Why I Love DreamHost

Published on March 13, 2007 (↻ June 12, 2021), filed under (RSS feed for all categories).

Only looking for promo codes? See the update.

I like web hosting provider DreamHost. I like DreamHost from a professional point of view because DreamHost does several things “more than right” and simply provides a great user experience.

How’s that? DreamHost:

An important point (at least to me) is the disk storage and bandwidth aspect. On the one hand these often are a problem with many providers, and DreamHost solves that problem once and for all (you have to be too successful to run into storage and bandwidth issues). On the other hand, it’s solved very interestingly through weekly bonuses. These bonuses play an important part in the overall experience since they make you feel at ease and can also offer new possibilities. (For example, the increasing storage allowed me to outsource all my project stuff—I recently dropped my local CVS setup, created an SVN repository, and yet never have to worry that there’s not enough webspace.)

DreamHost on storage and transfer limits.

Figure: Screenshot of DreamHost’s [past] “Disk” and “Xfer” info.

Long story short, DreamHost has made me a very happy customer. A happy customer even though there’s one thing that occasionally upsets me: Uptime could be better. (Monitoring my sites with Montastic reveals more breakdowns with DreamHost than with my German provider, the latter meaning so far 0 outages per year.) I’m confident, however, that DreamHost brings that under control as well. Cutting the blah-blah, I much recommend to try Dreamhost by yourself (promo code “j9t” will bring you “1 extra free lifetime domain registration”). DreamHost seems to get promos right, too.

Update (March 1, 2009)

Last time I played with promo codes was in December 2007; now I did it again. Overall, you might want to test the following codes when registering with DreamHost:

The heavy use of referrer links and codes in this post is a bit unusual, however it’s meant to benefit everyone here. I like testing and experimenting.

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About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on September 30, 2021.

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m somewhat close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

If you’d like to do me a favor, interpret charitably (I speak three languages, and they do collide), yet be critical and give feedback, so that I can make improvements. Thank you!

Comments (Closed)

  1. On March 14, 2007, 14:00 CET, Eric said:

    I 100% agree. Although in addition to uptime, I’d have to say their overall data transfer speed could be way better. Sometimes my site takes 20+ seconds to load.

  2. On March 14, 2007, 16:13 CET, Bernhard said:

    Wow, wow, wow!
    Did I get it right? After one year using “Crazy Domain Insane!” you have about 220 GB of disk storage?
    And Rails support for this little money? Why are they so cheap??? Why?
    Isn’t there anything like a “Pferdefuß”?
    And why didn’t you tell us before? đŸ˜‰

  3. On March 14, 2007, 16:43 CET, Bernhard said:

    These both blog entries and the comment of Eric shocked me a little bit.
    So, it seems to be great for testing and personal presentation but for commercial websites (even very small ones) these long downtimes can’t be accepted.
    And I just thought and found some Rails support at an affordable price so that I don’t have to care about my virtual server any longer 

    Or am I wrong?

  4. On March 14, 2007, 16:50 CET, Jens Oliver Meiert said:

    Yes, uptime’s sometimes an issue
 yet I never had any overly long downtime periods.

    See for yourself and monitor your DreamHost site (or my own WHWS, which is, unlike this site, hosted with DreamHost), for example using Montastic.

  5. On March 14, 2007, 17:33 CET, medyk said:

    I wonder how many of you really use that hundreds GB’s of disk space or TB’s of transfer (?)
    To me they’re just marketing catch and unfortunately (up to my experiences) the uptime and speed experienced on their servers is below average. Many other host provide much more balanced service in that case for similar price.

    I think best advantage of Dreamhost is possibilities you have on shared server.. like building your own compilation of PHP I don’t know any other host that will allow that.

  6. On August 19, 2007, 14:46 CEST, Web Hosting in Australia said:

    I’ve used DreamHost for a few of my clients and I have always found the servers to be big on features (very important) but slow on speed. I think they cram so many web sites on their servers that it slows them right down

  7. On October 22, 2009, 12:32 CEST, Linto Dilt said:

    In reality, if you use a large amount of disk space (e.g. 20GB for a database), they will contact you and ask you to remove it đŸ˜”

    It is great cheap hosting though, especially if you sign other people up.

  8. On May 13, 2010, 16:50 CEST, Justin said:

    I have never felt the need to give DreamHost a try, something just made me think they provided terrible service. I’ll be sure to add them to my recommended list since you have shared a positive experience with them and I’ll give them a go if I start having problems with my current host or need another to host another site.

  9. On October 15, 2010, 13:00 CEST, Shared Sh. said:

    I’ve been a pretty happy Dreamhost customer for a couple years now, but I won’t delude myself into thinking they are the best hosts around. I’ve been burned by uber-affordable hosting before. If my site, and many of my clients’ sites, go down for a day or get throttled or the other myriad problems Dreamhost customers encounter (it’s not just the recent, third party LA datacentre), I have only myself to blame.
    You always, always get what you pay for.