DreamHost entered the cloud hosting market in 2018 with the launch of DreamCompute. As one of the earliest and most established shared web hosting companies, DreamHost brought a wealth of experience to the cloud hosting space.
DreamHost offers cloud VPS servers on a pay-as-you-go basis, allowing users to scale resources up and down as needed. Users can choose between standard, high memory, and high CPU instances. DreamHost cloud servers run on the OpenStack platform and are hosted on Dell hardware.
Features and Benefits:
Some key features of DreamHost’s cloud hosting include:
Support for custom Linux distributions beyond Ubuntu and CentOS. Images for Debian, Fedora, and FreeBSD are available.
Integration with DreamHost’s one-click installer for popular apps like WordPress and Drupal. Apps can be set up with a few clicks.
SSH access and root privileges on cloud servers for full control.
Support for automated vertical and horizontal scaling of resources.
Snapshot backup capabilities to restore servers to previous states.
DreamHost’s control panel and SSH access provides server management capabilities.
Geographic selection – choice of data center locations in the US, Canada, and Europe.
IPv6 support on all plans.
The combination of rapid provisioning, scalability, and DreamHost’s user-friendly control panel makes their cloud hosting very convenient for managing infrastructure.
Pricing:
DreamHost uses a pay-as-you-go model for cloud hosting. There is no committed monthly cost. Pricing starts at $4.50/month for a 1GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 30GB SSD instance.
Additional resources like RAM, CPU cores, SSD storage, and bandwidth can be added as needed at an hourly rate. So the cost scales directly with usage. For high traffic sites that need beefier resources, the overall hosting costs will be higher.
DreamHost does not charge for inbound data transfer, so bandwidth costs are based solely on outbound traffic usage. This makes cost management easier.
The pricing is competitive with other cloud providers. The pay-as-you-go model provides flexibility for spiky traffic sites where resource needs fluctuate.
Pros and Cons of DreamHost Cloud
The lack of Windows support and a full suite of DevOps tools puts DreamHost cloud at a disadvantage with developers. The service is more tailored to Linux-based sites and apps that want an easy to use PaaS experience.
User Reviews:
Here are a few user reviews from Trustpilot and other sources to highlight real customer experiences with DreamHost cloud hosting:
Positive:
“DreamHost cloud has worked flawlessly for my business site. Scaling up resources takes just a few clicks and happens instantly. Love the per-hour billing – I can crank up the power when traffic spikes then scale back down to save costs when it’s quiet.”
“I switched over a couple low-traffic WordPress sites to DreamHost’s cloud platform and it’s been great. Performance is consistently fast and I haven’t had any downtime.”
“Their cloud hosting UI is so intuitive. It’s really optimized for people without a ton of technical skills. I can manage everything easily without needing to use the command line.”
Negative:
“While DreamHost cloud is very easy to use, I hit some performance limitations pretty quickly on my e-commerce store during peak traffic. It’s just not built to handle extremely high loads.”
“No auto-scaling groups is a big negative for me. I don’t want to have to manually add new resources every time traffic spikes.”
“I would like to see broader application integration beyond just WordPress and Drupal. Better DevOps support in general would make this more competitive.”
Conclusion:
DreamHost cloud hosting provides fast, flexible virtual servers combined with DreamHost’s friendly user experience. While not yet fully competitive with hyperscale cloud platforms, DreamHost excels at delivering an easy to use cloud hosting environment.
If your needs are limited to Linux hosting with moderate traffic loads, DreamHost could be an excellent choice. The lack of autoscaling and load balancing makes it less ideal for large scale dynamic workloads. But for small to mid-sized sites that want scalability without complexity, DreamHost cloud hosting is worth considering.
