When it comes to hosting, Dreamhost is one of the best choices you can make. They offer a lot of plans which you can choose from depending on your requirements. Dreamhost is popularly known for the easiest web panel and lightning-fast speed.
There are various types of hosting plans from which you can choose. Among all of them, shared hosting is the most preferable hosting type for beginners. Not only it is affordable but shared hosting is all you need if you have a small website or a medium-sized site for a startup, shared hosting works well for both of them.
This is a complete Dreamhost shared starter review where we will see all the things you should know about the Dreamhost starter pack. Not just the positive side, we will see positive as well as negative side. In this way, you can get a better idea of whether you should go with hosting or not.
Let’s begin with the overview.
Dreamhost offers many types of hosting such as shared hosting, VPS, cloud hosting, managed WordPress hosting, etc. Each of the hostings might have 2 or more plans. Users can choose the best plan that they can go with. Usually, the first plan is affordable and will cost you less.
In the case of shared hosting, Dreamhost offers two plans. The first plan is called Starter and the second one is called Unlimited plan. The main difference here is that the starter plan only allows you to host one website whereas the unlimited plan will allow you to host any number of websites.
Of course, there are many other differences in the plans. However, the major difference is the number of websites you can host. If you only have one website to host, the starter plan is for you. On the same side, if you have multiple websites, maybe this plan won’t be perfect for you.
For the developers or freelancers who are planning to host their client’s website, we highly recommend you to go with a starter plan instead of hosting all the websites in the multiple-domain hosting account. We will see more about it as we move further in this Dreamhost starter review.
As of now, let’s focus on some of the main features you are getting here.
- Host Single website
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 50GB Storage
- Free Domain name & SSL
You might surely get a basic idea of what the package looks like and the things you are going to get here. Don’t worry, we will see all the features in-depth. With that being said, let’s move to the features section which is also considered as pros of the Dreamhost starter shared hosting.
We will start by having a look at the features and the pros of the package. Please note that as we are doing a Dreamhost starter review, we will only cover the features that are applicable for this particular package.
After the completion of this article, you can easily decide whether it’s good for you or you should go with a different package/hosting. We will also see who all can buy the Dreamhost starter pack.
Let’s dive into the benefits of this plan.
Officially Recommended by WordPress.org
We are assuming most of you might be using WordPress. If that’s the case, one of the most important reasons you should go with Dreamhost is because they are officially recommended by WordPress.org. There isn’t a full list of hosting providers recommended by WordPress. Instead, there are very few hostings recommended by them. Dreamhost is one among them.
They have been serving the WordPress community for more than 10 years. When hosting is recommended by WordPress, it means that they have the best infrastructure and servers that will increase the performance of WordPress. So, you can depend on the hosting service if you are using WordPress. Talking about Dreamhost, their servers work super-well with WordPress. That’s the reason they give WordPress pre-installed on all their websites.
Made for WordPress
It’s made for WordPress, there are quite a few reasons for it. To start with, they give WordPress pre-installed, you don’t need to worry about the installation part.
Further, if you already have a WordPress website on another hosting, you can migrate it for free. Dreamhost offers automated WordPress migration. It’s a plugin using which you can migrate the website with zero downtime. More importantly, there is no technical knowledge required. You can easily follow the instructions shown on the screen. If something doesn’t get in your mind, the support team is there to help you anytime you want.
For the people who are new to WordPress and wondering about setting up your website, here comes the interesting part. There is a setup wizard where you can easily setup WordPress websites with just a few clicks. There are more than 200 templates for every possible industry. To make the changes, there is a drag-and-drop builder. You can simply change the content such as text and images, and you are all set to launch your awesome WordPress website.
As most people will be using WordPress, you don’t need to worry about the service here. You will get the best services for WordPress. Their servers work best with WordPress. They have been creating helpful resources for the WordPress community and contributing to the code. In the same way, Dreamhost also hosts many WordCamp events.
Free SSL Certificate
Security is an essential part of whether you have a new website or an old one. SSL makes sure that your website is secure. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It’s an extra layer of security. After adding SSL to your site, your website will start with HTTPS instead of HTTP. The extra S stands for security.
