DreamHost Review: Is This WordPress-Recommended Web Host Any Good?

DreamHost is a popular web host and one of four web hosting companies officially recommended by WordPress.org. I spent a week testing DreamHost’s shared hosting service to determine if it deserves its positive reputation.

I started with an in-depth examination of DreamHost’s pricing and plans, then purchased a plan and tested several key processes and features, including customer support. You can read how we test web hosting for a full breakdown of this process.

My experience with DreamHost was complicated. I had extended difficulties creating an account and struggled to get assistance from customer service. The site management tools were easy to use and server performance was good, but not enough to outweigh the issues I encountered. Based on this experience, I do not recommend DreamHost for hosting your website.

DreamHost plans and pricing: Sweet and simple

DreamHost offers a variety of hosting types for websites with differing needs, including:

• Shared hosting
• WordPress hosting (managed and unmanaged)
• WooCommerce hosting
• Managed VPS hosting
• Managed dedicated hosting

Shared hosting is the most affordable and accessible type of web hosting, so that’s the hosting type I took the most detailed look at. Shared hosting is also the hosting type I tested for this review.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting places your site on a server with hundreds of other sites. Each site receives a certain amount of the server’s resources, such as storage and processing power. This limits how many visitors you can have — basic shared hosting plans typically allow up to 10,000 monthly visitors, while more advanced plans may allow up to 400,000 — and how much data you can store, but also makes shared hosting affordable for blogs, hobby sites and small business websites.

Both of DreamHost’s shared hosting plans include:

• Free domain for first year, with domain privacy
• Unmetered bandwidth
• Free SSL certificate
• ModSecurity firewall
• Automated daily backups
• WordPress installer
• WordPress website builder
• Automated core WordPress updates
• Free WordPress migration
• Custom-built control panel
• 24/7 support via ticketing system and live chat

There are also some differences in cost and features:

Prices listed here are based on a three-year term.

WordPress hosting

WordPress hosting is typically shared hosting optimized for WordPress, a content management system — CMS — used to create and manage blog posts and website pages. These plans come with preinstalled WordPress and may include other features like automatic WordPress updates.

You may have noticed that these features are also included in DreamHost’s shared hosting plans. In fact, DreamHost’s WordPress hosting plans are identical to the shared hosting packages; only the names are different. Even the prices are the same — starting at $2.59 a month for the more affordable plan and $4 a month for the more expensive plan.

DreamHost also offers DreamPress, fully managed WordPress hosting where DreamHost takes care of WordPress updates and maintenance for you. DreamPress also comes with built-in caching for improved site speeds. The most affordable DreamPress plan starts at $17 a month, while the most expensive plan starts at $72 a month.

VPS hosting

In virtual private server — VPS — hosting, one physical server is divided up into several virtual servers. Each virtual server comes with dedicated resources, such as bandwidth and processing power, and is rented out to a single customer. This gives you better security and more server customization options than shared hosting.

DreamHost’s managed VPS hosting plans start at $10 a month for 30GB of solid-state drive — SSD — storage and 1GB of random access memory or RAM. The most expensive plan is $80 a month for 8GB of RAM and 240GB of SSD storage.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting provides an entire physical server to one customer. This gives you access to high levels of storage, RAM and processing power, allowing your site to accommodate thousands of large files and millions of visitors.

DreamHost’s dedicated server hosting is fully managed and starts at $165 a month for six central processing unit — CPU — cores, 480GB of storage and 16GB of RAM. The most expensive plan is $625 a month for 16 CPU cores, 1,920GB of storage and 128GB of RAM.

DreamHost ease of use: Good tools, if you can access them

The next step of my DreamHost review was looking at how easy its systems are to use. I focused on three areas: the purchase process, account management and website and server management.

Purchase process

DreamHost uses a multistep signup process. After selecting a plan, you’re asked if you’ll use an existing domain, register a new one or choose a domain later. I chose Register a New Domain and was directed to enter the domain I wanted.

