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Established by four Californian Computer Science undergraduates in 1997, DreamHost has grown
to become one of the larger players in the web hosting business, with a full-time staff of 50 and over
500,000 domains hosted. Fortunately, this growth has not prevented DreamHost from retaining
their original customer oriented focus.
DreamHost has the most loyal customer base in the web hosting industry, with many customers
rising to defend the company in times of trouble. This may be the result of the irreverent attitude
of those running the company and the almost total transparency shown when things go wrong.
This attitude is reflected in the very amusing monthly newsletter and official company blog.

As you can imagine, hosting 500,000+ domains requires some impressive hardware and the
DreamHost data center, consisting of hundreds of multi-CPU servers running Debian Linux, is more
than adequate for the task. The data center boasts a UPS system, with back-up generator and
multiple redundant gigabit connections to the Internet.

Plan Features and Pricing
DreamHost currently offer four different shared web hosting plans at various price points,
but the primary difference between these plans is the disk space and bandwidth quotas offered.
Interestingly, the space and bandwidth provided by DreamHost hosting plans grows each week,
as a kind of ‘loyalty bonus’, encouraging customers to stay with DreamHost for the long-term.

Control Panel
Unusually, the admin panel provided by DreamHost is not an ‘off-the-shelf’ commercial product,
such as cPanel, instead DreamHost have their own custom written admin panel. While this panel can
be a bit of a culture shock for those coming from other hosts, in our opinion, the DreamHost
panel offers a level of functionality and ease-of-use that exceeds packages such as cPanel.
Just about every task that you need to do, from managing the billing for your account, creating email
addresses – locally or on Gmail, installing software, registering domains to DNS configuration can be
done via the panel with a minimum of fuss.
For those that enjoy doing things manually, DreamHost provides full shell access with all accounts.
DreamHost also supplies a web-based FTP client for those situations where a ‘real’ FTP client is not
available, although, due to the inherent limitations of such web-based clients, we suggest that you
use a ‘real’ FTP client if you can.

One thing that DreamHost does not offer is any kind of easy-to-use page creation utility, you will need
to design your websites locally on your own computer and upload the relevant files to your DreamHost
web space, or take advantage of the excellent ‘one-click-install’ feature of the admin panel (see below).

Scripting Support
All DreamHost plans support the full gamut of server-side scripting languages, including PHP4, PHP5,
CGI, Perl, Python and Ruby / Ruby-On-Rails.
CRON access is available for those that require scripts to run at regular intervals and custom .htaccess
files are available on a domain-by-domain (or sub-domain) basis.
DreamHost also provide full shell access (SSH and Telnet) on all accounts.
The DreamHost admin panel also provides for the ‘one-click install’ (and upgrade) of various popular
scripts, such as WordPress, Joomla, phpbb, Gallery2 and MediaWiki. The number of applications
available through this ‘one-click install’ page is less than that provided by something like HostGator,
but most of the popular packages are represented.
Of-course, packages not supported through this page can be installed manually.

Reliability
DreamHost has a reputation for excellent reliability and indeed during the first few years of hosting
our sites at DreamHost this proved to be the case.  To DreamHost’s credit, when there are problems,
the company shows an almost total transparency, explaining exactly what went wrong and why, even
if the explanation casts their own staff in a bad light. This honestly is a refreshing change for a web hosting
company and we firmly believe many other companies could learn a thing or two from DreamHost in this
respect.

Technical Support
All direct technical support for the DreamHost is provided through support tickets sent via the admin
panel. All of our support queries were answered promptly, usually within 12 hours, the actual replies
were always friendly and provided the information needed to resolve the issue at hand.
DreamHost have said that they are currently hiring more support staff, so I expect the response time
for support requests to improve in the future.
The more expensive DreamHost plans do provide, for customers within the United States, a limited
number of support ‘call-backs’ per month, but since we’re located outside of the United States,
we did not have the opportunity to test this method of technical support.
DreamHost also maintains a wiki and customer support forum, both of which can be an excellent source
of information, often avoiding the need to lodge a support request.

Conclusion
Overall, the DreamHost plans represent excellent value for money.
Aside from a few minor Outages we’ve experienced (we’re talking twice in a 7 years time…), which were
also resolved very quickly.
It does seem DreamHost is the absolute number 1 host for the experienced user.

Total Score: 5 Stars

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