This will make sure that there are no attacks carried on your website. Attacks such as brute-force attacks and middle-man attacks are prevented here. Whatever data your customer submits will be secure and safe. Your customers won’t see the “not secured” or “unsafe” label when visiting the website.
Further, it will help you in ranking your websites. Google has made it pretty clear for a long time that they will prioritize the websites that have SSL installed. So, this will allow you to rank higher, as well as your customers, will trust your website.
Dreamhost gives an SSL certificate by Let’sEncrypt. The certificate is already free, Dreamhost provides a one-click installation. It’s free for a lifetime and not for just one year. So, you don’t need to worry about paying the renewal charges. In most cases, it will be automatically renewed when you pay for the hosting. If not, you can renew it with one click. You don’t need to pay anything here.
Free Automatic Daily Backups
Backups are a great way to have peace of mind. Just in case, something happens to your website, you can easily restore it from the backup. In case, you updated the wrong file or installed the wrong plugin that crashed your website, backups are useful in every case.
It’s always great to have a backup. Other hosts offer only monthly backups or they charge extra for daily backups. That’s not the case with Dreamhost. Dreamhost offers free automatic daily backups. You don’t need to worry about installing a plugin or paying anything extra for the backups, Dreamhost does it for you without any extra cost. You can restore them with one click.
Automatic backups are a great way to ensure that everything is in place. You can focus on your business side while the hosting company will handle the backups. You can just turn it on and forget about it. So, even small things like this can help you in focusing.
Daily backups are equally important along with automatic ones.
Let’s say, for example, you spend 10 hours updating one thing, and on the next day, you made a small mistake that crashed your website. Instead of solving the error, you can simply undo the thing if you have got the daily backup. You can simply restore them with one single click.
Now, a beginner might argue on this saying they won’t need the daily backups but what’s the guarantee that you will make the edit on the same day after the weekly backup? Let’s assume, the weekly backup was taken on Monday and you made some changes on Wednesday. What if you’re making an edit on Friday which causes something that you don’t want? That’s why daily backups are crucial.
Unlimited Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data your website consumes. For example, if you have 100 kb pages and if you get 5 visits on that page, your bandwidth usage is 500 kb. In the same way, if all of those visitors loaded two more pages, the total bandwidth usage is 100(page size)*3(pages)*5(visitors)=1500 kb. Bandwidth is usually calculated on monthly basis.
Here, Dreamhost doesn’t calculate the bandwidth. So, you don’t have to worry about any resource limit. You will see bandwidth as traffic in the features list of Dreamhost. Unlimited traffic is the most important thing you should look for.
Just like the bandwidth, the storage is 50 GB. For a single website, 50 GB of space is more than enough for any type of website. The hosting that provides unlimited storage has some kind of limitations to the inodes. In simpler words, you can only add a limited number of files. However, here the number of files doesn’t matter, you can use the entire 50 GB space.
If you are a beginner and wondering whether 50 GB will be enough for you or not, you don’t need to worry about anything. Most of the advanced-WordPress websites will be around 2 to 5 GB assuming there are a lot of media files. A normal website will consume a maximum of 500 MB of space. Let’s make it triple, even if you use 15 GB of space, you have still got 35 GB of space remaining. So, you have enough space to host your website. You can even save the backups here as there is enough space for a single website.
Free Domain Name
Here comes another great thing about the Dreamhost shared starter plan, they have got a free domain name. The free domain is only applicable if you register it within 3 months from the date of purchase. As here we are seeing the Dreamhost starter plan, you can only host one website. So, you can directly get a free domain when you register for the hosting.
In case you already have a domain name, you can surely buy a new domain name as per your wish. You are allowed to host more than one domain but you can surely redirect the same domain to the current one. The free domain is only applicable to certain TLDs. You can only get the free domain if the extension is .com, .club, .net, .info, .club, .online, .org, .shop, .tech, .site, .design, .me, .store or you can go with .xyz.
If you are a beginner and wondering which one is preferable for you, you can always go with .com.
Please note that the domain is free only for one year and applicable only if you go with a 1-year plan or 3-year plan. Even if you go with a 3-year plan, the domain will be free for one year only. We will surely discuss more pricing as we do the Dreamhost shared starter review.
