How to Host Your Website on DreamHost?
To test the functionalities, features and hosting experience on DreamHost, one must first create a website and launch it on the platform. Only then, they can indeed be sure what amazing features the platform has to offer you as its customer. While launching a website on other platforms can be a tricky task, starting one on DreamHost is rather simple and easy.
- Step # 1: Register a Domain name for your website. You can do that by visiting Namecheap or GoDaddy.
- Step # 2: Choose a Hosting Plan from DreamHost (You can choose cloud hosting).
- Step # 3: Add Hosting to your website. To learn how to add hosting, click here.
- Step # 4: Create Web Pages on your desired app such as WordPress. If you don’t know how to create one, you can visit W3School or learn a course on building a website through WordPress.
- Step # 5: If you have created the website on a personal computer in offline mode, upload the data on your hosted server using an FTP client.
- Step # 6: Voila! Your site is now up and running on the Internet.
Sounds a bit complicated? Hire a website professional to create a website and host it for you.
What Do I Get For Hosting My Website on DreamHost?
As we are all eager to learn the increasing benefits of launching your website on DreamHost, here are some of them to help you understand why DreamHost is one of the reliable hosting options.
DreamHost Gives a Decently High Website Up Time
If you are running a website, then without a doubt, website uptime is an important factor that you must consider. A website that fails to address the page speed loading time will only experience a loss in business and dissatisfied customers. Therefore, most website owners often compromise on the speed of the website rather than risk the website uptime at any cost.
According to recent research performed by Hosting Facts, 32 of the best websites on the Internet approximated a site loading time of around 99.59%, whereas DreamHost offered a website loading time of almost 99.928% which surpasses the above average of the 32 best websites on the internet.
The great thing about DreamHost is that they offer a 100% uptime rate for those who employ them as their preferred web hosting service. In case, if they are unable to meet the uptime requirements, they offer you credit for at least one day of service based on every hour your website is down.
This policy is mentioned in the DreamHost terms of service.
You can reimburse the credit once you have maxed out at 10%. The next time you’re billed, you get a refund for the amount which you’ve already paid. At the same time, DreamHost also indicates that server downtime can occur due to scheduled maintenance or the individual’s own mistake for which the return credits are not applicable. Hence, downtime doesn’t really apply to fulfill these promises.
DreamHost Offers a Good Website Loading Speed
In all honesty, when it comes to website loading time, Dream Host doesn’t offer the fastest loading time compared to some of the other remarkable hosting providers on the Internet. However, the speed it offers is still very decent compared to other web hosting providers in the market. Identifying the speed which a host has to offer to your website is an integral part of your website’s success.
So you might be wondering what is the average hosting speed that DreamHost offers, right?
If you’ve already launched your website on one of the DreamHost servers, then you can visit the Pingdom website and check what speed does it offer to you on your hosted server.
Here’s a very recent result of a website called the “Small Orange” which showed the following speeds.
The average response time recorded for a website hosted on DreamHost is around 600 ms.
It’s a good response time but not entirely great because there are many websites which load at half the time compared to what DreamHost offers to its customers.
DreamHost Offers a Variety of Features
While choosing a hosting platform for your website, you always find a limited number of features with each hosting plan they offer. But, that’s certainly not the case with DreamHost servers!
DreamHost wants you to know that they care about your website as much as you care about giving them business. Therefore, they offer you unlimited features in each of their pricing plans.
Once again, this isn’t something that you usually observe happening in the industry, but thanks to DreamHost! You have the ultimate option of getting unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email options, unlimited network transfers & unlimited disk space. What more could you ask, right?
DreamHost is Environment-Friendly Hosting Provider
DreamHost cares about the environment just as much as it cares about your servers. Henceforth, they have mostly optimized their data centers with green products to keep the environment safe and healthy. This particular action of going green followed by DreamHost doesn’t have any impact on your website performance but by contributing to their server host, you’re in a way, contributing to nurturing a safe and healthy living environment.
How does DreamHost transform itself into a completely GREEN business?
They have reduced their carbon footprints by using low-mercury lighting. They have HVAC plants that are energy-efficient and optimized to deliver the best cooling within their data centers.
They are also making contributions to organize and run “clean wind” programs in different locations.
So in a way, all of their efforts are complementing the establishment of environmental sustainability. If you want to contribute too, then getting a server on DreamHost doesn’t sound like a bad choice.
DreamHost Renewal Rates are Reasonable
If you’ve just jumped into the website world, then I am sure you’re not aware of the common practices. But, in case, if you’ve been running a few websites for a few years, there’s a common practice that every web host seamlessly follows on around the Internet and that is to offer you low introductory rates so once when you join them, they jack up their prices at the time of renewal.
As a result, you get hurt when you realize that the prices on your web host just got doubled.
However, this is certainly not the case with DreamHost. This platform is one of the few hosting providers on the Internet which actually respects your budget and condemns the increase of prices during renewals. Instead, they offer you price breaks instead which you can set on your own accord based on the length of contract that you are about to make with DreamHost.
So what’s the difference, the only difference is that you are aware of the plans beforehand.
The Downside
Just like many other web hosting platforms on the Internet have their downsides, so does DreamHost. Despite the fact, DreamHost offers an incredible uptime and promises a good website performance, it is still not one of the industry leaders and here’s something that makes us ponder, what other areas does the platform observes a setback. Here are a couple of areas where we believe DreamHost requires improvement.
DreamHost Customer Support Requires Attention
While most web hosting platforms are known for delivering excellent customer support to their respective users, DreamHost has a major flaw in its chatbot support feature which requires rework.
They do offer 24/7 service but when you try to reach them out, it takes hours for one of their service providers to respond back to your query. While, just like other hosts, they have a huge knowledge base that educates you on how to navigate yourself free from the server’s problem, it is not good enough.
At times, you need a professional to guide you through a solution & DreamHost needs to work on that.
DreamHost Charges you for Website Migrations
Another particular concern that raises a flag is paid site migrations. There are plenty of website hosts who offer site migration as an incentive so people can decide to shift to their platform, DreamHost does not. They charge a staggering $99 for a simple site migration unless managed WordPress host.
Now, this might not sound like a major concern if you’re shifting a single website as you will have to pay a single time. But, if you have multiple clients and you require continuous site migrations then it can weigh super heavy on the pockets. Also, there are other limitations as well that DreamHost doesn’t migrate WordPress Multisite or other Site Builder websites. If you want to migrate such websites, then you will definitely have to do it manually. Believe me, manual site migration is not easy.
Concluding Thoughts
It is without a doubt that DreamHost is a reliable hosting platform when it comes to hosting your website on the cloud. It offers good website uptime and a great website page loading speed.
As far as the question is concerned, whether DreamHost should be your preferred host?
My answer is yes because it is far better than many other website hosting platforms available currently right now. With minimum downtime, you don’t have to face that many problems
