About Dreamhost
Dreamhost has been hosting websites since April 1997 and now hosts over 200,000 sites. They give away insane amounts of bandwidth and diskspace for a low price. They have bare bones service which won't appeal to someone wanting personal support - especially phone support.
Price & Capacity
$9.95 (1-year) gets you 180 GB of diskspace and 1.8 Terabytes (1,800 GB) of transfer. Their higher plan gives you 270 GB of diskspace and 2.7 TB of transfer. They have higher plans but these limits are so high that the higher limits are almost irrelevant. Not only do they give you tons of bandwidth and diskspace but there limits increase on a weekly basis. They have a $49.95 setup fee if you go with a monthly plan so the 1-year plan is almost mandatory and they have a price freeze in effect guaranteeing that any price you sign up for on a recurring plan will never increase.
Features
They have an incredible 97 day money back guarantee. With their accounts they give you: Frontpage, raw logs, stats, daily backup, Anonymous FTP Server (requires a unique IP which is $4.95/month), CGI, crontab, full Unix shell, PHP4 and PHP5 support, custom DNS, unlimited subdomains, unlimited domains hosted, 1 free domain, webmail, unlimited MySQL databases, and a web-based control panel. With their $15.95/month account they give you a free MIVA Merchant License ($695 value).
Reliability and Support
According to Dreamhost: "We take a 'three-step' approach to technical support. We believe that access to clear documentation and a helpful user community results in fewer problems and a better user experience for all our customers." First, they want you to check for your answer in the Support Wiki. Second, you need to look through the discussion forums. Then when all else fails, you contact the technical support team via e-mail (24 hour e-mail support). They try to answer all emails within 24 hours, and most are answered in subtantially less time. For the $9.95/month plan you don't get any phone support at all. For the $15.95/month plan you get 1 call-back from tech suport. Their support team has a reputation for being slow and unhelpful - sometimes support tickets take 3-4 days to be responded to. But this is the kind of place where if you need support you should go somewhere else.
Random
They have a very generous referral program which a lot of people like and they have dedicated hosting plans starting at $99 per month.
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| Price: | 8 / 10 |
| Features: | 9 / 10 |
| Reliability: | 7 / 10 |
| Service: | 4 / 10 |
| Bandwidth: | 1.8 TB |
| Disk Space: | 180 GB |
| Price: | $9.95/mo. |
| MySQL Databases: | unlimited |
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