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Web Hosting Reviews

DreamHost
http://www.dreamhost.com/



There are 89 hosting user reviews for DreamHost

Average Jury Ratings & Reviews of DreamHost

       
4.6/5
3.8/53.8/5
3.6/5
Reliability
Support
Pricing
Overall


Below are some verdicts that users of our site have given to DreamHost . If you would like to submit your verdict about DreamHost please use our submit page to review DreamHost.

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Date Submitted : May 7th, 2008
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 3 years
Overall Rating : 3 out of 5
Reliability : 3 out of 5
Support : 3 out of 5
Pricing : 4 out of 5
Verdict : Somedays the hosting is super fast and efficient - some days no one can get on at all. Our forums receive about 8000 unique visitors per month and get about 200 posts per day. Today, for example, they had a primary DB server crash and many sites went down. We received about 40 posts today. Despite many sites being down they marked the problem as "Severity: Medium". If you go to dreamhoststatus.com they're nice enough to publish problems. Looking at the time and dates you'll see that they have a major problem once every three days with medium problems about every day.

What can you expect from a cheap host... Price is great. But you (dont) get what you (dont) pay for.
Submitted By : MadTurki
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 24.141.229.97 
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Date Submitted : January 16th, 2008
Length of time hosted by this company : More than 3 years
Overall Rating : 5 out of 5
Reliability : 4 out of 5
Support : 4 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5
Verdict : I currently use DreamHost to host two sites, with one of them being registered there as well. The larger of the two sites serves approx. 4,000 pages per day (not counting the faviocon, robots, and the like) and has an announcement list of approx. 1,000 users who subscribed using a (DreamHost provided) automated system. I have also used DreamHost in the past to host a site for a blogger-run-blog when I had the time to post.

The web hosting aspect is easy to use with standard ftp or secure-ftp access. The management of the various other things (changing billing options, checking user statistics, web-mail, forwarding/redirecting e-mail, and setting up e-mail subscription lists) is very user friendly. The team running it always has a sense of humor in their blog and newsletter -- but doesn't let that get in the way of getting the job done.

I have contacted them over a dozen times in the past with questions on topics such as transferring domains and the use of mailing lists and have gotten helpful responses within 24 hours to each one, often much quicker. (They also have a support wiki that answers a lot of standard questions).

I had a recent (my fault, I left a door open type) of security breach and they responded to my e-mail that day and followed up again the next.

The most negative publicity they have received is that recently they had a billing error where customers who were using automatic billing on their credit or debit cards were billed in advance. They caught the error, put a notice up about it on the status page, set about reversing the charges (e-mailing each person when their charges were reversed), and explained the entire situation on their blog.
Submitted By : BH
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 65.87.136.119 
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Date Submitted : November 25th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 6 months
Overall Rating : 3 out of 5
Reliability : 3 out of 5
Support : 4 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5
Verdict : ive been with dreamhost for the last 3 months. The customer service is great, but have to say the php server is damn slow, so is the mysql server, i am getting php and mysql errors very often. The space and bandwidth they provied are great a nd worth the price. So what i am currently doing is hosting my non-ecommerce sites on dreamhost and my e-commerce sites on another reliable host.
Submitted By : gar
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 152.226.7.211 
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Date Submitted : November 20th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 6 months
Overall Rating : 4 out of 5
Reliability : 4 out of 5
Support : 4 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5
Verdict : Well I've spent some time shopping around for some web host's, had a few that were "OK" and have administered a few websites with other hosting companies. The larger ones are a complete nightmare and simple tasks like importing a database file was like giving birth. Anyway I had a couple of people who I work with refer me to dreamhost and I've had them for close to six months now. I LOVE having ssh access, saves so much time to do things myself instead of putting in a "ticket" and waiting on some data center monkey to screw up the job.

Anyway Dreamhost has lots of tools available and if you half way know what you're doing they're great. That and tech support expects you to have a clue, that doesn't mean they're not helpful it's just that they're not there to admin your site. Now they have had some network issues that have been resolved, but then again who hasn't/doesn't?

