DreamHost Webhosting offers the best web hosting service. Our site is hosted with them ever since I switched to WordPress and is highly recommended. At that time though there were several good Webhosting deals, I primarily chose Dreamhost due to the cheap web hosting yet powerful feature-rich package they offered. But over time, I have come to love Dreamhost for several more reasons I want to share with you…
Photo by JohnSeb
1. Excellent Customer Support
Dreamhost has an excellent mechanism for addressing customer complaints. Whenever my sites were down, I just had to lodge my complaint in their automated support or fill in the support form which takes into account the severity of the errors (to sort the urgent issues first) and what your expertise about the subject is (so they do not feedback professional webmasters and sysadmins like novices).
I needed customer support twice over the last 5 months, once the sites were back up in 5 minutes and the other time in 1 hour. After that, there is an email informing you of the fix and a follow-up survey about your feedback regarding the customer support guy. You can keep track of all your support history. There is nothing worse than having a site down and not having any response from your WebHost.
They let you chat with other DreamHost Customers (sometimes official DreamHost representatives drop by) or visit the DreamHost Customer Discussion Forum to find the answers you need. And then there is the huge customer-contributed repository of DreamHost knowledge at their wiki!
2. Unlimited bandwidth and Storage Space
I do not know of any other web hosting service which will offer you Unlimted Storage and Bandwidth! I remember my first site I hosted on Geocities, it had a miserly bandwidth of few MB per day and the site used to offline any day there was a traffic spike. Monthly Bandwidth is very important because a link on Digg or slashdot can drive huge site traffic your way and finish your limited bandwidth in a few hours, leaving you to pay to let your site stay online. They even allow bandwidth throttling to save bandwidth.
Don’t be put off with the words “Unlimited”, they are not overselling and they explain what unlimited is really about. We get over 650,000 pageviews a month and the site runs smoothly on a shared hosting server (with WP-Supercache of course).
3. One click Installations and Upgrades
This is yet another wonderful feature that lets you start your own blog (WordPress), forum (PhpBB), wiki (MediaWiki), image album (Gallery), store (ZenCart), CMS (Joomla), etc in a matter of a few minutes. Initially, I created a forum, wiki and WordPress blog in 10 minutes. Imagine uploading each package and configuring it on your own if you had no prior experience with it.
Dreamhost currently supports following 1 click installs (both PHP4 and PHP5) – WordPress, phpBB Forum, Gallery Image Album, ZenCart Store, Joomla (Mambo) CMS, activeCollab Collaboration, OpenX, MediaWiki Wiki, Advanced Poll, and WebCalendar Calendar.
If you use multiple WordPress blogs, they can set it up in minutes and upgrade them too. That goes for all the tools they install automatically.
4. Host Unlimited Domains, Subdomains, Databases
Most other good webhosts will allow you to host a few domains and subdomains, but definitely not unlimited. Now you can create as many subdomains as you like, host all your domain names on one account and pay no extra charges for it. Imagine the ability to host hundreds of domain names for the same prices (of course it is shared hosting). And top it up with unlimited free databases on each domain!
5. Make Money with Dreamhost Affiliate Rewards
You will never need to pay for Webhosting again as they let you use your affiliate earnings for your yearly fees. Make money via the Dreamhost affiliate program and encash it via Paypal. Provide discount promo codes to help your visitors get cheap web hosting deals.
6. Neat and Easy Control Panel
Even a person who is hosting his personal site for the first time will find it easy to navigate around the panel. It is simple and helps to easily track all your hosted domain names. Simple help explanations and warnings prevent you from doing something foolish and make even techies feel comfortable. Simplicity does not compromise on the powerful features and functions you can perform with the simple interface.
7. Maximum Power Features You Need
The package meets the demand of the newbie personal site creator and the professional webmaster alike. It comes power-packed with CGI, PHP4 & PHP5, Ruby on Rails, SSI, Jabber chat server, Quicktime streaming, frontpage extensions and numerous other powerful tools I know less about and might never use. But it is great to know you can expand your web services to new levels when you require without paying more or looking for another service to host them.
8. Dreamhost Status Notifications
The Dreamhost status pages keep you aware of what exactly is the problem going on in different web servers, what is the cause of downtimes and when scheduled upgrades are expected. You can subscribe to their feed for every announcement on Dreamhost Status. They are willing to truly convey their problems.
9. Dreamhost Blog and Newsletter
It is not the usual corporate style impersonal newsletter that is sent out every month. Nor does the Dreamhost blog has that faceless feel to it. They have a friendly and humorous tone to what they do, and the fact that they love Webhosting and Dreamhost customers come through.
10. 97-day money-back guarantee on all plans
If you are unsatisfied with Dreamhost for any reason, they assure a full refund if notified within 97 days of signing up for hosting. If you have taken advantage of the free domain registration service, that will refund of $9.95 is not possible, and you may transfer it to another host if you’d like. Now that is an incentive worth trying out for.
11. Top company hosting 850,000 domains
They are now hosting over 850,000 domain names and are in the top 11 web hosting companies worldwide. You can also join these sites and be part of the Dreamhost experience.
Update: Now we have switched to Knownhost hosting.