Free Domain Whois Privacy Protection
When you buy a domain name, your information is public. In simpler words, anyone can see your name, address, email, phone number, etc. With Whois privacy protection, all this information becomes private. After adding whois privacy protection, people will only see the company’s details and not yours.
Every domain name provider offers privacy protection. However, most of the domain name providers offer it as an add-on. In simpler words, you will have to pay to get privacy protection. That’s not the case with Dreamhost. Here, you can get Privacy Protection for free.
The good thing is that it’s not just free for 1-year. As long as you keep the domain name with Dreamhost, you will not be charged a single penny for privacy protection. You will just have to pay the renewal charge for the domain name and that’s pretty much it.
Reliable Uptime and Speed
Uptime is the time in which your website was accessible and live. Sometimes, there are small problems in the server or server connectivity. In this case, your website will be inaccessible for a couple of minutes. Usually, the websites go down for a maximum of 10 minutes and not more than that.
Well, these are the scenarios with other websites and not with Dreamhost. Dreamhost offers a 100% uptime guarantee. Your website won’t go down even for a minute. They offer a money-back if your website goes down. That’s the biggest type of guarantee they can give.
They say the website will stay up because of their high-tech servers. The high-tech servers include emergency generators, redundant cooling, and multiple data centers. Not to mention, they monitor it constantly to make sure everything is working fine.
Speed is also an important factor to take into consideration. They offer lightning-fast speed. The average speed for a WordPress website is roughly less than 1 second which is considered excellent seeing the price and other features. They have SSD storage which increases the loading speed. Normally, the HDD storage will take a lot of time to load the scripts whereas the SSD storage will load in a fraction of seconds. They also have various guides on how you can speed-up your WordPress-based website. You can check out their tutorial if your website is taking time to load.
Therefore, we can conclude this section by saying that the speed and the uptime are awesome in Dreamhost. You will not have to worry about the same.
One-click Software Installation
If you are a WordPress user, you don’t need to worry about anything. When you buy the hosting, they will ask you whether you want to install WordPress or not. If you tick the box, they will install WordPress for you. Thereafter, you can go through the setup wizard to set up your website. This is surely up to you, you can surely skip the wizard and do it by yourself.
The setup wizard will take you through the steps to install and set up your WordPress website. You can even select your template directly from the setup and Dreamhost’s wizard will import that template for you. Now, you will only have to change the content of the website and get started. That’s the easiest thing you can do.
Other than that, it offers one-click installs for most of the applications. You can easily install WordPress and many other applications.
User-Friendly Control Panel
The Control panel is a big advantage for the newbies. They don’t offer the traditional cPanel. Instead, they have their panel which is much easier to use and interact with. Whether you have experience with hosting or you are completely new, you can easily go through all the options and make the changes as per your wish.
The custom-built panel is advanced and can help you easily accomplish things. If you face any difficulties, there are tutorials to help you. With the panel, you can check your emails, install WordPress, access your files, add users, etc. Unlike most of the other hostings, you won’t have to open a different panel to renew your hosting. To renew your hosting, you can easily go to the billing section in the same panel.
So, it will make a lot of things easier for you.
Customer Support
Customer support is also an important thing that you will have to keep in mind. Some people might think that they won’t need support. However, it’s one of the most important things to keep in mind. Talking about Dreamhost support, you will get 24/7 email support. The support team is highly competent, attentive, and professional. Your query will be solved in a short amount of time.
There are various ways you can contact the support team. At first, you got the email that is preferred by some people. You can send the email anytime you want and the support team executive will answer your email.
Other than email, they have got a chatbot to help you. It will search your question from the comprehensive knowledge base or it will look up from the data to answer your question. Of course, as it is a bot, it is available for you anytime you want.
But what if you are not satisfied with the bot’s answer and want to talk with a real person? In that case, you can use the live chat. The chatbot will have an option to talk with Dreamhost’s representative. You can easily talk with them from the live chat. Also, they have their in-house team for support, they don’t outsource the support service. This will make sure that the answers are perfect.
On the negative side, the live chat is only available between 5:30 AM to 9:30 PM PT. You can surely send your message and wait for the response. It’s just a couple of hours when the live chat won’t be available. The live chat can be accessed through your panel.
Green Hosting
Just imagine, a website you are running will need continuous internet and the servers have to be working 24/7. What does this mean? Imagine the total power you are consuming and how much you are affecting the environment? If you go with Dreamhost, you don’t need to worry about the environment.
They are carbon-neutral hosting. In simpler words, all their servers are eco-friendly which will make sure that you are doing your part to save the environment. The power grid takes energy from many renewable sources. They are also a part of the state-level clean wind program.
The same goes for their offices too. Not just the data center, even their offices are eco-friendly. They use LED and low-mercury, high-efficiency CFL lighting throughout, and Balanced, highly-optimized HVAC plants along with many other things. It doesn’t matter whether you are an environmental activist or not, the point is if you get a chance to do your part, you can surely consider it.
97-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Most of you might have researched other hosting providers before considering Dreamhost. If so, you might surely be knowing that most of the hosting providers have a money-back guarantee between 30 to 45 days. Surely this much time is enough.
However, if your website is new, you might need more time. Usually, it takes 30 to 45 days to get the initial traffic. So, it becomes hard to decide whether the hosting is right for you or not.
Dreamhost gives you a 97-day money-back guarantee. You can ask for your money back within 97 days if you don’t like their service. 97 days is a huge timespan and even a complete beginner can know whether it’s right for them or not. It has the longest guarantee compared to all the competitors.
So, in the case of Dreamhost, there are two ways you can know whether it’s for you or not.
- The first one is where you read this complete Dreamhost starter plan review and get all the information that you probably need.
- If you are still confused about whether it’s right for you or not, you can directly go with Dreamhost and ask for your money back in 97 days if you are not satisfied.
But wait, we only saw the positive side of Dreamhost, right? How can you know if the Dreamhost starter pack is not for you? For that, let’s have a look at the cons.
There are always two sides to any service or product. If you just consider one side, you will find every hosting as the best one. So, it’s necessary to have a look at the negative side too. The negative side may not be negative for all people. There are always some amount of expectations that you will have to make.
You will understand that at the 4th point where we will see one negative side which can also be taken as a positive one. So, this depends on your requirements. With that being said, let us now move on to the cons with the shared starter hosting plan.
An Email Account is not Free in the Starter Plan
An email account is not free in the starter plan. You will have to pay for the email account. An email will cost you $1.67 per month.
One thing that we like about Dreamhost is that they don’t hide anything. The email charges are written in the list of the main features. Most of the companies will hide the price or don’t display it. That’s not the case here.
If you have used cPanel before, you might be thinking that you can easily start using the email by creating it from the cPanel. That won’t be possible here. As we mentioned previously in our Dreamhost shared starter review, you will get a custom panel here instead of cPanel. So, if you want an email address, you will have to pay for it.
For the people who only want one email address, this isn’t a big deal as the charges are very less. However, if you want more than one email address, you might have to spend some money here.
Paid Site Migrations Service
Here comes the clashing! We previously mentioned that migration is free, right?
Well, if you have read it carefully, you might be knowing that free migration is only applicable to WordPress websites. (We know, most of you will ignore such small details. So, the main aim of this review is to be as transparent and honest as possible. In this way, you can precisely choose whether the hosting is for you or not).
If you want to migrate a WordPress website, it’s free as they have a plugin for the same. However, if are not using WordPress and want to use the migration service, you will have to pay for the migration.
To summarize this section, WordPress automatic migration is FREE but if you are using other software or script, you will have to pay for the service or do it by yourself.
Long Waiting Time in Live Chat
If you want to use the Live Chat to communicate with the team, you will have to make sure that you have got some time. Their support is only available in US timing.
The timing for the live chat support is 5:30 AM–9:30 PM PT. At first, you will have to adjust the timing to talk with the support team. Along with this, you will have to wait for a little bit longer as the chat gets slow sometimes.
Due to the large user-base and limited-time support, many people are requesting support and talking with the live chat. This will slow down the work and as a result, you will have to wait before you get your chance and talk to the person.
The chatbot is always available. So, if you have a common question, you can directly ask the bot and it will see if the question is answerable from the data available.
Further, they also have a complete knowledge base where you can learn more about the hosting. In the end, it’s still a negative point that the chat is slow.
No cPanel Available
Here comes the fourth point. As we mentioned, it can be taken positively as well as you can take it negatively. There is no specific answer to this one.
The thing is that they don’t have a cPanel platform. cPanel is a popular commercial panel that is offered by most of the hosting to manage your hosting. In the case of Dreamhost, they have their custom panel instead of the cPanel.
This is different as compared to others. For a newbie and even for an experienced person, it might take some minutes to figure out the panel when they open it at first. However, you can surely master it in very little time.
The custom panel will give some of the advantages as well as there will be some disadvantages. We have already discussed both of them but here is a small overview of them.
With the custom panel, you can easily renew your hosting directly from the panel whereas you can’t add an email address for free. In the same way, there will be some advantages as well as disadvantages.
Our suggestion here would be not to waste more time thinking about this one. If you are using WordPress, the panel will be the least used thing. You will do most of the things from the WordPress dashboard. Therefore, don’t dwell more on this and make your decision based on other pros and cons.
Only US location for their data centers
Server location can be a big issue for some people. However, as a beginner, it won’t matter much. The problem here is that they only have a US data center location. All your data will be stored in the US data center.
Server location will slightly affect the speed of your website. For example, here the data center is in the US. So, if someone visits your website from an Asian country, the speed will be slightly slow. If you have most visitors from the United States only, this is not a disadvantage but it can be taken as a positive point.
To compensate for it, they offer Cloudflare CDN integration for free (basic plan). CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It will cache your website in various locations. When the visitors visit your website, the website will be served from the nearest possible location. Talking about Cloudflare, they have 50+ locations.
If you have most of your customers from the United States, you can surely ignore this point. However, if that’s not the case with you, you can surely use CDN here.
4) Pricing
Now comes the most awaited thing that people are waiting for the shared starter plan. We will see the complete in-depth pricing of the starter pack. The main pricing is visible directly from the main page but what about other things? That’s the reason we are here with the pricing details in our Dreamhost shared starter hosting plan review.
There are three billing cycles you can go with.
- Monthly plan
- Yearly plan
- 3-year plan
Just like every other hosting, the charges of monthly hosting are the maximum and the 3-year package is the lowest. We will see some of the details you need to know before you signup for any plan. We will even see which billing cycle is better for you. Whether you should go with a monthly plan, annual plan, or pay directly for the long term and go with a 3-year plan.
Thereafter, we will have a quick look at the extra charges and add-on charges. There, we will cover things like domain charges, email charges, and the add-ons that they offer. As this is a Dreamhost shared starter review, we will also see which addons are worth buying and which are not worth it.
Monthly Plan
- The plan is valid for 30 days.
- It will cost you $4.95 per month
- The monthly plan will renew at the same price. You won’t have to pay an extra penny during the renewal.
- There are no commitments here. You can cancel the plan anytime you want. Even if you want the hosting for 1 month, you can get it.
- You won’t get the free domain in the monthly plan.
The monthly plan is not recommended for most people. Unless you are clear that you only want the hosting for 1 month, you shouldn’t buy it. This will cost you more. Instead, you can go with the annual plan.
If you fail to pay the fees after the month-end, they might suspend your hosting. Usually, when the service period is over, they keep it for a while (roughly 15 to 30 days), and thereafter, if you don’t pay the charges, they deactivate it. In the case of a monthly plan, they won’t wait for this long. Therefore, it’s important to pay the fees when the period is completed.
The main point is why waste your precious time in renewing every single month when you can directly go with the annual plan with better features and cheaper rates? That brings us to the next point where we will see the annual plan.
Yearly Plan
- The yearly plan is valid for 1 year.
- The initial cost of the plan is $3.95 per month. You will have to pay it yearly which sums up to $47.40.
- The renewal cost of the plan is the same.
- You are saving roughly 43% as compared to the monthly plan.
The annual plan is the best one because it will cost you less as compared to the monthly plan. Moreover, you will get a free domain name. If you don’t like their services, you can surely ask for a refund. So, the annual plan is the best one you can go with.
One year is enough to build your website as well as get a decent amount of traffic. Also, if you are new, it might take some time to figure out the right set of features you will need. Within one year, you will find all of them. Once you have implemented all the features, you can easily find out if the hosting works for you or not. You can renew it for 3 years if it’s best for you. On the other hand, if it turns out to be bad, you can surely migrate. For most people, the Annual plan is the best.
