DreamHost - Rated #11

Dreamhost is a California based, employee owned hosting company that is the leader in budget web hosting. They have hosting solutions that are perfect for those just getting started in hosting. They’ve been in business since 1997 and have become one of the largest web hosting companies. They host everything from small personal websites to large business sites and everything in between.

Relability

Dreamhost utilizes space in one of the premier data centers in the Los Angeles area. With redundant internet connections and redunant power supplies, downtime is minimized. In the past, they have been criticized for performance issues, but they are improving their service. A big plus for Dreamhost customers is that Dreamhost doesn’t cancel accounts for using too much CPU resources and instead works with users to help improve their CPU usage.

Features and Benefits

Dreamhost offers one of the best values in webhosting. Their insane savings means that you can get an unbelievable amount of storage space and bandwidth at a low monthly cost. It’s difficult to find more bandwidth and storage for the money. When you pay for a year of service, their setup fees are waived and you even get a free domain with domain privacy. They have all of the hosting features that you expect in a budget web host and they even provide SSH access to their servers for those who prefer command line access.

Account Management

Dreamhost utilizes their own custom made control panel. It features a tag cloud of commonly used features so that you can quickly do what you need to do without fumbling through menus. The control panel also features automatic installation of popular open source web applications such as WordPress, Joomla and Coppermine Gallery. The control panel provides access to all of your billing information as well as your domain registrations. You can set up all of your hosting with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Customer Support

While customer support is not their strong point, they have ticket based support that is responded to in a reasonable amount of time and a status blog where posts are made when servers are having issues. The status blog is hosted in a different data center so that you can get status information, even if the control panel is down. Everything on Dreamhost is automated so there is little need to contact customer service. Webhosting at Dreamhost just works.

Conclusion

While Dreamhost is not for everyone, they are adequate for someone just building their first website. In fact, they are very good entry level web host that you can just setup and forget about. If you are primarily interested in cheap hosting, Dreamhost might be what you are looking for.