Blog: DreamHost is the Dream Host
Menu
DreamHost is the Dream Host - Tuesday, November 1, 2022
Since my hosting term was about to renew, I wanted to take a second crack at evaluating alternatives to DreamHost. I realized that if I was willing to give up things like unlimited disk space and unlimited hosted sites (I'm not hosting multiple sites anymore), I could find a cheaper plan just about anywhere. But as I mentioned in a recent post, a lot of the big web hosts seem to not have a great reputation for one reason or another.
I finally decided to give one particular host a try. We'll just call them Host B. It's one of the few hosts generally recommended by Reddit's r/webhosting community. Unfortunately, the experience left a bit to be desired. While DreamHost has supported multiple users for as long as I can remember, Host B only provides this under their slightly more expensive reseller plans. I have a couple subdomains and I serve them out of different user accounts for greater segmentation, so the ability to create multiple users is important to me.
There were also some technical issues. Host B uses cPanel, and there I had the ability to create an FTP subaccount, but the FTP server didn't accept my credentials. And the automated SSL certificate deployment was broken - when visiting my site, my browser showed an error saying that the cert was invalid and belonged to a random website.
At this point I had a day before my hosting would renew, so I decided to just stay with DreamHost for another year. But I did downgrade to the cheaper plan which will save me $72 a year. On this plan I still get 50GB of disk space, which is way more than I've been using. I did have to give up email forwarding (it costs extra with the cheaper plan), but now that my domain is registered with Google Domains, I'm able to set up forwarding for free there.
I do like DreamHost. There's a reason why I've been with them for nearly 16 years. Their customer support is top-notch, their custom-built admin panel is easier to use than cPanel, and everything just works. Well, occasionally (not frequently) there are hiccups like I talked about in my previous post, but their sysadmins are usually on top of those. So now that I'm paying a pretty reasonable price, I feel happy sticking with them for the foreseeable future. Maybe even for another 16 years.
I finally decided to give one particular host a try. We'll just call them Host B. It's one of the few hosts generally recommended by Reddit's r/webhosting community. Unfortunately, the experience left a bit to be desired. While DreamHost has supported multiple users for as long as I can remember, Host B only provides this under their slightly more expensive reseller plans. I have a couple subdomains and I serve them out of different user accounts for greater segmentation, so the ability to create multiple users is important to me.
There were also some technical issues. Host B uses cPanel, and there I had the ability to create an FTP subaccount, but the FTP server didn't accept my credentials. And the automated SSL certificate deployment was broken - when visiting my site, my browser showed an error saying that the cert was invalid and belonged to a random website.
At this point I had a day before my hosting would renew, so I decided to just stay with DreamHost for another year. But I did downgrade to the cheaper plan which will save me $72 a year. On this plan I still get 50GB of disk space, which is way more than I've been using. I did have to give up email forwarding (it costs extra with the cheaper plan), but now that my domain is registered with Google Domains, I'm able to set up forwarding for free there.
I do like DreamHost. There's a reason why I've been with them for nearly 16 years. Their customer support is top-notch, their custom-built admin panel is easier to use than cPanel, and everything just works. Well, occasionally (not frequently) there are hiccups like I talked about in my previous post, but their sysadmins are usually on top of those. So now that I'm paying a pretty reasonable price, I feel happy sticking with them for the foreseeable future. Maybe even for another 16 years.