With that being said, let’s move on to the 3-year plan details.
3-year Plan
- It’s valid for 3 years
- The cost of the plan is $2.59 per month. You will have to pay it for all three years. So, the total amount due is $93.24.
- Like all the other plans, the renewal cost is the same.
- You are saving 63% over the monthly plan.
The 3-year plan is good if you are sure about the hosting or it’s fine for you to spend the money. You can surely ask for a refund if you are not satisfied with their service within 97 days. However, if you exceed 97 days, you will have to keep it for 3 years. It’s surely up to you whether you want to go with the 3-year plan or not.
If you are new, we recommend you to go with the annual plan. Thereafter, if you like their service, you can change your billing cycle to 3 years. On the other hand, if you are sure that you will need to keep the hosting for more than 1 year, you can directly go with 3 years plan.
Let’s take a quick example. If a person goes with an annual plan, it will cost them $47.40. Now, if you are sure that you want to keep it and you renew it, it will cost you another $47.40. The total is $94.80. You are spending $94.80 for 2 years whereas, the 3-year plan will only cost you $93.24. So, you can decide things accordingly.
On the other hand, if you don’t like it within the first 3 months, you can always ask for a refund within 97 days.
Extra Charges and Addons
There are various extra charges. We don’t mean the hidden charge as there are no hidden charges but we are talking about the extra charges such as domain name, email address, etc.
Domain name: If you are signing up for a monthly plan, then the charges for a domain name will depend on the extension you plan to go with. Let’s talk about the most popular domain name. A .com domain name will cost you $6.99 a year for the first year. It renews at $15.99 per year. In the same way, if you transfer the domain to Dreamhost, it will cost you $9.99.
Email Address: An email will cost you $1.67 per month. The mailbox will cost you $19.99 per year which gives you 25 GB of storage and all the filtering options.
Dreamshield Protection: It’s a security extension to increase security. It will cost you $3 per month. You don’t need to spend extra money here as this addon is not that good.
G-Suite: G-suite will cost you $6 a month. You can surely access the free trial of 30 days. If you like it, you can pay and start the plan.
These are some of the extra products you can get along with the hosting. All of these are optional. You can pay for this if you want else you can directly go with the hosting. If you are a newbie, you don’t need to get anything except the main hosting. You can leave the rest of the things as it is.
Unlike all the other hosting providers, where Dreamhost won’t push you too much in the sales pitch. Once you don’t plan to buy the addon, you will not see their sales pitch again. You can surely buy it as an add-on afterward.
In the end, the question remains the same. Most of the features that we discussed are available on the website too but the main question is whether you should buy the plan or not. This is where our recommendation section comes in. We will see a couple of scenarios where you can buy the hosting plan.
This is an opinion-based Dreamhost shared starter review section where we will tell you who should buy the plan and which type of people should stay away from it.
The Requirements
The first thing that you need to see is the requirements. If the Starter plan offers the same type of requirements that you want, you can surely go with the plan.
Here is a quick review of the same thing. You can buy a Dreamhost shared starter plan if you:
- Need to host 1 website at a high speed that can handle traffic of thousands of visitors a month.
- Want a Free Domain name and free domain privacy protection from Dreamhost.
- Need a lot of web storage space up to 50GB (which is a lot more than you need).
- Want Automated Daily Backups to keep your data safe at all times.
- Want a Free SSL Certificate to secure your eCommerce website.
- Are tired of using the old cPanel.
- Want all the features that Dreamhost provides.
These are the basic requirements. If Dreamhost matches your need, you can surely go ahead and buy it. However, most people are pretty clear about the requirements and they are still confused, here are different scenarios that might describe your situation.
Thinking if this plan is right for you? (Plan Confusion)
The first scenario we will see is where people are confused about whether the Dreamhost starter plan is right for them or they should go with a different plan.
Well, the thing is pretty simple. If you just have one website as of now, you can go with the Dreamhost starter plan. Most of the beginners are thinking that they will create one more website within a short period and that’s why they will need multiple domain hosting.
