DreamPress WordPress Hosting Overview
We love to share the latest and greatest WordPress hosting options available on the web, which is why we need to introduce you to DreamPress. DreamPress is the managed WordPress hosting offered by DreamHost that comes loaded with great features perfect for any blogger or small business. Click the button, or keep reading, to find out more about DreamHost. Oh, and right now you can get DreamHost Shared Hosting for just $5.95/mo (that’s 33% off!) with the code WPEXPLORER33.
Why Choose DreamHost
We know there are a ton of hosting companies to choose from, and it can be really hard to find the right one for you. Well, DreamHost might be just right. Started in a college dorm room back in 1997, DreamHost now hosts more than 1.5 million websites. In their years of service they’ve focused on service, security, fun and flexibility – and clearly it’s working for them.
Web Hosting Options
One of the key points for choosing the right host for you is finding a plan that meets your needs. You want a plan that offer features you’ll use. If you don’t know anything about servers, then you should probably get shared or managed hosting. But if you know your way around a server and want to really get hands on, perhaps you could go with a VPS or dedicated server. DreamHost offers plenty of plans to fit a variety of hosting needs:
Shared Hosting: Great for blogs, portfolios, small business and other new sites
Managed WordPress Hosting: Specifically for sites run on WordPress
Managed VPS Hosting: Powerful enough for businesses, stores, developers and more
Dedicated Servers: Fully managed and ready for high traffic websites
Of course each of these hosting options includes different service levels, so you can scale up as your hosting needs grow.
Web Hosting Features
In addition, DreamHost offers great features to all of their clients. No matter which plan you choose, some of the hosting features you’re sure to enjoy from DreamHost include:
- Control Panel: The DreamHost control panel is command central for your hosting. You can manage your account, view your domains, add or delete users and even access your 1-click installs. Plus there are tons of other useful quick links for mail, VPS, dedicated servers, billing, support and more.
- 1-Click Installer: Standard with most webhosts, this makes the process of installing WordPress (or another platform) easy. No logging in via FTP. No downloading zips. Just click the button, wait a couple minutes and you’re good to go.
- Awesome Support Techs: Who doesn’t want helpful support? When you’re working on your website and you run into an issue, it’s nice to know that there are knowledgeable folks you can reach out to for help.
- Mobile Website Generator: Powered by DudaMobile, this feature makes it possible for you to create a mobile version of your website (as opposed to simply using a responsive website template).
- Cafe Commerce Integration: Building an online store is a great way to generate a bit of extra cash, and while you can always use a plugin like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads, DreamHost also fully supports Cafe Commerce – so you have plenty of store building options.
- Automated Malware Scans: Malware is no bueno, and DreamHost runs their own automates scans to keep Malware at bay.
- CloudFlare Integration: Having a good CDN can help decrease your page load time for visitors around the globe, and Cloudflare is one of the best out there.
- 100% Uptime Guarantee: In a perfect world your website would never go down, and DreamHost wants to make your hosting experience as perfect as possible. They have a 100% uptime guarantee (but of course, there are time that your server might go down for a few minutes for maintenance, software updates, etc but most hosts will notify you in advance).
DreamPress Managed WordPress Hosting
If you didn’t already know, we love WordPress. That’s why we couldn’t wait to learn more about DreamPress – DreamHost’s fully managed WordPress hosting plan (which is 20% off right now, making it just $19.95 per month). DreamHost became a WordPress partner in 2005, and since then more than 750,00 WordPress sites have been hosted with them. Here’s a peak at what’s included with their powerful DreamPress hosting:
- Automatic WordPress Installation: Forget about the 1-click installation – with DreamPress WordPress is already installed for you.
- Automatic WordPress Updates: DreamPress is all about making hosting your website easy, so they’ll take care of core WordPress updates for you. So don’t worry if you go on vacation, or have errands to run, DreamPress will keep your WordPress version up to date.
