Summary: Whether you are a business owner, freelancer, blogger, corporate executive, a government agent, or simply someone who wants to have a personal online presence, building a website to promote your brand image is the best way to go. When building a website, you want to make sure to have a hosting solution that can cater to your needs, with all the features that you can use out of the box. You also want a hosting provider that knows how to keep your website online all the time and cares about the needs for different users. DreamHost has primarily focused on shared hosting offerings that can be used by anyone, personalizing your experience in each and every step of the way. With more than 400,000 customers worldwide, it just keeps getting better.
The most important things that people are looking for when it comes to finding the best hosting solution for their website are the security, performance, and uptime guarantee. No matter what type of website that you are trying to build, whether it is a personal blog, ecommerce platform, corporate website, online forum, or any others, you need your website to be online all the time, and you need it to be secure and fast to access. These are the basic and most important things that determine the survival of your website, which in turn, the survival of your business.
Reliability is an important factor that makes the users love a certain web hosting provider, and this is the one thing that DreamHost provides to all their users right off the bat. No matter how small or big your website, whether you are just a beginner or an expert in web development, this web hosting provider ensures that all websites hosted on their servers are completely secure, fast, and guaranteed to be up all the time. This way, your website visitors and the search engines will trust your brand.
As primarily a shared web hosting solution, DreamHost provides the features that are commonly not available in other similar services. Aside from giving the customers the ability to choose between different hosting plans according to their needs, it is also completely dedicated toward privacy and online security. Moreover, this web hosting service is privately owned, which makes it possible for the company to keep their commitment to their customers. To learn more about this amazing web hosting solution, we have interviewed Micah Sachs, DreamHost’s SVP of Product.
What Makes DreamHost Stand Out from Other Hosting Companies
When you take a look at various hosting companies that are available today, there bound to be many similarities that they offer to their customers. Many of them offer similar features, similar control panels, and similar look and feel without trying to differentiate their services from the others. It’s like they are just using the hosting provider’s templates off-the-shelf without any customization at all. Not to mention that there is a big number of hosting providers that are simply selling the services of other hosting companies as resellers, meaning that they just use the basic templates as it is, with minimal customizations.
This is what differentiates DreamHost and other hosting providers. First of all, DreamHost is a privately owned company that runs their own services in their own way. They have customized every core aspect of their services, such as control panel, features, server configurations, the software they are running, and many more. It makes this hosting company unique, and it is also what makes this company capable of offering unique and dedicated services to their customers. Micah Sachs explained about the uniqueness of DreamHost when compared to other hosting providers,
“We’ve always done business and hosting our own way. We created our own control panel, tech support processes, server configuration management, and billing systems from the very beginning and so automation and writing our own software has always been a big part of our DNA. This means we’re able to offer customers solutions that aren’t as cookie cutter as all the other “off-the-shelf” solutions other hosts provide. Now that also means that we have a lot of technology to maintain so we’ve done our best to transition to only writing and maintaining things that are core to our business, especially as so many good solutions for some of those functions exist now, where they didn’t 20 years ago…”
DreamHost’s WordPress Hosting Solution with WordPress-Optimized Server
Nowadays, lots of websites are running on the WordPress platform, meaning that WordPress is the basic building bricks for their website. Since WordPress is fully customizable and completely flexible, anyone can build any type of website using the WordPress platform. With the right template, layout, and plugins, you can easily build the website of your dream simply by installing WordPress on your web server. The good thing is that DreamHost offers a dedicated hosting solution for WordPress sites, with the servers optimized to run any WordPress site at its maximum potential.
Micah Sachs explained about the WordPress-optimized server, how it works, and how it can benefit the customers,
“We run our managed WordPress service, DreamPress, on our own private openstack cluster which allows us to very quickly provision our customers’ new services in a completely isolated environment with dedicated resources. Paired with multiple layers of built-in caching, this allows us to provide a consistent and high-quality level of performance.”
Staging Environment for Managed WordPress – A Powerful Tool to Keep Your Site Evolving
As a WordPress user, you might want to tinker around your website to see if you can find the best combination that makes it look and perform the best. You might also want to update your site from time to time to keep your visitors coming back to it. But, such updates might sometimes cause problems to your site if you don’t do it carefully. For instance, installing or uninstalling some plugins might actually break your WordPress site if you don’t do some research beforehand or have a good knowledge about WordPress coding.
