Dreamhost

I have been with dreamhost for about 3 years, and I've been happy with them.

The complaints about php/mysql performance are valid. However, for me, in the grand scheme of things, an extra second or two doesn't hurt my users enough to make me change hosts (especially since I've used other hosts that were worse).

When I originally signed up, it was directly because of their ability to support PHP5, which was hard to get at the time.

Bottom line is I am satisfied with them, and the 10TB+ bandwidth I now have is very useful.

I've had horror stories to tell about many previous hosts I've used. I only have one about Dreamhost, but anybody who was a member of the service at the time has the same story. Luckily, Dreamhost took care of that issue and took measures so that it never happens again.

I've never had a downtime problem, never a problem with customer support, and never a problem using their panel. For ten bucks a month I'm hosting FIVE websites and still have plenty of server space and bandwidth to expand on that. How can you go wrong?

I've been using Dreamhost as my host for about 9 months now. I had one spat with downtime, all of 4 hours on my cluster. It was for upgrades, not a crash.

Features are reasonably good, but the panel can be a pain sometimes. They use a custom Control Panel, but it is fairly well feature packed, and easy to use. It just takes getting used to.

Support was great 7 out of 8 times I've contacted them. The 1 bad time was when no one there had a clue how to check and see if my mysql was having a heart attack, or just the sql server as a whole. because they couldnt figure that out, my site was lagged down. I figured it out on my own.

Pricing is spectacular. You cant beat it. So far, I've abused it here and there for bandwidth, but nothing major yet. About 400mb a day lately. I plan to begin hosting COD4 maps on it, so that will add a bit of bandwidth to test the theory of 5+TB of BW a month.

Thankfully I have got away from dreamhost, from my view it appeared that some of their clusters were good and other were bad, I was on the Spacey Cluster (On server Monster) and had constant downtime because of issues with the filer servers, mysql clusters. I recorded around 93% uptime the whole time which in this day and age is not good enough.

Whilst I was there there was two major network outages and well as a billing issue in which they just made fun of it on their blog and then said hey this guy did it which I think is very unfair on their staff.

For features it had everything, but I found the package was misleading in regards to bandwidth allowance, not that I could use it. I was also randomly blamed for making the server slow so they randomly deleted files off some of my sites disabled two of the domains and found it wasn't me, no sorry or anything just sarcastic comments from their unhelpful staff.

What I hate the most is the attitude from members who love them (Get $80 for every signup using their URL's), they will do everything they can to defend Dreamhost so they can continue making their money.

Dreamhost is amazing! They do have some downtime issues but I'm willing to overlook those for everything else. There have been some recent hiccups with one of the file servers which had caused some slowness issues but they appear to be fixed and now everything is back to normal. Their support is always fast, very succinct, helpful, friendly and straight to the point. Their servers overall are fast and the features are practically endless. One of my favorite features is they have been 100% carbon neutral since 2007! On top of all that their prices are incredible and if you search carefully you can find some awesome coupon codes to get you free domains and dedicated ip's for life! Thank you Dreamhost!

I've been with Dreamhost a little over a year and during that time I've had very fast and solid hosting. Using PHP and SQL on my site, their servers run anything I've coded without problems (except my own coding errors lol).

They are feature rich and answer trouble tickets usually within 30 minutes to an hour.

Thanks for some awesome hosting Dreamhost and keep up the good work!

Dreamhost was the host du jour for the master program. It is attractive because of its low pricing. For development, back 2006 they were fairly responsive now they are less timely.

When I was part of a group developing a mobile game. We started on Dreamhost but they had a fire that took down their whole system and we could not wait for them to return and uncertainty so we had to switch providers.

A couple of months ago they inadvertly charge users who had auto renewal for an additional year. Their response was flippet and were not acknowledging how much of problem it was for people on budgets.

