Overview
A hosting plan is a product you must purchase in order for your website to display online. When you purchase a hosting plan, you are assigned a server. You are then able to upload your website to the server. If the DNS records for your website are pointed to DreamHost, your site will then load online from your new DreamHost server.
DreamHost hosting plans
DreamHost offers several different types of hosting plans running on the Ubuntu operating system. Most sites work well on the basic Shared Hosting plan, however, if your site is getting a large amount of traffic or if you need to make customizations not available to shared users, you may need to upgrade to a VPS, Dedicated, or DreamPress plan.
You can find further details at DreamHost Hosting which describes the various options available to you as a DreamHost customer.
Bandwidth usage
Bandwidth usage at Dreamhost is unmetered on all hosting plans except for cloud services.
What if my domain is registered at another company?
You can still host your site at DreamHost if your registration was purchased at another company. You just need to point your DNS to DreamHost. The other option would be to transfer the registration to your DreamHost account. View the following articles for further details:
Shared Starter hosting
Shared Starter is DreamHost's introductory Shared Hosting plan that's geared toward users who are new to web hosting. It's also a perfect solution for a personal or business website that displays simple information about yourself or services that you offer.
What's included?
Since this is a starter plan, there are a few limitations that don't exist with a regular Shared plan. For example, a Shared Starter plan offers the following:
- 1 domain you can use for your website (e.g., example.com)
- 5 subdomains of your single domain name (e.g., blog.example.com)
- Email is not included — an email plan is available for an extra charge
- Site storage is limited to 50GB
- A maximum of 6 FTP/SFTP/Shell users
- A maximum of 6 MySQL databases
Refund policy
Refunds on Shared Starter follow the same policy as a regular Shared Hosting plan.
Pricing
Current prices are available on the following page:
Adding a Shared Starter plan
View the following article for instructions on how to add this plan:
Shared Hosting
On a shared server, you 'share' server space with other customers. Though no other customer has access to your files, you and the other customers share the resources of the server. This means that if another website on the same server is receiving a large amount of traffic and using a lot of CPU resources, it's possible that your site may run slower as a result.
While DreamHost works hard to make sure all sites on a shared server never disrupt other sites, this is always a possibility due to the nature of Shared Hosting.
View the Shared Hosting page for current plan options.
Shared Hosting is perfect for blogs, portfolios, personal/business sites, and database-driven sites. Visit the following page for further information:
Non-Profit discount
Shared Hosting plans offer a free Non-Profit plan for qualifying non-profit, charitable organizations registered in the United States. View the following article for further information:
VPS hosting
The DreamHost Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a premium hosting plan available as an add-on to an existing DreamHost plan or a standalone service.
DreamHost VPSs use Linux-Containers (LXC) to create a "virtual" server that protects a user's RAM resources from other users on the same physical machine.
On a shared server, resources are shared by other users. On a VPS, these resources are more isolated which improves performance and helps to maintain stability.
You also have the ability to control how much RAM your server uses. On a shared plan, this is limited to a specific amount; but on a VPS, you get to select how much RAM is available for your server to use.
What can I host on a private server?
A VPS is ideal for websites that require more resources than a shared server can provide, yet do not need the full power of a Dedicated Server. It's ideal for businesses, eCommerce, designers, and developers.
Pricing
View the VPS Hosting page for current plan options.
Dedicated
A Dedicated server is a server that is completely dedicated to your data alone. This means no other DreamHost customers have any access to or share any resources with your sites on that server.
You have full root access to customize it any way you wish, but please note that DreamHost support cannot assist if any errors occur as a result of a customization.
Another feature is that your MySQL server is on the same Dedicated Server allowing faster access, unlike with all other hosting plans where your MySQL databases are on a separate database server.
View the following page for further details on Dedicated Hosting plans:
What can I host on a Dedicated Server?
Dedicated Servers are Fully-managed business-class servers. They are perfect for resource-heavy apps and giant websites.
Pricing
View the Dedicated Hosting page for current plan options.
DreamPress
DreamPress is DreamHost's Managed WordPress hosting. It's a scalable cloud-based service where both website files and the database are hosted on the same machine, offering the added benefits of server robustness, caching, and memory.
One DreamPress plan is configured for a single domain. If you want multiple domains on DreamPress, they must each have their own separate DreamPress hosting plan activated.
View the following page for further details:
Pricing
View the WordPress hosting page for current plan options.
Apache and Nginx
If you have upgraded to a VPS or Dedicated Server, you have the option to run Nginx as your web server. Shared and DreamPress hosting must use Apache. View the following article for a detailed comparison:
Comparison graph of hosting plans
| Feature | Shared | VPS | Dedicated | DreamPress |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Isolated CPU resources | No | No | Yes | No |
| Isolated RAM resources | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| root/sudo access | No | No | Yes | No |
| MySQL server on same machine | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Root access to MySQL server | No | No | Yes | No |
| Can run Apache | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Can run Nginx | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free domain included | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Unlimited storage | Yes | No | No | No |
| Unlimited domains | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Remixer
Remixer is a 'cloud hosted' click-to-edit site builder, that requires no coding experience. You build your entire site within the Remixer panel, so there are no HTML/CSS/JavaScript files to upload. View the following articles for further details.
DreamCompute
DreamHost also offers a cloud computing service called DreamCompute. View the following article for further details.
Secure hosting
Secure hosting is not a specific plan, it's an SSL certificate you add to a specific website. View the following links for details:
Email hosting
You can purchase an email-only plan or add email service to any Shared Starter or domain registration-only account. For more information, please see the following article:
All Shared, VPS, DreamPress, and Dedicated Hosting plans include email service. DreamCompute-only plans do not include email hosting.
MySQL hosting
With any Shared or VPS hosting plan, you also have free access to a shared MySQL server. This Shared MySQL server can store all of your databases for all of your websites. Since it's a shared server, resources are 'shared' with other customer in the same way as a shared web server mentioned above.
If you need more database resources than the Shared MySQL server can offer, you can purchase a private MySQL server.
If you choose to purchase this plan, all of your databases will be moved to the private MySQL server. It's not possible to split databases across Shared and private MySQL servers.
