DreamPress Review – Best WordPress Hosting of 2022

DreamHost is a 25-year old web hosting company situated in Los Angeles, United States. It has several plans to serve customer needs and requirements.

My sites have been hosted on this host for the last 2 years. DreamPress is one of the best WordPress hosting plans with quick loading times. 

Also Read – Check Performance of Best WordPress Hosting Rocket.net

It was started by Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil, undergraduate students at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.

Common hosting services include – Shared Website Hosting, VPS Hosting, Managed WordPress Hosting, Dedicated Server Hosting and Cloud Hosting

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30GB SSD Storage is an advantage of this managed hosting plan. 

Just like other hosting companies, DreamHost provides managed WordPress hosting in the form of DreamPress plans. The three main forms are – WordPress Basic, DreamPress and VPS WordPress

Also Read – Why Rocket.net is Best WordPress Hosting in 2021? Simple Features

In this complete guide, we are going to see the benefits of DreamHost DreamPress Review and its performance. 

DreamPress Plans

There are 3 main plans under the DreamPress Category – DreamPress – best for starters and normal blogs. 

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This DreamHost review will talk about the features of managed WordPress hosting services and performance metrics. 

If you want to upgrade your business when traffic increases, then you need DreamPress Plus. It also provides faster content delivery, 

Also Read – SiteGround Hosting Review – New Control Panel Interface in 2019

WordPress hosting platform should provide quick installation of WordPress and have high uptime.

In addition support staff should be of expert level. DreamHost plans provide the unique feature of selecting the server location. It can be in united states, if you want to be ranking higher in US Google search results. 

DreamHost DreamPress – Pros

When your site or blog reaches the million visit mark, you need high-capacity architecture and extreme performance. DreamPress Pro is suited for those high-end websites. 

DreamHost DreamPress does the best of the two worlds. You get faster response from the server and can handle large traffic of 100k visitors.

It is useful for medium website owners. Organic traffic and Paid traffic can be handled well by this wordpress web hosting company. 

Also Read – Migrate WordPress Site to DreamHost

DreamPress Pricing

DreamPress annual plans save 15% over monthly plans. It costs $16.95 billed monthly on annual plan.

First-time users have better discounts. DreamPress pricing is also economical when you compare with the same managed wordpress hosting plans of other hosting service providers | Get DreamPress Now (aff)

Business Sites

DreamPress Plus costs $24.95 billed monthly with a 17% saving on annual plan. Unlimited CDN and JetPack Professional are the main extra features over the basic DreamPress plan. 

The dreamhost panel is easy to create email accounts and install path.

Entrepreneurs

DreamPress Pro costs $71.95 billed monthly for entrepreneurs and network builders. It costs little and is only needed when your traffic volume exceeds 1M+ visitors per month. 

Also Read – Transfer Emails Siteground to DreamHost Email Hosting – Simple Steps

Unlimited bandwidth is of great importance if you have too many resources on your webpage. The number of requests will be high. 

Unlike the shared hosting plans, each website is billed under these plans. For example, 1 site will cost around $203/year when billed annually for a basic DreamPress plan. 

Also Read – WP Review Pro – Best #1 Star Rating Plugin of 2020

This DreamPress review will talk about the common features of this kind of plans. The rating review by several hosting industry experts gave excellent remarks to this host.

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Personally, my recommendation is it is one of the best WordPress web hosting plans. 

DreamPress Features 

  1. It is suited to approximately 100k monthly visitors. The impact website won’t be shut down if it suddenly increases, but performance may degrade. You can then request more resources or upgrade to a higher plan. 
  2. Unlimited Email – With each domain, you can create an unlimited number of domain emails. 
  3. 30GB SSD storage is provided – It boosts the performance by 200% as the read/write transfers are quicker. Compared to traditional hard disks, SSDs fail less and perform better. 
  4. Unmetered bandwidth – If you have too many videos or images within the 30GB limit, the bandwidth transfer between the server and visitors is not limited. 