With a domain selected, I was sent onto a form for billing information and account details for my new DreamHost account. You can also change the contract length and select the add-ons you want to purchase here.

There are two red flags here. First, your plan renews automatically and there’s no information about renewal costs. This information also wasn’t clearly displayed on the plan selection page, so you might find yourself caught off guard by the price hike at renewal time. Most web hosts display this information in small text, but do make it visible on either the plan page — where you’ll find it for A2 Hosting and GoDaddy — or the purchase page — where you’ll find it for HostGator.

The other red flag is in the Additional Features section, where two options are already selected:

The first preselected feature is DreamShield Protection, a monitoring tool used to identify malicious code, out-of-date software and other issues for $3 a month. The second is DreamHost Email for $20 per year per mailbox. Many folks will want these add-ons, but it’s annoying to have to deselect them if you don’t.

Once you’ve submitted the information on this page, you should be able to log into your account.

Overall, this process was simple. The purchase steps are separated, but they’re technically all on one page so you can move quickly from one to the next. The issues with transparency around pricing and preselected add-ons are, unfortunately, things you’ll run into with many web hosts. For example, HostGator only mentions renewal pricing on the purchase page — and displays it in tiny, easy-to-miss text — and also automatically preselects the SiteLock add-on during checkout.

Account management

Account management is where things got complicated. I wasn’t able to log into my account right away. A live chat agent told me to reset my password. This got me into the account, where I was confronted with an error message:

I contacted customer service and DreamHost reset my email, removing the original sign-up and forcing me to sign up again. 

This sign-up didn’t work either. In fact, I worked with my editor on four separate attempts to create an account, and all four were rejected with a form message suggesting I seek another web host.

Frankly, at this point, I would have gone to a different web host if I hadn’t been attempting to write this review. For the sake of the evaluation, I soldiered on and, after much back-and-forth, was able to create an account.

The one good thing about this experience was the actual account dashboard. Websites are listed in the main area and management areas for domains, websites and email are linked to in a sidebar on the left. Billing and account management are also visible in the sidebar rather than being hidden in a drop-down menu like they are on HostGator and GoDaddy.

Website and server management

Clicking on Manage in the Websites area of DreamHost takes you to a page where you can manage your files, databases and domain. You can also install WordPress here, and you’ll be able to take advantage of DreamHost’s guided WordPress installation:

I loved how easy this guided process was. I entered some basic information about the website I was creating and my goals, and DreamHost suggested several plugins to auto-install. It was almost as effective as the A2 Hosting WordPress setup wizard, but the A2 Hosting setup wizard also generated key pages for me.

Server management through DreamHost is more frustrating. The company uses a custom-built server management tool instead of the industry-standard cPanel. While this tool is easy to navigate, there’s still something of a learning curve if you’re new to website building or used to cPanel.

This proprietary system may also make switching web hosts down the line more difficult, as most migration services are based on cPanel transfer.

Overall ease of use

DreamHost is complicated for everyday use. The purchase process seems easy, but I had several signup attempts rejected — and I’m not the only one. In fact, there are several threads on Reddit from users complaining about declined DreamHost accounts in the past year, like this thread from three months ago and this thread from eight months ago.

Managing the website and server was relatively simple when I finally had an account approved. The proprietary tool is different from cPanel, but the learning curve is fairly similar to figuring out cPanel.

Still, the account-creation process was so arduous that I can’t give DreamHost high marks for ease of use — so I settled on a 4/10 ranking.

DreamHost performance: Solid servers

With the basic account setup figured out, it’s time to review DreamHost’s site performance. I created a basic WordPress site using the Total theme, two images and two text boxes to simulate a regular homepage. I then tested two aspects of performance:

• Uptime, or the amount of time the site spends online. Anything more than a few minutes of downtime is highly problematic, as users who can’t load your site will go elsewhere — and this can result in major financial losses if you’re creating a business site.
• Speed, which is the amount of time it takes for the site to load. This should happen within a couple of seconds.

