As the name itself suggests, DreamHost is a hosting company and it’s best known for exactly that. However, it can offer much more than just hosting for your website.
Imagine that you just got hosting for your company’s website. As soon as you have it, a very natural question will appear in your mind: “Now what?”
Well, this DreamHost review will guide you and show you how the company covers every process for your website to succeed: from hosting to marketing services and everything in-between.
Some of the most attractive selling points that make DreamHost stand out are great compatibility with WordPress – they are actually officially recommended by WordPress – over 1.5 million hosted websites, vast experience of 24 years in the industry, and 24/7 live support.
Furthermore, DreamHost saves you time with a great Drag-and-Drop builder, 200+ templates for various industries, and no coding is required to achieve the best results.
In this DreamHost review, we will discuss everything the company has to offer so that you don’t have to spend hours on research.
Let’s roll!
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Uptime and Response Time
Before we go more in-depth with the DreamHost review, let’s take a look at its uptime and response time, as they are great implications of how well DreamHost is working.
Uptime is one of the things DreamHost appears to be extremely confident about and guarantees 100% success rates. The company claims that to achieve the promised results they use high-tech systems, such as multiple datacenter locations, redundant cooling, emergency generators, as well as constant monitoring. So let’s look at what we’ve got.
We can see from the table below that most of the tiusDreamHost does produce admirable results, but there are exceptions, and hosting disturbances do happen.
So what about response time?
Normally when we talk about response time, a good performance is considered to be less than 1 millisecond.
Unfortunately, the information in the table below shows us that lately it’s been over this threshold. However, what is really worrisome is that previous data shows that typically DreamHost performs much better than that.
So are they “slowing down” or is this just a phase? We guess time will tell.
Now, let’s look into everything DreamHost has to offer, starting with hosting plans for WordPress.
1. WordPress Hosting
Did you know that 34% of website owners use WordPress?
DreamHost is aware of the popularity and reliability of WordPress, therefore most of its plans and a lot of its features apply specifically for WordPress.
Moreover, nothing expresses DreamHost’s confidence in its service as much as a customer-friendly refund policy.
More specifically, starting from the first day you open your website, DreamHost gives you 97 days to get a refund for shared hosting and 30 days for DreamPress customers. Amazing, right?
So let’s talk details and we’ll start with hosting features, plans, and prices that we can choose from.
1.1. WordPress Basic Plans
Let’s start with the basic option for WordPress.
No matter which basic plan you pick, WordPress Starter or WordPress Unlimited, the pricing and features slightly change depending on the length of commitment you pick: monthly, 1 year or 3 years.
More specifically, if you choose a monthly payment plan, the payment will be $3.95 per month ($1.46 more than with a 1 or 3-year payment plan) and $8.95 per month for WordPress Unlimited ($5 more than with other lengths).
Moreover, the 1 year and 3-year plans include a free domain, whereas the monthly requires you to buy a .COM domain for $6.99 (both Starter and Unlimited plans).
1.2. DreamPress and WooCommerce Plans
The same pricing strategy applies to the DreamPress and WooCommerce packages.
if you commit for a longer period of time (yearly plans) instead of shorter ones (monthly plans), you can save up to 17% in the long run. Luckily, in this case, the features are not affected by the payment plan.
1.3. WordPress Hosting Features
DreamHost offers convenience with many great features that are included in the plans, such as pre-installed WordPress, WP website builder, fast SSD storage, and an SSL certificate.
In addition, the company claims that the offers are included in every WordPress hosting plan. However, not all of these features are included in all of the packages, at least not for free.
As mentioned earlier, the free domain is not included in WordPress Starter if the payment plan is monthly.
In addition, no matter which payment plan you decide to go with, the free email feature will not be included in the WordPress Starter, though there is an option to pay $1.67 per month to get it.
But what if you don’t use WordPress? This DreamHost review is here to give you answers.
2. Other Hosting Options
In case you want to operate somewhere else and not on WordPress, DreamHost has options for you too. DreamHost supports Wix, Shopify, Weebly, and others.
The pricing strategy is exactly the same – you can save money and in some cases get more features if you commit to yearly payment periods instead of monthly.
The Shared Hosting option works exactly the same way as the previously discussed WordPress Starter plan: it costs $3.95 per month with a monthly payment and $2.49 per month with a yearly payment plan.
In addition, a monthly payment plan doesn’t include a free domain (a yearly does) and none of the payment options include free email, but you do have an option to pay $1.67 per month.
