Dreamhost: Best at customer service and everything you can think of!

[shotaz]

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.

[ldcdc]

I've only been with Dreamhost since January 2007 but i've never been disappointed by them!

That's a decent amount of experience actually.

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.

How are you monitoring uptime?

They cap your emails so you can only send a certain amount per hour

The vast majority of hosts will have similar limits in place, for similar reasons. One can't fault them there.

[shotaz]

yeah true and i've got a cgi-script running on another hosts which e-mails me and let me know if the site is down. It worked when they had the down time they warned us about and it hasn't emailed me since so am guessing it hasn't been unavailable. Plus there is the InternetSeer.com
Web site monitoring
that i use and i only got one notice from them and that was also at the same time as the down time they warned about.
oh as for the e-mail i forgot to mention that they have a system in place that allows users to opt in to receive emails from your website through a form they provide thats fully customizable and then there isn't any limits on how much e-mail you send because they know those people opted to receive the emails. Its quite cool although i only tried using it once.

[trichnosis]

dreamhost is a terrible company to work

[korr]

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.

[priyakochin]

I never worked with dreamhost.But I think they are trouble, from many net sources.

[shotaz]

well i can't speak for anyone else but i haven't had any trouble with them

[bonh]

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.

QFT, Listen to this guy. If it's a small site its fine, if you plan on running a large forum or anything cpu/bandwidth intensive get a VPS. I'm on a single VPS, running 4-5 sites on it and I am more than happy with..... uh.. my vps provider.

[shakir]

I am not a customer of them. But I heard lots of bad review about them.

[shotaz]

don't judge a book by its cover. i think they're good and am not sure how far this goes but up to early this year there were rumors that google wanted to buy them. Don't think theyt managaed to but i can tell you that they've got some partnership with google now and google don't just get associated with **** companies that aren't reputable. Sometimes the people writing these reviews had bad experience because they wanted to. if you slap someone expect to get slapped back. For eg there was a popular blog that wrote a nasty review about them giving the impression that DH doesnt care about bit torrent. the blog Boing Boing said they were clueless. Quite honestly its the writer that was clueless, you can't expect to run such things on shared hosting without affecting the server for other people. They now offer VPS so if shared hosting won't do you can always upgrade. Not every review on the net can be trusted some of them come from people who've misunderstood stuff. I've been with DH for a while now so everything i wrote is from experience.

[ldcdc]

but up to early this year there were rumors that google wanted to buy them.

Rumors can often be just that. I suppose this is what triggered it:

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/12/05...f-that-action/

[shotaz]

haha thats wicked. so true sometimes its only a rumor but like i said from the start am only writing based on my experiences nothing more nothing less. If someone has a bad experience with them then thats their experience mine has been awesome so far and i stand by that.

[walker2]

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.

[godrifle]

I can't help it. I just have to say that is the least useful poll I've ever come across.

And, BTW, 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.

[unclebills]

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.

[esem]

So far with me, it's been good customer service.

Although some PHP has broke on my page for no apparent reason, forcing me to rewrite.

My contact form stopped working out of the blue a few months back, Still haven't got around to fixing it.

[John Lampard]

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.

[web-hosting.tv]

the shared plans are great for hosting static sites like html and flash since they offer lots of bandwidth and storage, but their database is slow so if you run a cms your site is slow even with little traffic

[jeffvdovjak]

I think dreamhost is great. I've been with them since the early days (2000). They weren't nearly as good (but was anyone really). And I've had several accounts. I think they're the best. (I've used a couple of other places). Never tried their VPS though.

[jeffvdovjak]

Anyone used it? I've been on their shared hosting for years. But I was wondering if anyone has used their scallable VPS system?

[SiberForum]

If you are interested in finding people (their customers) simple do the search on this forum or use google and lots of reviews come to you. I have heard of them several times and I'm sure you will be able to discover much info
Good luck

[dklynn]

Jeff,

Moved.

Regards,

DK

[~ServerPoint~]

Anyone used it? I've been on their shared hosting for years. But I was wondering if anyone has used their scallable VPS system?

You know sometimes that is good index. If company good at providing shared web hosting - that might be good prove they are the same good in VPS.
If yopu have been happy with them I believe that you should give them a try with VPS as well if you need to.

[jeffvdovjak]

I've been with them off and on since 99 or 2000. Been with them straight since 05. They've definitely improved over time (their stability!). But they've always been good with response time for help (though even better now!). They're pretty good... I keep using them. Though like with all shared hosts, you get trouble from time to time. I might leave them soon as my primary host (for a VPS) though I'll still probably keep them... they're very good at what they do!

[rmeeuwsen]

I loved them too.

But they were too slow to react to industry price decreases so I left.