DreamHost is a web host provider currently hosting over 1.5 million websites globally. We compiled DreamHost reviews from around the web to determine what customers think about the company and compared the most common pricing options for small business owners.
For an in-depth comparison of three top hosting sites for small businesses, read our buyer’s guide.
DreamHost Customer Reviews
Overall experience: Great
Ease of use: Great
Customer service: Great
Pricing: Low
Summary of DreamHost Customer Reviews
We scoured hundreds of available reviews and found that DreamHost has mainly positive ratings. Here’s what we found:
What DreamHost does well:
Users who recommend DreamHost said that they liked the service’s ease of use in setting up an account to host their website. Great and fast website performance were also cited by a lot of users.
What DreamHost does not do well:
Users who left negative reviews mentioned that the free email provided by DreamHost constantly encountered issues. Users also noted that DreamHost’s pricing is higher than other web hosting service providers such as GoDaddy and Bluehost.
Most Helpful Positive Review
“I’ve been a DreamHost customer since 2007. I build and host websites for non-profits, so I operate on slim margins. DH has pricing that is right for me. I’m a skilled UNIX system admin and have been cranking out sites since 1995, so I am very comfortable with the techie side of things. DreamHost has been rolling out newer one-click installs that are evidently aimed at less techie customers, but I don’t think I have the right perspective to know how user-friendly they are for non-sysadmin types. If you have a competent web developer who knows Linux/UNIX well, they are a good choice. This seems to be their ideal niche.”
– Mark
Most Helpful Negative Review
A user who left a negative review on G2 Crowd said that the problem he sees in DreamHost is their free email as their email servers are constantly having issues. He said that the reason for this might be DreamHost’s unlimited email feature to all its clients.
DreamHost Reviews From Users Around the Web
Here are a few other resources for finding helpful DreamHost reviews from customers. We rated the review sites on a scale from poor to excellent based on how trustworthy and useful the reviews seemed.
| *Average rating as of date article was written: June 14, 2017 | |||
DreamHost Pricing
DreamHost only has one shared hosting package that ranges from $7.95 to $10.95 depending on the duration of subscription.
| Pricing Plans | |
|---|---|
| Pricing per month | $10.95 per month/ no lock-in |
| Pricing for a 12-month contract | $9.95 per month |
| Pricing for a 36-month contract | $7.95 per month |
| Free Domain Registration | Included in 12-month and 36-month plans |
| Free Domain Privacy Protection | Yes |
| Storage Space | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited |
| Number of websites | Unlimited |
All pricing contracts include free domain registration and domain privacy protection. There is also unlimited allocation in terms of storage space, bandwidth and number of websites that can be hosted with DreamHost.
Small Business Web Hosting Buyer’s Guide
Not sure if DreamHost is the right small business web hosting site for you? Check out our in-depth comparison of three top hosting sites for small businesses in our web hosting buyer’s guide.
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Shelah Barr
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
What Dreamhost does really well is ignore requests for technical help, leave what little help they offer unfinished and miscommunicate.
Offer actual technical help. Days will pass before they respond and often the responses are irrelevant to the issue for which you requated help.
They charge you to talk to anyone too. What hosting company does that? None. Just Dreamhost.
That they have terrible technical support, no customer support, that they charge to sleak with anyone, that the sites they host are very buggy.
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
Nathan Arthur
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
DreamHost does really well at making it super easy to manage a website using a wide variety of content management systems, from WordPress to Joomla to MediaWiki, through their one-click install process. When you install a CMS using this feature, they’ll even take care of installing updates for you automatically, which is very useful for keeping your website secure.
DreamHost now supports LetsEncrypt SSL certificates out of the box, allowing you to set up HTTPS at no cost and without any technical expertise on encryption. The service will also renew your certificate automatically for you.
DreamHost’s support is generally responsive, friendly, and eager to solve your problems. They offer live chat with their technical support team, which makes solving simple problems and getting quick answers a breeze.
DreamHost allows you to manage everything you’d need for a simple website in one place–hosting, CMS install, domain, DNS, databases, email inboxes and forwarding, and security certificates.
It can take some time getting familiar with the sheer volume of features available in the control panel. Expect to contact support on occasion just to figure out where you need to be to do what you need to do.
Support is generally very competent and helpful; however, there was one instance when they caused an outage for my website because they deleted the wrong virtual machine.
I feel like I knew everything I needed to know before purchasing. I’ve been very happy with their services and don’t regret choosing them for my virtual private hosting.
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
Derek Letellier
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
Dreamhost is a fast and reliable web hosting provider well-suited for hosting content management systems such as WordPress. I use them for my company’s site, and I’ve set up about a half-dozen other sites for clients who have asked me to do web hosting for them. I rarely have any technical issues with them, uptime is phenomenal, and there’s many useful features for people of varying degrees of experience in web hosting and design. I would highly recommend a VPS for most websites as it provides a balance with performance, pricing, and easy to scale up and down based on your needs. It starts at $15 a month, which is very reasonable in the web hosting world.
There isn’t a well-established technical support system via phone, which has made some of my clients apprehensive. I personally feel that their live chat and email ticket systems are more than sufficient for the vast majority of customers, but some people rely on phone support and find text-based support to be inadequate. The company also has encountered some cyber attacks (as have many companies we work with for different reasons), which crippled our site for a few hours once, but such instances are rare and they’re continuously working to prevent such issues. I personally find their email systems inadequate, but I personally don’t feel ANY host has decent email support (the gold standard right now is Google G Suite or Office 365, which I’d recommend for anyone needing business-level email support).
I personally wish I had known they did not offer cPanel as this makes it slightly more difficult to control your virtual web space not having this tool. That being said, I can’t recall any specific instance where I needed to change a setting and was prevented from doing so. The biggest learning curve for people who are used to cPanel is figuring out where specific settings and controls are on Dreamhost’s control panel. I also appreciate that, because they use their own proprietary system and not cPanel, we are protected from any potential breaches within the cPanel code.
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
Willian Molinari (PotHix)
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
Really simple to host WordPress blogs and handle your domains and emails. The price is pretty good for the service as well. The customer service was really great when I needed it. I used Dreamhost for more than 4 years.
If you want to build complex applications I would recommend looking for a VPS. Dreamhost is great if you want to use automated installs but I would not recommend it if you want a place to build new stuff from scratch.
I wish I had known I would not have any privileged user to deploy my applications. It’s implied but at the time I purchased (2009, maybe?), it was not so clear to me. But for these needs, I just hired a different service while I used Dreamhost for my WP blog.
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
Peter Heylin
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.
The support is excellent. Email support is very fast (usually within 1 hour or more of contacting them) and support agents are very knowledgeable.
They may discontinue support for some add on services / one click installs and may not communicate this clearly enough to the customer or provide notice. This does not affect how the company communicates major service updates which is better.
I wish I had heard about their excellent service, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and competitive pricing sooner than I did.
Review SourceFitSmallBusiness invited user to leave a review and offered a nominal gift card as a thank you.