After conducting a series of tests, Bluehost stands out as the clear winner in this Bluehost vs DreamHost comparison. DreamHost provides a 100% uptime guarantee and a 97-day money-back guarantee, offering greater reliability and customer satisfaction. Additionally, DreamHost is recognized for its strong privacy protections and free daily backups.
Only WordPress websites within the first 30 days after signup
Yes, only WordPress websites
Starting Price
$2.95/month
$2.59/month
Money Back Guarantee
30-days
97-days on shared hosting, 30-days on other plans
Storage
Up to 100 GB on Shared hosting and up to 240 GB on VPS hosting
Up to unlimited on Shared hosting, up to 240 GB on VPS hosting
Bandwidth
Unmetered
Unlimited
Free Domain Name
Yes
Yes
Free SSL Certificate
Yes
Yes
Free One-Click WordPress Installation
Yes
Yes
Uptime Guarantee
99.99%
100%
Average Page Load Speed
1.2 s
1.77 s
Customer Support
24/7 support, live chat, email support, video guides, ticket support, and knowledgebase
Live chat, ticketing system, email, knowledge base, forums, and video tutorials
Server location
Orem, Utah, Provo, USA
Two server locations in Virginia and Oregon
DDoS Protection
Yes
Yes
Daily Backups
Yes, except basic plan
Yes
DreamHost
Dreamhost is a reliable hosting company amid a sea of them. With unmatched service since 1996, they ensure your website has top-tier functionality and reliable performance. Explore Dreamhost and maximize your online presence.
Bluehost is a famous web hosting company that supports over 2 million websites worldwide. This company has worked on its quality since 2003, and we must say, it has some noticeable results.
Bluehost has a range of products and services to help with the process with your website or online store, and this web host is suitable for all kinds of websites – from small business websites to eCommerce ones.
DreamHost is one of the oldest web hosting companies in this industry, as it was founded in 1997. One of the best things that personally got my attention is the advanced security features, which means this web host is secure and reliable for your website.
Up to 100 GB on Shared hosting and up to 240 GB on VPS hosting
Up to unlimited on Shared hosting, up to 240 GB on VPS hosting
Bandwidth
Unmetered
Unlimited
High-performance SSD storage
Yes
Yes
Free daily backups and restore
Yes, except basic plan
Yes
Free WordPress installation
Yes
Yes
Free site migration
Only WordPress websites within the first 30 days after signup
Yes, only WordPress websites
Free website builder
Yes
Yes
Free SSL
Yes
Yes
Bluehost Features
Bluehost offers up to 100 GB on shared hosting plans, up to 240 GB on VPS hosting plans, and up to 2 TB on dedicated hosting plans. You also get unmetered bandwidth, high-performance SSD storage across all plans for faster access and loading times, and free SSL certificates to secure your site.
Other Bluehost features include:
Free Domain Name—Every Shared plan includes free domain name registration, saving both money and time with a simple domain registration process.
Website Builder—Bluehost features a specialized Bluehost Builder with a beginner-friendly drag-and-drop interface, thousands of themes, pictures, and design tools.
eCommerce Options—Provides immediate access to eCommerce tools like Zen Cart, Cube Cart, OS Commerce, or Agora Shopping Cart for online stores.
Open-source Apps—Offers improvements on over 80 open-source applications, including WordPress, shopping carts, and more.
Regular Backups—Includes regular backups without additional charges for restoration, accessible through cPanel or Bluehost support team assistance.
And the Winner Is DreamHost
DreamHost stands out primarily for its unlimited disk space and bandwidth on shared hosting, making it an excellent choice for users seeking scalability and flexibility without worrying about exceeding limits.
DreamHost offers up to unlimited disk space on shared hosting plans, up to 240 GB on VPS hosting, and up to 2 TB on dedicated hosting. You also get unlimited bandwidth, free SSL certificates and free daily backups to all users for enhanced site security and trust.
Other DreamHost features include:
Professional Email Hosting—Offers professional email hosting to enhance website credibility, with one Email hosting plan available. Option to purchase monthly or annually.
Website Builder—Provides three WordPress + Website Builder plans with an easy drag-and-drop interface, access to endless designs and plugins, facilitating website editing and management as it grows.
Useful Tools—Supports PHP 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3, Canned CGI Scripts, Full CGI Access, SSI, SVN, IPv6, and SSH Access. Features include creating email accounts, Encrypt SSL, domain forwarding, user addition, and quick WordPress installation.
