DreamHost review
Independent US host with a strong privacy stance
Some links here are affiliate links — if you buy through one we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes a Hostoholic Score.
Quick verdict
A dependable independent alternative to the big hosting groups, particularly for US-facing WordPress sites.
An employee-owned independent host, listed on WordPress.org as recommended. Uses its own panel rather than cPanel and includes domain privacy as standard.
Who it suits
- · WordPress sites
- · Privacy-conscious owners
- · Small business websites
Who should look elsewhere
- · US data centres only, so UK latency is higher
- · Custom panel rather than cPanel
- · No phone support on lower tiers
Hostoholic Score
How this rating is built
Weighted from six dimensions. Affiliate commission is not an input — there is no field for it in the calculation.
What you pay across the full term — including the renewal, not just the headline.
Channels offered, hours covered, and whether the answers are any good.
Staging, email, SSH, Git, database and security tooling included as standard.
Control panel, onboarding, migration and how much you need to already know.
Not yet assessed: Performance, Reliability. These are excluded and the remaining weights renormalised, rather than counted as zero.
What is good
- Independent and employee-owned rather than group-owned
- Free domain privacy included
- Monthly billing available without a long lock-in
- Recommended on WordPress.org
What is not
- US data centres only, so UK latency is higher
- Custom panel rather than cPanel
- No phone support on lower tiers
The detail
Features and specifications
Anything marked unknown has not been verified by an editor yet. We would rather show a gap than a guess.
Hosting and platform
- Control panel
- DreamHost Panel (custom)
- UK data centre
- Unknown
- Data centre regions
- United States
- Free SSL
- Yes
- Email hosting included
- Yes
- Free migration
- Unknown
- Money-back period
- Unknown
Performance and tooling
- Staging environment
- Yes
- CDN included
- Unknown
- Object caching
- Unknown
- Redis
- Unknown
- Automatic backups
- Unknown
- Backup retention
- Unknown
Developer access
- SSH access
- Yes
- Git
- Unknown
- WP-CLI
- Yes
- Cron jobs
- Unknown
- PHP versions
- Unknown
- Node.js support
- Unknown
Ecommerce and security
- WooCommerce support
- Yes
- Malware protection
- Unknown
- Web application firewall
- Unknown
- DDoS protection
- Unknown
- Support channels
- live chat, ticket, knowledge base
Pricing
What it costs
We publish a price only once an editor has checked it against the provider's own pricing page and recorded the date.
Renews at 10.99 — check the term length before committing.
| Plan | Type | Sites | Latest checked price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web Hosting Launch | shared | — | GBP 2.89 |
Alternatives
Compare DreamHost with
Sources
Where this information came from
- DreamHost hosting overview· Capabilities and plan structure · checked 17/08/2026
- DreamHost pricing page· Entry pricing · checked 17/08/2026
Spotted something wrong?
Facts drift. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will check it.