Bluehost vs DreamHost 2024: Which One Is The Best?
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$2.75/month
$2.59/month
Bluehost vs DreamHost 2024 Review
Bluehost and Dreamhost are two very popular web hosting services on the market today. They both provide awesome services and affordable prices, but which one is right for you? Here’s our deep dive into the ins and outs of both Bluehost and Dreamhost.
BlueHost | DreamHost | |
Rating | 4.3/5 | 4/5 |
Fees | From $2.75 per month | From $2.59 per month |
About BlueHost
Bluehost is a web host service founded back in 2003 that is based out of Utah. They are known for its partnership with WordPress, and their service with both large and small businesses.
About DreamHost
DreamHost is another popular web hosting service based out of Los Angeles and was founded back in 1996. They are known for their WooCommerce partnership, enabling sellers to seamlessly integrate their shop and website together.
Bluehost vs DreamHost – Comparison Details
BlueHost | DreamHost | |
Price | From $2.75/mo | From $2.59/mo |
Free Domain | ||
Hosting types | Shared hosting plans, WordPress, VPS hosting plans, cloud, and dedicated | WordPress Hosting, Website Hosting, VPS Hosting, WP Website Builder, Dedicated Hosting, Cloud Hosting |
Money-back Guarantee | 30 days | 97 days |
Detail | Read more | Read more |
Website |
Best Overall Pricing and Value: Bluehost
Bluehost
Overall, Bluehost seems to have the most quality offerings for the best price. They offer seamless WordPress plugin installation, excellent prices, and an overall beginner-friendly experience. We’ve rated them with several other web hosting providers and they seem to often come out on top. Bluehost pricing might not be the absolute cheapest, but for its features, the price seems a steal.
DreamHost
DreamHost certainly has its strengths in regards to WooCommerce options, cheaper pricing, and awesome customer satisfaction rates, but they are found wanting when it comes to the user-friendliness of its account management features.
Best Performance: Bluehost
Bluehost
Bluehost performs much better on average than DreamHost. They currently have a running uptime average of 99.94%, and Bluehost guarantees an uptime average of 99.98%.
DreamHost
DreamHost offers many desirable features, however, its customers have complained of outages, and say they took a while to resolve. As far as statistics go, Dreamhost’s uptime average is currently 99.77%. Which definitely isn’t the best in the industry, although they claim to have an uptime guarantee of 100%.
Best Common Features: Bluehost
Bluehost
Bluehost is known for its incredible offerings along with WordPress installation. They provide a one-click WordPress plugin that makes them tempting for anyone interested in streamlined WordPress hosting. They offer VPS hosting, dedicated hosting plans, shared hosting, cloud hosting, and WordPress hosting, and a free domain. They also have a WordPress site builder for their customers to utilize as they create and host their new sites.
DreamHost
Dreamhost comes in second with some similar features: VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, shared hosting, cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, and a free domain. They come highly recommended for their WooCommerce hosting partnership, but we placed them in second because this is catered specifically towards sellers.
Best Customer Support: DreamHost
Bluehost
Even though Bluehost makes phone support available to their customers, we still found them lacking in the customer service arena. As a rule, the average Bluehost review includes customers who are generally happy, but their reviews pale in comparison to DreamHost’s.
DreamHost
DreamHost does not offer customer support over the phone, but they do have callbacks, chat, and email support. In general, customers seem happier with DreamHost’s problem-solving when it comes to customer support.
Best Ease of Use: Bluehost
Bluehost
Bluehost is one of the more user-friendly web hosting providers in the industry, and they have created a sort of hybrid interface for users to interact with cPanel in an easy-to-use way. Customers who are new to website hosting don’t have much trouble finding what they need and using their interface to manage their sites.
DreamHost
DreamHost does not utilize cPanel for their site management, but they’ve created an entirely customized interface for users to view all their shortcuts in one place. However, some have said there’s a learning curve when getting to know DreamHost’s management software that can be difficult for any hosting newbie.
Best Account Management Dashboard: Bluehost
Bluehost
Bluehost’s dashboard comes out above DreamHost’s because of its catering toward hosting novices. They have integrated cPanel with their own dashboard to provide an intuitive home base for all their customers’ hosting needs.
DreamHost
Because of the learning curve when using DreamHost’s less-intuitive dashboard that we touched on earlier, it comes in second to Bluehost’s dashboard management system. We thought it was a little less pleasing to the eye and a little more complicated compared to Bluehost’s interface.
Best Website Builder Experience: Bluehost
Bluehost
Bluehost provides its customers with a user-friendly site-building experience from start to finish. If you want to build a WordPress site, they have a builder for that plugin specifically. We found that customers were slightly happier with Bluehost’s site-building experience.
DreamHost
DreamHost also offers its own website builder, both as a separate WordPress builder and “Remixer” their “click to edit” website builder, that is user-friendly and perfect for the website novice.
Best Website Migration: DreamHost
Bluehost
At this time, Bluehost isn’t offering free website migration, including WordPress website migration. Customers can pay to migrate their site, but many hosting companies do offer this service for free.
DreamHost
DreamHost currently offers free automated WordPress migrations with most of their shared hosting plans. This is incredibly helpful for those who want to move their site over to DreamHost’s affordable web hosting plans.
Which Should You Choose?
Most hosting providers provide general services such as shared hosting and website builders, but Bluehost and DreamHost both offer special features such as WordPress installs and WooCommerce partnerships. Between both of these providers, one might be better suited for your website’s needs.
Choose Bluehost if:
If you’re new to site owning and managing, it might be best to go with Bluehost. They offer user-friendly WordPress websites that help the website novice to create, host, and manage a successful site.
Choose DreamHost if:
If you’re planning on using reseller hosting or selling items on your website, the WooCommerce partnership DreamHost has might really help your business. Consider DreamHost if you’re looking for great prices and a seller-focused specialty.
Final thought
Bluehost is definitely a world-class web hosting provider that provides excellent features and service, but Dreamhost is close behind with lower prices and some very comparable offerings. It’s up to you which provider you think would be better for your site’s needs.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Between these two hosting providers, Bluehost seems to have the most availability for phone support, and their customers seem generally happy with the experiences they have with customer service.
Between Namecheap and Bluehost, Namecheap presents the cheaper shared web hosting plan, and Bluehost offers a more expensive plan.
Yes, Namecheap and Bluehost both offer free SSL certificates with their hosting packages. In general, it is common for a hosting provider to offer free SSL certificates.
A shared plan offers the customer use of the same server as other customers, to keep costs low. A dedicated hosting plan would offer a dedicated server to the customer.
Namecheap offers their premium customer backups, and Bluehost backs up every customer’s information, but it’s not guaranteed.
Unmetered bandwidth means that you have a certain amount of bandwidth in which you can upload or download as much data as you’d like to your site. It’s a more accurate depiction of what speed and storage is available to website owners than “unlimited bandwidth.”
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- Remixer plans and pricing. DreamHost Knowledge Base. Published October 10, 2022. Accessed October 20, 2022. https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000468691-Remixer-plans-and-pricing
- DreamHost: We Test Their Speed & Support. The Data Doesn’t Lie… – Down.com. Down.com. Published September 24, 2018. Accessed October 20, 2022. https://down.com/web-hosting/dreamhost/
- DreamHost, LLC. DreamHost. Published 2021. Accessed October 20, 2022. https://www.dreamhost.com/legal/terms-of-service/