I have remained with dreamhost for sites that are not that critical to up 24/7. I would not recommend them for a business oriented site that needs 24/7 support and uptime.

my website is most of the time down.i see these comments and decide to host my website on dreamhost.but im really sick. i lose my visitors.Support is to slow.I can do anything only cry for money i gived for host for one year.When my website reachable is toooo slow.

People outside dont put your money in trash. (dreamhost)

I have been with dreamhost for over a year now. Their prices are amazing. They give you a huge amount of bandwidth and disk space. Their servers are extremely fast. I have never experienced any downtime on the server that I am on, but I have seen them post about downtime. They seem to be very reliable when informing their customers about downtime and they try to fix problems very quickly. Their SSH access is a very nice added bonus and allows you to use your hosting as a place to run perl and ruby scripts. Their support team is very good. When I have encountered errors with scripts I was trying to write or had any problems with a part of their site my tickets were answered within an hour and the responses were helpful. Overall I am completely satisfied with them and I would recommend them to anyone!

I've had terrible luck with DreamHost. My site was down 5 times in 5 consecutive days, and I'd never use them again. I just don't understand why people rave about DreamHost; they are the rock bottom of all of my experiences with hosting services.

Cheap service: I used http://www.dreamhost-promo-code.net/ and I got great deal

Slow: really slow servers

Customer support: they try to reply within 24 hours, and they cooperate.

Mysql: a lot of times I found mysql server super slow.

I've been with DreamHost for about 2 years now, and I have been running different kinds of software on my site(s) - IP. Board, MediaWiki, Joomla, WordPress, and stuff like that.

I found that it's true what "most people" (seems like it to me at least) say these days; it's a great host for certain things, like static pages, storage and bandwidth, but not so great for php and mysql software.

Their support has always been top nothc, I'll give them that. I can dig the silly ninja humor in their newsletters, too - but when you're struggling with uptime and slowness, that really doesn't cheer you up anymore.

I have decided to move on to a new host that can give me what I need; perhaps I just didn't realize what I needed before I signed up with them, and saw that on paper (or is that monitor?) their stuff was great!

In any case, I now know what I need, and I know that I have to look elsewhere for a host that can provide me with the uptime and resources I require for the software (see above) I wish to run.

I'd give DreamHost a 4 on my d6.

I finally switched hosts after about 6 months because their server was down atleast twice a week it seemed.

I have been with Dreamhost for about a year now, utilizing their package for personal purposes. Overall they've completely satisfied me with both their bandwidth, space and features.

I haven't had the opportunity to use their support but beyond their small (but nasty) billing fiasco they have been perfect for me.

They are ok for static sites. Nothing that requires php and mysql should be put on their servers. It's very slow.

The good part is that you can use lots of space and eat lots of bandwidth.

You should not host anything mission critical on it. Uptime is not very good either and sometimes takes 3 days for them to answer a ticket and one week to fix something.

Not recommended.

I currently use DreamHost to host two sites with one of them being registered there as well. The larger of the two sites has been there since 1999, serves approx. 4,000 pages per day (not counting the faviocon, robots, and the like) and has an announcement list of approx. 1,000 users who subscribed using a (DreamHost provided) automated system. I have also used DreamHost in the past to host a site for a blogger-run-blog when I had the time to post.

The web hosting aspect is easy to use with standard ftp or secure-ftp access. The management of the various other things (changing billing options, checking user statistics, web-mail, forwarding/redirecting e-mail, and setting up e-mail subscription lists) is very user friendly. The team running it always has a sense of humor in their blog and newsletter -- but doesn't let that get in the way of getting the job done.

I have contacted them over a dozen times in the past with questions on topics such as transferring domains and the use of mailing lists and have gotten helpful responses within 24 hours to each one, often much quicker. (They also have a support wiki that answers a lot of standard questions). I had a recent (my fault, I left a door open type) of security breach and they responded to my e-mail that day and followed up again the next. The most negative publicity they have received is that recently they had a billing error where customers who were using automatic billing on their credit or debit cards were billed in advance. They caught the error, put a notice up about it on the status page, set about reversing the charges (e-mailing each person when their charges were reversed), and explained the entire situation on their blog.

