DreamHost Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 9.3 out of 10

Score

9.3 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for DreamHost are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Reliable and Great Uptime Service: Many users have praised the Linux-based Web Hosting for its reliability and great uptime service, stating that they have experienced limited technical issues. The consistent performance of the hosting has been appreciated by multiple reviewers.

Excellent Customer Support: Several reviewers have expressed their appreciation for Dreamhost's customer support, mentioning that they have never had a problem that wasn't solved by them almost immediately. They also mentioned that every question they asked was responded to within 24 hours, highlighting the prompt and helpful nature of Dreamhost's customer support team.

Easy-to-Use User Interface: Users have found Dreamhost's user interface to be extremely easy to use, with an intuitive dashboard that allows for easy navigation without causing any confusion. The simplicity and user-friendly nature of the interface have been commended by many customers.

Reviews

10 Reviews

DreamHost Delivers fo Basic Hosting Needs

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

June 26, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As an independent web developer, I often inherit the use of platforms selected by my clients. I have one long-term client who came to me with a couple different websites hosted on DreamHost. I utilize the DreamHost administrative panel for database and file management as well as configuring email accounts and forwarders.

Pros

Email Address Configuration
Website File Management
Technical Support
Domain Registration

Cons

File Management
Database Management
Live Support Chat

Likelihood to Recommend

DreamHost is well suited for the novice website developer who needs an intuitive interface for File Management. Most web designers rarely need to access the server at all. But when it comes to providing comprehensive technical support, it is often necessary to access File Management tools or create FTP accounts. DreamHost makes this simple, though I personally prefer the standard cPanel interface.

Jim Nelson

Lead Developer in Corporate at Agreda Communications (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

View profile

Function is great, price jumps are shocking!

Rating: 6 out of 10

January 10, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I just needed a landing page to direct traffic. DreamHost was an affordable plan to do just that.

Pros

WordPress sites
Emails

Cons

It is not intuitive for newbies.

Likelihood to Recommend

I had zero problems or complaints with DreamHost until out of the blue they notified me that my monthly rate is going up 300% after one year, though they advertized that the rate would not change. I see lots of people shocked by this in the past few months. Not inclined to stay with them as there are now less expensive options for what the product offers.

TS Botkin

Owner at AterFlix (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

DreamHost is the perfect balance of price vs. performance - and an A+ for the outstanding support team!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 12, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use DreamHost to host our static websites - content WordPress websites, corporate one-page websites, etc. Because these websites are mostly informational and don't directly drive any revenue, we valued a hosting provider that could keep our overhead costs and time to a minimum. DreamHost's managed hosting solutions fit our needs perfectly and we've been happy using them.

Pros

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.

Cons

We've had issues in the past with compatibility migrating websites over (from Bluehost specifically).
We've had issues of WordPress updates crashing our server, but a quick call to support fixes everything immediately.
Their pricing structure and different packages are a bit confusing to choose from.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're not too technical, don't want to spend time managing a server and want something quality while sticking to a budget, DreamHost is the best it can get. We may be able to save money by switching to something like AWS, but for our usage it doesn't totally make sense even with potential cost-savings and improved speeds. The support and ease of use cannot be overstated here.

Stephen Steinberg

Founder in Corporate at Raw Athletics (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

Great service for an affordable price

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 17, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dreamhost is our main hosting solution, since 2006, and we're offering their services to our clients as well. We have dozens of websites and it works really well for us.

Pros

Panel is easy to use
Flexibility to configure our websites and domains
It's affordable
The customer support is very attentive and helpful

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

It works really well for small or even medium scaled projects. If you need something fast and easy to use, it's great. You're able to host how many sites you want, create users and use some tools like Wordpress with "one-click" installs.

But if you need some scalable solution for a big project, maybe it's not as good as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, since their pricing policies are much better for those cases.

Carlos Eduardo de Souza

Co-founder & Manager in Information Technology at Coopers Digital Production (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

View profile

A powerful hosting service

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 26, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dreamhost is used for hosting a Drupal based CMS site. The site is a public portal for services and information resources. The hosting service helps provide a solid presence with limited downtime or security problems with its Linux based servers.

Pros

Dreamhost has very good hosting plans that can be matched for different levels of hosting needs and expected web traffic bandwidth.
The hosting service is very friendly for coders and those needing to tinker "under the hood" with their sites.
Great uptime service with limited technical issues.

