The first webhost I signed up was Dreamhost which was around 4 years back – 2007. In the mean time, the portfolio of my websites grew and services imparted by Dreamhost went from worse to worst.  Though I still maintain an account on Dreamhost but I have now transferred most of my websites to Hostgator.

Having been with Hostgator for more than 9 months, here’s my review -

Courteous and helpful support

Whether you are an existing customer or someone who wants to become one, with Hostgator polite help is just a click away. They have a huge team of chat support specialists who are ready to answer all your queries ranging from basic to advanced. It would never take more than 2-3 mins of wait time before you can chat with a customer care exec at Hostgator. Compare that to Dreamhost, they only provide chat support to VPS and dedicated customers and even then at times it would take ages to connect. Moreover, I find the Dreamhost customer support way too rude to handle. The sentiment is echoed by two other friends of mine who are with Dreamhost. They have stopped using Dreamhost customer support altogether!

Servers that would never go down

I monitor all my websites using a nice service called AreMySitesUp. My sites hosted on Hostgator have been down for a total of 10 mins or so in the past 9 months. Compare that to Dreamhost where websites are down for an 1/2 hour on average (modest) in every 15 days. Sum that up and you get around 9 hours of average downtime for last 9 months! Which one will you choose? 10 mins or 9 hours?

Transparent with Statistics

Okay, when it comes to control panel user interface, I think Dreamhost is a clear winner. I find the Dreamhost control panel UI quite slick compared to the boring cPanel UI offered by Hostgator and most others shared webhosting service providers. Having said that, Hostgator’s cPanel offers you a quick glance over your real time RAM usage, CPU usage and number of concurrent processes running. This is something, which, for some reason beyond me, Dreamhost wants to hide from their customers.

If I have to choose a new shared hosting provider today, I think I will ONLY go with Hostgator.

3 Reasons I love Hostgator is a post from ReviewOfWeb

On the Occasion of 4th/July, the independence day of US, our web host – Dreamhost – is offering one year hosting plan for $9.24 only which otherwise sells for ~$120.

To avail this offer go to Dreamhost Sign Up Page , enter your domain/personal details and enter 777 as the promotion code in Step#7.

Act fast as this offer is valid till 6th/July/2009 only!

DreamHost webhosting independence day discount offer. Offer valid till 6/July only is a post from ReviewOfWeb

Act now!

Dreamhost, the web host on which this weblog is hosted has gone MAD and is offering 2 years of hosting absolutely free to all existing Geocities users. 

For the uninitiated, GeoCities is one of the oldest and a free web hosting service provided by Yahoo!. Now that the news of Geocities being closed down later this year is confirmed, our dear webhost Dreamhost has decided to give 2 years of webhosting free to all existing GeoCities users.

So how can you avail this offer?

1. Upload a file to http://geocities.yahoo.com/  having the text “I’m off to DreamHost!”
2. Fill in the full URL of your uploaded file at the "promocode" field on the sign up page https://signup.dreamhost.com/ 

Some important conditions to note:

1. This offer is valid for new customers only.
2. This offer is not valid for existing customers.
3. Don’t get greedy and try to create more than one account with them. They are very strict with their terms of service(TOS) and spam policies. If you try and somehow succeed in creating more than one account, you will end up losing ALL your hosting account(s). Not to scare you but to warn you.

Get two years of web hosting absolutely free for all Geocities users. No strings attached. is a post from ReviewOfWeb

Here, I would like to  share my experience of finding and setting up my blog on my web hosting service provider.

1) Choosing the host:

Since the start of my blogging activities I have followed Digitalpoint Forums religiously, which in a way have immensely helped me in choosing my blog host. I found the reviews for dreamhost web hosting more or less good all over. With features like 500 GB of disk storage on sign up increasing by 2GB every week, 5TB monthly bandwidth increasing by 40 GB every week, one free domain, unlimited domains and subdomains (that can be hosted), very less outage time. It took me no time to choose this as my preferred choice of Web Host.I registered with dreamhost on 11/Dec/07, luckily that was the last day when they allowed $97 discount for the new members. Now the maximum discount offered by them is $50.

2) WordPress Installation:

Within half an hour of subscribing and making payments, I received emails detailing about email and FTP services. Then came wordpress installation part, dreamhost offers a very simple ‘one click installation’ for wordpress(along with other installation options like forums). This can be done either in the root folder eg: ReviewOfWeb.com or you can create a wordpress folder of your own for eg: ReviewOfWeb.com/wordpress. Unless you intend to put your blog itself at the subdomain level, I would suggest you to stick with root folder only and not a seperate wordpress folder ( because of some security issues that comes along with it)

3) Choosing theme:

WP provides a number of built-in themes( through the presentation tab) or through http://themes.wordpress.net/. Other than these, you can get zillions of themes for a google search on “wp themes”. I suggest if you are a newbie to blogging stick with themes provided by WP, they are tested for IE, Firefox layout and other possible problem areas.

4) FTP client or Web Ftp:

FTP stands for File transfer Protocol whereby you can transfer your files to the web host. There are step by step instructions in the mailer from dreamhost to accomplish this task. You have two options here, either download any FTP client or use the web option provided by dreamhost https://webftp.dreamhost.com/ . I prefer the latter just because its simplicity.
Thats it! You are all set to make your mark on web. Enjoy Blogging.

Note: You can use the promocode HIGHESTDISCOUNT1 to get the maximum possible discount of $50 on dreamhost.

4 easy steps to set up your self hosted wordpress blog is a post from ReviewOfWeb