I was with Dreamhost for about 4 years, and for the most part it's a good service. I really like the control panel and features they make available. My problem is with speed and uptime. If I had to guess, it's probably down to luck for the most part, whether you get put on a shared server that is bogged down or not. About 80% of the time I would load up my site there would be at least a two or three second delay before anything appeared. Doesn't sound like much but when you're adjusted to everything loading in a matter of milliseconds it's quite off putting. And on top of that, there would be downtime more frequently than I am comfortable with.

I signed up for Dreamhost in July 06 and it's been an excellent experience. I enjoy the up close and personal approach of the administrators and the support is always fast and accurate. My uptime has been fabulous and I love how much space I have for a relatively low price. My only wish is for some features a little more geared towards reselling. I host two other people on my account and they can see all my domains and I can see theirs. It gets a bit messy.

I've been using Dreamhost for both business and home stuff for over a year now. The occasional bit of downtime occurs but nothing i'm too worried about. The same Same for speed issues, sometimes it gets a bit slow but never for long.

For the price you pay and what you get this company is a winner.

For the price I pay for the amount of space i get this is a brilliant host. I couldnt ask for faster support. Usually requests are answered with in 15 minutes. Good Wiki and active forums. Easy to use admin section and one click installs.

Thanks Dreamhost

I've been with dreamhost for one year now and have rated is a pretty good.

Support is excellent, emergency tickets get replied to in under 15 minutes for me and others less than 1 hour.

Support is very helpful, server problems are posted on their dreamhoststatus.com website and updated around the clock. Dreamhost is one of the few hosts that publicly posts server problems, eta, and lets you know what's happening.

I've used 1TB out of the 1.4tb of bandwidth I have with them with no problem, I've even used 50GB of space with no problem. they oversell, but they do it right. they don't close your account for resource abuse unless its really intensive scrips and programs. They even said i could use my storage space to store my photo collection (family photos).

Uptime has been okay. I've had about 99.6% uptime with them which isn't bad, but it isn't great either.

they use a super cool in-house control panel which is easy to use and have 1-click installs for major programs.

So far I've been happy with dreamhost. but I would not recommend it for medium size-large size businesses. for personal, small business and storage, its great!

I've been with Dreamhost about two years. I have a couple of domains hosed with them, all on shared servers. I have nothing but good things to say about them. Last I checked, there were only 18 other sites hosted on the same server as mine. They support php5 and all the php extensions I need. I can create MySQL databases myself through the control panel without "authorization". I can add additional TLD's at no extra cost. My webmail is a Lot easier to get to than it is on other hosts using CPanel.

I've read several reviews here about all the down time they experience. I can't argue with someone else's experience, but I haven't experienced but a handful of hiccups in the past two years. I'm not paying for business or dedicated hosting, so I have no complaints about that.

I have been with DH almost 6 months

Simply:

Great Control panel, features, price,

Too much downtime and server maintenance.

If you need a stable host go elsewhere..

I find DreamHost has a good blend of price, features and reliability. For what I pay, I get a lot and to me, this is a good thing. When there are downtimes, they are usually for good reason.

yeah, they are OK. For the money i give them every year, they are like great. Unfortunately, i too had some problems with up time on my sites, and this is a very bad point. You can't really have a site that my go down any time for a longer or shorter period of time.

Their support was great every time i had problems, and that's also a plus.

Overall, a good host.

I have mixed views regarding Dreamhost, I do believe they are trying to provide what they advertise but they fall short.

The price is very cheap and setup very quick, the control panel is different but houses loads of features and after a while is really easy to use.

I signed up two months ago and whilst the price seems to be right the server struggled with a community forum I host.

Then the downtime hit, almost every day for two weeks the sites were down at least once a day and FTP was a nightmare (Appeared to be an issue with a file server but took two weeks before they spotted it).