Regular Backups—Automatically creates daily backups, with the option for an additional manual backup once a day. Stores backups for up to two weeks, with restore options available in the Control Panel.
Bluehost offers a variety of shared hosting plans, starting from the Basic plan at $2.95/month for one website with 10 GB SSD storage and chat support, including free CDN and a domain for the first year, but lacks free backups.
The Choice Plus plan at $5.45/month upgrades to three websites, 40 GB SSD storage, enhanced support, and additional security features like daily backups and malware scanning.
The Online Store plan at $9.95/month is designed for ecommerce, supporting three websites with tools for selling unlimited products and managing bookings.
The Pro plan at $13.95/month targets high-traffic sites with support for five websites, 100 GB SSD storage, and prioritized support. Each plan beyond Basic includes free CDN, domain, SSL, backups, domain privacy, and malware protection for the first year.
DreamHost Hosting Plans
DreamHost’s shared hosting comes in two plans: Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited.
The Starter plan is priced at $2.59/month for three years, catering to a single website with features like free domain, 50 GB SSD storage, unlimited traffic, WordPress tools, and a free SSL certificate.
The Unlimited plan, at $3.95/month for three years, expands offerings to include unlimited websites, SSD storage, and email accounts, maintaining the same benefits as the Starter plan.
DreamHost also offers monthly plans starting at $4.95/month or yearly plans starting at $2.95/mo.
Standard at $29.99/month with 2GB RAM and 120 GB SSD
Enhanced at $39.99/month with 4GB RAM and 165 GB SSD
Ultimate at $69.99/month with 8GB RAM and 240 GB SSD
All plans include a 36-month term, 2-4 core CPU, unmetered bandwidth, and a cPanel license.
VPS Hosting Plans with Bluehost
Bluehost has built its Virtual Private Servers (VPS’s) from scratch using all SSD-storage to make your experience enjoyable, powerful, flexible, and fast.
Bluehost VPS hosting uses OpenStack and KVM, which are well regarded open source technologies.
Unlike most other companies, Bluehost VPS hosting gets you up and running within minutes. With the easy-to-use cPanel hosting control panel, you can manage your hosting without in-depth technical knowledge. Along with advanced features, you get Bluehost’s 24/7 customer support.
Bluehost’s dedicated hosting offers three plans:
The base plan at $89.98/month includes a 4 core CPU, 8 GB RAM, and 1 TB HDD.
The second plan at $119.88/month upgrades to an 8 core CPU, 16 GB RAM, and 2 TB HDD.
The premium plan at $139.99/month boosts RAM to 30 GB, with the same 8 core CPU and 2 TB HDD.
All come with a 36-month term, unmetered bandwidth, Linux, and cPanel with root access.
DreamHost Dedicated Hosting Plans
DreamHost’s dedicated hosting plans range from $149.00/month for basic setups with 4 GB RAM and 1 TB HDD, to $379.00/month for high-demand needs with a 12-Core CPU, 64 GB RAM, and 2 TB HDD.
All plans feature RAID 1 storage, root access, Ubuntu, 100% uptime guarantee, 24/7 support, and DDoS protection, scaling to meet different levels of performance requirements.
WarningWarning: The Shared Hosting and WordPress Hosting plans come with a promotional offer only available for new account registrations with an introductory price at the end of the initial period. The price renews at the then-current rate.
And the Winner Is DreamHost
Personally, I loved the wide range of hosting plans that DreamHost offers, so that’s what helped us choose the winner in this round. There isn’t a huge difference in the prices, although DreamHost is a bit cheaper.
You can contact Bluehost’s customer service via live chat, phone calls, ticketing, and email. They are all available 24/7/365.
Bluehost also has a comprehensive knowledge base that covers a wide range of topics, forum support, and even video tutorials for visual learners.
Online user reviews state that Bluehost may provide the best customer service in the industry one day or leave you hanging with no reply on another.
We were curious to see if this is true, so we contacted the Bluehost live chat.
Overall, I had a pleasant experience. I asked a few quick and simple questions, and the agent replied in a matter of seconds to help me.
For those who don’t want to talk to an agent, Bluehost has an extensive knowledge base that covers both basic and advanced subjects. However, some of the articles may be outdated with screenshots from the previous Bluehost interface, which makes them a bit more challenging to follow.