Let’s take a look at the data.

Uptime

DreamHost goes above and beyond the industry standard 99.9% uptime guarantee, promising 100% uptime. In theory, your site should never go down due to server issues.

I monitored my DreamHost test site with BetterStack for one week — and DreamHost lived up to its guarantee. My site didn’t experience any downtime whatsoever. This gives DreamHost an uptime ranking of 10/10.

Speed

Site speed is an essential component of your visitors’ experience — so essential, in fact, that a site’s bounce rate increases by 32% when loading speed goes from 1 to 3 seconds. Page speed is also an important Google ranking factor.

Most experts recommend a site speed of less than 3 seconds. While there are things you can do to improve your site’s loading time, like installing your own caching plugin, your host should provide fast enough servers to meet the speed recommendation in most locations for basic websites.

I used WebPageTest to test my site’s speed over the course of five days, running each set of tests at a different time of day. WebPageTest lets you test speeds from several locations, so I chose a range of places around the globe to simulate what international users will experience when accessing a DreamHost site.

Based on these tests, I came up with the following averages, measured in seconds (remember, less is better and the ideal speed is under 3 seconds):

This allowed me to determine that DreamHost has an average mobile site speed of 3.42 seconds and an average desktop site speed of 2.08 seconds, for an overall average of 2.75 seconds.

While this does land under the recommended maximum, earning DreamHost a 7.5/10 on our ranking scale, this is slower than other hosts I’ve reviewed. GoDaddy had an average loading speed of 2.29 seconds, A2 Hosting had an average of 2.55 seconds and HostGator had an average time of 2.41 seconds.

These site loading speeds won’t match the experience of every user — individuals’ devices and internet plans will affect loading times — but it is a good representation of what most users will experience and, frankly, it’s less than ideal.

Overall performance

DreamHost’s 10/10 uptime and 7.5/10 speed rankings combine to give it an 8.75/10 performance rating. This puts it above HostGator’s 6/10 ranking and A2 Hosting’s 8.5/10 ranking, but below GoDaddy’s 9/10 performance ranking.

DreamHost customer support: An abject failure

Testing customer service was the next stage of my DreamHost review. I first explored the Knowledge Base — an area for self-directed learning and troubleshooting — and then reached out to DreamHost’s customer service via live chat and support ticket.

Knowledge Base

The DreamHost Knowledge Base is well organized, with a prominent search function and a homepage sharing key information categories like Hosting Plans, DNS and Domains and Products and Services.

Individual articles use headers, numbered steps and images to make it easy for beginners to find the information they need and put it into practice. However, only a couple of the articles include video tutorials. This can be frustrating for folks who prefer to learn through video.

Overall, I’m going to give the DreamHost Knowledge Base a 9/10.

Direct communication

I had some issues with the signup process, so I reached out to DreamHost right away — and I was immediately disappointed when it forwarded me to a contact page with a notice that “Live chat is not available.”

This was an immediate red flag, as all customers are supposed to have 24/7 access to live chat. I had even communicated with live chat before — but now it was unavailable, with no hint as to when it might become available again.

I received an email 20 minutes later stating that my support ticket had been moved to a specific customer service team. The actual follow-up came a full two and a half hours after I submitted my ticket. This response time was frustrating, but in my experience, it’s pretty average for support requests submitted via a ticket system or email.

In terms of helpfulness, the initial conversation was only somewhat useful. The customer service agent wasn’t able to fix my account — all he could do was disconnect my email and ask me to sign up again. This might be an issue with DreamHost’s systems rather than the support agent’s technical expertise, but it was still frustrating.

Signing up again didn’t work. In fact, my editor and I attempted to create a DreamHost account five times, with five different emails. I then reached out on Twitter and was told to fill out a contact form. The email response came many hours later and wasn’t very helpful. We spent several days in back-and-forth communication with DreamHost before we managed to create an account.

