One of the top reviews suggested by wordpress.org official team is DreamHost review. The pricing is moderate compared to other managed WordPress hosting plans. The tech support is also very good with immediate rectification of small issues. The uptime is great.
You would think you can leave your WordPress site installed and leave it for years. The automatic renewal would take care of on your credit card. But there are some trivial issues that have to be compared with another great hosting company called HostArmada.
As we know core web vitals(CWV) are a small, but significant signal in ranking of pages on Google and Bing. If all other ranking factors are constant then page loading speed and CWV makes a difference. Also, the user experience is dependent on how quickly the page loads.
In turn this factor depends on the time to first byte (TTFB). The time taken to render the first byte and show the first image or text is important from a visitor point of view.
In this DreamHost review we are going to see some important speed details related to shared hosting plans. As an alternative we see the HostArmada results on the same kind of hosting plan. BTW, it costs much less than Dreamhost shared hosting.
DreamHost Review of Shared Hosting Plan – PageSpeed Insights, Core Web Vitals and TTFB Test
To see the results of this test we have taken a website on Dreamhost shared hosting plan. The article has 8 images. I used Google’s PageSpeed Insights test to test different variables including cwv and ttfb.
The mobile score was red and core web vitals were all in red. Though AMP pages were not used on this site, it reflects the poor performance of DreamHost shared hosting plans. The desktop score was better. The core web vitals were mostly in green.
In order to confirm these results, the same page was tested using the GTMetrix free plan test.
We got a C grade for the standard test results. The fully loaded time was 3.4s. But the TTFB time was more than 1 second, which shows the poor performance of the dreamhost shared hosting plan. In most of my tests I can confirm that shared hosting plans give very poor initial server response time.
HostArmada Shared Hosting Review – PageSpeed, Core Web Vitals and TTFB Results
Since we did not yet transfer this site to HostArmada, we took another test page with 10 images. This site had AMP installed. The mobile score was in green. In addition, all the CWV factors were also well within limits. The desktop score was also good with green parameters.
The same page was tested with the GTMetrix test. We got a B grade with good LCP and CLS scores. The TBT was in red for desktop testing. Most important of all, the TTFB parameter was very low. It took only <300ms, for the initial server response time.
The page loaded in just 2.5s. In addition the size of the page and number of resources loaded also were very few.
To know more about DreamHost hosting you can read my review here.
Conclusion
From the above test results we can say that HostArmada was better than Dreamhost in speed and performance. In order to have a common leveling field, we tested the shared hosting plans on both the servers.
As we found out, Dreamhost shared plan is not recommended if you are looking for quick pagespeed and best core web vitals on mobile. The most important of all, ttfb is much higher in dreamhost compared to hostarmada. It causes the user to wait more for the page to load and also has negative effect on ranking signal.
I would recommend WordPress site makers to go for HostArmada shared hosting plan while considering speed, as it is much cheaper than DreamHost.