The first couple of months at Dreamhost was faultless. That was partly because I did not face any major issues with my site. But lately my site has been experiencing occasional downtime and I have been using their tech support regularly. This is when things turn bad. The lack of live chat means I have to resort to emails. The response was painfully slow and when the problem was a website down issue, it just makes things worse. Soemtimes a response wouldn't arrive until after about 4-5 hours. This is very disappointing. I am moving to another host.
dreamhost.com provides excellent deals on shared hosting. I have been using them to host several sites for a few years. (My current storage is 27 GB with no limit from dreamhost; my current bandwith usage is 1.4 GB/mo with no limit from dreamhost.) Dreamhost provides excellent service, an excellent package of features. It is particularly good for anyone wanting to develop a site using certain common CMS or other features--content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla, etc. Regular backups of a site or of your entire account can be scheduled, but are not (as far as I know) automatic. I do regular backups downloaded to my computer. I have never tried the Virtual Private Server which is available for a slightly higher fee. I have used other webhosting services before dreamhost. The others trapped me into deals offering storage and bandwidth that quickly became inadequate. With dreamhost, the limits increase. New features are added regularly. (If you insist on using Microsoft web features, dreamhost may not be the place for you. They seem to use linux servers exclusively.) I recommend dreamhost.com highly. (I do not receive any compensation from dreamhost for posting this opinion. Actually, I'm trying out this site's implementation of the joomla extension, "JReviews".)
They've been hosting a couple of my sites for two years now. There's the odd spot of down time. I find outages come along in batches. There's a couple (usually of only a few hours) every two or three months. They have a dreamhost status website, which is handy but sometimes not always up to date, or covering every problem.
They've handled traffic spikes I've had quite well (having caching tools for your sites helps a lot here) and the support people usually return emails reasonably promptly.
I have been with dreamhost since Aug. 2001. Back then i think the company was still to new and starting out and they had some problems. I kept my domains with them but i moved my hosting. I recently moved my hosting back to dreamhost this year, and i have to say all the poor performance problems are gone so far. Customer Service is as good as always, and they have added many features that i enjoy. They are definitely worth another look if you run a small – medium sized site. So far about 6 months into my year long term and i am not considering going anywhere else.
I am a DreamHost customer, and I wish I wasn't. Slow slow slow slow. Outages, and they're so caught up in being hip and off-the-cuff that they fail to be effective system administrators.
I'm testing out imageleet for hosting now, and thus far, their throughput is much more consistent, identical pages housed in a cloned Joomla site load far faster. So far, it looks like a decent shared hosting provider, though I've not pounded on it very hard.
My experience with dreamhost is kinda old, I was with them around 2003-2004 and they were terrible. Too much downtime, I had lots of traffic so got lots of complaints about that, also, I bought my domain through them and it was a pain to get back, I had to go through tucows or something to get it back since dreamhost didn't actually have it, that took a few months, but I did eventually get it from them. However, the domain thing I think is typical though, I guess that's why it's recommended you buy your domain from a separate party.
Let's see, my experience isn't quite so long. I started hosting some sites with Dreamhost in January of this year (2008).
At first it was sloooow, but this only lasted a week or two. They stopped adding new members to that particular machine and took it down for upgrades & transfers for about one hour one weekend night at 3 AM EST. When it came back up, it was running fast and I haven't had a single complaint since then.
I particularly like how easy they've made it to install new software - especially Pligg. I'm not too technical, so I tried to install it manually about three times before I gave in to the almighty "one click install." I wish I had done that in the first place! The community forums are active & helpful, but I don't know about the official support channels because (knock on wood) I haven't had any problems of that magnitude yet.
Oh yeah, and their affiliate program is excellent. Get paid to give people coupons and discounts - how do ya beat that?
Dreamhost is not necessarily the place to host if you have a well-established site that has thousands of visitors every day - unless you want to fork over the extra $15 or $20 a month for a VPS. (If you have thousands of visitors every day I think you should be able to afford something more than $6/month for hosting or else you need to rethink and optimize your business model)
But I would definitely recommend it for anyone who wants to start up some new websites or anyone who doesn't want to worry about the more technical aspects of their content management software.
I've only been with Dreamhost since January 2007 but i've never been disappointed by them! I'm still hosted with them and i don't intend to move unless all my websites are being kicked off the net!
When it comes to customer service i'd give them a 10/10. Their respond time is sometimes almost immediate, as in less than 5 minutes after you contact them. Their staff are knowledgable and helpful. The longest i've had to wait for a response was 30 minutes.
When it comes to their reliability, i'd give them 9/10. My sites have only ever been down once, and they contacted me weeks before to let me know that their will be a short outage while they upgrade the server that my sites are on.
As for services, its an 8/10, you have so many options on a shared hosting that you'd want to ask what is the point of getting dedicted or a VPS. You can install almost any server software you want from SSH and you have full control of your server environment from a .htaccess file. The only draw back is you don't get sudo, but then thats a good thing because that means you can't break anything beyond repair.
Their wiki offers extensive help and information on installing all sorts of software, and to top if off they offer a one click install service, which basically allows you to install some very common software with the push of one button like wordpress.
Like i said i've only been with them since 2007 but my bandwidth and the amount of space i have grows each week. So it just grows with my website, I'll never need more bandwidth and if i do i believe its only $1 per gig. My total allowed bandwidth should be hitting TB by now.
They have all sorts of plans and payment terms, there is monthly, yearly, every two years, every 3 years i believe every five years and every ten years, i might even be missing a few but they offer you so many things at such a decent price its hard to keep up with all the things they're giving you. A 10/10 for the range of things they provide for such a small price.
I believe their specialty or main focus is on shared hosting and thats what i've got and my server has never dragged, except once before the did the upgrade but since then the speed has been incomparable to any host i've been with. A 9/10 for server speed.
If there is anything i would say i don't like about dreamhost service is the limit that they have on sending out emails. They cap your emails so you can only send a certain amount per hour, can't remember how much it is off the top of my head but their justification of why they've done it is satisfying. Its simply to reduce the amount of spamming and hence when emails are sent from their servers the don;t end up in hotmail junk folders. Even though it may not be your site that sent spam e-mails hotmail will chuck your messages into the junk folder and from what i can remember thats why they've capped the email. On the bright side of that they offer pop3 and smtp and you decide where to access your emails eg. mail.domain.com or mychoice.domain.com; A 6/10 for email.
I'd definately recommend Dreamhost to anyone looking for a good reliable host who pride themself on true customer service, putting you before everything else. An overall rating i'd say of 9/10 for Dreamhost.