Also Read – Ads for WP – How to show Ads on AMP pages and posts

Special Features

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  1. SSL Certificate Preinstalled – If it is the only domain under this plan, automatic installation of the SSL certificate takes place. It makes the domain HTTPS secure and ranks well in Google. 
  2. On-Demand + Daily Backups – Everyday site backup is taken to prevent any failure or loss of resources. Restoration is also very easy. When you need additional backups, that is also possible. Loading times are quick. 
  3. 24/7 WordPress Expert Support – In addition to regular chat support and tickets, you get access to an expert level team of WordPress elite members. They are the in-house team of DreamHost, and technical support is an asset. 
  4. 1-Click Staging – You can move your live WordPress site offline and test new themes, plugins, CSS code. Make sure they are working properly, and then upload them to the live site. It will make sure nothing breaks the site. 
  5. Free Automated WordPress Migration – When you are on a different host like SiteGround, Bluehost, Kinsta, Inmotion Hosting and would like to migrate your site to DreamPress, it’s a breeze. You can make use of the DreamHost Automated Migration plugin. 
  6. WP Website Builder – With attractive templates, easy site creation wizards, drag-n-drop editors, you can create stunning WordPress blogs using the basic DreamPress plan. 

Extra Features

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  1. Built-in Caching – Server caching in the form of Varnish cache helps your site serve visitors very quickly. It reduces the first-byte time and TTFB values to well below 200ms. It reduces the burden of adding additional caching plugins. 
  2. Automatic WordPress Updates- Core and security updates of WordPress can be automated using this plan. It reduces the manual intervention. 
  3. Free Domain and Privacy – If you take up the annual plan and register the domain within the first 3 months, a free domain of listed TLDs is provided. Privacy to this domain is also free. It is useful for starters. 
  4. Custom build Control Panel- Normally, cPanel is provided by many hosting companies. It is a little clumsy in the present period of 2021. The customized interface makes creating DB, email accounts, and wordpress installation much easier. 
  5. Advanced Features – SFTP, Shell access, WP-CLI and more features are provided as part of DreamPress. They disallow common request methods like FTP for security purposes. 
  6. Support – WordPress specialized support, live chat support, phone support callbacks are assets of the DreamPress plan. The technical support is good enough. You can also place tickets if you are a non-native speaker of English. 
  7.  30-day money-back guarantee – If you are not satisfied with their plans in the first 30 days, you can get a refund. 

Hardware and Software Specifications – DreamPress Review

What you won’t find in the DreamPress documentation are the server technical details. It is because your website is loaded from a cloud architecture virtual instance. The following are the details I got from their support team.

xxxxx is currently running under a DreamPress plan. These run virtual instances providing 2 virtual server-grade processor cores, 1.5GB RAM and 30GB SSD storage.

On the software side, the instances run on OpenStack, Ubuntu 18.04, and MySQL 5.7.29. DreamPress plans limit the number of databases they can run to 1, as they are set up to run a single site under a single install and don’t support multisite

Source: DreamHost

Virtual private servers resemble dedicated hardware. The final user will have the same experience as that of dedicated server. The impact website had good TTFB and core web vitals in our case-study. DreamHost backup is also good and is easy to gain access. 

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DreamHost control panel is also intuitive and requires less input from the user. Most the fields are self-explanatory. DreamHost WordPress plans are easy to manage with this kind of server configuration. You need not worry about the backend.

Dream host DreamPress – TTFB

One of the main advantages of DreamPress compared to shared hosting plans of DreamHost is the fast initial response from the server. When a visitor requests a web page from the server, its first byte is served within 100 to 200ms.

Dream Host has powerful servers where quick response can be got. The shared hosting plans are little slower in this regard. The main advantage of DreamPress is the low TTFB times.

Read Case – Study – [Review] DreamPress and TTFB – Can we get good value with DreamHost’s plan?

It makes the visitor more comfortable seeing his page load quicker than others. On shared hosting plans, the initial byte response takes around 800 to 1000ms. The user cannot wait that long and may move away to other sites.

Also, page speed is a ranking signal, according to Google and Bing. Faster websites always tend to rank better in search engines. Time to first byte (TTFB) is one of the speed performance metrics that shows how good the hosting and the web service is.