There’s also VPN Hosting if your business requires more. VPN Hosting doesn’t have as much to offer as DreamPress, but it’s a great option for startups, small businesses, and bloggers.
In fact, although VPN hosting generally offers less (and consequentially costs less) than DreamPress, you can have unlimited websites, whereas DreamPress can only give you one.
3. WordPress Website Builder
Before we get you excited about this, allow us to inform you that this feature is designed for WordPress users only. So, if you’re not a WordPress supporter, you can skip this part. Otherwise, keep reading, it will be fun!
So what exactly makes the website builder so great? In short, it is time-saving, easy, and more often than not, comes with beautiful design tools!
More specifically, it offers 200+ stunning templates for you to start your website with, the super easy-to-use Drag-and-Drop builder, and even SEO recommendations.
In other words, you can make your website more unique and beautiful using less time.
4. Domains
It’s time to get an address for your website (a domain) and let’s see what DreamHost can offer.
If you’re looking for variety – you are in the right place, as DreamHost has 400+ TLDs on their menu. All you need to do is find a suitable one for you, though they do have different prices.
In addition, the company will give you free subdomains and WHOIS domain privacy that will renew automatically – perfect if you value your privacy.
5. Email Hosting
You don’t have to switch your hosting and pay for a full package plan with DreamHost if your current situation is satisfactory.
However, DreamHost does offer email hosting as a single package and it’s fully compatible with your current domain.
When it comes to pricing, you must have gotten the hang of the system: you can pay $1.99 per month monthly or $1.67 per month yearly with the same features that include:
- 25GB Storage per Mailbox
- Mobile and Desktop Sync
- Ad-Free Webmail
If your business requires more systemization for organizing communication with email hosting, G Suite plans will give you just that.
No matter which G Suite plan you find more appealing, both will make your work secure and more efficient with video and voice conferencing.
6. Services
Earlier we have established that DreamHost seeks to support you through the whole process of creating and managing your website.
Now that we know what the company can do for us with the website creation, let’s discuss how it can help us manage it and lead it to online success.
6.1. Design
You’re probably thinking “Isn’t this the same as the website builder feature?!”
Well, it isn’t and that’s the great part!
DreamHost’s web design expert will create a website from scratch and it will be 100% personalized to represent your company’s values, brand, and strengths.
In other words, you won’t have to do anything, only have a talk with the web design expert assigned to you, discuss your expectations, needs, industry, and business identity.
As for price, it completely depends on your needs and goals, but DreamHost’s declares $1,499 as a starting price.
6.2. Marketing
Nowadays there isn’t much meaning in having an online presence if it doesn’t benefit your business and DreamHost has marketing experts who can lead you there.
The company has a blog where they write about important digital marketing topics and tips, which is great, but their articles are meant for the general public.
DreamHost offers these personalized marketing services:
Do you want more traffic to your website and precious leads? Then allow a group consisting of an SEO manager, SEO strategist, content writer, and WordPress developer to do the job for you.
The dream team promises to continuously optimize your website, publish content with relevant keywords on your blog page, and present monthly reports about progress and strategy.
Different plans with prices and features are clearly defined so that your business knows what to expect.
- Social Media Marketing
Social media can be used for many things: socializing and interacting with customers, increasing brand awareness, and driving more traffic to your website and business.
Just like with SEO marketing, DreamHosting has a full team ready to support your social media channels: content writer, graphic designer, social manager.
DreamHost ensures you that the content will be unique to your business and you will receive monthly reports and strategies to grow your platforms sustainably.
6.3. Website Management
Website management is all the technical behind-the-scenes work that many of us don’t even think about until there’s a security breach in our websites.
It’s very thoughtful of DreamHost to have these services on the menu and it demonstrates great empathy to their customers.
It’s unlikely that you won’t find what you need on their menu: they offer both precautionary and repair services, such as website management & monitoring, hacked site repair.
In addition, DreamHost can optimize your website to make it faster and move your website to DreamHost.
Final thoughts on the DreamHost Review
Not all hosting companies will lead you all the way through the online process, but DreamHost certainly will. The company offers all services that you might need for your success, even if you haven’t considered these services before.
Although the response time could be improved (and we believe that it will be), the overall quality of service and empathy showed to the needs of DreamHost’s customers make it a reliable and worthy company to do business with.
As you might have realized already, we strongly recommend and encourage you to try DreamHost out and see for yourself what a great host it can be.
Good luck!
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