Editors DreamHost Review

Dreamhost Review

Dreamhost bills itself as the choice for both novice and experienced users, but that claim is a bit optimistic. In reality, Dreamhost will appeal more to sophisticated hosting customers who don't need their hands held through the creation and publication of a website, but instead are looking for account control and leading-edge tools.

Customers can pick from four hosting packages. We tried out the basic plan - Crazy Domain Insane! - which comes with 500 GB of storage, 5000 GB of bandwidth, 3 domains, 60 mailboxes and a free domain registration for $5.95 per month.

Dreamhost definitely tries hard to be non-traditional. In addition to using funky names for its hosting packages (besides Crazy Domain Insane! there's Sweet Dreams and Code Monster), the company offers a charity section (where it matches donations to pre-selected organizations like the Sierra Club) and groups web tools under a section called "Goodies."

That's all well and good, and goes with the overall feel of the company's website - a positive, upbeat one bathed in soothing blues. More important to us, though, was the flexibility and control Dreamhost gives its customers when it comes to online account management.

A few clicks through the web panel and a customer can add a plan, bump up a service level, or simply add what Dreamhost calls "booster packs." These packs, which cost an extra $4.95 per month, give customers additional domains, subdomains, ftp accounts, and mailboxes. In addition to plan flexibility, customers get control over billing and account access, among other things. These administration options were impressive and likely are attractive to the experienced customers we expect are drawn to Dreamhost.

The control panel is a little disorienting and takes some getting used to. Dreamhost packs various announcements, instructions, navigation links, FAQs, blue boxes and blue lines into the panel's web pages. But once we got our bearings, we were able to get around just fine.

The toolkit, or should we say "Goodies" bag, that's inside the control panel relies heavily on third-party software. It's a little unsettling when you're directed away from the control panel to add this module or that. The guestbook from Dreambook (no relation) is very weak and should be avoided. But the tools for creating polls, forums, blogs and managing mailing lists are much better.

The inclusion of Apple's QuickTime Streaming Server in the "Goodies" section is a very forward-thinking, useful feature, at least for those with experience QuickTime and a need to host rich media on their sites.

Dreamhost offers unlimited MySQL databases with even the lowest hosting package, which is nice and setup was easy. A third-party interface has to be used to manage the databases, but that makes sense given Dreamhost's other offerings. Furthermore we really liked the ability to download "raw" log files and setup Cron jobs.

Support is something Dreamhost prides itself on. The company does a good job of trying to be proactive with announcements on the control panel home page. It also relies heavily on a robust and useful Knowledge Base as well as discussion forums. But if you want to contact technical support directly, you are routed through a web interface (No phone calls, please). We got email replies within an hour during the day, but a sneaky one we posted at 2 a.m. wasn't answered for four hours. Still, it would have been nice to be able to talk to someone on the phone.

All in all we were pleased with Dreamhost's offering and would recommend it to anyone in need of advanced hosting tools and features. The unlimited databases makes installation of numerous scripts much easier to manage, and it seems as though Dreamhost is committed to offering features not widely available in the low-cost web hosting sector. That said there is a definite learning curve when it comes to the Control Panel and many of the items offered (we think everything is too text heavy). Also given the advanced tools and features we would have appreciated the ability to contact technical support via telephone.

DreamHost Site Screenshot (http://www.dreamhost.com)

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