Overall, this web host has superb customer support.
DreamHost Customer Support
DreamHost comes with the same customer support features as Bluehost. However, there is one slight difference with the live chat – it isn’t available 24/7.
I’ll start with the DreamHost Knowledge Base divided into three categories: Getting Started, Announcements, and General Hosting Topics.
DreamHost stands out by offering its Academy of Premium WordPress Tutorials. These are skillfully written instructions, pictures, and videos that may help you quickly and easily understand the platform, even if you have no prior experience or technical knowledge.
Furthermore, you can use the DreamHost ticketing system, even if you don’t have an account. You can choose from Sales, Billing, Tech Support, or Other departments. Let’s briefly see how it works.
First, you should select the topic that best explains your issue. You can go for Account Management, Billing, Sales, Professional Services, Websites, Email, etc. Then, you should enter the domain. What I liked a lot is that DreamHost asks for your level of expertise, so they can help you better.
After you fill in the information, you can choose to submit a ticket or chat with an agent. So, I decided to contact an agent. The agent responded within seconds and was very helpful.
However, the live chat isn’t available 24/7, everything else works flawlessly on this web host.
WarningWarning: DreamHost’s customer support chat is available daily through the panel from 3 am to 9:30 pm PT.
And the Winner Is Bluehost
Although DreamHost has extraordinary support options, its live chat isn’t available 24/7, which can be quite a drawback. If you think that this is the most important thing for you, you can always check out some DreamHost alternatives.
Creating an account with Bluehost is pretty fast and smooth. The whole process is divided into three easy steps, which should take about 10 minutes.
First, you choose the best hosting plan for your website
Then you choose a domain
Lastly, you need to enter payment information
Another thing that makes Bluehost easy to use is the personalized Bluehost control panel.
The Bluehost control panel lets you easily manage everything your website needs thanks to tools like
A unified login
Integration with Bluehost’s help functionalities
Technical support assets
Full-featured domain and email management features
Easy upgrades and scalability so you can change the hosting that supports your website
WarningWarning: The personalized control panel is a bit more complex than cPanel.
Lastly, Bluehost allows you to install WordPress with just one click. There are just a five simple steps to follow:
Select a Bluehost package
Make a domain name selection
Complete the registration process
Install WordPress after logging in
Start building your website
DreamHost Ease-of-Use
You can create an account with DreamHost in a few minutes. You just need to choose a hosting plan, enter your information, and select a payment option.
Lastly, you can also install WordPress with a single click, just like you can do with Bluehost.
And the Winner Is DreamHost
Although both web hosts offer more or less the same user-friendly and straightforward processes, DreamHost comes with the well-known cPanel. Bluehost might’ve won if the personalized control panel wasn’t more complex than DreamHost’s.
As it can be seen from the chart above, Bluehost includes almost every essential security feature:
Free SSL certificates
SFTP
SSH
HTTP2
Malware detection
Google monitoring
SiteLock
Cloudflare
DDoS protection
Malware scans
Firewalls
DreamHost Privacy and Security
Compared to Bluehost, DreamHost has a bit more advanced security features that make sure your website is safe from any kinds of hacker attacks. Here are some of them:
Free SSL certificate
Malware Remover
mod_security
Nginx offerings
DreamShield Protection
Cron Jobs
SSH
SFTP access
PHP version
Multi-factor-authentication
Cloudflare
Firewalls
DDoS protection
And the Winner Is DreamHost
This web host checks your site regularly to monitor its reputation and find harmful code, out-of-date software, broken permissions, and other issues.
Bluehost supports millions of websites worldwide thanks to its data centers in Provo, Utah, and Houston, Texas. In other words, Bluehost’s server is located only in the USA.
However, when you use the Cloudflare CDN, you gain access to Cloudflare’s global network of data centers. The CDN helps the web host deliver content rapidly and reduce page load times no matter where it is located.
DreamHost Server Location
DreamHost is a smaller web hosting company, which is not expanded like Bluehost is, but it didn’t disappoint us. DreamHost is located in California, and, through the years, it has grown to host over 1.5 million websites globally.
Nowadays, DreamHost supports 400,000 customers located in more than 100 countries worldwide. In contrast to Bluehost, this company has two server locations – one in Oregon and the other one in Virginia.
And the Winner Is DreamHost
DreamHost’s server locations in both Oregon and Virginia offer a strategic advantage in providing service coverage and potentially better performance across the United States.
