What types of hosting plans are available?

 

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 SFTP or 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.

What can I host on Shared Hosting?

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.

Comparison of Shared and VPS hosting

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 VPS?

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 No
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 MySQL VPS.

If you choose to purchase this plan, all of your databases will be moved to the MySQL VPS. It's not possible to split databases across Shared and MySQL VPSs.

See also

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