I have since moved over to their "VPS" and really, really like it. The cost isn't bad and with the monitoring tools you can adjust your resources to suit your needs. What that means is when you are doing some updates, db work, etc. just crank up the resources short term till the task is done. Then for your day to day web traffic you drop it down to the level you need. This is great since you don't have to pay for what you don't use/need.

All in all I really do like them, you've got a lot of control over your services to suit your needs. If you need someone to hold your hand you really won't be happy. I'd say unless you've got the $$$ for a CoLo they have a good balance and are a good bang for the buck.
Submitted By : marcus0263
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 69.64.230.97 
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Date Submitted : November 19th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 6 months
Overall Rating : 3 out of 5
Reliability : 3 out of 5
Support : 4 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5
Verdict : I started off with the basic host package (the semi cheap one) and while it was OK, there were performance issues, especially for picture hosting (gallery).

I got tired of the problems and moved to a PS account where I have a VM'ed dedicated server and my problems went away. Sites are fast, availability is good, etc.

Also love the fact that they all allow ssh access.
Submitted By : jaymz
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 64.183.229.182 
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Date Submitted : November 18th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 6 months
Overall Rating : 2 out of 5
Reliability : 1 out of 5
Support : 2 out of 5
Pricing : 4 out of 5
Verdict : I joined Dreamhost about 3 months ago because a friend of mine recommended them. The site I was hosting was a hobbiest gaming site.

There E-Mail support sucks, when my site is down or not responding as it should I don't need to wait 10 hours for a reply telling me what I already know.

Uptime is HORRIBLE. I've had 4 outages each lasting an hour, (the most recent one has lasted over 9)

The PHP server is glitchy as hell and even when it works it is frequently slow.

I'm currently in the process of moving.
Submitted By : VinceN
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 69.131.165.73 
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Date Submitted : November 16th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : More than 3 years
Overall Rating : 2 out of 5
Reliability : 1 out of 5
Support : 3 out of 5
Pricing : 4 out of 5
Verdict : I've been a customer of dreamhost for over 4 years.

4 years ago, they were one of the best shared hosts available. Pricing was at about $40/mo for a robust account. Customer service was top-notch. I ran a small eCommerce business on them and never had to worry about anything.

That lasted about 2 years. Then they slashed prices, and starting having problems.

Now ... they're horrible. I still have a $10 account for non-business stuff that I don't care about, mainly because I've been too lazy to back it all up and move it off.

Your website will be down at least once a day. If you're running a blag or personal site, eh ... no bid deal. Anything that needs some semblance of reliability? Bad idea.

You can't even rely on them to run a mail sever without problems - your email will fail on a regular basis (As in, people sending you mail will get bounces). Yes, it's that bad.

Seriously, look elsewhere. They have serious problems that they don't seem to know how to solve. There have been several multi-hour and multi-day outages of their entire network this year, and that trend doesn't seem to be changing.
Submitted By : Roach
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 67.176.85.132 
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Date Submitted : November 16th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 6 - 12 months
Overall Rating : 1 out of 5
Reliability : 1 out of 5
Support : 1 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5
Verdict : Dreamhost was a nightmare. The tech support was slow, rigid, and patronizing. No phone support unless you pay for it, even when the problem was their fault. We had lost email problems that were never resolved.

And for the privilege of having such bad and infuriating service, we were repeatedly overcharged.Then to add insult to injury, when we closed our account we were told that we couldn't get a refund for the $117 balance because we were past the 97 day money back guarantee - we could only use this as a credit should we decide to reopen our account! Outrageous. Not standard procedure, in my experience.

Our organization is really supportive of worker coops and that's why we went with Dreamhost. Unfortunately, Dreamhost gives coops a bad name.
Submitted By : programs
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 128.119.163.70 
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Date Submitted : August 27th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 6 - 12 months
Overall Rating : 5 out of 5
Reliability : 5 out of 5
Support : 5 out of 5
Pricing : 4 out of 5
Verdict : All I can say is, wow!