- Optimized Hosting Configuration: Servers are tricky, and if you don’t know what you’re doing you really should be trying to change settings on your own. Leave it to the professionals, who have setup each DreamPress server especially for WordPress.
- WP-CLI Installed: For more advanced users, having WP-CLI already installed makes it easy to use dev-friendly command line prompts right out of the box.
- Managed VPS & MySQL Servers: Yup – managed hosting. Like we said before, you don’t have to worry about your servers at all. DreamHost does everything for you!
- Web Based Control Panel: This is the same control panel mentioned before, where your can manage everything to do with your DreamPress hosting plan.
- Expert WordPress Support: When asking a question it’s important to ask the right person, and with DreamHost’s team of WordPress experts you can ask any question you might have and know you’re getting a good answer.
- Compatible With Any Theme/Plugin: You read that right, any theme, any plugin. There are literally limitless combinations. So if you have an awesome theme or plugin you’re anxious to use, you should have no problem installing it on DreamPress.
- Varnish Caching: CloudFlare is great, but Varnish caching adds even more performance boosting caching to your site. This HTTP accelerator helps the DreamPress servers deliver your sites on the double!
- Automatic Daily Backups: Backups are an integral part of any WordPress security regimen, and since this is such an important factor DreamHost included this features in their DreamPress plans.
- Optional Backup To DreamObjects Cloud: This is a premium feature you can add-on for a fee – a safe and secure cloud environment to save those daily backups to.
- Unlimited Storage/Bandwidth: You’ve seen this one before (I’m sure), and like many other hosts and hosting plan, DreamPress assures you that you can use as much storage and bandwidth as you need. Within reason of course (if you’re running a high traffic site, you will have to scale up your plan though).
- Unlimited Emails: Some managed hosting plans don’t include this, but we’re glad DreamPress did. If you’re thinking of running your business website on DreamPress it’s a must that you can create professional email accounts for each of your employees.
Pretty nice list of features right? Built on DreamHost’s managed Virtual Private Servers (VPS), DreamPress is ready to go right out of the box. The DreamPress servers are pre-configured to use the best options for WordPress so you don’t have to tinker with any server settings yourself.
On top of that, they’ve added a Varnish caching layer (plus the Varnish HTTP Purge plugin) to improve your site’s performance. And don’t worry – any theme or plugin will work with DreamPress (including Tour own Total theme), so how your site looks and operates is completely up to you. Now that you have an idea of what DreamPress is all about!
Just A Few Thoughts
DreamPress has a lot going for it, but there are just a couple features that I use regularly that just aren’t available at the moment. The first is multisite support. Not a huge deal for most people. If you’re running one or a few blogs or businesses using WordPress, you’re simply going to have to purchase a separate hosting plan for each site.
The other feature missing is a staging area. I really hope this is something that DreamHost has in the works. Personally, I’ve found that staging areas come in handy for a variety of purposes, with one of the most important being to test updates (especially for WordPress and WordPress themes). But for most users (who aren’t update skeptics like me), you probably won’t miss the staging area all that much.
Other than that, DreamPress has everything a WordPress user could possibly need – even built-in caching. Oh, and unlike many of the other managed WordPress hosting plans on the market, DreamPress doesn’t have any blacklisted WordPress plugins that they won’t let you use (at least not that I could find). Some web hosts have a list of disallowed plugins to prevent duplicate functionality. But with DreamPress they’ve kept their setup pretty clean, so if you really want to use BackWPup or YARPP then go for it.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully you enjoyed our inside look at DreamPress! This seems like a solid WordPress hosting option, and DreamHost has added some great features to make setting up your WordPress site easier. If you’ve used DreamHost or DreamPress let us know your thoughts below. We’d love to hear from real users how their hosting performs!
I think very important this kind of giveaway. I’ve always been curious to use this hosting, but I confess to be worried about changing where I am. If I win, will allow me to test the services without much concern and future transfer calmly from my other hosting.
