In this Dreamhost review i'll go
through the most up-to-date information about
everything you should know before you buy Dreamhost, like advantages,
disadvantages, support, performance and overall
what type of websites benefit from using Dreamhost the most. Last year, I looked more into the managed
WordPress plans that DreamHost is offering
this time I want to pay more attention to their shared web hosting plans
so I'm going to grab a fresh account to see how a new user might experience DreamHost for the first time. I'll go with the unlimited shared
hosting plan for $3.95 a month Which totals out to around $50
for 1 year. Quite cheap actually, for comparison a
plan that offers similar features from SiteGround, a more
premium web hosting provider would cost you $135 while
providers like Bluehost, would cost you $90
and a cheaper option like Hostinger is still 65 bucks.
Keep in mind, that I am testing all of these plans using discounts,
you can get the exact same exclusive discounts by using the links in the description. But I want to be super transparent here
and let you know that these links are actually affiliate links, meaning if you
buy anything through them i'll make a small commission.
This is what allows me to improve the quality of my videos, keep the
information unbiased and accurate. So, thank you for
your support and let's get back to this Dreamhost review, getting back on track
Dreamhost is actually offering one of the cheapest 1-year plans that are
available right now. So, if you're not looking to commit for
long you just need hosting for a year or a couple of months Dreamhost is gonna
be the cheapest choice you can go with. After you're done with your purchase
you'll see this screen. There's no need to wait for activation
or manual approval of your plan all you need to do is wait around 3
minutes for the server space to be allocated for your plan,
the control panel itself is easy to understand and definitely more beginner
friendly than the standard cpanel that comes with
a lot of other web hosting providers. Right off the bat
you can see a huge blue button saying install WordPress now. Once clicked it
will start the installation process you've got to be patient here for me the
installation took around 20 minutes. And at one point I even
thought it was stuck. So, I've contacted the support they've
responded almost immediately to their credit but
they explained that well basically it's working fine
it's just slow so don't get worried if it's taking a bit longer than you would
expect. Once it's finished your website will
look something like this just as the default WordPress theme
and you can work on the design or content yourself at this point
but it is already online and available for people to see.
So, the whole process from purchase to online took around 25 minutes.
At the moment, it would seem that Dreamhost is going through a little bit
of a data phase with their control panel there's new functionality and new
designs added every single day. But keep in mind, that this is a work in
progress even though they're trying to make everything easier for their users
the interface is a bit more glitchier Than I would like.
Once you've created a basic website you'll still have this email setup
button. Let's see what happens when I click that,
just as expected it's a simplified way to create a professional looking email
address Keep in mind that, this function is
included with every single Dreamhost plan.
So, I'm able to quickly create an email called emit@emitreviews.com nice and professional you can also manage
your email addresses by clicking on mailbox manager. Here, you'll be able to
change the password set auto removal of old emails to save
space and even set up an autoresponder so if someone messages your business you
can automatically reply with the message like
thanks for contacting me or receipts for purchases.
Basically stuff like that. If you want to actually check your email box to see
what kind of emails you've got you can do so by clicking this link and logging
in. The mailbox itself looks modern and
you'll probably have no problems communicating using it,
Since DreamHost just updated it. I've definitely used older solutions in the
past and I had no problems so I'm sure this
will work just fine. If this seems complicated
don't worry as soon as you go through these setup
steps you can actually reach your email box
by clicking on go to webmail straight from your dashboard.
But if you don't want to use Dreamhost every single time
you need to access your email box I actually have a guide on how you can set
up that to work with gmail that you can find
right here. Moving on what additional settings do you get to play with
when choosing DreamHost? Well, clicking on domains
website and manage you get access to your site specific features
here you can change the PHP version to the latest one DreamHost
does offer PHP 7.4 which is the newest version at the moment.
So, your website will be fastest using this version
you can also manage your website files manually and see when
your free ssl certificate expires. But don't worry about that too much as a
Dreamhost does renew your ssl certificates
completely automatically and for free as well.
This is true for every single domain you buy at
Dreamhost. By the way, an ssl certificate adds this
green lock next to your domain name encrypting your website and making the
connection secure it's a mandatory security feature that's
highly necessary for pretty much every single website So for me personally, this is the most
interesting part of the review the performance because in essence it's
the main component of the service that you're gonna be paying for
everything else is just a nice bonus or simple gift wrapping
to start things off I need a baseline so I jumped into my WordPress dashboard to
see what my auto install software came with
as you can see it did come with some plugins that are
deactivated by default So, I'll just uninstall all of them and
have a simple empty website. By the way, what i find to
be really disappointing is that a Dreamhost, unlike A2 hosting
or SitegGound more speed focused web hosting companies
don't offer any custom plugins or software
to help you optimize your website DreamHost relies on third-party plugins
that you'll need to install yourself and learn to use yourself if you want to
optimize your website for the best possible performance.
I'll also change the theme to the one I always use for testing
i don't exactly know why i just find it more appealing than the other ones.