DreamHost is fabulous. You get SOO much for about $7.95 a month, which I guess isn't too terribly bad. The people there are very nice and in the 8 months that I have been hosted with them, I haven't experienced any downtime at all.

I definitely recommend DreamHost.
Submitted By : Darren
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 24.241.124.133 
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Date Submitted : July 23rd, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 3 years
Overall Rating : 4 out of 5
Reliability : 3 out of 5
Support : 4 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5
Verdict : I joined up with Dreamhost in early 2005 based on friends' recommendations and general good experiences. Feature wise the site has everything I need and more, and the hosting is simple and easy to manage.

Down-sides -
Reliability/up-time has been declining since I've joined, down-time is not frequent, but is fairly common (I'd say my site is down for small periods at least once a fortnight).

I've only needed to contact support when I've been experiencing down-time, and their response is generally slow, and usually the site is back up by the time they respond. When they do respond, it tends to be along the lines of "something went weird, but we don't know what. Is it still broken for you?", which doesn't inspire confidence in the stability of their systems.

All in all I think Dreamhost is a step up from small and un-reliable web-hosts, but it's nowhere near stable or reliable enough to run websites where up-time is critical. However, for the price, it's still pretty good value.
Submitted By : Chris
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 81.179.83.69 
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Date Submitted : July 14th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 6 - 12 months
Overall Rating : 4 out of 5
Reliability : 4 out of 5
Support : 5 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5
Verdict : I've been a happy dreamhoster for about a year now and have these comments about them:

Customer Support:
Although I LOVE their fast response times, there is no other method in contacting them besides a ticket. I literally had a 3 minute response time at 8:00 p.m. with sales going back and forth with emails literally 3 minutes after I sent them, I got a response. Tech support emails are answered within 3 hours usually and tickets marked as urgent or as they mark it "OMG PEOPLE ARE DYING!" or "THINGS ARE BROKEN AND I'D LIKE THEM NOT TO BE" you can expect a response time WITHIN 30 minutes, usually about 15 minutes. They are very professional and are very polite. Problems with a server or service are posted and updated regulary on dreamhoststatus.com

Pricing:
The pricing and features are the best. Unlike other hosts, Dreamhost puts its servers in 2 data centers and can actually provide all they offer. For example: Myself and others have pushed the 1-2TB bandwidth range without ANY problem. I've stored 10GB of files with no problem. The servers are fast and cpu and memory usage is minimal. They also allow backup of photos as long as you don't go to far with it (i.e. cupu hog).

Reliability:
I rated reliability a 4/5 because uptime can be iffy. Downtime and email problems occur every now and then and are sometimes unpredicable. Expect about 99.6% uptime most of the time. My server gets 99.8% and my sever is considered lucky. The worst you will see is 99.1% uptime. No SLAs are offered.

Verdict: Good for hobby/personal/small business sites. If you run a "I need the web to make money or I will live in my car" website, I would NOT recommend Dreamhost.
Submitted By : Dave
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 68.60.238.20 
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Date Submitted : July 5th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 3 years
Overall Rating : 5 out of 5
Reliability : 5 out of 5
Support : 5 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5
Verdict : I have to say coming from a host whos servers got burned away to Dreamhost was a DREAM COME TRUE. They are serious about their Dreams!

Best host I have ever been with and cheap to. Last cheap host I was with had all sorts of downtime issues and they would just say, your getting a deal, why complain...NOT DREAMHOST! Dreamhost support is the most reliable support I ever seen!!! I mean they give better and quicker support than my credit card company support line which is pretty quick. The staff at dreamhost are very friendly, laid back people and not all corporate about everything. Josh the one that hogs the blog (as he said before) is one of the funniest people I have seen in a blog!