It seems to be ok at the moment but still very slow.

One thing really did annoy me, about a week ago they deleted some files off one of my sites rendering the frontpage blank losing possibly hundreds of pageviews, they made no attempt to contact myself which is really rude. I think the pages were being spammed by spambots which may have caused some issues but come on I should be told "we have removed this because of blah blah blah".

I think I may leave my small personal site on dreamhost but I would not recommend anything like a complex bbs board like SMF be hosted on Dreamhost.

This host has been great for the first few years I was with them, then everything turned horribly wrong.

I do not know if it is thanks to them switching my web server, or what, but I've had HORRIBLE uptime.

Besides uptime, the features are OK, but they are pretty much overselling, which is horrible for good hosts to succeed, which in my opinion, Dreamhost is not.

At first, when I signed up for Dreamhost, I noticed their incredibly low prices and excellent features, but as my sites grew, they demanded more, and Dreamhost just could not handle them, thanks to their overselling.

Overall, if you want a host with excellent pricing and features, Dreamhost is what you want. On the other hand, you'll have to sacrifice uptime and slowness because of the overselling, unfortunately.

The good:

Huge storage and bandwidth for the cost. Their cPanel replacement is much more geek friendly.

The bad:

Support can be terrible. 48+ hours to receive a response is common, even for simple things. God forbid you have an actual problem. It can sometime take 5-6 rounds of emails to get a severe problem resolved. With their lag in e-mail responses, it took 2 weeks to resolve a bandwidth issue that turned out to be a hardware problem on their end, even when I provided them with a detailed diagnosis.

so far its excellent. the user interface is actually a dream for techies, I've been with many hosting companies over the last ten years, dropping in and out with my interest in websites. Recently I wanted to do a community site and chose dreamhost after a two-week nightmare with godaddy, and I'm very impressed with how this thing is organized (definitely for the customer).

At this point I haven't had a highly visited site so I can't say how well it would take that load. Last night I didn't noticed a slight slowdown but i guess thats a given with shared hosting.

they've recently started dedicated hosting, which I was definitely interested in until i read that mysql would still be shared. Oh well, hopefully they will change this.

I got Dreamhost June of this year for my personal website. I used around 500 megabyte of bandwidth a month and used around 10 MB of disk space. Anyways, the past 2 months, the personal site became big and I also host other sites and other big files.

Now I use around 12 GIGS of bandwidth per month and still am running strong with 99.93 uptime!

Support: Tickets usually gets answered in 24 - 30 hours and I am fine by this.

Performance. Uptime has been rock solid! Web page loads fast and my visitors do not complain.

SSI - I mainly use CGI and PHP, with mySQL - works like a charm

Dreamhost is PERFECT for just storing a bandwidth heavy STATIC website.

If your hosting something mission critical, do not choose dreamhost, however if you use up a lot of bandwidth, dreamhost is great!

I love this host! After a few bad hosts, I switched to Dreamhost on a whim. Best choice I've ever made. They have a great web panel with tons of neat, easy to use tools, installers and whatever. You get tons of everything. I don't know about you, but I can't move a terabyte of bandwidth a month, nor can I readily fill 23 Gb of drive space with web-apps.

They support a plethora of languages, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Perl, and have tons of other cool things like CVS and Subversion repos, personal Jabber IM servers, shell accounts, cron jobs, etc. Every hosting plan has most of the features, and the small ones only don't have things you probably wouldn't care about (who needs Miva Merchant or SSL for their personal site?)

Another great thing is the one-click installs, which let you drop in good scripts, like MediaWiki, WordPress, Joomla and Menalto's Gallery.

I've had good experiences with their support, which is prompt. They also have a good community forum and wiki full of quick answers. The only problems I have had have been occasional down-times and slow periods, but these are always documented and explained on their status blog. I like a company that will at least tell you what happened to the system. The outages have never lasted too long either. Finally, they have a great newsletter and make you feel at home.

