Not only is hosting affordable, their customer service is insanely awesome. They go so far out of their way to help you. Twice my website got messed up m by my own doing and general lack of web knowledge, and even though it had nothing to do with the hosting - they went ahead and fixed my coding!
Price increases after the first year's promotional price but the cost is still a good value.
Unlimited web hosting across my several sites for one yearly fee, hosted emails, and easy domain renewal
Dreamhost is not fancy gimmicks or overpriced. You get exactly what you pay for and they deliver. We started with their shared hosting many years ago and moved to a virtual private server, and then a dedicated server and then upgraded our dedicated server. We have not turned back. We run over 50 sites and without any issues. The support of DreamHost staff is some of the best - and though you cannot call DreamHost, their live chat and email support is better than any we have encountered (note: you can request that they call you for a charge or included with higher plans, we've never needed to use their call-back feature). They also have honest domain registration and SSL pricing.
The only problem I see with DreamHost is their free email. Their email servers are constantly having issues. I personally feel this is because they allow unlimited email for free. I think this is what creates the majority of their issues. We only run about 5 emails out of 50 sites, with none of the emails being mission critical. Searching or sorting your domains is not easy. You go through alphabetized lists. There is no way, at least not that we know of, to tie DreamHost in with WHMCS.
We need solid hosting at an honest price with great support. We get all of that and are able to pass this great service to our clients. We also use DreamHost for the majority of our domain registrations.
Very extensive control panel, with one-click-installs, shell access and multiple ftp users. While still shared hosting, the fine-grained access on several levels at once, made it very flexible in multiple scenarios. Practically unlimited bandwidth and web space and databases. Very generous storage and usage restrictions. Cheap price (at the time), including one domain name. So good value-for money.
Extensive control made the control panel very complex and detailed. Often had to look around to find what I needed and when changes occured, it wasn't always clear how to get to certain sections. I could literally get lost in the control panel at times. Speed issues: Hosting a Drupal site with the majority of users from EU showed that page load times were considerable. I learned that it might be due to quite DB-intensive nature of Drupal and the fact the DB and web pages were running on different machines. But since the DB and site were fairly small, this was concerning me, as it would hold-down possible growth.
Me and my brother have shared a Dreamhost package for a while. He used it for his website development business and I had my personal domain and a few smaller sites. While the functionality was extensive with good control, for a low price, I had problems with Drupal hosting and especially website response time. Eventually, we stopped the account and moved to a local hosting company, which is somewhat more restrictive in storage and bandwidth, but which helped us and had a more usable speed here in EU.
My favorite part about dreamhost is that for one low price you can host an unlimited amount of domains. Their pricing is never more than ten dollars a month and everything is unlimited. You can get unlimited domains with unlimited emails so I host all my websites on their services because you can't beat their pricing unless you are offering a lower quality service. I have tried other hosting sites and so far this one has been the most effective for my websites.
A lot of the other hosting sites you can call and will be put on hold but can talk to a customer service representative. In dreamhost's case they only offer chat support, which you also have to wait for. And they are not 24 hours, they are on the east coast and hold those business hours and aren't available for chatting during non business hours and also weekends, which is terrible if you run into technical issues. They have a website that explains a lot but if you aren't too savvy you won't understand a lot of the technical jargon. So that means you have to email them and wait for support which might take a bit depending on when you email and their business hours.
All my clients are happy with their websites and hardly run into any snags. They love the ability to create emails for their employees and not being charged a lot since I forward what I save onto them.
Value for money is high; the standard package includes unlimited disk space, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited domain slots, and very generous bandwidth. A decent selection of one-click-install applications is also available, and they work well, with minimal configuration and automatic updates. Setting up mailboxes is fairly easy, as is setting up SSH and FTP access for multiple users. Adding a new domain is quick and painless. Recently, they have added two-factor authentication for extra safety.
In the last few years, the prices have gone up a bit and, while there's still good value for money, it could be cheaper. Another thing that is missing in this modern world is support for technologies besides PHP, most notably NodeJS and MongoDB (or any no-SQL database, for that matter). The webmail interfaces could also do with a little bit of a touch-up.
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Dreamhost's control panel allows you to customize and make changes for almost anything you ever need including handling domain records, web server configuration, etc. The customer service is excellent too, usually responding to major issues in a short amount of time without needing any kind of extra cost contract for quick responses.
The control panel looks archaic, it could use a little more redesign, maybe some options to hide advanced configuration for users that don't need to see everything. The monthly pricing for various services is good, but I think it could be lower these days with how much competition there is.
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I used it a few years ago, and even though it was a bit more expensive than their competitors they had so many good features for its value. I would describe it as the best hosting provider if using Wordpress or PHP. They have lots of one-click installation programs, and you don't really need much knowledge to install any popular script. I love unlimited aditional domains, subdomains, SQL databases, bandwidth and disk-space. What else can you ask for? Finally, and as far as I know they provide 100% up-time guaranteed in their hosting, which is rare, but it is amazing for this price.
When talking about Virtual Private Servers, I would definitely go for other service provider. I think they should be a bit cheaper. Let us be honest, right now if I had to hire a webpage server, I would go for a NodeJs, Django or Ruby On Rails solution. I guess their interface could be better, it is true, you can customize lots of things, but I feel a bit lost when playing around.
I had to host the typical university association webpage, so after studying all posibilities I decided to for this hosting service. The experience was great, I remember we hosted linux images, the webpage, some other personal files, photos, and I do not remember any problem during the whole experience.
What I like the most about being a dreamhost client is that they update really often. So privacy or encryptions are always up to date. With other hosting sites they are sometimes behind on new implementation. Their prices for new customers are really good, and I definitely have my clients taking advantage of that. Along with the good pricing for new customers that I like they always add on things for free, while other hosting companies will charge you extras.
They've been having a lot of webmail issues the last month. Normally I have been super satisfied with how their mail works. Adding it to a pop account is tedious and not as easy but you can have it integrate with google mail very easily, but once you change it to sync with google mail its tedious changing it back. But if you don't use google mail and just use their webmail they've been trying to fix it, but it seems like a while since it's been working properly. So hopefully they get it sorted out so it works perfect like before.
It's always good referring my clients to them, when my clients get a deal and happy with their website hosting then it always makes me look good. You can create an unlimited amount of websites on their hosting site and it's nice if you have a lot of niche websites.