The COMPLETE DreamHost Pricing Plan Comparison for 2024

DreamHost is a US-based web hosting provider that tries to appeal to customers on a budget. Like most other hosts, it offers a cheap starting point with shared hosting. However, DreamHost specializes primarily in managed WordPress, which it claims to offer at “half the price of the other guys” – a bold claim.

Are there any deals to be had with DreamHost? I’d say so, but you have to be careful. Choose the right plan with DreamHost and you’ll save money; choose poorly, and you’ll end up paying a premium for a subpar hosting package.

As the value of each DreamHost plan varies so much, I thoroughly evaluated each of them myself, and compared them to similar plans from other hosts. Read on to find out which of them deliver the best value.

Features and Pricing Overview

DreamHost offers two shared hosting plans, three managed WordPress plans, four VPS plans, six cloud hosting plans, and nine dedicated server configurations.

Nearly every plan can be purchased with a monthly or annual payment plan, although shared hosting and VPS plans can also be paid for triennially. Cloud hosting is billed by the hour.

As with most other hosts, a longer payment term commitment nets you better prices. Fortunately, there are no hidden charges, but shared hosting plans renew at a higher price after the initial term.

You can add credit to your account via all major credit or debit cards, PayPal, check, and money order. However, your first payment for VPS, cloud hosting, or dedicated servers must be made by card.

DreamHost offers a huge 97-day money-back guarantee with its shared hosting plans, but you must pay with a credit or debit card to be eligible. Managed WordPress, VPS, and dedicated server plans all come with a 30-day money-back guarantee, but with VPS and dedicated servers this guarantee is only available on a one- or three-year term.

As DreamHost offers so many different types of hosting, it can work for just about anyone, from beginners on a budget to large companies looking for a customizable solution.

Shared Hosting

If you’re just looking for a simple and affordable way to host your site, shared hosting is your best bet. With this type of hosting, you’ll be sharing a server’s resources with other customers. This keeps prices low, but it offers a lower level of performance than other forms of hosting.

As with most hosting providers, Dreamhost’s shared hosting plans are designed for beginners. For example, a drag-and-drop site builder is included with both shared plans.

Shared Starter

The Shared Starter plan is DreamHost’s cheapest plan overall, and by paying triennially, you can get an even more affordable rate. And, any long-duration plan gets you a free domain for the first year. Sadly, in spite of the savings, this plan is a little too basic.

You get unmetered bandwidth, but you can only host a single site. There’s also daily automatic backups, but only if you’re running a WordPress site – and in that case, WordPress is preinstalled for you. But there’s not much else of note. You don’t even get email hosting, so if you want a domain-based email address, you’ll have to pay extra.

Many budget hosts offer more comprehensive plans at similar prices. For example, Hostinger’s Premium Shared Hosting1 plan allows you to host 100 sites and 100 email accounts for the same price.

Shared Unlimited

For a slightly higher price, the Shared Unlimited plan includes unlimited SSD storage. It also offers an unlimited number of email accounts for free, thereby solving one of the issues with the previous plan. Lastly, you can host as many websites as you’d like.

While it’s initially only slightly more expensive than the Shared Starter plan, prices upon renewal are much further apart. After renewal, Shared Unlimited costs twice as much as the Shared Starter plan.

Despite this, Shared Unlimited offers no other additional features. For this price, other budget hosts might offer a performance boost, access to a content delivery network (CDN), or even just some miscellaneous freebies.

Is Shared Hosting Right For You?

DreamHost’s shared hosting plans are for those who’d like an easy place to start, especially with WordPress. The Shared Starter plan offers the best long-term value, if you don’t need (or don’t mind paying a bit extra for) email hosting.

If your site traffic increases, a typical shared hosting plan may run into performance issues. Additionally, our tests found that DreamHost’s shared hosting is unusually slow to begin with. I’d recommend taking a look at a higher category of hosting if you begin to experience these sorts of problems.

Managed WordPress

While DreamHost’s basic WordPress plans are simply its shared plans with different names, its managed WordPress hosting plans are a step up, offering cloud-based servers and guaranteed resources. Even the entry-level plan is set up to handle 100K monthly visitors.

These plans also include server-level caching, which speeds up page loading times on your site without having to install and configure a WordPress plugin for this purpose. 