Be nice to win hosting to see how good Dreamhost hosting is.
If I’d be lucky enough to win this giveaway, I’d start my first website that I’m planning for quite some time! Fingers crossed.
I am looking for good WordPress hosting
I really wanna rock my very first website on DreamHost. Crossing my fingers!
HI! So, first off – this is a totally cool idea and give-away! Give-away’s are fun and allows us to be as creative as we want to be. Also, I LOVE LOVE LOVE how you have so many different options for us as the audience to join and talk about the contest. That being said, I think I SHOULD WIN because I: Joined using my Facebook – then immediately was going to “enter” by submitting a blog post comment. Sadly, I couldn’t really leave a comment because the form does not work on my end. It DOES not allow me to submit a BLOG POST COMMENT.
And of course when I tried to confirm that it wasn’t just me (user error), it wouldn’t allow me to submit more than one blog post comment. So – I logged out, then chose to log-in using my e-mail address and name – and now here I am.
So – Why should I win???? Well – I will tell you why.
Because if I was like “most” customers, I would have already “bounced” from this page because I wasn’t immediately satisfied by the OPT-IN form that I was trying to use. On top of that – I was immediately attracted to your site, because it said, FREE GIVE AWAY.
Therefore, I should win because:
1. Most customers would have already left.
2. Most would not have taken the time to come back and try a second time.
3. Most certainly would not have even bothered to articulate some of the end-user malfunctions being experienced (which BTW are the sole responsibility of the Web Developer).
So – I think I should win because I’m awesome for sticking around as long as I have! 😉
Hi Dara,
I wish you the best of luck with the Giveaway! Unfortunately winners are chosen at random, but hopefully you are one of them 😉
Hi AJ! Ok – Well cool! At the very least, I hope that I have been able to provide you with helpful feed back! Also, feel free to check me out at skygirlsunsetload.com/ and any feedback you might have for me is always welcomed! Thanks again! 😀
I really like Dreamhost, I hope they include WordPress Multisite in the near future!
Wait, they don’t allow for Multi-site installations? I didn’t know this…that seems weird.
Sorry AJ, I should have clarified I meant “DreamPress” doesn’t allow for multisite installs.
Really want to win this *0*
Would be awesome to win fast managed hosting that DreamPress can provide.
Would be nice to take the DreamPress service for a spin. Not had the chance to do so yet…maybe this giveaway will change this situation.
I want to rock my website on DreamHost. Crossing my fingers!
I’d like to try DreamHost out!
If I win, I would make good use of this to get my site back up and running
I probably don’t qualify but speaking as a fan of DreamHost, whom I’ve been with since January of 2013, I have had nothing but great experiences. I’ve had to contact support every so often for some help or questions, and they usually respond with in a few hours to 24 hours. I put one of my websites on DreamPress and it was the best decision I ever made. The website is super fast. I host all my websites and client websites under my account on DreamHost. I highly recommend them. The custom Cpanel is just simply amazing. I hate the other CPanel that nearly every other web host uses.. and that is definitely a major reason I stay with DreamHost. I also want to note: DreamHost loves people who are in it for the long run. Also: DH loves people who stay with them for the long-term and will give huge discounts for paying in advance and knowing you are a loyal customer.
Thanks for sharing! It’s great to hear from a customer 🙂
Nice contest. I really hope to win!
Thanks for giveaway. HOPE I WIN
I have dreampress and several of these claims are false. Varnish prevents you from running anything with PHP Sessions like Advanced Custom Fields and a bunch of woocommerce product configuration plugins.
Varnish does can conflict with some plugins (we never said it couldn’t). If you are using plugins that use PHP sessions and having conflicts with Varnish the Dreamhost documentation page explains that you can disable Varnish and use your own caching plugin instead like W3 Total Cache. So you aren’t “locked” into Varnish.