Review: Dreamhost web hosting
Summary: Cheap, lots of features, can resell. Servers located in US (may be a problem) and expensive for dedicated servers.
Details: Register at Dreamhost. If you use the promotion code RTWILSONBLOG you will get $50 off your hosting package, and a free lifetime domain registration – yes, really! The details of their standard package is available here.
I’ve had my own domain (rtwilson.com) and associated website and blog for around a year and a half now, and I’m very glad I decided to set it up. I’d always wanted a website, but wasn’t quite sure what I’d put on it (well, I guess I’ve sorted that now by having useful academic stuff to put there), and I thought it would be expensive to set up.
In fact, I didn’t have to spend much money because I got a great detail through Dreamhost. I’d heard of the hosting company before, but wasn’t sure whether they were any good or not. After reading some good reviews at Lifehacker, I decided to bite the bullet and go with them – and I’m glad they did.
Their support for many different services (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Subversion, Jabber etc) was a definite selling point for me, as was the capability to resell hosting services (which I have started doing). Unlimited downloads and unlimited storage really do mean that – and they have a lovely 1-click installer which will set up common web applications (WordPress, MediaWiki and many others) for you in less than five minutes.
I’m always slightly wary of tech companies customer support, but Dreamhost have been very good to me. When I signed up I used the wrong promotion code, and they managed to sort that out for me within around half an hour (instant online chat to customer advisors is a useful thing), and they’ve also helped me with troubleshooting some rails problems that I’ve had. Their online web hosting control panel is by far the best I’ve seen – far better than cPanel, which most people seem to use – and combines ease of use and power.
For those in the UK or Europe, you may wish to be aware that their servers are located exclusively in the USA and therefore sites can appear slow sometimes. However, this seems to have improved a lot recently, and I don’t notice any problems with my sites.
So, overall I am very happy with Dreamhost and happy to recommend them.
If you found this post useful, please consider buying me a coffee.
This post originally appeared on Robin's Blog.
Categorised as: Computing, Reviews, Technology
I’ve been looking for a backup hosting account to serve distributed images when my VPS fails (and it fails with depressing regularity). DreamHost might be just the ticket. Thanks for the promo code!
Sounds like it’d be good for that. I say, for the price (particularly with the promo-code) I’ve been very impressed.
The article is short but but very helpful, thanks a lot