Great easy to use web hosting company with few limits (dreamhost.com)

Member Name: non_sense

Product:	dreamhost.com
Date:	31/10/08 (153 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to control and manage, lots of options for what you can do

Disadvantages: Might be too many options to take in!

I don't have a particularly big online presence, I manage a few domains for myself and friends to have personal email and to share photos, update a blog from time to time. These aren't essential for a happy life and many of the features are available free, but it's nice to have your own domain and control exactly what is on them.

Lots of shared hosting companies exist that put limits on what you can do. I chose Dreamhost on the recommendation of a friend as they don't impose many limits.

Dreamhost are also good if you have a more commercial need for a website. They allow you to host an unlimited number of domains with them, it doesn't matter which company you regsitered the domain with, you are allowed unlimited subdomains and email addresses. You control all of these settings too, no limits on what you can do each day or extra payments for more than 10 email addresses for example. You can install any website software you choose on the servers

Here's some of the things they offer:

- 500GB Disk Storage
- 5.0 TB Bandwidth
- Unlimited email accounts
- Full shell access (servers are linux)
- POP/SMTP/IMAP email access
- Webmail at your domain
- Unlimited MySQL databases
- 50GB Personal backup space

That's only a taste, it would take me a long time to list them all! To make your life easier they have a fantastic control panel that they have developed themselves, this is not the same as you will find at other hosts. Here you can setup your hosting, create shell accounts for server access, register domains, create mailboxes, email forwarding and so on.

Another nice feature for less experienced users (or lazy ones like me) is the one-click installers. Here you can install software on your website, such as a wiki, blog, photo gallery with a single click. There will be some configuration work for you, but they provide all the instructions.

If you're a more advanced user I'd suggest taking a look at their site for some of the more advanced features, such as ruby-on-rails, perl, python, dedicated server hosting, VPN access, google apps, gmail integration and many more.

A google search may provide some info of a little error that Dreamhost made earlier this year when they managed to bill many of their customers for an extra year of hosting in advance. They did manage to reverse all of the transactions (you don't HAVE to have your credit card details stored with them by the way) and they even covered bank fees for people who lost money when other payments got rejected from their banks as a result.

They're very honest about mistakes, they have a good website giving details of all outages and problems. They also have a blog giving you some humorous updates on the company and a wiki to help you out with things you don't understand.

On the couple of occasions I've had to contact support they've dealt with my problems within 30 minutes and been very helpful (1 was my fault, 1 theirs)

They also give you an incentive to recruit more customers, you are able to give discount codes to friends that reduce their costs and give you a little something too. The actual cost of your hosting can vary, depending on the length of time you pay for in advance. They include your choice of 1 .com/.net/.org/.info domain in the costs.

In summary, Dreamhost provide a service suitable for people with basic or advanced knowledge of linux, hosting and the web in general. I'd happily recommend them to anyone, but then how many people actually want web hosting?

Summary: It would take a lot to make me switch to another shared hosting service