Dreamhost Review by John Stewart, February 11, 2008

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You can’t beat growing bandwidth and space every week! I have been with them since febuary 2006, and haven’t had a problem yet. Their domain registration is fast and easy and they offer free private whois. All their plans offer unlimited everything and enough space and bandwidth to last me forever. They have pleanty of servers, and shut down clusters to new signups when they reach a certain ammount, so overcrowding isnt an option.

The only downside is their user interface could be quicker, its still nice, but could always be quicker. Also, I wish they offered dedicated server plans as well. But they do offer virtual servers now, so thats a plus.

Dreamhost Review by aFriend, March 5, 2008

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Dreamhost have extremely ridiculous hosting plans. Competitive bunch to beat in the hosting business.

Only downfall is they have their own *cpanel*.

Had a music site hosted with them awhile back. Their downtime can be pretty heavy sometimes… up to 1 day.

Dreamhost Review by voyage, March 9, 2008

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As for dreamhost, I have an account there and this past week there has been 14 instances of downtime, none lasting longer then 20 mins – and most under 5 mins. I am running nagios from 2 locations to check my dreamhost account (co-incidentally, we use nagios from those same two locations to ensure our machines are up and running). Dreamhost also tends to offer slow downloads at times, but for the price I honestly think they are doing a pretty decent job of things.

Dreamhost Review by Richard, May 13, 2008

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A few of my friends use dreamhost, and so it came highly recommended. Dreamhost can survive a digg front page no problem. Don’t know about a slashdotting, but I am guessing it could. Anyway, as long as you find a discount code, dreamhost is very cheap for the normal user. They have free private domain registration, 1 click installs of forums, blogs and other applications, support that responds in 1 business day, a control panel that is very feature rich, growing bandwidth and space (increases per week), and many other great functions.

The only thing that bothered me a bit is when you first sign up you have to send a fax of your credit card information into them to be approved. However, for me, I was approved witin like 15min so it turned out not to be that much of a hassle.

Dreamhost Review by Xing, June 13, 2008

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Dreamhost is good for when you own a lot of domains and need a place to host them. Great once click install & interface.

Dreamhost Review by 123John, August 30, 2008

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I recently moved all images except uploads from my vbulletin busy forum to Dreamhost, and edited the style vars in vB so that images are pulled directly from them. This has significantly improved my board’s performance.

Obviously this is much cheaper than an own dedicated image server, and still should work for most smaller/medium big boards, since Dreamhost is providing tons of traffic and storage. Nice for boards with limited budget.

Dreamhost is also providing shell access including rsync access, so they can also easily be used for your backups, although they probably won’t be too exited about that kind of usage.

This of course also works most others shared hosting providers, but I think Dreamhost is especially nice for this.

Dreamhost Review by Steven, October 14, 2008

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Dreamhost have many useful tools, plenty of bandwidth & space. They do have some downtime but at least you will know what’s going on from their dreamhoststatus.com site.

Dreamhost Review by GreenAlien, March 4, 2009

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My experience with Dreamhost has been poor also. Their shared hosting is very unreliable. You don’t even want to know how many customers they cram onto each box and from what I can tell they wont put a RAID-1 or RAID-10 in there. For that reason I tried out their VPS server – which is a full self-contained Linux server running in a VM machine. I’m paying about $60/mth on top of the shared hosting costs of $20/mth for a VPS, which is for both web server and MySQL server – Dreamhost force you to put each on different servers. It actually makes things flexible because you never use localhost for the MySQL address, but it increases the chances of things going wrong.

So with my setup I’m on at least 3 heavily oversold RAID-less servers, 1 for Apache, 1 for MySQL and 1 for file system. My MySQL server went offline for no good reason. No hardware faults and no explanation. Rebooting did nothing – it was dead. It took Dreamhost over 24 hours to even respond to my support ticket (with “Urgent” tag selected) at which point they brought it back online. Their support is usually friendly and knowledgeable, but the time it takes them to reply is ridiculous.

Other providers have an option for Hybrid VPS servers, which limit the number of VMs per machine. Some even dedicating a Xeon core to each VM which means no more than 8 customers per server, usually with RAID-10 harddisks. And this can be had for the same price as Dreamhost, or marginally more. Dreamhost represent very poor value for money. Especially when you consider they host 60+ customers (I counted them in one of their status messages) per machine even on their VPS setups! That’s 60+ full webservers running in virtual machines for every single physical server. That’s madness.

So why did I opt for Dreamhost VPS in the first place? Several reasons. Their control panel is brilliant. I came from cPanel on a previous host (bluehost) which I hated – it felt like a hacked together piece of junk, unintuitive, and one of the features enforced some downtime because they got it back to front at the time. Dreamhost’s inhouse custom control panel is a joy to use though, it’s a breeze for managing users, multiple SSH, FTP, multiple domains and subdomains, MySQL, 1-click installs, domain record editing etc. It’s all childsplay on Dreamhost and nicely presented too. Another reason I went with their VPS is because I was already on their shared hosting, and opting for VPS was automatic – no setup on my part needed. The third reason is because it’s all inhouse they have more control over proactively upgrading and patching the OS, control panel and all the core essentials like Apache, MySQL, PHP, SSH, FTP and so on. Finding all that on a Hybrid VPS or dedicated server for a reasonable cost is not easy.

So my advice. If you want a bargain web host and some downtime isnt the end of the world for you, Dreamhost are very good. If your websites matter to you, don’t bother paying extra for their VPS options until they pull their finger out their ass, and go with another provider who guarantees not to oversell you. Dreamhost need to sort out their network infrastructure badly, especially their shared file system. They’ve promised to revamp the whole setup and move the file system local to each machine to avoid the source of many issues, but as of this time they havent rolled it out yet.

Dreamhost Review by JA, March 4, 2009

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Dreamhost is not really a hosting company, it’s more like a money making scheme. Here’s how it works:

1. Lure users to sign-up using a secret coupon that gives 97% discount. Recently they have even gave up on this and started offering accounts for free on Dreamhost Apps http://www.dreamhostapps.com

2. Under the TOS (that no-one reads), write things highly subjective, like “Link Farming” and “Spamdex”. (Even the wikipedia definition for Spamdex is subjective)

3. Allow adding unlimited domains, the idea is to create dependency. Now almost all hosting companies followed.

4. Bet on user’s procrastination and wait for 1 year renewal: charge $120.

5. Re-evaluate user: if using too many resources: ban and don’t refund. Invoke TOS. If not, go to 4.

Need some proof?

A server is having stability issues. What do they do? Try to fix it?

No, they look at the load, select the top 10 users and BAN them. Sweet and simple!

Don’t take my word for it, read it here:

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2009/02/26/joker-stabillity-issues-being-worked-on/

“So far we’ve looked for bad users (and have in fact removed a few which helped)”