DreamHost Managed Hosting

DreamHost Managed Web Hosting Review 2017

DreamHost’s DreamPress hosting offers managed WordPress hosting functionality at an affordable price point. If you’re interested in even more affordable pricing, we also reviewed DreamHost’s shared hosting, though it didn’t perform very well.

DreamHost is one of the oldest hosts around and now hosts millions of websites worldwide. So when you go with DreamPress, you know that you’re getting reliability.

Keep reading to learn more about DreamPress and see our real testing results.

Overview of DreamPress Features

When you go with Dreamhost’s managed DreamPress hosting, here’s what you can expect:

• 5x faster than DreamHost’s shared plan
• Pre-installed WordPress
• 30GB SSD storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• PHP 7 and HTTP2
• Built-in caching
• Isolated server resources
• WordPress-specific firewall and other security measures
• Pre-installed SSL certificate
• 24/7/365 support via email, live chat, or phone callback

DreamHost’s DreamPress plan definitely offers an attractive list of features, but let’s see how it performs. In the next section, we’ll show you our testing data for our test site hosted on DreamHost’s DreamPress plan.

DreamHost DreamPress Performance – Real Testing Data

While Dreamhost’s shared plans were a dud in our tests, DreamPress performed very well.

For Time to First Byte, a basic measure of server responsiveness, our DreamPress test server responded in 0.44 seconds. This was right in line with similarly priced managed WordPress hosts. Only ultra premium hosts like Liquid Web and Kinsta were significantly faster.

For average page load time, our test site clocked in at 2.20 seconds. We would’ve liked to have seen this number be a little lower, but 2.20 seconds is not horrible. Most similarly priced hosts were able to at least break the 2 second mark, though.

Finally, our test site’s uptime (a measure of reliability) was excellent, coming in at 99.99% uptime. We can’t really complain about 99.99%!

Overall, we were happy with DreamPress’ Time to First Byte and uptime. Ideally, average page load time would be a little faster, though.

DreamHost Data Center Locations

You should always consider data centers when choosing a host because a closer data center typically equals better performance. So whenever possible, you want to pick a host that has a data center near your target audience.

DreamHost offers two different data centers in the USA. One on the east coast and one on the west coast. While that’s great if you’re targeting a North American audience, it’s not so great if your core audience is in Europe or Asia.

A CDN can help you mitigate this issue, though.

DreamHost Hosting Technology

Like SiteGround, DreamHost does a good job staying abreast with the latest technologies. First off, you get SSD storage on all plans.

Second, DreamHost supports PHP 7, which offers improved performance over older versions You’ll need to ask support to upgrade to PHP 7, though. It’s not the default.

And third, DreamPress offers HTTP2. HTTP2 is another new technology which, without going into the gory details, offers big performance improvements over previous versions.

DreamHost Support and Knowledge Base

DreamHost offers 24/7/365 support for all their plans. However, DreamPress plans get access to better support channels. Those are live chat, ticket, Twitter, or a phone callback. Shared plans don’t get that callback option.

DreamHost also has a knowledge base with about 800 articles if you’re a fan of solving things by yourself.

DreamHost DreamPress Plans and Pricing

Like their shared plan, there’s only one tier for DreamHost’s managed WordPress DreamPress hosting.

For DreamPress, you have two different billing options:

• Month-to-month at $19.95 per month.
• Annual at $16.95 per month.

Remember, with DreamPress you get 30GB of SSD storage, isolated server resources, unlimited bandwidth, and a full suite of managed WordPress features.

As far as managed WordPress hosting goes, DreamPress is very affordable.

Should You Choose DreamPress?

DreamHost’s DreamPress plan offers good mid-range value for webmasters who need more performance than shared hosting but aren’t quite ready to shell out $100 per month on a premium host like Kinsta or Liquid Web.

If that sounds like you, we recommend you give DreamPress strong consideration.