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Editor‘s Review for "DreamHost"

The marketing approach DreamHost practices, though being somewhat distracting, nevertheless is pretty interesting. They use a picture of a kid sleeping on the coach with the words "Party All Night Long" when advertising their "your own dreamy domain" and "your own dreamer server" products. Yet, strange as it may seem, it all works just finewith them hosting presently 200,000 websites on more than 700 servers that are maintained by 40 full-timer professionals. DreamHost have been on this journey since 1997, when they started as four Computer Science undergraduates, with a T1 internet line and a Pentium 100 web server.

Ecological responsibility is another aspect of DreamHost's operations took progressive steps in. They acquired the right to be called a carbon-neutral web hosting provider through purchasing Renewable Energy Credits to power their servers, and through cutting the use of paper and paper products in their office. DreamHost's customers may be sure their sites are powered with the cleanest energy available on the market, with every environmental impact of each resource at work being encountered for and balanced.

Price Value

DreamHost have introduced an interesting twist into their hosting plan as well: while providing limited email accounts (only 675), they provide unlimited domains, and not just 5-10. Another offer that outshines those offered by other web hosts is the 1TB of bandwidth.

With all the gimmicks introduced to attract clients' searching eyes (like 1 TB data transfer or unlimited domains), the services offered by DreamHost are quite adequate for an average discount web host. Another such gimmick is the additional bandwidth customers earn for each week of remaining a DreamHost's customer.

The undeniable fact is that with DreamHost customers are saving not only their money but the environment, too. It gives considerable peace of mind to green-conscious customers to be sure that their web hosting company uses only renewable power resources and that all its operations are safe for the environment and leave it clean.

However, there is one thing that should invite your consideration: it is the fact that DreamHost provides no Microsoft operating systems for any of its hosting products, preferring to it Unix systems only. Yet, this will not be a problem for those who are fine with Unix, Linux, MySQL or Apache. DreamHost offers full support of Ruby on Rails complete with FastCGI, domain registration at $9.95/yr and dedicated hosting at $99/mo.

Reliability

Along with a 97-day money-back guarantee, DreamHost offers their customers the longest "trial periods" in the web hosting industry and a price of monthly rate that will freeze as soon as you become their customer, since DreamHost promises there will be no hidden fees or costs.

Control Panel

What distinguishes DreamHost's control panes is that along with traditional features like website creation, billing and email, it offers a range of additional (and less common) features like community newsletter, customer suggestions, "The DreamHost Site of the Month", "The Unofficial DreamHost Directory", a charitable donations program, an interesting Rewards program, and a customer discussion area.

All these opportunities DreamHost's proprietary web-based control panel offers, foster a great sense of community about their customers, hopefully tickling down to their hosted websites' visitors as well.

Having the undeniable advantage of being packed with features (like Cron Jobs, autoresponders, FrontPage extensions, Log Files, Jabber instant messaging, RealAudio and Video and Quicktime Streaming) the DreamHost control panel has a minus side of being mostly table- and text-based. This fact makes it less intuitive and easy for newbies (to say nothing about not being so eye-pleasing). Yet, the number of 200,000 hosted websites proves that function may often be more preferable than form.

Customer Support

The 3-Step support DreamHost runs is based on the preference they give to the users' troubleshooting their problems on their own, and not just having them solved. They offer a really huge but searchable FAQ knowledgebase, the DreamHost Support Wiki, as Step 1. For Step 2 there are discussion forums, where fellow users (and sometimes a DreamHost employee) discuss issues and offer solutions. And only Step 3 - an email query ticket system - is a direct appeal to the professionals in the support team.

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