While these included optimizations give you more time to focus on developing your site rather than fiddling with software settings, it’s important to note that all of DreamHost’s managed WordPress plans only support a single site. If you have multiple WordPress sites, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

DreamPress

Despite being the cheapest managed WordPress plan, DreamPress costs a fair bit. You can pay annually to receive the best long-term value, but the price still rivals some of the more expensive managed WordPress hosts out there. Unfortunately, paying a premium price doesn’t get you many premium features.

For example, you get the Jetpack plugin, but it’s the free version you can get anywhere. There’s also single-click site staging and automatic daily backups, but these can be had with cheaper plans from other hosts.

DreamPress Plus

The DreamPress Plus plan costs significantly more than the entry-level plan. For the extra investment, you get a boost in server resources, supporting up to 300K monthly visitors. This should be more than enough for most medium-to-large businesses.

Additionally, this plan upgrades Jetpack from the free to the professional version. It’s a comprehensive piece of kit, providing all the security features from the free version as well as access to Jetpack’s CDN, which caches your site’s images on servers nearer to your visitors around the world.

DreamPress Plus also grants you support by phone, although this is limited to three calls per month. You can’t just up and call them whenever you’d like, either – you’ll need to send a ticket about your issue, and check a box stating that you’d like an agent to call you.

Despite the awkward phone support, this plan offers good value. Many hosts struggle to offer a similar level of hosting performance at this price.

DreamPress Pro

DreamPress Pro is aimed at big businesses looking for high-powered hosting to serve heavy traffic. To meet these expectations, DreamPress Pro will handle around one million monthly visitors. As you’d expect, the price is high.

This plan doesn’t offer any extra features, but it does offer a greater level of support. With DreamPress Pro, your site will receive priority treatment – this includes two additional support callbacks per month, faster response times to support queries, and proactive 24/7 monitoring. If DreamHost detects an issue with your site, support engineers will immediately step in to fix it.

If you do have the audience necessary to require this plan, it’s actually cheaper than much of the competition. Kinsta, a popular managed WordPress host, offers a plan that costs nearly ten times as much to serve a similar number of visitors.

Is Managed WordPress Right For You?

DreamHost’s managed WordPress plans are intended for those with bigger budgets looking to serve larger audiences via a single WordPress website.

While the cheapest plan lacks a good set of features for the price, DreamPress Plus and DreamPress Pro offer premium power at lower prices than much of the competition. I’d say DreamPress Plus holds the best value overall.

If you’re looking for a more customizable solution that doesn’t require WordPress support, you may have more luck with a VPS, cloud hosting, or a dedicated server.

Managed VPS Hosting

If shared hosting isn’t cutting it, a virtual private server (VPS) is the next step up. Unlike with shared hosting, you’ll have a portion of server resources fully dedicated to your site, providing you with stronger, more consistent performance.

DreamHost includes managed service with every VPS plan, so there’s no need for any advanced technical skill. However, these plans lack full root access. If you need this level of customization and control, you may be more interested in DreamHost’s cloud or dedicated hosting plans.

VPS Basic

For an affordable monthly fee, VPS Basic provides you with 1GB of RAM, unlimited traffic, and 30GB SSD storage. Purchasing a three-year plan gets you the lowest overall price, and there’s no increase upon renewal.

Interestingly, every single VPS plan comes with 4 vCPU. This means you’ll be getting quite a lot of processing power for an entry-level plan.

However, there isn’t much allocated RAM. While you’ll be able to run a simple landing page or a blog without any issues, even a modest bump in simultaneous visits could overload the limited memory. This could lead to your site lagging or becoming temporarily unavailable. Still, for a managed VPS, you’d be hard-pressed to find a cheaper starting point.

However, keep in mind that none of these plans support static IP addresses. You’re given a unique IP address, but it can change at any time. If you’re looking to run an application where a static IP is essential, such as a game server, you’d best look elsewhere.

VPS Business

While this plan doesn’t offer anything new in the way of features, you still get a sizable upgrade to your available resources. VPS Business offers twice as much RAM and storage than VPS Basic. The price also increases significantly, though it remains relatively affordable.

It’s here that the value of DreamHost’s VPS really begins to shine – a similar virtual machine with managed support usually costs double the price.

And, as there’s no increase at renewal, fees remain the same going forward. If you’re looking to host a handful of busy sites, this plan is a nice balance between good performance and long-term value.

VPS Enterprise

The VPS Enterprise plan doesn’t mess around. This server has enough capacity to support large companies or hosting resellers with 50-100 (or more) popular websites. It features 8GB of RAM and 240GB SSD space – though you still “only” have access to 4 vCPU cores.

