I have been with Dreamhost now for over a year and I thought I would share my experiences. I first signed up on a special deal for a completely unlimited package with all the disk space and bandwidth I can use for $10 a month (£6.50 to me). Obviously pretty cheap when I had previously been paying around £20 a month for a few gigs of space and a hundred or so gigs of bandwidth.

So the first instinct was the old oversubscribing argument that for hosting so cheap they must be oversubscribed and hence slow speeds and crappy underpowered servers. However my experience has been quite the opposite. The first thing I have to congratulate them on is the excellent bandwidth and server stability. I’ve had less problems with Dreamhost than with any host I’ve used. There has been the occasional minute of downtime, but I’m hardly a multimillion dollar e-commerce site and these occurrences have been rare. Not to mention that as a continuing customer I still continue to get free rewards like a year’s free domain payment.

Secondly I have to praise their support systems and personnel, they are a light-hearted and helpful bunch who have always been there to help me out with any questions I’ve had quickly and professionally. Also of note is their forum and the wiki they keep up to date and full of helpful information. There are guides there on many aspects of the hosting packages and control panel. It was particularly helpful to me in setting up awstats on my site.

One thing that may put you off is Dreamhost’s custom control panel software, I’ve used cpanel and plesk in the past which are both pretty good systems though Dreamhost’s panel may take a little getting used to it has every feature I’ve used in cpanel and plesk and a lot more to boot. It will even automatically set up all your domain records for using Google apps so getting your own email through Gmail is as easy as possible.

So all in all I have to give Dreamhost a shining review, they seem secure, stable and helpful. Their latest deal is aroud $9 for the same package I’m on at the moment: