DreamHost vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
DreamHost
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
DreamHost is a website hosting service with features such as managed VPS hosting, public cloud computing, and dedicated servers. Managed options include WordPress with the DreamPress upgraded service with staging and coaching, WooCommerce hosting, as well as dedicated server hosting.
$3.95
per month
Rackspace Managed Hosting
Score 1.1 out of 10
N/A
Rackspace Managed Hosting is cloud computing company Rackspace's managed IT services and IaaS offering. Its infrastructure options include bare metal servers, virtual single-shared servers, and cloud multi-tenant environments.
$23
per month
Pricing
DreamHostRackspace Managed Hosting
Editions & Modules
Shared
$3.95
per month
DreamPress
$16.95
per month
Linux
$23.00
per month
Windows
$75.00
per month
Windows + SQL
$128.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DreamHostRackspace Managed Hosting
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DreamHostRackspace Managed Hosting
Considered Both Products
DreamHost
Chose DreamHost
We've tried a few other WordPress-specific hosts, as well as other shared hosting providers (Rackspace, WPEngine, and others). We have found that DreamHost gives the best balance of cost, performance, and features, for our needs. All vendors have their own pitfalls and …
Rackspace Managed Hosting

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
DreamHostRackspace Managed Hosting
Small Businesses
Cloudways
Cloudways
Score 9.5 out of 10
Cloudways
Cloudways
Score 9.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 9.2 out of 10
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.4 out of 10
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DreamHostRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
6.9
(10 ratings)
1.1
(15 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(1 ratings)
2.2
(2 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
DreamHostRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
Dreamhost
Dreamhost was previously a great web host with reliable service and top-notch features, but I can no longer recommend them. If you're looking for web hosting on a Linux platform (such as running PHP or platforms like Wordpress, Jooma, or Drupal), with simple pricing services, then this is the great service for you. One big downside is lack of phone customer support. This is especially frustrating because of their many issues the last few weeks, which aren't easily resolved or addressed by their team.
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Rackspace
Rackspace is very well suited as a IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider, particularly when you're planning on leaving the infrastructure up for a period of time. They seem to focus a bit more on that aspect of infrastructure. That is to say, they seem to promote running servers for longer periods of time and not spinning up/shutting down servers frequently based on usage spikes. While, they do support that sort of availability -- they don't have features built into their offering, necessarily, that make it a lot easier to implement. Our experiences with Rackspace have been 100% around their cloud platform, but they have another entire part of their business that is centered around hosting/maintaining/supporting physical hardware (bare metal). They have had a great reputation over the last several years (10+) for being top-notch providers in this space, which is one reason we even considered them for our Cloud-based hosting needs. We don't have any direct experience with their "bare metal" offerings, but their reputation is certainly great, and worth noting.
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Pros
Dreamhost
  • Customer service is industry-best. We've never had a problem that wasn't solved by them almost immediately.
  • Their dashboard is extremely easy to use and doesn't cause any confusion at all.
  • Their website speeds are good but not great. In an age when speed is important, they are good enough, especially for the price.
  • They have a great backup feature.
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Rackspace
  • Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone.
  • Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform.
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Cons
Dreamhost
  • They could have better deploy solutions for not so experienced users
  • More integration with external services to automate some tasks
  • Better ways to track hosting performance
  • The user management could be easier to understand
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Rackspace
  • Latest outage 12/2/22 and counting over 75 hours - in my opinion, support has been miserable. In my experience, there's little/no communication regarding the problem or cause. No support. In my opinion, erroneous advice. Virtually NOTHING for users. I feel we've been abandoned.
  • Outage appears to have been caused by unpatched servers & no backup servers
  • In my opinion, NO COMPANY should trust their data or services to a nonresponsive company like Rackspace.
  • In my experience, there are NO published policies/practices re: server maintenance (patching) to mitigate hacking, NO published policies/practices re: backup servers in the event of problems. I feel it's stupid of me as a user to have chosen to trust them with critical services
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Likelihood to Renew
Dreamhost
We have every intention of staying with Dreamhost, but we are a tad concerned with the company's recent involvement in high profile litigation and controversial topics. While we don't take a position one way or another on what type of content they should host, one concern we have is that repeated attacks on their infrastructure have caused significant downtime during business hours for us, and that's something we'll have to take into consideration going forward.
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Rackspace
If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!
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Usability
Dreamhost
No answers on this topic
Rackspace
The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability
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Support Rating
Dreamhost
Whether we're calling in on the phone, live chatting or emailing, we get immediate high-quality, native English-speaking support. This cannot be overstated when it comes to hosting, because support tickets are usually time sensitive and high stress. I've always had great experiences with the limited times we've needed to use DreamHost support. We've dealt with support for many other providers and no one comes close to DreamHost.
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Rackspace
In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!
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Alternatives Considered
Dreamhost
We've tried a few other WordPress-specific hosts, as well as other shared hosting providers (Rackspace, WPEngine, and others). We have found that DreamHost gives the best balance of cost, performance, and features, for our needs. All vendors have their own pitfalls and shortcomings, and DreamHost isn't without its own, but it works for us.
Read full review
Rackspace
LiquidWeb or Amazon both offer some products that could be considered similar. I will say though, after years of dealing with Rackspace, their service is what always has me coming back. Their support is typically so much better than other vendors that I hesitate to use other vendors. Pricing might be cheaper, but when you have an issue and need it resolved ASAP, then Rackspace has come through in the majority of cases for me.
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Return on Investment
Dreamhost
  • The service can really be a positive value with its very solid performance and lack of downtime issues found with other services.
  • For those with limited hosting or web development knowledge, the service can be a challenge to fully utilize. Sometimes this may mean additional training.
  • The service also provides a number of expansion opportunities for growing with greater functionalities.
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Rackspace
  • We've found it helpful to host our own web sites on their cloud servers, which is a positive.
  • We've also hosted our Nagios instance on a low-end cloud server, which is also a positive.
  • A negative impact is that they've now decided to start charging for their support.
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