Although 99.9% uptime is the general promise made by web hosts, DreamHost made the rare step forward and brought it all the way to 100%. Our tests and external reviews show stellar uptime reports. However, if they break that promise, you only get a free day of service for each hour of outage, which seems a little light in terms of penalization.

Security is paramount to DreamHost, and they offer 50 GB of automatic backups. They also include improved security through passwords on directories and other forms of boosted website security.

You don’t just get all the unlimited basics that many web hosts offer – like domains, bandwidth, disk space, email accounts, and MySQL 5 databases – but you get advanced features, too. You also get free domain registration, support for multiple coding languages (PHP5, Perl, Python, etc), website traffic statistics, and a variety of plugins, platforms and other solutions.

DreamHost also starts you off with a $100 Google AdWords credit when you launch the included promotional campaign starter.

DreamHost has a wealth of functions, but that’s tempered by the somewhat limited technical support. Their tutorials, wiki, and user forums are wonderful, and kudos to them for their dedication to social media, but you can’t connect via live chat or an outgoing phone call. They promise to respond to support emails within 24 hours, which isn’t the best.  Even then, the quality of your support technicians is inconsistent.

DreamHost is on the expensive side of the web hosting world.  However, if you are ready to commit to a longer contract, you can get a much better deal.

Most packages don’t include an e-commerce solution, so plan to spend another $30 per month for its CafeCommerce platform.

One bonus with DreamHost is that it does have the capability to take care of you as you grow, so if you get to the point where you need a VPS or a dedicated server, DreamHost can fill that role for you. VPS plans start at $15 per month, and dedicated server plans start at $99 per month.

Users used to cPanel will notice (or miss)  its absence. DreamHost has created their own control panel, which is easy to use; you just need to take a moment to get used to it.

If you had a cPanel account before, you don’t have to start entirely from scratch; you can actually import your information (including all settings), with an “importer” feature.