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Optimized WordPress hosting without breaking the bank
August 11, 2017

Optimized WordPress hosting without breaking the bank

Jim Rubenstein | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with DreamHost

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 some of the optimization features of a hosted WordPress platform (eg, varnish caching, optimization, resource allocation, etc).
  • Automatic WordPress updates
  • Site provisioning and set-up
  • Reasonably available customer support
  • The web interface for managing WordPress deployments, command line users, domains, and SSL certificates has the most room for improvement.
  • DreamHost has enabled us to free up resources that would be used to otherwise manage WordPress deployments for small to medium sized sites.
  • The cost for DreamHost's services is very inexpensive, much less expensive than managing independent infrastructure deployments for separate installations, for our needs.
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.
MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Laravel PHP Framework, GitHub, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), ActiveCampaign, SendGrid Marketing Email, Sendgrid Transactional Email, Mandrill, Twilio SMS, MailChimp
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.