DreamHost - Brea, California

Mike Reed

DO NOT HOST WITH THEM.

Had my site hosted for years. Until...
- They've steadily increased prices, now it costs $15/mo to host
- Extremely expensive for simple hosting.
- It's impossible to get support and when you do, they charge you for it. Ridiculous.
- Their shared servers are very slow.
- There webmail is horrible outdated and hard to tag emails as spam.

Dennis

Can't agree more with what others have said. I hosted my website with them for over 5 years, and was always recommending that company. Until I had enough. Major issues:

1. They've already done this to me twice. One day you wake up and your website just stops working. You try to log in to the admin panel and pretty much everything is broken. You don't even know where to start. Eventually you contact DreamHost and learn that they upgraded your PHP (or whatever language was used for your server side scripts) to the latest and greatest version, and it broke everything.

2. Their control panel is very convoluted and hard to use. The login is overly complicated to the point of a major pain in the a$$.

3. Like others have suggested, support takes forever to get back to you. And usually if they do, they either blame you or leave you hanging. Like in the example of "force-upgrading" your server-side language version, I asked them to return it back to the previous configuration, for which the guy told me that they "do it for me to keep my site safe." I wonder if they also do it for me to pay someone to adjust the site to work again after their "keeping me safe"?

And the final straw for me was a week ago when my website stopped working again. After the usual thing, I learned that they again "migrated" my site to a new server and broke everything. On top of that they also lost the backups and gave me a long list of things that needs to be done to make my previously working website function again.

So that is enough! I'll be looking for a new hosting company.

Micha Petty

I've been hosting our rescue center's website with DreamHost for 14 years. Yesterday, they accidentally deleted our website AND ALL OF ITS BACKUPS.

They managed to restore a backup of mine from 2019, meaning we lost a complete revamp of the site, our extensive shop, our blog, and basically countless hours of work for the past four years which I do not have time to recreate.

They were very nonchalant about it, though they did say they were sorry that "I was experiencing trouble with my website."

Yes, I know I should have my own up-to-date backups. That isn't something I excel at, so I was actually paying Dreamhost extra every month for an offsite backup service, Jetpack Pro. When I log into Jetpack, though, it does not show me having pro status anymore, despite my having set it up years ago. I emailed them asking why and just got an irrelevant copypasta reply. I am left to guess that Dreamhost has been pocketing that money for who knows how long.

So I'm basically screwed, despite years of paying hundreds of dollars a year for a premium plan. But hey- they didn't entirely disappoint. They credited me $35 after reluctantly admitting their mistake. ?

I can't say that I still recommend Dreamhost or the Jetpack Pro offering and I apologize to any of the people I sent their way over the years.

I'm still sinking under the gravity of this. Fun times. Like others have said, this used to be a decent hosting service but those days are quite obviously gone.

Angela Bee

Very disappointing company. Expensive and takes forever for each page and updates to load. Good luck getting in touch with customer service. Their server is always down. Loosing lots of client since the website takes forever to load and is down at random times. Spent a fortune on seo and design service but selected the wrong hosting company.

C.S. Montgomery

DreamHost wasn’t so Dreamy! I was with DreamHost for several years always having issues with the uptime of my sites. While I had an entry level Virtual Private Server (VPS) with DreamHost, I had never had an issue like this with my previous VPS providers. Trouble tickets were created with DreamHost Support over the years and I would always follow any advice to optimize the speed of the processor and/or RAM usage, however nothing seemed to change the performance of my sites on their VPS. Also, just because you purchased a VPS with DreamHost does not mean that your SQL databases will run on it. I’m pretty sure they are still using shared hosting for your SQL databases and they upsell you to move them over to a faster VPS.

In addition to the uptime issues, they kept raising their rates on a VPS that was not working properly and auto renewing my contract. If you don’t cancel your auto renewing VPS subscription in time, they will charge you for everyday that it is open or running, so be sure to backup your sites and cancel or close your VPS before the plan auto renews.

If you are looking for a VPS I would do your research because hosting companies have a huge markup on their products. I would recommend looking at a VPS like AWS Lightsail. It may take a little more work and education on the platform to get started however in the long run you will understand how a VPS works with a lower overall expense. I hope this helps someone that has had the same experience that I have had with DreamHost.

Mike Martinez

Absolutely the worst web hosting company experience I have ever had. I went all in on a 3-year plan because the price was right, and I was looking to save some money. Their dashboard is overly technical and not laid out intuitively at all. Their "free" email service is dated, clunky, and well, just old. Their customer support would be totally an SNL skit (entertaining and funny) if it wasn't so shoddy, inconsistent, and glaringly inept. They can't even get basic domain name transfers done in an efficient and timely manner. MY ADVICE: SAVE YOURSELF THE STRESS, PAY A LITTLE MORE SOMEWHERE ELSE, AND STAY AWAY FROM THIS COMPANY!

Michael King

I wanted to sign up for one months service, on checkout the site switched me to the most expensive plan and charged my debit card over $720.00. I did get a hold of them after about three days and they were willing to refund me but I was ignorant in thinking I could let them have the money because I could use the hosting anyway.

I own a record label, I'm trying to post new music on my website and once again, Dreamhost has failed to provide a usable panel. I can't even change my password on the VPS user account because their stuff is messed up and they admit it. It's been since 12PM today, there was one update at 3PM saying they had a fix and it is now 9:21PM and I still can't change my password.

I am going to try to get in touch with a customer service manager and get the remainder of my money back in the morning. This is B.S.! Garbage!

CARL STANTON

Hosting wise I’ve had no issues for two websites, this is my issue, I’ve had happy hosting since 2009, which was unlimited everything for 119.00 a year, last year they decided to jack it up to 155.00 or so, I thought it was for domains why I had the extra amount,

Checking the billing this year I find that they took it upon themselves to increase this. After numerous emails and chats the best the would offer me is a three year promotional price paid up front.

Needless to say I’m old school and a deal is a deal, so I won’t renew and can’t recommend this company to anyone else. Happy unhosting dreamhost.