Frankly speaking, it’s pretty hard to create one more website too fast. Instead, you can go with the annual plan and if you have made your mind about creating another website soon, you can create it once the current website starts running well. It will surely take at least one year to get enough visitors or sales.
Therefore, we recommend you go with the single domain as of now to maintain the cash flow. Thereafter, you can surely upgrade. On the other hand, if money is not an issue for you, you can surely go with multiple domain hosting.
Now, many freelancers are confused between plans. If you want to host your client’s website, we highly recommend you to use single domain hosting for each client instead of going with multiple hosting. In this way, you can also give them access to the panel if they need it. Further, if the clients are non-technical, you can surely go with multiple domain hosting.
In most cases, the single domain hosting plan will be the perfect one for beginners.
Have Doubts on Dreamhost?
Some people don’t want to buy the hosting because they are not yet sure about Dreamhost. We are going to make things extremely simple here.
If you are using WordPress, there should be not a single doubt about choosing WordPress. Dreamhost has more than enough features for WordPress that will make your website super-fast as well as super-easy to setup. If you are a beginner, you can surely use their setup wizard to get things in place. That’s the reason why they are officially recommended by WordPress.
Talking about speed and performance, they are the best. The speed is more than expected and the same goes for the performance too. They have an amazing set of features at an affordable price. If you have gone through other hosting companies, you surely might be knowing that the pricing is very reasonable compared to the features it provides.
The support is surely slow but not bad. You will have to wait for a couple of minutes to get the answer but the answer is perfect and they will solve all your queries. The staff is professional and they have an in-house team. The in-house team will ensure that the query is solved and won’t make you wait for long.
To summarize this section, if you are wondering whether Dreamhost is right for you or not, our recommendation will be 100% yes. You can surely go with the company if you want affordable pricing with great features. The best thing that we love is transparent pricing. They won’t charge you double or triple at the time of renewal. All the prices are clearly stated. In the case of the starter plan, we already discussed detailed costs in our pricing section.
Afraid of Trying the Different panel?
This might be a big deal for many people. Even if you are new and have searched about hosting, you will be knowing that they have cPanel. However, Dreamhost will give you a custom panel instead of the cPanel.
Now, there are mixed reviews about the panel on the internet. Some people say it’s better than cPanel whereas some people find it worst.
According to us, there aren’t many differences like you might have thought. The custom-panel offers all the features that you might want. The only difference is the navigation. If one feature can be accessed directly from the page, you might have to go to a different menu in the case of the Dreamhost panel.
So, the question is how can you decide whether you would like it or not?
The answer is pretty simple here. We recommend you to directly buy the annual plan. If you are not sure about the hosting, you can buy the domain later. If you don’t buy the domain during the purchase of hosting, you will get a temporary domain by Dreamhost. You can check the custom panel and see if it suits your needs or not.
If you like it, you can surely get the free domain within 3 months. On the other side, if you don’t like it, you can surely ask for a refund within 97 days. So, you are in a win-win situation whether you like it or not.
Don’t even think of going with the monthly plan because there is no free domain available. Instead, you can ask for a refund. Don’t worry, they will provide a complete refund if you haven’t bought the domain name. They will deduct the domain charge if you bought the domain name too.
Conclusion
To summarize, this was the complete Dreamhost shared starter hosting review. We saw all the possible things that you might want to know. Starting from the biggest advantages to the biggest disadvantages, we saw all the things. In this way, you don’t need to worry about a single thing.
Let’s summarize the entire Dreamhost starter review in short.
Here, you will get truly unlimited bandwidth with 50 GB of storage. They are officially recommended by WordPress.org and they have many WordPress features that make them unique. You will get an easy WordPress builder and custom panel. The biggest negative point is that you will have to wait for the support to come live on chat. The support is slow sometimes which might cause some issues.
Talking about the plans, you can go with any billing cycle you want. The plan starts at $2.59 which is for the 3-year plan. However, we have already mentioned that you should go with the annual plan, or the 3-year plan instead of going with the monthly plan. The annual plan will cost you $3.95 per month which sums up to $47.40 annually. This is the most popular plan and according to our opinion, you should go with that plan.
Lastly, if you are still wondering whether you should go with Dreamhost or not, our opinion will be 100% positive here. You can surely go with Dreamhost and the starter pack is the best one for a beginner.
