Dream Host Review

DreamHost have been happily hosting clients since April 1997.

Those early days forced us to get creative and use innovative solutions to meet the needs of our customers. It’s a habit that’s stuck with us as we’ve decided to build much of our own technology, and really differentiates us from the competition. Our technology is built by some of the industry’s most clever developers on stable systems that come together to create one amazing user experience. Designed to be easy-to-use, everything at DreamHost is built with the customer in mind.

So far, we have hit the nail on the head. Over the last decade or so, we’ve grown to more than 1500 servers, state-of-the-art data centers, and a full time staff of more than 100 employees. We now host more than 1 million domains. We’re focused solely on providing a quality customer experience backed by the absolute best web hosting technology in the industry. It’s a never-ending quest, but it’s one we’re happy to take on.

We pledge to always take your business seriously. We’re always looking for ways to diversify our offerings, improve reliability, and improve our overall quality of service. After all, your ideas put you online, but we’re the ones that help keep you there.

The DreamHost Difference
As with all companies, there are some things we do the same as our competitors and there are some things we do differently. Most importantly, we’re focused squarely on providing quality customer service and the absolute best web hosting packages in the industry. It’s a never-ending quest, but it’s one we’re happy to take on.

DreamHost is carbon neutral.
We’ve calculated the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use – paper in the office, electricity for our servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office – leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.

Services
Shared web hosting is what most people mean when they refer to “web hosting”. It simply means that many customers’ websites reside on a single web server, and that the server’s resources (CPU and RAM) are shared among every customer account on the machine. Customers who do not need the flexibility of a Virtual Private Server or the performance of a Dedicated Server greatly benefit from what shared web hosting has to offer.

Shared Benefits – User Friendly Customers can easily manage their shared account from a web browser thanks to our intuitive control panel.
Advanced Functionality – Write your own web apps with a wide variety of code languages including PHP5, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, and many more.
Satisfaction Guaranteed – DreamHost is committed to customer satisfaction and every account is backed by a 97-day money-back guarantee.
Limitless Possibilities – Get unlimited data transfer bandwidth, website storage, email and hosted domains, and much more!
Blogging Made Easy – Our One-Click software installer will automatically install and configure a new WordPress blog in minutes!
Enterprise-Level Reliability – Our expert technical support representatives are available 24/7 via email, live chat, and you’ve even got the option of reaching a human being over the phone. Our 100% uptime guarantee means we take uptime seriously.

97-Day Money Back Guarantee
DreamHost has the longest trial period in the industry! Sign up for a shared hosting account with us today and you’ll see why DreamHost has consistently garnered customer praise and a reputation for rock-solid reliability. If you decide within the first 97 days of your time with us that DreamHost isn’t for you, just close your account from our panel and you will automatically be refunded all your money!*
But wait, there’s more! If you cancel anytime after those 97 days, you will still get a refund to your credit card for all remaining time!

The DreamHost 100% Uptime Guarantee
DreamHost has a solid commitment to providing you with the very best web hosting service we can – that’s why we can offer you a straightforward and rock-solid 100% Uptime Guarantee!

DreamHosting VPS
DreamHost partitions a physical server into multiple virtual servers that each have a protected and reserved amount of CPU and RAM resources. Unlike Shared hosting, VPS instances do not compete against each other for these resources. Therefore, a spike in resource demand among other VPS instances, will not lead to a performance decline in your website or database.

Benefits of VPS Hosting

Flexible – Scale up your performance as your website grows. Linux-VServer allows you to quickly scale vertically with no need to reboot. Add another virtual server instance in seconds (e.g. a low-resource VPS for chat).
Reduced Costs – Only pay for the server performance you plan on needing. Dial in your CPU/RAM requirements and avoid paying for resources that you will not use.
Easy to Use – DreamHost makes managing your VPS a breeze. Our web panel’s GUI provides access to historical usage graphs for memory and load. Simply adjust our GUI slider to change your load/memory requirements. You can also quickly install popular applications like WordPress with our One-Click Installer.
Enterprise Level Reliability – DreamHost manages its own network, so that your site never skips a beat. DreamHost’s network is backed by a 100% uptime guarantee policy and you’ll have around-the-clock (24×7) access to our expert technical support representatives via email, and live chat.
No Overage Fees – Bandwidth and disk capacity for your site are both unlimited! There is no need to worry about getting hit with surprise overage fees.
High Level of Control – Unlike Shared hosting, you have control over your VPS. You have full root access to your virtual server, and the ability to reboot remotely from our homegrown web panel. Utilize our API and write code to programmatically control your VPS.

Dedicated
The Dedicated server product line includes several bundled options to help businesses choose the appropriate hardware configuration that best fits their needs. The entry-level bundle is competitively priced at $99/month and includes a dual-core CPU, 2GB RAM, and a 500GB hard drive.

Benefits of a Dedicated Server

Blazingly Fast Apps
Harness the full power of your multi-core processor. Choose from bundles that include dual-core and quad-core CPUs.

Peace of Mind
You won’t lose all of your data if the hard drive fails. We perform automatic managed backups of your entire site. There is no back-up storage capacity limit.

Data Center

At our Los Angeles datacenter we’ve replaced literally thousands of miles of cat5, cat6, and fiber with a large supply of 802.11n USB wireless dongles. Everywhere you look you’ll find dongles dangling everywhere. Dangling dongles. (Internally this project was codenamed “Dang Dongs“.)
We’ve donated all of our old cabling to a local recycler, and the amount of clutter we’ve eliminated in our datacenter is phenomenal. You can now walk through the entire facility without tripping or fear of passing under a cable avalanche.

We’ve also reduced our carbon footprint by a huge amount. Do you have any idea how many trees it takes to make a 6 foot ethernet cable? Probably not very many…but still. Having less stuff generally means you’ve used fewer resources to make that stuff. It’s really a win-win all around.

Ethernet entanglements are now a thing of the past. 802.11n wireless is the future, and the future is now.

In fact it says right here on the box from Linksys that the new router we bought will “stream stored music to devices around your home” – no small feat. Imagine how fast it’ll serve your websites. Should be pretty great.