help Desk: Yes
Phone Support: No
Member Forum: Yes
Sign Up!
Visit: www.dreamhost.com

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.”


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.

Dream Host

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.

Editor review : Fair Web Hosting Provider
Overall rating
6.8
Website Uptime
5.0
Control Panel Features
8.0
Customer Support
7.0
Price
7.0
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Was this review helpful to you? yes     no


I have not been with dream host for that long but they have done a good job so far. I am still learning my way around the control panel but all is going pretty well. I wish that they had awstats or a good log viewer but now that I am using Google Analytics it has become a moot point.

As time went on the uptime statistics went down. I am not sure if it was the server I was on or not. I am inclined to think that it affected many people since the issue was with a backend file server. One month I think the uptime was around 92% which is entirely not acceptable.

Some months would be good and some months would be bad. Tech support was slow to respond, at least in my opinion. They told me about the issue with the file server and that they would be replacing it. They did replace it and for about a month all was well then my site started going down every other day. Enough was enough. I have moved all sites but one off Dreamhost. I use that site for monitoring their uptime.

DreamHost has a bit of irreverent newsletters and support options. Which they are all very funny and they should be commended for. It is nice to know that they take their job very serious but can have fun at the same time.

PHP5
They have a great interface if you need to switch your websites to run php5. However they do not have Magic Quotes enabled by default.

Ongoing Sevice Outage
It appears that Dreamhost has been having a big service outage for some of there customers. Learn more about from our Dream Host Thread

Last updated: Tuesday, 29 January 2008


User reviews

Average user rating from: 2 user(s)

Overall rating
7.5
Website Uptime
6.0
Control Panel Features
9.5
Customer Support
5.5
Price
9.0
 

Add new review




Overall rating
6.5
Website Uptime
4.0
Control Panel Features
10.0
Customer Support
2.0
Price
10.0
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

Was this review helpful to you? yes     no

Dreamhost

Written by Christopher Smith
Monday, 05 May 2008

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.

Overall rating
8.5
Website Uptime
8.0
Control Panel Features
9.0
Customer Support
9.0
Price
8.0
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Was this review helpful to you? yes     no

Pretty good host but site sometimes slow

Written by Terry
Sunday, 18 February 2007

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


 
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