I rate them 10 out of 10 but it stopped at 5 :-( I recommend anyone that wants a good host to go to them!
Submitted By : Shawn
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 12.201.18.177 
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Date Submitted : July 5th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 6 months
Overall Rating : 5 out of 5
Reliability : 5 out of 5
Support : 5 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5
Verdict : This is the best I ever seen. They help you, they're fast and always give support, their plans are good and they have rewards for every week you're hosted by them (increase in bandwidth and disk space). You can also get promo codes for a discound if it's your first account.
Submitted By : Ra
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 151.5.132.107 
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Date Submitted : June 5th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 6 months
Overall Rating : 5 out of 5
Reliability : 4 out of 5
Support : 5 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5
Verdict : Ok.

I definitely do not feel that a whole lot of the remarks below are justified, but we all have our problems, right?

First off, I'd like to say that I'm thoroughly impressed by Dreamhost's services. They seem to be pulling up their socks and stepping up to the place. I have been hosted since April 2007, and while I've not been here a long time, I can see I'm quite pleased already.

They offer both Shell & FTP access, which is a real deal; not a whole lot of hosts will permit you to see what is on the rest of your server. I can go and look at each & every hosting account that is on my server with Shell.

FTP access has sometimes been a little bit spotty, which is why I could not give DH a 100% score; it is sometimes intermittent, but nothing too large to open a complaint about.

Their rewards program is awesome. I'm glad for it. Rewards make babies smile. The next thing, as stated, is their Wiki. What a wonderful tool this was. If I ever have a question, I go straight to Wiki first, and in most cases, my answer is solved. On one occasion, where I asked for SHOUTCast! rather then the QuickTime streaming that they offered, I was referred to a suggestions page; a huge database with all of the reccomended upgrades for DreamHost. This may be updates to software, updates to hardware, services, customer support, a new server in X Country, etc. You get points, and you vote what you want. Although this is not the final decision in the end, it is nice to know that you are being heard.

I have not yet experienced problems with email.
DreamHost either is improving; learning, adapting & growing, or has just been in a dark spot with its customers.
Submitted By : James
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 71.17.0.38 
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Date Submitted : May 25th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : Less than 1 month
Overall Rating : 1 out of 5
Reliability : 1 out of 5
Support : 2 out of 5
Pricing : 4 out of 5
Verdict : This is the worst hosting company we have ever come across. Not only are they technically in over their heads, they have a tendency to blame their customers for issues that come up and for even expressing discontent with the FREQUENT down times (about 2 times a week email is down, randomly through a week, websites, ftp service etc goes down). We signed up with dreamhost because we thought it would be nice to have a "green host" and because their prices looked good. Within the first 2 weeks, our smtp service was down 3 times... 1 of those times the issue was resolved after 9 daytime hours were lost!

They have a status blog they're very proud of where they report issues (and they really don't report all of the issues). On this status blog www.dreamhoststatus.com, commenters who are very obviously employees of this company are constantly bickering with the people who are complaining about the latest service outages. There are homophobic, sexist, and in general rude and obscene things that customers who dare say a non-flattering word about the company are constantly called by "anonymous" commenters in almost every blog entry.

Everyone from the bottom to the top seems to have a sense of entitlement. Being "green" does not mean people get to get away with horrible service. They are proud of being employee-owned, but it seems all those employees/owners are so emotionally invested in keeping up this pride facade, they don't actually do their job properly. Either their hardware or their systems admins need to be replaced, but of course, they are too proud to entertain such ideas.

Dreamhost is all sizzle no steak, and it's really not worth the trouble, unless all you are running is a vanity site, and you never use your domain email. If you're looking for a cheap but good host, check out godaddy.com, eboundhost.com, hostgator.com, all with better uptimes. Dreamhost is really a terrible choice for a web host.
Submitted By : maven
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 74.98.9.10 
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Date Submitted : May 24th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 3 years
Overall Rating : 3 out of 5
Reliability : 2 out of 5
Support : 3 out of 5
Pricing : 4 out of 5
Verdict : Thought things were getting better since the meltdown of summer 2006.

