If you want to build a linux-powered website, DreamHost should be one of the first places you look. Its rich feature set satisfies many personal and business web hosting needs by offering shared, virtual private server (VPS), dedicated, cloud, WordPress, and reseller plans. In particular, its cloud hosting packages give webmasters simple tools to create attractive and highly flexible sites. As a result, DreamHost earns our Editors' Choice award for cloud hosting alongside the equally impressive Ionos.
If you're looking to create a website but don't want to spend a lot of money, shared web hosting is the best option. Shared hosting is an extremely low-cost form of web hosting that sees your site share CPU, RAM, and other server resources with other websites. The "shared" in shared hosting refers to the fact that each server may host multiple sites that share hardware resources, so you're at the mercy of your server mates. If one of them gets on the front page of Reddit, you might find that your site slows to a crawl as a result. If you expect your site to see a large amount of traffic, you should look into virtual private server (VPS), cloud, or dedicated hosting.
DreamHost has two shared hosting plans: Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited. Shared Starter ($4.95 per month or $2.95 per month with a one-year commitment) lets you build a single website with unlimited monthly data transfers and storage, but it lacks email. That's right: no email. For that, you must upgrade to Shared Unlimited (starting at $8.95 per month at sign-up or $2.95 per month with a one-year commitment). That plan adds email and unlimited website hosting. The lowered price for the annual plan puts it within striking distance of the Starter option, making it a much better option than when we last reviewed the service. Keep in mind, however, that the sign-up rates are lower than the renewal rates. Starter renews at $7.99 per month, and Unlimited renews at $13.99 per month.
That said, HostGator is one of the few web hosts we've reviewed that offers Windows-based shared web hosting. That's a big deal, as many businesses require Microsoft's operating system to run specific software. DreamHost, on the other hand, only offers linux-based servers. HostGator also offers unlimited email across the board.
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DreamHost offers four linux-based VPS web hosting plans (starting at $15 per month or $13.75 per month with a one-year commitment) for businesses that need servers with more power than what shared hosting offers. VPS hosting places your website on a server with far fewer virtual roommates than shared hosting. As a result, there's more server power available for your site to tap.
The VPS plans offer unlimited monthly data transfers and domains, which is a nice perk. However, the base memory and storage are quite low; the Basic plan (whose prices are quoted above) offers only 1GB of RAM and a 30GB solid-state drive. On the other hand, the highest configuration ($120 per month or $110 per month with an annual contract) maxes out at 8GB of RAM and 240GB of solid-state storage. Also note that the VPS plans only offer the Ubuntu linux operating system. These are also introductory rates; the Basic plan renews at $19.99 per month, and the high-end Enterprise plan renews at $137.99 per month.
Hostwinds, our top pick for VPS hosting, offers superior plans and wallet-friendly, well-rounded offerings. The linux VPS plans start at just $8.24 per month for 1GB of RAM, 30GB of storage, 1TB of monthly data transfers, and unlimited email. They scale to $395.24 per month for an impressive 96GB of RAM, 750GB of storage, 9TB of monthly data transfers, and unlimited email.
If you want maximum web hosting power, you need to get a dedicated server. With this setup, your website lives on a server all by itself, thus leveraging all the system resources. You should look into dedicated hosting if you're expecting significant traffic, and if your site is so mission-critical that it absolutely can't go down or slow down.
DreamHost offers several dedicated server options. The Standard 16 plan ($199 per month or $165 for an annual commitment) includes 16GB of RAM and 480GB of storage. The tiers top off with the $749 per month Enhanced 128 plan, which boasts 128GB of RAM and 1920GB of solid-state storage. Each DreamHost dedicated server plan has unlimited data transfers.
Unfortunately, DreamHost lacks Windows-based dedicated servers; it's linux or bust here, too. If you want to build a website using Microsoft's operating system as a foundation, we suggest checking out AccuWeb, which offers linux and Windows dedicated server options. AccuWeb also has powerful dedicated plans with impressive scaling, including several $1,000+ per month packages that have 8TB of storage, 512GB of RAM, and up to 50TB of monthly data transfers.
You've probably heard of cloud hosting, which spreads resources across multiple servers (traditional hosting pulls resources from a single server). As a result, cloud hosting lets you easily increase server needs when the situation calls for it. DreamHost offers three cloud hosting tiers—512MB RAM Server, 2GB RAM Server, and 8GB RAM Server—in linux, BSD, and Windows varieties.
These excellent packages start at $4.50 per month (for 512MB of RAM, 80GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers) and top out at $48 per month (for four CPU cores, 8GB of RAM, 80GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers).
If you're a corporate customer who wants world-class cloud hosting, Ionos is the way to go. Thanks to its incredibly powerful cloud hosting packages, it's our other Editors' Choice for the category.
If you're looking to get into the web hosting business, but don't want to deal with infrastructure matters, reseller hosting is the way to go. Unfortunately, DreamHost doesn't offer standalone reseller plans; you can resell your own server space, but only if you add other domains to your own. Check out DreamHost's reseller FAQ page for more information.