Sadly, VPS Enterprise costs a lot – there are a ton of resources, sure, but they aren’t worth that asking fee. For the same price, you can get a managed VPS with InterServer that has a whopping 14 vCPU cores, 28GB of RAM, and 420GB SSD space. There’s no compelling reason to pay more for DreamHost’s offering.

Is Managed VPS Hosting Right for You?

If you’re looking for managed VPS on a budget, DreamHost could be a good choice. Both the VPS Basic and the VPS Business plan offer very good value for an affordable price.

However, I’d avoid the VPS Enterprise plan – it simply isn’t worth the money. If you’ve outgrown VPS Business, you may want to consider cloud hosting, or a managed dedicated server.

Dedicated Servers

A dedicated server is only necessary for those who require the power of a physical server. To take full advantage of the resources on offer, you’d likely need to be running multiple popular sites, large databases, and/or intensive web applications.

Or, you could start your own web hosting company on one of these – and the entry-level plan below is more than adequate for you to begin with.

As DreamHost’s dedicated servers are fully managed, you won’t need to worry about server upkeep, optimization, and security. Plus, you’ll still have root access if you’d like to customize the server to meet your specific needs. The only thing you’ll need to get started is a big budget – dedicated servers are the most expensive form of hosting out there.

Standard 4

Standard 4 is the cheapest dedicated server offered by DreamHost. If you’re making this kind of an investment, you’ll undoubtedly want to pay yearly for a small discount.

With such a high price, I was pretty disappointed: Standard 4 offers only an Intel Xeon 4-core processor, 4GB RAM, and a 1TB HDD drive. I was particularly disappointed to see that it only offers an outdated HDD – for the high price I would’ve liked to see a faster and more reliable SSD.

If you’re looking for more competitive value, A2 Hosting1 offers a managed dedicated server with 16GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD space, and a similarly fast processor, all for a better price.

Enhanced SSD 16

By making the upgrade to an Enhanced dedicated server, you’ll be rewarded with a better chip. Enhanced SSD 16 servers all come with an Intel Xeon 12-core processor, which is triple the CPU power available in the Standard servers.

This plan is also the least expensive to offer an SSD drive, but at a capacity of only 240GB. While this may be enough for some, it’s still rather limited compared to the 2TB offered by A2 Hosting’s more affordable servers.

The Enhanced SSD 16 server costs nearly twice as much as the Standard 4 – if you want a solid-state drive, you’ll have to pay this absurdly high asking fee. Many competitors offer dedicated servers with SSD for a much lower price.

Enhanced SSD 64

The Enhanced SSD 64 server is the most expensive DreamHost package. Despite this, it really isn’t a huge upgrade from the Enhanced SSD 16. You still have the same Intel Xeon 12-core processor and the same limited 240GB SSD drive. The only difference from the previous plan is more RAM to be able to handle more traffic – 64GB, to be exact.

To be fair, this much RAM will make a sizable difference, but I’ll be blunt here – this server is unnecessarily expensive. For instance, InterServer1 offers a managed, dedicated box with an AMD EPYC 24-core processor, 128GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD drive for significantly less – almost half the price, in fact.

Is a Dedicated Server Right for You?

DreamHost’s dedicated servers aren’t worth the money. If you’re looking for a powerful hosting solution, you’d get much better value from the managed dedicated server packages offered by InterServer and A2 Hosting.

Recommended Vendor Alternatives

Some of DreamHost’s plans offer truly great value, but others are lacking in the face of competition. I’d take a look at the following hosts to see if they provide the features you’re looking for at a more affordable price.

Hostinger

Like DreamHost, Hostinger provides plenty of support for WordPress on its shared hosting plans. However, Hostinger goes a step further – as well as managed updates, it uses the LiteSpeed web server and its associated WordPress caching plugin to maximize performance.

Our speed tests found Hostinger’s page loading times are much shorter than DreamHost’s on a significantly cheaper entry-level plan. DreamHost offers unmetered bandwidth and more SSD space over Hostinger, but you’d have to decide whether that’s worth the loss in speed and increase in price.

FastComet

FastComet’s shared hosting plans are slightly more expensive than DreamHost’s, especially upon renewal. However, FastComet offers superior global coverage, with 11 data centers across all major continents. DreamHost only features two data centers, both in the US. If you’re looking to serve an audience outside of the States, FastComet is the better option.