Cons

Dreamhost may not be the best solution for users with limited web hosting knowledge.
The service doesn't offer great technical support and lacks customer support by phone.
The service may not be the cheapest among hosting providers.

Likelihood to Recommend

Dreamhost is really well suited for different types of web hosting. Its unlimited data bandwidth plans can really help a company with an e-commerce site flourish without fears of limited bandwidth. The service also provides free SSL certificates for added security. It is also great for web developers that want to create a specialized site using coding tools such as Subversion.

Bruce Emmerling

IT Consultant in Professional Services at Seedco (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

One-click installers are really nice and easy to use

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 25, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I'm using Dreamhost myself since 2008. I started my first blog there by using their WordPress service with one click installation. At the time, I wanted to start sharing my knowledge but did not have too much time to set up my own infrastructure for blogging. It was really easy to get my blog with custom domain up and running.

Pros

One click installers work really well.
When I needed support it was really effective.
As a new customer, it was really easy and fast to get what I wanted (WordPress in a shared hosting).

Cons

If you want to deploy something that needs more tuning and is not a one-click installer it will take some time.
As any shared hosting, the libraries will be outdated because they can't update it without breaking many things.
Sometimes my blog was unavailable for some time without reason. Probably problems with bad neighbors.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need something that they already have a one-click installer for, and is not that mission critical for your business, I would really recommend starting with DreamHost. I have no regrets about starting to blog using their WordPress service some years ago. With some clicks, I got my domain, email, and blog up and running.

Willian Molinari

Backend Engineer in Information Technology at Doist (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

DreamHost Above the Competition

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 11, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At Francis Lewis High School we use dreamhost to host a large number of student run websites. It is being monitored by me, the teacher, but 90 students have access to updating and revising the website and re-uploading new files to update the website. We use dreamhost both for hosting and for registering new domains.

The business problem it addresses is the issues that students run into each year. Our seniors need personal websites for themselves for their future resumes, to host video introductions and portfolios. In addition, students utilize the the websites in their classes. Many classes have a website that illustrates the content covered, displays the curriculum and shows student work. Dreamhost provides the platforms for hosting those sites and using plug-ins for Wordpress our students can effectively manage their own websites daily.

Pros

Dreamhost provides great support. Every question I have asked I have heard back from them within 24 hours.
Dreamhost sends you updates via email as your hosting and domain expiration get close. They assure that you are aware that you need to update your hosting and domain.
Dreamhost has an easy to use interface that assures it is simple to navigate for simple management of content and websites.

Cons

I would like to see MOODLE re-installed as a plug-in. Most educators use MOODLE so this plug in is important.

Likelihood to Recommend

DreamHost is well suited for small businesses. As an art director that needs to manage multiple websites and client domains, it is important to use DreamHost for structure and organization. When working with clients, it is important to be able to manage each client individually. You can have private servers, allow each website to redirect to any other site desired, and each can easily be given multiple emails. When working with various clients, being able to be quick to update the website for clients is important, DreamHost provides that.

Christopher Power

Virtual Enterprise Coordinator/Educator at NYC Department of Education / Francis Lewis High School (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile

Solid, reliable web host despite lack of phone support and recent downtime with attacks.

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

September 8, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Dreamhost currently hosts my company's website on a virtual private server using the Wordpress platform. We've also used Dreamhost as our web host of choice for client websites. Dreamhost has provided us fast and reliable space on the web for prospective customers to find us, for eCommerce and online payments, and other web-based integrations and applications.

Lately they've been off their game in a lot of ways. I have six websites with them, and five of those sites have had major issues in which my clients have experienced major downtime or data loss. Their support staff has been unable to answer tickets in a timely manner, sometimes taking days to respond I assume because of the volume of tickets. They've gone from being a steady force in the web hosting world to an unreliable average provider trending downward.