In terms of phone support, DreamHost says it offers callback services, but I couldn’t find the phone number anywhere.

All in all, DreamHost landed the following rankings for customer support:

• Live chat support: 1/10
• Email customer support: 2/10
• Phone support: 0/10

Reputation

DreamHost’s reputation is mixed. It’s one of a few hosts officially recommended by WordPress and has a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot. DreamHost’s Better Business Bureau page lists 25 complaints in the past three years, and all of those complaints have been closed.

However, looking at other sites like Reddit, opinions are mixed. Several people have encountered the problems I faced with account creation. There are also threads talking about recent issues with PHP updates and email hosting outages. Most of these threads suggest that DreamHost’s formerly reliable service has decreased in quality over the past year.

Overall

DreamHost’s Knowledge Base is great, but its complete lack of helpful customer support earns it a meager ranking of 3/10.

DreamHost security: Utterly average

DreamHost’s shared plans include four security measures:

• SSL encryption to protect data sent to and from your site, including information submitted by customers through contact and payment forms.
• ModSecurity firewall to protect your site from spyware and other malicious software.
• Automated WordPress updates for the core software. This ensures that you always have the latest security patches for WordPress.
• Automated daily backups so you can quickly restore your site if anything happens to it.

However, there are some key things missing from DreamHost’s built-in security. The first is protection from DDoS — distributed denial of service — attacks that flood your site with malicious traffic to overwhelm your server. Most web hosts provide this protection, as DDoS attacks are common.

The other thing that’s missing is malware scanning to catch any malicious software that makes it through the firewall. This software isn’t provided by all web hosts, so the lack of it isn’t necessarily a strike against DreamHost, but it is disappointing.

You can get access to DDoS protection and malware scanning for an additional $3 a month. This pricing is permanent, making it more cost-effective in the long run than the SiteLock Essentials add-on offered by competitors like HostGator.

DreamHost value: Looks good on the surface

How does DreamHost stack up to other web hosts in terms of value?

Let’s take a look at the offerings from three other popular web hosts — GoDaddy, A2 Hosting and HostGator:

There are a few things we can learn from comparing DreamHost’s basic shared hosting plan to the offerings from these hosts:

• DreamHost has the lowest introductory pricing, starting at $2.59 a month. The next-lowest introductory pricing, offered by A2 Hosting, is $3 a month.
• DreamHost also has the lowest renewal pricing, starting at just $6 a month rather than the $10 a month offered by GoDaddy or HostGator. It’s significantly lower than A2 Hosting’s renewal pricing of $13 a month.
• DreamHost offers moderate storage — the 50GB on the Starter plan is more than the 10GB and 25GB offered by GoDaddy and HostGator’s comparable plans, but less than the 100GB offered on A2 Hosting’s basic plan.
• DreamHost offers average security features, including the basic firewall and SSL certification offered by HostGator and A2 Hosting — features not included with GoDaddy’s basic plan. However, it doesn’t offer the DDoS protection offered by A2 Hosting and HostGator, or the full security tools suite offered by A2 Hosting.

Overall, DreamHost’s features are pretty average. What stands out is its low pricing — both the introductory and renewal pricing are lower than top competitors’ prices. This earns it a 7/10 ranking for value.

DreamHost: Is it right for you?

I was thoroughly unimpressed with DreamHost’s lack of transparency about renewal pricing, the absurd difficulties I faced trying to sign up and the poor customer support.

Still, it’s worth going through the category rankings from this review:

• Ease of use: 4/10
• Performance: 8.75/10
• Customer support: 3/10
• Value: 7/10

This gives DreamHost an overall ranking of 5.5/10. As stated in our article about how we test web hosting, this is a low enough ranking that I cannot recommend DreamHost. I recommend checking out A2 Hosting or, if long-term savings are important to you, HostGator instead.