This is where Staging Environment for Managed WordPress comes into place. This is the feature that is offered by DreamHost to ensure that you can update or tinker around with your site without having to create any problems to the live site. It is like a sandbox environment that you can use to add or remove various features from your site or experiment on it as you please, without having to worry that you might accidentally break your site while doing so. Micah Sachs explained about this feature for WordPress users,
“With staging, our DreamPress customers are able to test changes to a copy of their site without worrying about breaking their live site. We offer the ability to make a clone of their live site, fiddle with it however they want, and then promote those changes safely to production. We did a lot of customer and market research before implementing staging environments and it was one of the most requested features for a large portion of our customers.”
The Custom Control Panel Offered by DreamHost
While most hosting providers that are available today offer the standard control panel type such as cPanel or Plesk, DreamHost goes one step further by offering their own custom control panel. This is what makes DreamHost different from other hosting companies out there. But, the custom control panel is not there only for the sake of making a difference, but for the sake of the customers as well. The custom control panel offered by DreamHost offers the best flexibility for them to build additional features to it without having to wait for the updates offered by those standard or third-party control panel software.
Micah Sachs explained why DreamHost needs to build its own control panel as opposed to using cPanel or Plesk just like other hosting providers,
“The main reason is flexibility. If we want to offer something new for customers in our panel we can just build it! We don’t have to wait for the next version of cPanel or Plesk to be released, nor upgrade a license to make it available. Cost is another factor, particularly in light of the recent cPanel pricing changes. We’ve always maintained strict oversight of our cost and upgrade cycles. Being beholden to someone else’s bottom line or development roadmap is not a good place to be, so we’ve worked hard to build something unique here.”
The Viability and the Future of Shared Hosting Services
As with the increase of websites being built and hosted nowadays, shared hosting seems to be a solution that is considered far too basic for many people to use. Thus, this type of affordable hosting plan is having less and less popularity as compared to other hosting plans like dedicated hosting, website builder pack, VPS, and others. But, what DreamHost believes is that Shared Hosting won’t go anywhere as long as they can provide better additional features for their Shared Hosting plans.
Since Shared Hosting is considered as the most basic hosting plan with typically fewer features than other more advanced plans, people might not be interested to use this plan unless they are just getting started. But, with its affordability, DreamHost wants to keep this plan to be popular among their customers by adding additional features like better email protection, better security, and others. Micah Sachs explained about the viability and the future of Shared Hosting services,
“While people have decried the demise of shared hosting for years now, and certainly it has felt a fair amount of market compression and newer “website builder”-only entrants, the need for affordably-priced websites isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. What we’ve seen in the industry is a proliferation of value-adds beyond basic hosting services. That’s why DreamHost has branched out into cloud offerings, VPS, Malware Removal, more robust email, and other add-ons.
We believe that if you’re offering people what they need to run various portions of their business – more than just space on a server – you’ll continue to attract customers for some time to come.”
DreamObjects – How It Can Benefit Small Businesses and Enterprises
DreamObjects is a feature offered by DreamHost that allows small businesses and enterprises to scale up their operations, adding potentially limitless storage space that can be accessed from any device. This feature is very handy as it can be used for various purposes, such as site backups and disaster recovery. This way, your website won’t lose its data completely since it is always backed up to the DreamObjects storage space. Concluding our interview, Micah Sachs explained about DreamObjects and how it can help small businesses and enterprises in their business operations,
“DreamObjects is an object storage service that helps small businesses and enterprises scale. It provides virtually limitless storage that’s accessible via a browser, familiar apps, or an API. With industry standard connectivity, customers can leverage existing tools to perform off-site backups and disaster recovery. DreamObjects also helps customers take advantage of elastic compute resources by providing a warehouse for static resources at affordable rates. DreamObjects does this by harnessing the power of Ceph, the open source storage system incubated at DreamHost. Ceph uses off-the-shelf hardware to keep costs down, and the power of open source to deliver new, compelling features regularly.”