So, this is how the website looks currently. Pretty much just a static page
let's see how fast it loads Just so we're on the same page i'll be using
a tool called GTMetrix. It will allow me to measure the loading
speed of my website with relative ease I've did 2 tests to show you a cool
little example of how much impact your data center
location can have if we test from dallas USA I get a
loading speed of 0.7 seconds. Which is incredibly fast and a really
really good result However, if we would switch to Vancouver
Canada the loading speed drops to 1.3 seconds almost twice
as slow this happens because DreamHost. only has
2 data centers where they store all of your website information
and they're both located in the United States. One in the west coast and one in
the east coast so naturally the further that
information needs to travel between the server and the user
the longer it will take for that user to reach your website
that's why I always recommend choosing data centers that are gonna be closest
to your user base not you because they're the ones that
are actually gonna be visiting your website.
And of course there are ways to mitigate this by using content delivery networks
but that's a topic for another video the main takeaway from this
is if your customers are not from the United States
you might want to consider another web hosting provider that has data centers
all across the world like Hostinger or SiteGround i'll leave
reviews and discount links for both providers in the
description that I recommend you check out after
watching this video. Just to keep things fair for all further testing i'll be
using the United States servers Because that's where Dreamhost is the
strongest but enough of this empty website nonsense
let's simulate an actual website and send some users to it
to see how dreamhost reacts to a real live website scenario.
First of all, and I recommend you do this as well with your websites
go into the appearance tab and delete all of the pre-installed themes that
you're not using even if you're not using resources they
will still slow your website down by taking up space
after that's done i've added some flair to my website and simulated something
that could pass for an actual website to see how
fast DreamHost is able to load it. As suspected the design elements slowed
my website down but not by much. DreamHost was still able
to load my site in 2.3 seconds Which is actually a completely fine
result for the price that i'm paying Finally, I want to be thorough here. So,
I'll use a service called the k6 cloud and send some virtual users
on my website. To simulate actual users this is going
to give us a better idea of how DreamHost performs when it's
under load I've set up a super simple test to send
50 virtual users onto my website over a five minute period
seeing how the response times change with more and more users on my website
after the test was done the software didn't find any performance problems
the website was able to handle this load just fine
to understand this graph you need to pay attention to the blue line
as you can see it doesn't move up as the test goes on
it just jumps up and down periodically this indicates that higher user counts
didn't faze the performance of my website in fact
the biggest spike in performance was with the lowest amount of users By this point, it's quite clear DreamHost
is offering really cheap web hosting if you buy for a shorter period of time
while still offering competitive performance. But what kind of other
advantages can you expect if you decide to choose DreamHost.
For starters, you get a free automated migration tool
meaning if you already have an existing website somewhere else dreamhost makes
it easy to transfer your website to their hosting service so let's test
it out. I have a website called
extremelycheapdomain.com and it's currently hosted with another
web hosting provider called Hostinger here's how my website looks. So,
let's say I want to transfer this website from Hostinger to Dreamhost.
How will I go about it? Well, according to DreamHost it's really simple
all I need to do is go to my old web hosting provider
in this case it's Hostinger and access the WordPress panel
then install a plugin called DreamHost automated migration
once that's done i need to go back into Dreamhost, get my
unique id from the dashboard and paste it in the plugin
and that's it everything else is done automatically.
In real time, I had to wait around 10mins for this I've sped it up for the
video here but after the process was done my
website was fully migrated all of the files that were on my
Hostinger website are now on my Dreamhost website and the best part is
that you can use this tool completely free to migrate
your website if you're hosting on Dreamhost
another notable advantage that Dreamhost has over
other providers is that they allow you to buy plans monthly
no need to pay for 1 year or 2 years upfront. If you just need a site for a
couple of months most other web hosting providers require
you to buy for a minimum period of 1 year. While DreamHost doesn't have any unique
disadvantages they still share the same disadvantages
as most other web hosting companies mainly the increase in price after first
purchase but not with every single plan as
I understand it if this sounds confusing it is it's super confusing but let me
try to do my best to explain this Okay, as you can see here we have the
prices for shared starter and shared unlimited
plans which are $2.59 and $3.95 respectively but these are promotional prices
that means you only get this price on your first purchase
there's this little question mark next to the shared unlimited plan
that explains that this plan renews at $7.95
instead of $3.95, but if we would go into my dashboard right now
you can see that my plan would renew at $9.95 a month. Long story short
more likely than not you'll need to pay more after your initial purchase when
it's time to renew your plans because the first time it's a
promotional price and the second time is the regular renewal price
if you're looking for a web hosting company that doesn't have these
sneaky price increase tactics I recommend you check out InterServer.
I actually have a review of InterServer on my channel
right here, another notable disadvantage is their support team.
Currently, the chat is disabled altogether but even when it's online
it's not 24/7. You can only get chat support at certain
working hours. Finally should you get Dreamhost for
your website well in my honest opinion if you're
someone who's looking for shorter term web hosting for a small
to mid-sized website The Dreamhost shared web hosting plans
are actually excellent and as a company Dreamhost is still
among my favorites they're an independent company and
they're more focused on users rather than profit margins the prices
are the lowest in the market for short term hosting
the performance is on par with more expensive plans from their competitors
and you get a lot of modern features like an up-to-date control panel
free migration tools and an ssl certificate
if you're ready to migrate to Dreamhost or start a completely new project using
dreamhost use the links down below and get a
significant discount but if you're unsure about what type of
web hosting you need for your project feel free to check out my channel where
i do all sorts of stuff related to web hosting. If you don't find the answer
there feel free to leave a comment down below
i try to read and answer every single one and help you out
the best i can but for now thanks for watching
good luck with your website and i'll see you in the next video you