Dreamhost has recently been having problems, but in the 8 months I've been with them, the service has been top notch. The downtime for me was very little, and something I can deal with. The features they provide are awesome, and they really do let you use all that bandwidth and space. They provide great scripting tools such as PHP 4 and 5, Ruby on Rails, Python, CGI, FastCGI, etc.

DreamHost is totally fantastic. It's a little tech-y, and their 'one-click install' goodies, well, aren't. That all said, if you're either not looking to do excessively fancy things or you're moderately more adept at these sorts of thing than I am, you'll have no problems. Yay for DreamHost.

Great host with very friendly support. Dreamhost is changing the hosting industry for the better and I'm proud to be a customer.

Support was cheerful and prompt, but in two weeks with DreamHost I had more outages (and cheerful excuses) than in two years with my previous shared hosting service, which I left only because they didn't have a plan with enough storage or bandwidth for some new site features I plan to add.

Add Dreamhost's screwy/slow panel to the unreliability, and I gave up and moved. Got my money returned promptly, no problem.

With better redunancy and connectivity (that is, reliability), DreamHost would be fine. Their people are very nice.

I've been with Dreamhost for more than a year.

Dreamhost is a budget host, plain and simple. They do "oversell" their servers, but have all the major services - mysql, home dirs, page serving - on separate boxes. In my opinnion, they do heck of a job in keeping their crowded servers running. That's quite far from "rock solid", but I've had no big problems.

Customer support is quite slow. I've seen the "sorry, no reply for 24 hours - but we still remember you" autoreply for more times I care to remember. On the other hand, they don't usually give useless replies. Support has been friendly and competent.

I like the features - and they constantly add more. Script installer and backup snapshots are among my favourites. I can give SSH access for all of my accounts - even the ones I create myself. Control panel is ok, it has all the tools I need. Some parts are excellent, some are not so good.

If you're only looking bandwidth, space and price, Dreamhost is hard to beat. I wouldn't host important business websites there, though.

Great hosting company with very cheap prices and incredible storage and bandwidth plans. Support phone calls and emails are always quick.

The web control panel is sometimes a little slow but very powerful.

The only downtime was in late '05 when half of LA lost power.

Highly recommended.

Everything works like a charm. The controlpanel works efficient and though its not very pretty in teerms of eyecandy, it is logical, and very udeful for developers. SSL works fine for me. The Wiki is quite extensive, and is a very usefull tool. The suport is fast. And I don't know what that with the 30 minutes witing for a passwd changee was about. I did'nt wait more than 2 min. for it to take effect. MySQL dataabaase creations are instant. Really can only recommend them, except for their email servers performance. It's really not too fast to check my IMAP accounts as it used to be over at b-one. but you do get 20Gig storage and 4000Gig bw and that grows everyday. Its a lot at such a cheap price. thumps up.

Great host! cheap, reliable and they support ruby on rails.

They have a great wiki that enables me not to ever have to talk to customer support) and when they go down its always planned and they say so before they do it.

Dreamhost is a great webhosting solution, especially for the price.

The control panel is excellent for web developers, though less advanced users may struggle with it.

No outages for my site in the three months I've been with them. Their control panel was down for a day during scheduled maintenence, but there was a weeks notice.

Support is slow but polite and efficient. On average, my tickets are probably answered in between 8-20 hours, except during emergencies (I tested their downtime system once. I got a response 3 minutes later informing me that there was no server wide problem detected.)

Overall, a good host, and enjoyable to use. Not recommended for beginners.

I've been with Dreamhost for two years now and have never had a problem with them. They offer fantastic value for money and have a loyalty scheme whereby your bandwith and space increase every week you stay with them.

One thing I would say is that the Web Panel used to administer your site can sometimes be very slow to the point of being practically at a standstill but this is very rare and my site itself has always been available and fast-loading.

Also, if you're someone who uses CPanel then this is not an option but they do have their own equivalent both to this and to Fantastico.