You want to enjoy different types of useful tools: DreamHost provides support for PHP 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3, Canned CGI Scripts, Full CGI Access, Server Side Includes (SSI), Subversion Repository (SVN), IPv6 Support, and Secure Shell (SSH) Access
You want a wider range of hosting plans: DreamHost includes Shared Hosting, WordPress Hosting, Managed WordPress, VPS Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Servers, WooCommerce, Domains, Email Hosting, Website Builder, and Pro Services
You want to feel more secure from hacker attacks: This web hosting company comes with free SSL certificates, Malware remover, mod_security, Nginx offerings, DreamShield Protection, Cron Jobs, SSH, SFTP access, PHP version, and Multi-factor-authentication
When to Consider Bluehost
Bluehost is known worldwide and expanded, and it supports many websites globally. This web host is best to choose if:
You want fast-loading websites – the loading speeds are slightly faster than DreamHosts’, so if you want your website to load in under 2 seconds, Bluehost is the best choice.
You want a leader in open-source – Bluehost has an in-house development team working to improve over 80 open-source applications
You want to use WordPress as your website builder – Bluehost is among three official WordPress providers
Bluehost and DreamHost Alternatives
Provider
Overview
Expert & User Reviews
Hostinger offers affordable shared hosting, VPS hosting, and cloud hosting, along with domain registration services.
HostArmada focuses on speed, security, and reliability and offers features like SSD storage, free website migration, daily backups, and a user-friendly control panel.
Bluehost is a good choice for beginners because it includes everything you’ll need to get started with WordPress (the most straightforward website builder), including a free domain name, automated WordPress installation, a free drag-and-drop page builder, and detailed step-by-step instructions. This web host also provides decent security solutions, a money-back guarantee, and various hosting packages to suit different consumers. However, Bluehost has its flaws. The biggest drawback is the high renewal prices and the personalized control panel that might be more complex for some customers.
On the other hand, DreamHost is a newer but slightly better web host than Bluehost. It provides a straightforward cPanel that is beginner-friendly, and it also offers a fantastic array of security-enhancing tools, such as Malware Remover, mod_security, SSL certificate, Cron Jobs, SSH, and SFTP access, Multi-Factor-Authentication, and a money-back guarantee. However, this company could improve customer support because even though their agents are beneficial, the live chat has limited work hours, which many see as a drawback.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does DreamHost have an uptime guarantee?
DreamHost guarantees 100% uptime with every plan you choose. If you experience any downtime, you receive compensation equal to the cost of one day’s hosting, up to 10% of your total hosting cost.
Does Bluehost offer an uptime guarantee?
Unfortunately, Bluehost doesn’t provide an uptime guarantee, but you’ll still enjoy an uptime of 99.9%.
Is Bluehost suitable for high page traffic?
The Bluehost Shared Hosting package managed 100 virtual users without slowing or stopping in our test. However, they have a limited amount of server resources. You’ll have no other choice than to expand your hosting subscription if you predict significant traffic.
Can I cancel my Bluehost account if I’m unsatisfied with their services?
Of course, you can. Most plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is plenty of time to see if Bluehost is right for you. But if you decide to cancel Bluehost after that, you’ll get a prorated refund for the remaining time on your contract.
What are the best DreamHost alternatives?
If you read our Bluehost vs. DreamHost comparison and decide that although DreamHost showcased as better isn’t the one for you, you can choose from one of the following DreamHost alternatives: Hostwinds, Cloudways, SiteGround, Hostinger, Kinsta, A2Hosting, etc.
What are the pros and cons of using Bluehost?
Bluehost include affordable pricing, user-friendly interfaces for beginners, reliable uptime, and strong integration with WordPress, making it an excellent choice for WordPress sites. It also offers free SSL certificates and domain registration for the first year. However, its cons include occasional upselling tactics, variable site loading speeds, and the cost of site migrations, which are not free, potentially adding to the overall expense for users requiring these services.
HostAdvice.com provides professional web hosting reviews fully independent of any other entity. Our reviews are unbiased, honest, and apply the same evaluation standards to all those reviewed.While monetary compensation is received from a few of the companies listed on this site, compensation of services and products have no influence on the direction or conclusions of our reviews. Nor does the compensation influence our rankings for certain host companies.This compensation covers account purchasing costs, testing costs and royalties paid to reviewers.
