Hosting is cheap these days, especially shared hosting. With a plethora of companies out there, all offering unlimited everything, it’s hard to know which way to go when you’re starting out. For me it comes down to 3 things; my sites are always (within reason) up, they are responsive, and so is the company should anything go wrong. Which is why I’ve been a happy DreamHost customer for just over 3 years.

DreamHost currently serve over 1 million domains which, if you’re unsure, is a lot and there is a lot of experience earned in the 11 years it’s taken them to reach that number. When I signed up in 2007 I chose a great half-price deal on a package that allowed me to host as many domains as I liked with very generous bandwidth and disk space allowances. Since then, all of the allowances have become unlimited and the price has more than halfed!

Now, as with all hosts, “unlimited” comes with caveats. This is shared hosting. If you’re using up all of a server’s resources then either your code is very badly written or you are big enough to be paying for a dedicated server. If you’re the former, tighen up your code and while you’re at it, cache everything you can to reduce load. That’s just good practice anyway. An account like this will go a long, long way if you’re sensible, and can indeed seem limitless, assuming you’re not Amazon.

Now that so much on their hosting offering is unlimited, DreamHost run with just one Debian linux-based shared hosting package, at $8.95 per month. It seems like everything is unlimited. Disk space, bandwidth, domains, subdomains, forwards, SSH/FTP/SFTP users, email accounts, databases… everything. They support PHP5, MySQL 5, Python, Ruby on Rails, full CGI and offer full shell access for more advanced users, SVN/CVS for version control and one-click installs for some of the most commonly used open source packages, such WordPress, Gallery, Joomla, MediaWiki and phpBB.

Their support, both technical and billing, has been quick to respond to any issues I’ve had by email. I prefer email comms given that it gives you a written record of the contact, and you can better plan what you need to say. Their phone-support is a premium feature at extra cost but I’ve so rarely needed to contact them, I certainly haven’t noticed it to be a problem. When I have needed their text-based support they have always been friendly, and very helpful.

That’s one thing that works really well for me – the whole attitude and demeanour of the company, while professional, is relaxed and friendly throughout. Their newsletter, for example, is frequently and completely unnecessarily hilarious. In their awesome, custom-built control panel when you make a change, say to a domain’s hosting settings, the confirmation message displayed is signed off by “The Happy DreamHost Domain Editing Robot”. There’s no need for that, but it’s a nice touch. It’s fun. I easily warm to a company with a sense of humour at the core of their ethos.

As well as that phone support package, other premium features include unique IP addresses, VPN access and SSL certificates, all of which are a very small extra charge.

That’s an impressive package for that price, especially to someone who remembers paying 5-6 times that amount for much lower spec hosting just 4 or 5 years ago. The lower cost of large amounts of storage and computing power has made such things possible.

If you need more than shared hosting, they offer very flexible and currently VERY cheap dedicated hosting options, though I can’t speak to their effectiveness.

As far as their shared service goes, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend DreamHost to anyone starting out with plans of rapid expansion – they have the headroom you will need for quite some time.