Then all their DNS servers failed at once. No backup. They rated it a "medium" severity issue on their status blog, and it stretched on from one day into the next.

Even when things are "working," every week there's still some kind of problem or outage, particularly with mail.

You get what you pay for. Stay far away until they resolve their problems.
Submitted By : GM
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 38.100.222.81 
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Date Submitted : May 22nd, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 6 - 12 months
Overall Rating : 2 out of 5
Reliability : 2 out of 5
Support : 2 out of 5
Pricing : 4 out of 5
Verdict : My initial experiences were very good, but things have gone sour. They came highly recommended. Prices looked great. At first I only needed very simple domain hosting and email. Later on I started up a blog, and found the WordPress plug-in very straightforward and easy to use.

Problems arose when I started doing mysql development, which meant that I was interacting with my site for extended periods nearly every day. I noticed system outages or severe slowness almost every week, occasionally lasting several hours. I had been planning a product launch for a specific date, but had to delay it. That was a lucky thing, because Dreamhost went down for most of that weekend.

Now things have gotten even worse. I'm shopping for a new host, which is why I found this site.

Dreamhost has somehow changed its MySQL configuration in a way which breaks my database. This has been going on for days, and I find them to be surprisingly slow in responding and understanding the problem. I imagine they'll figure it out eventually, but I can't afford this trouble anymore.
Submitted By : flywheel
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 65.11.98.158 
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Date Submitted : May 3rd, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 6 months
Overall Rating : 1 out of 5
Reliability : 2 out of 5
Support : 5 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5
Verdict : I have only had Dreamhost for a few months, but I have to say that the service is not reliable.

My email is down for the second week in a row. It seems that every time they repair the cluster that my email is on I lose my email.

My email has been down since 7am as far as I can tell, and it is now 1:15. I have had no acknowledgement from the company

Part of the problem is they only look at and respond to service problems on California time. They do not have 24/7 service. I did not select their 7.95 program, but their 15.00 program figuring their service would be better. The last time the email was down it took them two days to respond and three days to repair.

I must say that the people are very nice, but the service response is inadequate.

If you are on the East Coast you will not be happy with them.



Submitted By : Sandor
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 24.105.202.205 
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Date Submitted : April 28th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 6 months
Overall Rating : 2 out of 5
Reliability : 1 out of 5
Support : 4 out of 5
Pricing : 4 out of 5
Verdict : Dreamhost is one of popular hosting sites on the net. They announce good plans to their visitors which eventually lure them in. I was lured in by Dreamhost's "delicious" plans. I signed up instantly and was offered 300 Gigs of Space and 2 TBs of Bandwidth.

Here comes the bad news. I've been with dreamhost for a while and their hosting uptime is utterly horrible. 2 Times down for the last week of December 06. 7 times down for the month of January 07, and it just continues to grow each month until I just gave up. If you think I'm a calling bs or making up lies, check out their customer support page. http://dreamhoststatus.com

As you can read there, they post about 14 times in a month about this set of servers down, mail servers down, power outages, faulty hardware and more.

For about the time I was on dreamhost, I finally reached 50% of my space used. What was I hosting? I was hosting my files from my old computer which I needed to transfer to my new computer. Most of them were music and we're actually bought by me. What did dream host did? They shut me down for using too much space and putting up illegal files. Wtf?

The thing is, Dreamhost does really give you that much space. They just trick you to stay at their hosting so they can leech money off you. If you use alot of space, they go searching through your personal files and take it from you.

I hope you guys dont suffer from Dreamhost like I did.
Submitted By : DaFlameking
Submitted From : Web Hosting Jury
Submiter IP : 74.236.97.87 
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Date Submitted : April 2nd, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company : 1 - 6 months
Overall Rating : 5 out of 5
Reliability : 4 out of 5
Support : 5 out of 5
Pricing : 5 out of 5