DreamHost Review (2023)Can You Trust Their Shared Hosting?

DreamHost Pricing

Price Increases on Renewal

Almost all web hosting companies offer very cheap introductory prices to get you on board. However, unfortunately these prices are not forever. At the end of the offer period, your hosting plan will renew at the standard price.

These renewal prices are usually much more expensive than the introductory offers. However, since these are the standard prices, they are much more representative of the true value of your hosting plan.

And therefore it’s these renewal prices that you should use to compare different hosting providers, and they are the prices we use in all our hosting reviews.

In the chart below, you can see the price increases on renewal of the basic shared hosting plans for all the providers that we test and review at Tooltester:

As you can see, DreamHost starts off with a very low introductory offer that increases considerably on renewal. However, even on renewal, DreamHost remains cheap compared to many of the other providers.

But let’s see what you will get for your money…

What Do Their Shared Plans Include?

*Free domain name the first year for annual and 3-year plans. DreamHost has an ‘Unlimited Policy’ and they don’t accept certain projects like file distribution sites.

I really appreciate that DreamHost’s pricing and plan structure are both transparent and simple. They only have 2 shared plans which come with most of the basics you’ll need – no aggressive and expensive upsells.

Let’s check out what plan will you need:

The Shared Starter hosting plan is limited to 1 website, so if you are only looking to host 1 site, this is your best option. Be aware that if you need email accounts, those are paid separately in this plan (start at $1.67 a month extra) – a fair price if you ask me. The only other limitation is databases (6) and 50 GB of storage – this is plenty for most small to medium websites.

To host more than 1 site you’ll need the (still affordable) Shared Unlimited package. This one includes email accounts, unlimited storage and databases too. There aren’t any other features added as the basic plan is already pretty generous with FTP accounts, bandwidth and so on.

There are also optimized pricing plans for WooCommerce users, that you can find here.

DreamHost Review: Pros & Cons

When to Use DreamHost’s Hosting?

Well, a lot of site owners should think about using DreamHost, especially those looking for reliable, cheap web hosting. It combines both low prices and high quality, something that’s very difficult to find these days in the hosting world.

I would say that small projects (e.g. a dentist’s site) looking for the best value for their money should consider DreamHost.

However, larger sites could find a good partner in DreamHost’s shared web hosting services too. It has enough speed, good customer service and reliable uptime for avid bloggers and hardcore site developers.

Even if it’s not PCI-compliant out-of-the-box, DreamHost supports this technology – you could make it happen geeking around. This is obviously a massive pro for ecommerce projects.

When Not to Use DreamHost’s hosting?

But there are a few cases where I would not recommend DreamHost.

As they don’t have servers outside the US, if your audience doesn’t come from North America, it’s probably not the best choice. WP Engine, SiteGround or A2 Hosting could be a better fit.

Finally, tech-savvy users like developers or agencies may miss some advanced features like staging areas, integrated caching system or pre-installed Git repositories. If you fancy having these, SiteGround or DreamPress (by DreamHost) is the way to go.

DreamHost Shared Hosting Details

* They have a truly unlimited policy (storage and bandwidth), but they do make some exceptions that seem to ‘affect to less than 1% of the users’. Basically, they don’t seem to want people abusing their Unlimited Policy (e.g. file distribution sites).

DreamHost Performance Tests

Is DreamHost slow and/or has constant service interruptions?

Before you commit and leave your website’s ‘well-being’ to a new web hosting provider, you should check out their performance.

Of course, I don’t expect you to have time to go and test 5 or 6 hosting providers over a number of weeks. To make your life easier, I’ve recently tested DreamHost’s performance and benchmarked it against their competitors.

DreamHost Web Host Speed Test

No one wants their website to take ages to load. Slow average page load times can harm your user engagement metrics (e.g. conversion rate) and mess up your organic (search engines) rankings.

There are many tings you can do to fix a slow website. And you can specifically make WordPress faster, too. But a fast hosting company is the fundamental player for your website to load quickly.

Unfortunately, DreamHost didn’t perform particularly well compared to its competitors, in our web host speed tests this year:

And it didn’t perform much better over the previous two years:

Results in seconds

DreamHost came out 9th out of 15 providers tested, with an average speed of 1.75 seconds when we evaluated the performance of the test site. However, although there were lots of faster web hosts, an average page load time of 1.75 is OK.

You can see how DreamHost compares to other web hosting providers in terms of “price to speed” ratio in the chart below:

As you can see, DreamHost pretty good value for money when it comes to page load times!

Is DreamHost’s Web Hosting Uptime Good?

Some web hosting providers have constant interruptions and their availability (uptime) suffers. As you can imagine, this can be a big issue for hosting-dependent projects like online stores or digital marketing agencies. On top of that, Google and other search engines won’t treat you too favorably.

In light of this, I constantly monitor hosting providers’ uptime. Let’s take a look at DreamHost’s performance in 2022, compared to other web hosts:

As you can see in the chart above, DreamHost’s uptime score has barely been acceptable in 2022. This is a significant downturn compared to the previous two years:

To monitor uptime I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.

At 99.83%, DreamHost’s uptime levels have been poor over the last 12 months. As you can see in the table, other providers achieved much better rates.

DreamHost Review: Do I Recommend It?

Yes, I do recommend DreamHost.

In fact, at Tooltester we are using Dreamhost for apptooltester.com using the DreamPress plan since it’s a WordPress website. Overall our experience has been a really positive one, with just one minor hiccup. We booked DreamShield, which is a security add-on that protects you from malware.

However, we still got hacked! Someone managed to put a spam link into our navigation menu, which only showed up on the mobile version of our website. The disappointment was that DreamShield didn’t protect us from that. However, in all fairness, it’s a malware detection system, which probably doesn’t work for this type of attack.

Dreamhost can be a good option for many. Fair prices, solid support and a very generous unlimited policy (for storage and bandwidth) are remarkably appealing perks.

They are a particularly good option for WordPress users that are looking for good value for money, and in fact we found them to be the best cheap WordPress hosting in our tests.

Be aware however, that if you are looking for professional features like staging areas, integrated caching and pre-installed Git repositories, DreamHost may fall short. Also, it’s not ideal if your traffic comes mainly from outside North America.

> Try DreamHost for 97 days without any risk

DreamHost Alternatives

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Alright, I have to say that I do think DreamHost can be a good match to host most websites. However, let me suggest a couple of alternative web hosts for some scenarios:

• Along with DreamHost, SiteGround and InMotion Hosting offer the best support (compare them here).
• For those looking for a Windows-based shared web hosting service, I would suggest looking into InMotion Hosting or GoDaddy.
• In my experience, SiteGround is a top-performing and reliable hosting. On top of that, they offer a fully-featured web hosting service and are a great match for WordPress users.
• If you are looking for a top WordPress host and have some money ($25/month+) to spend, you can also check out Kinsta.

> If you still want to go with DreamHost, you can try them for free for 97 days. Or check out our other roundup of the best web hosting providers.

I hope I answered all your questions about DreamHost in this review. But please, if you do still have some questions, leave a message and I’ll do my best to help you.