DreamHost
PMB #257
417 Associated Rd.
Brea, CA 92821
DreamHost was founded by four computer science undergraduates from Harvey Mudd College in 1996 and they began offering shared hosting services to customers the following year. The DreamHost of today is an employee owned green hosting company that has more than 800,000 customers and uses datacenters in downtown Los Angeles and LAX.
Review
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Sales
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I had a few questions for DreamHost regarding their shared web hosting plan and set out in search of answers. DreamHost offers sales service via a trouble ticket system. I sent my questions off and received a politely worded, well reasoned response about 60 minutes later. I was 100% satisfied with the presales experience.
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Setup
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The signup process with DreamHost was simple and painless and took about fifteen minutes to complete. As a new customer, I was able to take advantage of DreamHost’s free seven day trial and was given my account information by email within 90 minutes of signup. My welcome letter from DreamHost included my login information and all the many details I required to get my website online as quickly as possible.
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Billing
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I paid for my shared web hosting account with a credit card and was bill properly; never being charged for services or features I had not ordered. Likewise, I had no difficulty in cancelling my account.
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Pricing
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DreamHost offers one shared hosting plan with unlimited space and bandwidth for $5.78/month if customers pay one year in advance. Clients who choose to pay month to month will be charged a $49.95 setup fee. If paying one year in advance, DreamHost is well within the norm in pricing structure, but on the pricy side if paying monthly and having to deal with the setup fee.
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Reliability
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My fourteen month stay with DreamHost had many ups and downs and most of the downs came in the area of reliability. The server on which my website made its home suffered from almost routine hardware failure during my first six months, though that dramatically improved once I was moved to a new server. Even so, my website was often slow to load or experienced several periods of downtime on a monthly basis.
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Help & Support
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DreamHost offers free help desk support for customers or those with accounts can choose to pay $9.95/month for premium support, which includes three phone calls from DreamHost technical support team. The average support response time was about 90 minutes and while helpful, I often ended up having to send multiple emails per day to get one simple question answered. This meant that it took nearly an entire day for my situation to be resolved. The support team is knowledgeable and polite, but without telephone or live chat support, the process can be tedious and time consuming.
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Uptime
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I use a premium service uptime monitoring tool and experienced several periods of downtime with DreamHost during my first year of hosting. Some of those outages were caused by network issues and some by routine hardware maintenance. While the downtime did not have a major negative impact on my website, it was a monthly cause for concern. To their credit, I was promptly refunded or issued a service credit for any periods of extended downtime.
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Guarantee
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- 100% uptime guarantee
- 97 day money back guarantee
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Terms of Service
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DreamHost’s Terms of Service are available for reading online. Highlights include:
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$49.95 setup fee if paying monthly instead of one year in advance.
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Hosting contracts are automatically renewed.
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SPAM strictly forbidden.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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Great custom dashboard control panel.
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Excellent money back guarantee.
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100% uptime guarantee.
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Network updates onsite and Twitter.
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Free 7-day trial.
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Disadvantages
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$49.95 setup fee on accounts not paid annually.
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No telephone or live chat support.
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Some reliability issues which may stem from offering unlimited services.
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