We did a case study with DreamPress and TTFB using 9 different server locations. Our site was located in the US region, and when the speed testing tool was from Virginia, TTFB was below 150ms.

WordPress backup is required when any changes to the live site have given 404 or 502 errors. Sometimes, you can lose images, posts that have taken lot of time to create. In that case dreamhost backup helps to restore to normalcy. 

DreamPress and Core Web Vitals

User Experience comes first when users visit your site for information, shopping and content. Google has made it easy to measure the web vitals metrics in LCP, CLS and TBT. It has mentioned what good indicators and bad scores are.

Search Console also has an item called Page Experience where it indicates the number of web pages of your site that pass the core web vitals test. These metrics are mainly based on loading, interactivity and visual stability.

Read More – Core Web Vitals : DreamPress + GeneratePress – Is it Worthy – Test Results

Though the server and DreamPress plan has nothing to do much, we tested for core web vitals on this plan. Code optimization, themes, layout, and defer elements play a major role in this aspect.

DreamPress and GTMetrix Test – Without Google Adsense (Display) and AnyClip Ads (Video)

We used the WebPageTest speed testing tool to measure the different performance metrics in the above case studies. We are also going to test using the GTMetrix test and see the performance results.

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One important things that can spoil the performance and structure metrics are the display and video ads. GTMetrix provides a setting where you can enable AdBlock plus to test the page without ads.

Keeping all the other parameters constant, we tested the same web page without ads loading.

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When we tested without ads, we got a perfect GTMetrix Grade A score. The Performance and Structure scores were also 100%. The Core Web Vitals were also green. LCP was 618ms, TBT was 15ms, and CLS was 0.

TTFB was only 150ms which was below the 200ms, as recommended by Google. Since there were no display and video ads, it reduced the fully loaded time to 1.1s. The total page size was only 250KB.

It means that the GeneratePress theme and WP Rocket cache plugin were also useful in reducing HTML code. Also, the built-in cache of the Varnish cache drastically improves the loading time. In addition, we have Cloudflare to reduce the paint times of JS elements of plugins.

DreamPress and Mobile (AMP)

We did not have an accurate picture of mobile page speed load, as we installed the AMP plugin on the site. Google creates a cache of the mobile pages in the form of AMP, which drastically improves the speed metrics. We used the default AMP plugin from Google.

Still, we wanted to measure the mobile results using the WebPageTest. We ran a test with a test configuration as Mobile – 4G for testing the core web vitals. It used the same web page.

The test server location was Virginia, USA and used Chrome browser.

The TTFB was 286ms for the AMP page. LCP and CLS were in the green, but TBT was in red. It was mainly because of the ad-JS from cdn.ampproject.org. If we can disable the ads and check the results, we will obtain a better score.

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Using the GTMetrix test configuration of LTE Mobile (15/10 Mbps) and AdBlock Plus turned on, we got a B Grade Score. The Performance was 80%, and Structure was 96%. LCP was 1.9s, TBT was 0ms, and CLS was 0.01.

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TTFB was 565ms. The main issue was render-blocking resources because of font files. If we minify and cache the font files, too, we can get a better score.

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Google Tag Manager and analytics code on AMP pages were spoiling the total loading time to 3.8s. If we can optimize the AMP JS code and defer it, we can measure better speed improvements.

DreamPress Tech Support

The domain connected to DreamPress gets special support from the elite WordPress professionals, as mentioned in the features list.

 Dream Host chat support can be availed only in specific times. But 24×7 ticket request support is there always.

You can either talk to a live agent or open a support ticket. Both are quick to respond. Chats start quickly without much delay. Even if there is a queue, it will be only 2 to 3 people. The ticket support system is also fast.

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You get a quick response within 15 to 30 minutes. The advantage of ticket support is that specialist, and detailed replies are received. You have time to script the issue, and answers will also be of expert level.

To know more DreamHost plans, you can read my review here.

Talking to the live support team is also possible. But I never needed that, as I was a non-native English speaker and feel comfortable with chat and ticket system.

DreamPress Review – Best WordPress Hosting of 2022
DreamPress Review – Best WordPress Hosting of 2022

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