Product Review: DreamHost Website Hosting

DreamHost web site hosting is a web site hosting company that has been around since 1997. With servers located in Southern California, DreamHost does experience some issues with servers being down, but no more so than any other company providing website hosting services to the public. DreamHost offers website hosting plans starting as low as only $7.95 per month, which includes one free domain name registration! The plan also includes 160 GB of storage space, the ability to host an unlimited number of domain names, and 1.65 TB of bandwidth monthly.

One of the greatest things about hosting your website with DreamHost is that they reward you for being their customer. The longer you are with DreamHost, the more your rewards grow. When you sign up with DreamHost for a website hosting plan, your disk storage space increases weekly. The amount it increases depends upon the plan which you sign up for. If you sign up for the lowest priced plan, the $7.95 per month plan, then your disk space grows by 1 GB each week! A similar rewards system is in place for bandwidth. Using the lowest priced plan as an example again, the bandwidth for it increases by 16 GB each week.

For some time now, DreamHost has been offering up a special price on their "Code Monster" web site hosting plan, which is their level 3 plan out of a possible 4 level plan option. The promo special for the Code Monster plan is getting the hosting plan for half price for as long as you are signed up for it. This makes the Code Monster level 3 plan the same price as the level 2 plan, which is a win for you!

A lot of people complain about DreamHost in regards to servers going down or just general slowness of the servers. In my experience, I have not seen any downtime with DreamHost that makes it a worse offender than other hosting companies. The problem of slow servers is not something that I have noticed at all. Apparently though there are some users that have their web sites on the same servers as some high traffic adult content web sites, which seem to be bogging down the server. The first week of April DreamHost sent out communication saying that they were aware that this might be an issue for some people and have resolved to move all of the adult content related web sites to their own servers to insure that other customers do not experience the delays in service that a few customers reported to DreamHost. This example of DreamHost's customer service really paints an accurate picture of how responsive they are to their customers needs. The few times I have had to contact customer service with a problem or question, they have responded in both a timely and courteous manner. For this reason, I would never consider changing to another web hosting service. Recently when RegisterFly lost their accreditation and around 900,000 domain name owners without hosting, DreamHost offered a year of free hosting to any RegisterFly customers if they wanted to sign up with DreamHost.

As someone that only knows a moderate amount about html coding and website building, I especially love how user friend DreamHost web hosting is for me to use. DreamHost has a support wiki on their site as well as a user forum. Any question that you might have you can find on one of these. When I installed a WordPress plugin to create a blog on my site I lost the ability to check my stats. It only took me about 15 minutes searching the user forum to find a quick answer and I was able to check my stats in no time.

I am particularly a fan of DreamHost's one-click installs, especially the WordPress plugin. If you want to host your own blog, nothing is easier than using DreamHost's one-click WordPress install. It literally takes about 3 minutes before your blog is up and running. My only complaint is that there is no information on how to port over your old blog if you were using the new Blogger, as the information is only available for the old Blogger. To see what a DreamHost hosted WordPress blog looks like, visit www.completeslacker.com for an example.

Another great thing about DreamHost is that it allows its users to create unique promo codes to offer to new customers. I am able to offer all Associated Content readers $45 off a year of hosting with DreamHost if you use the promo code ACREADERS45OFF when you sign up. If you are looking for a web site hosting provider, you cannot go wrong with DreamHost!