Additionally, while DreamHost does offer helpful support, live chat is only available during certain hours. On the other hand, FastComet offers an exemplary 24/7 live chat service. They’ve helped me with site issues that other hosts simply wouldn’t touch.

InterServer

InterServer is also a local US-based host. Despite also having only two US-based data centers, InterServer offers much better speeds than DreamHost throughout the USA. InterServer also includes unlimited SSD storage and unlimited email accounts for a lower price.

Notably, InterServer also offers a hack-fix guarantee on its entry-level plan – if your site is hacked or infected with malware, InterServer will restore it for free. DreamHost charges a massive fee for this service. If security is of particular concern, InterServer could be the better option for you

A2 Hosting

Unlike DreamHost, A2 Hosting doesn’t lock you into an inflexible agreement. You can purchase a three-year plan to get a discounted price, but you can cancel at any time to receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of your contract. With DreamHost, any cancellation outside of the money-back guarantee period is lost.

However, A2 Hosting isn’t just easier to cancel – it also offers double the SSD storage of DreamHost’s Shared Starter plan at a lower price, alongside excellent loading times and reliability.

Kinsta

If you’re looking for premium managed WordPress hosting, Kinsta is definitely worth considering. Our Kinsta performance tests revealed some of the fastest loading speeds I’ve ever seen. With the whopping 24 data centers across the globe, you could serve any given audience, anywhere.

You can also create multiple WordPress sites with nearly all of Kinsta’s plans. With DreamHost’s managed WordPress plans, you’ll always be limited to a single site. There’s one caveat, though. Kinsta is much more expensive.

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks offers shared hosting plans at prices similar to DreamHost’s, but with some extras. Like Hostinger, it uses LiteSpeed web servers to deliver faster loading rates for WordPress-based sites. Our tests confirmed that GreenGeeks is the faster of the two, likely thanks to these extra optimizations.

However, what stands out about GreenGeeks is the amazing support service. These guys have always gone the extra mile for me, regardless of how technical my issue.  Best of all, live chat support is available 24/7. If you’re a beginner, this degree of helpfulness can prove to be crucial – and you might not always get it at DreamHost.

DreamHost: Great for WordPress and VPS – Low Value Elsewhere

DreamHost is a mixed bag. Unlike many other hosts, its budget shared hosting plans don’t offer very good value. Instead, the best deals are found with DreamHost’s premium services, namely its managed WordPress and VPS hosting plans.

DreamHost may not be the ideal option for individuals operating on a tight budget seeking a straightforward way to commence their hosting journey. However, if you require resource-intensive, mid-range hosting, DreamHost could potentially offer substantial cost savings for you.

Still unsure about which DreamHost plan is best for you? Here are my recommendations.

If you’re looking for budget-friendly shared hosting, I’d avoid DreamHost entirely and go with Hostinger instead. Hostinger provides everything DreamHost offers and more, all for a similar price. Additionally, Hostinger proved to be much faster than DreamHost in our performance tests.

Planning to use WordPress? DreamPress Plus offers superior-quality managed WordPress hosting at a cheaper price point than the competition. If you’re looking to run a single WordPress site for up to 300K monthly visitors, this plan includes all the resources and features you’d need.

Do you need dedicated resources? A VPS is likely your best option, and DreamHost offers managed VPS at surprisingly low prices. VPS Basic is cheap and offers adequate resources – while there isn’t much RAM, there’s plenty of processing power.

FAQ

Which of DreamHost’s plans is the best value for money?

I’d say the DreamPress Plus plan offers the best value. It’s certainly not a budget plan, but you can get a good set of WordPress features and strong resources for a low price. If you’re looking for a good deal, check out our coupon page for great discounts in 2024.

How easy is it to cancel Dreamhost?

Cancelling a DreamHost plan is quick and easy. The entire process occurs within the account dashboard and takes under a minute to complete. If you’re eligible for a refund, it will be automatically processed, in most cases.

Does hosting affect the speed of your website?

The speed of your site can vary significantly from host to host. If your host employs outdated technologies, or implements little to no optimization, your site visitors may experience poor performance.

For example, DreamHost tends to be slower because it mainly uses Apache, which is adequate but older web server software. Many of the hosts on our list of the best web hosting providers for 2024 offer better tech and better page loading speeds.

Is Dreamhost easy to use?

DreamHost accounts are managed on a proprietary, easy-to-navigate control panel. All necessary functions are easily found. There’s also a helpful support service and an extensive knowledge base available.