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Brief History of DreamHost

DreamHost (DH) was founded by four Computer Science undergraduates students in 1997. Since then DH has grown and has become one of the famous web hosting providers. According to DreamHost official blog they are now hosting more than 700,000 domains.

In spite of becoming such a big player in hosting world, their service hasn't been degraded and their first and only goal is to provide wonderful user experience to their customers. Now, managing more than 700,000 domains is not an easy task. They keep their growth in mind and they have enough support and technical staff to handle their increasing customer base. Need less to say that they also have data center with enough servers and redundant gigabyte Internet connections.

Why I Wanted Hosting And My Requirements

DreamHost is not the first hosting I am hosting my sites with. Actually DH is the third hosting company I have tried. I changed to DH over my previous two hosting company because those did not satisfy my requirements.

From May 2007, I was impressed by world wide web and I wanted to make some money online. Now for making money online, you need to have website. In the August 2007, I was looking for Linux web hosting company. I was looking for web hosting which provides lots of space, lots of data transfer limit, unlimited domain name hosting, unlimited mails and ssh users. So if I want to make any changes in any page, I can do that over ssh prompt. Since I was about to start online business, I was looking for service which provides very high up time and good technical support. I also wanted all these features at very cheap rate.

I researched a little bit at that time and found that DreamHost is cheap and provides all the features I wanted. I did more research about service and support. I found many good reviews. I also found some bad reviews. I read all reviews and I wanted to go for DH but after reading bad reviews I could not make my mind. I searched more but didn't find any hosting service which provides all needed features at cheap rate. Finally, I thought there always will be some bad reviews on any service and decided to give a try to DreamHost. Since I was on a limited budget, I didn't have many choices. So on 17th August 2007, I finally registered service with DH.

Hosting Plan I Use

Currently DreamHost offers only one plan for shared hosting. At the time when I purchased, they were offering three plans.

1. Crazy Domain Insane
2. Sweet Dreams
3. Code Monster

I selected Crazy Domain Insane plan. They provided around 200GB of disk space and 4TB of data transfer limit. This limit also increases weekly. It's a way to say thank to their customer for staying with them. This limit was more than enough for my usage.

Easy to Use Control Panel

When you register the service, DreamHost provides login details for the control panel. DH is not using any readily available control panel like CPanel. They have their own control panel written in perl. You can control any of the service by logging in to panel. You can create or delete mail and mysql account or to install or remove any software from the panel.

When I purchased a web hosting service, I also got one domain for free to register. I registered my domain and I wanted to install WordPress blog on it. DH provides one click installation of many open source softwares like WordPress, Gallery, ZenCart, PhpGedView, OpenX, phpbb, joomla, MediaWiki and many more. So I just logged in to the panel, select WordPress, insert the mysql database, user and password information and clicked on Install. Within just 3 minutes, I got mail from DreamHost saying that WordPress blog is installed on my domain. That was the easiest WordPress installation I have done ever.

Reliability And Support

In the last 10 months, I only needed to contact their support two times. First time when one of my sites was down. I opened a support ticket but within few minutes my site was up after opening the ticket. Second time my site was up but was not able to connect to mysql database. I opened a support ticket and tried to figure out what went wrong. Since I am a technical person, I know how to troubleshoot. I removed mysql user and created it again and problem was solved. I have to admit that their support response is very quick. I got the response in both cases within 10 hours.

For support, DH provides three kind of support. They have their wiki where you can get many how to. If you want to install any software, change DNS entry or want to do any thing using panel and don't know how to do, Wiki is the best place to search for. You will get the answer of your question immediately. DreamHost also provides forum where advance users might help you to solve your problem. If after using wiki and forum, you don't get the solution for your problem then you can open a support ticket from panel and one of the DreamHost support representative will be in touch with you.

Conclusion

Currently I have 9 domains hosted with DreamHost. Of course, not all of them are getting heavy traffic but I never had major break down service. I measure the uptime for my sites and it varies from 99.5% to 99.9% . I am very happy with DH and will recommend it to any one looking for cheap and good hosting service.

Check out detailed DreamHost review and discount DreamHost coupons before you purchase DreamHost service.