If you really want to dabble in reseller hosting, we recommend Hostwinds. Its plans, starting at $5.24 per month, have unlimited email, storage, and data transfers. On offer are dedicated and VPS packages of both the linux and Windows varieties, as well as shared hosting, which is limited to linux. The servers have the same RAM and storage amounts as those that Hostwinds supplies directly, which is not always the case. Hostwinds also lets you apply your own branding to the servers you rent, and it supplies 24/7 tech support, too.
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Like several of its competitors, DreamHost offers WordPress hosting in three different categories: DreamPress, DreamPress Plus, and DreamPress Pro. DreamPress is the standard option with WordPress hosting, a service that gives your website the white-glove treatment by auto-updating the popular content management system software, performing automatic daily backups, and providing WordPress-specific security.
DreamPress (starting at $19.95 per month) kicks off with 30GB of SSD storage, unlimited email and monthly data transfers, support for up to 100,000 monthly visitors, and has a content delivery network (CDN) for faster site loading. DreamPress Plus (starting at $29.95 per month) doubles the storage, increases the visitor count to roughly 300,000, and adds up to three free phone support callbacks per month. The top-tier DreamPress Pro (starting at $79.95 per month) offers 120GB of SSD storage and a 1,000,000 visitor limit.
DreamPress lets you install any plug-in you desire; WP Engine, on the other hand, restricts you from installing a small number of plug-ins that may impact your site's performance. Recently, DreamHost added staging to its WordPress offerings, so you can test new site features on another site instance that won't affect your live pages.
Impressive as DreamPress is, Bluehost and WP Engine are our top picks for small business and enterprise WordPress hosting, respectively.
Overall, we like DreamHost's user interface—it's simple and well laid out, and it made getting started on my test site easy. Instead of going the HostGator or iPage route with cute, screen-cluttering icons, DreamHost offers a tree of menu options on the left side of the screen. It's easy to find billing information, manage domains, and view the settings for VPS and dedicated servers. We had no trouble finding the security options or the third-party app marketplace.
DreamHost now offers Liftoff, an AI-powered website builder that lets you start building your site right away. You no longer have to endure a long wait time as your DreamHost account gets approved, as you once did. It's a great addition. After we keyed in a few site descriptors, Liftoff autogenerated matching themes that we tweaked using its clean menu system. We found it refreshingly simple to add photos, text, and video.
DreamHost has several e-commerce hosting plans if you want to build an online store through Ecwid and WooCommerce. Ecwid has two tiers: the $4.95 per month Shared Starter option or the $8.95 per month Shared Unlimited option. The key differences are that the Shared Unlimited plan gets you unlimited SSD storage and unlimited WordPress sites. WooCommerce offers three tiers, and they are the same price and offerings as the ones mentioned in the WordPress plan breakdown above.
DreamHost offers antispam on its email, but no antimalware services. That oversight aside, we like its attention to other aspects of website security. The control panel has an easy-to-find link for editing the .htaccess file to control access to the site or to set up a password. For parts of the site that shouldn't get indexed by search engines, you can block spiders. You can set up cron jobs (automated batch jobs) to schedule tasks and monitor processes on the site. DreamHost also offers free Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates, which are a must-have addition for people who sell products online.
If you are a developer or manage a software development team, you will like the fact that DreamHost comes with Subversion, which can help you manage your source code files. Most web hosting providers restrict you to whatever applications are listed on their software marketplace. Version-control tools such as Subversion rarely make it onto these marketplaces, so it's nice to see the option to set up your own repository. Of course, that's assuming you don't just use Git repositories for your code.
What if you don't really want a website or a blog, but just a place to store your files? DreamHost also offers DreamObjects cloud storage plans that offer free API requests, starting at $0.025 per GB of storage and $0.05 per GB of downloads per month.
Website uptime is a vital element of the web hosting experience. If your site goes down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. DreamHost guarantees 100% uptime and compensation if your site goes down.
DreamHost offers email and ticket-based support, as well as online chat. It has a robust knowledge database, too. It lacks phone support, which is too bad; sometimes you just want to deal with a human being at the moment a question or problem pops up. Some Dreamhost plans, like its Dedicated server tiers, DreamPress Plus tier, and DreamPress Pro plans, come with three to five free callbacks per month. For all other hosting plans, you pay a premium to have access to callbacks. A one-time only callback is $9.95, or you can add three callbacks to your account for $14.95 per month.
We asked about the differences between VPS and dedicated hosting. The representative gave me a thorough, satisfying answer. We also asked the representative how to import our WordPress.com setup into DreamHost and received a very helpful link with step-by-step instructions. Again, we were quite pleased with the answers. DreamHost also offers a Knowledge Base that answers many commonly asked questions.
DreamHost's shared hosting has an excellent 97-day money-back guarantee policy. However, the credit policy works differently for VPS and dedicated server plans. If you cancel an annual VPS plan within the first 30 days, you'll receive a credit for the unused balance. Annual dedicated plans work the same way.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: DreamHost)
DreamHost Web Hosting
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
Thanks to its useful website-building software, security options, generous money-back guarantee, and unlimited storage, monthly data transfers, domains, and email across many tiers, DreamHost is easy to recommend and earns our Editors' Choice award for cloud-based web hosting services. That said, if you're a corporate customer who wants world-class cloud hosting, Ionos is worth checking out. Both are worthy Editors' Choice winners that feature flexible cloud hosting packages.
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