Pros

Linux-based Web Hosting
Wordpress one-click installs
Security certificate one-click installs

Cons

Webmail Servers
Customer Service
Telephone Support (or lack thereof)
Email reliability
Recent uptime
Delay in resolving issues

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Derek Letellier

IT Specialist, Legal Videographer, Marketing Specialist in Information Technology at Lake Cook Reporting (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

DreamHost Will Help You Sleep Better At Night

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 7, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At the college and academy where I worked, we used DreamHost to manage our main web presence and domain name registration. This allowed for us to have one place to manage everything related to our web presence. DreamHost's one-click installs allowed us to spin up new projects quickly. It's automatic WordPress updates allowed us to spend less time worrying that we were missing an important security patch. DreamHost generally has very good support, which allowed us to spend less time troubleshooting.

Pros

DreamHost lets you manage everything in one place--hosting, databases, domain names, email forwarders and inboxes, etc. This can make it much easier to keep track of all the important aspects of your web presence.
DreamHost's one-click installs of many popular web products, including WordPress, makes it very easy to start a new website.
DreamHost has very responsive support, which makes solving many problems much easier.

Cons

There was one instance where DreamHost support caused unnecessary downtime because they misread my request. Unfortunately I don't have access to that account anymore (it was an old employer) so I don't remember the details. To avoid this, make it very clear whether you're just asking a question or want support to handle it (they can be quite eager to fix the problem even when you've just asked a question), and be VERY clear what you need when doing the wrong thing may cause serious problems.

Likelihood to Recommend

DreamHost is well-suited to people who have moderate to high levels of experience in web administration. It has all the tools you need to get the job done, plus some (like one-click installs) that can make your job much easier. It's also very convenient to have everything (including email config, databases, and domain registration) within one dashboard. DreamHost is also good for a beginner who wants to learn. The learning curve is real, but support is always helpful, and, again, having everything in one place is a plus for the learner. If a beginner just wants to throw up a website and isn't interested in learning the technical details of website administration and DNS, DreamHost is not the best solution. Such a person would be better served by finding a fully-hosted and managed software-as-a-service solution, such as WordPress.com, Weebly, SquareSpace, etc.

Nathan Arthur

Programmer in Information Technology at Simple Updates (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

Optimized WordPress hosting without breaking the bank

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

August 11, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use DreamHost for deploying WordPress sites, exclusively. Utilizing DreamHost's "DreamPress" offering allows the flexibility of a self-hosted installation (install whichever plugins you like, have direct access to the site code and configuration) while getting <i>some</i> of the optimization features of a hosted WordPress platform (eg, varnish caching, optimization, resource allocation, etc).

Pros

Automatic WordPress updates
Site provisioning and set-up
Reasonably available customer support

Cons

The web interface for managing WordPress deployments, command line users, domains, and SSL certificates has the most room for improvement.

Likelihood to Recommend

DreamHost's services are best targeted towards personal sites or small to medium sized business sites for businesses that don't have a full-time IT staff to manage WordPress or the infrastructure that goes along with it. If the requirements of the web site/application exceed that of a simple webserver and mysql database (eg, memcached, redis, etc, or other custom services), DreamHost's services are likely to be lacking. Which is not to say you couldn't use those services with the DreamHost deployment, just that they're unavailable from the same vendor, and as such there will be a performance penalty when utilizing them cross-vendor.

More technical natured folk who want to get into optimizing performance of their site on the server level (beyond the software that DreamHost provides, and the actual application software) will want a more robust solution. Larger deployments of sites (WordPress or otherwise) where the deployment is more advanced than a simple application server, will likely also want to look elsewhere.

Jim Rubenstein

Chief Technology Officer in Engineering at LoudDoor, LLC (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

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Reviews and Ratings

DreamHost Will Help You Sleep Better At Night

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 7, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

DreamHost lets you manage everything in one place--hosting, databases, domain names, email forwarders and inboxes, etc. This can make it much easier to keep track of all the important aspects of your web presence.
DreamHost's one-click installs of many popular web products, including WordPress, makes it very easy to start a new website.
DreamHost has very responsive support, which makes solving many problems much easier.

Cons

There was one instance where DreamHost support caused unnecessary downtime because they misread my request. Unfortunately I don't have access to that account anymore (it was an old employer) so I don't remember the details. To avoid this, make it very clear whether you're just asking a question or want support to handle it (they can be quite eager to fix the problem even when you've just asked a question), and be VERY clear what you need when doing the wrong thing may cause serious problems.

Likelihood to Recommend

Nathan Arthur

Programmer in Information Technology at Simple Updates (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile