Digital Solecism

Jump to Comments

I’ve been using DreamHost as my webhost for 2 years now. Throughout the entire time I have never experienced an outage of any sort.

First, the Dreamhost plans.
Oh wait. I mean plan. Singular. They only have one. They only need one. All hosting accounts with them come with 500GB of hard drive space and 5TB of transfer per month. Furthermore, it grows at a rate (much like a GMail account) of 2GB storage/week and 40GB transfer/week. Prices start at $5.95/month depending on how far you prepay.

Sounds a little absurd. Who would use that much? That is basically their whole idea. The average website uses so little space and bandwidth, yet it seems everyone always shops around for higher limits so they feel they get a better deal for their money. Because of this I was a little leary at first, but I figured they were worth trying - and I haven’t been disappointed.

I think I already mentioned how virtually unlimited things are.. this includes actual unlimited: Domains (and subdomains) hosted, MySQL 5 databases, email accounts, Shell and FTP users, discussion lists, and forwarded/mirrored/cloaked Domains. You also get all the ‘normal’ stuff you expect from web hosts, like PHP4/5 support, webmail access, website stats, lots of automatic installers (like WordPress!), and 1 free Domain Registration.

You also get some things a lot of other hosts don’t give you: Shell access, cron jobs, jabber servers, and Quicktime and Flash streaming right from your own website with instant setup.

Their web panel is fast and very easy to use. Everything on it is explained in sufficient detail, and if you need helps there are always abundant links to their very informative wiki. I’m fairly new to all this, and their wiki has been invaluable.

If their wiki isn’t enough there are several other options. Their forums are very active, and lots of users there are constantly helping out other people. I’ve asked a few quests in the past there and had almost immediate replies with good advice. Beyond that, there is their email support. Just recently I had some problems getting everything setup with some .htaccess files. I submitted an email to them at 12:38 in the afternoon. By 1:20 they had replied AND fixed my problem for me, and it was my mistake and lack of knowledge that caused this, not even a hosting issue. Still not enough support? They offer Premium callback services for $9.95/month for the extra needy folks out there. You input your support request and tell them the exact time you’d like a call back to fix it.

Yeah I’m hyping them up a bit, only because out of the 3 other hosts I’ve tried in the last couple years they have been, by far, the most responsive and easiest to deal with, while also giving the most control through their web control panel.

Is there anything I’m unhappy with? Not really. My site has had moments of sluggishness, but nothing more than a very tiny hiccup - and I mean tiny. Instead of loading a page in 2 seconds it maybe took 3 or 4. The possibility of others abusing the massive transfer and storage capabilities is always there, but after 2 years I’ve never had any real downtime with DreamHost. I’m sure some of you had read about their recent massive billing error. Yeah, it is pretty messed up and for some people almost unforgivable. But they communicated it immediately, every step of the way, and are going out of their way to make it right for their users.

I definitely recommend checking them out if you’re unhappy with current host or are looking for a new one, and I’d be happy to help anyone with any questions regarding them.

Pricing:

Monthly - $10.95/month ($49.95 one time setup)
Yearly - $9.95/month (Setup fees waived on all payments of 1yr+)
2 years - $8.95/month
3 years - $7.95/month
10 years - $5.95/month (plan on hosting for a while?! :))

Furthermore, if their plan ever changes or improves, you can upgrade to the new features at no cost or loss to yourself AND retain all of your ‘Veteran’ weekly bonuses of storage and bandwidth increases. (For example: Say my old plan was only 100GB of space and had increased to 150 over time. New plan is 200GB. I can upgrade to 200GB for free, and get the 50GB tacked right on giving me 250GB, all automatically from the control panel without every having to talk to anyone)

Sign up here and enter the code “DSBLOG25OFF” at checkout to receive $25 off whatever annual hosting plan you choose, or “DSBLOGNOSETUP” to get the setup fee waived if you want to go month to month!

Thanks for listening! And like I said, feel free to comment or email with any questions!

Popularity: 6% [?]