Bluehost vs. Dreamhost

Bluehost vs. Dreamhost: Specs

Plans & Pricing

At first glance, Bluehost and Dreamhost seem to cost the same amount per month for a starter plan with both coming in at $2.95 per month. However, both prices increase after the initial promotional period. Bluehost’s basic plan reverts to its regular price of $11.99 per month once the promo is up, and Dreamhost reverts to $6.99 or $12.99 depending on the starter plan you choose.

If you’re looking for ecommerce hosting, Bluehost’s hosting plans for online stores start at just $6.75 per month, whereas DreamHost is nearly double the price. Both share similar features like free domain, free CDN, and free SSL, but Bluehost’s basic plan customers will also get custom WP themes to get started.

While they’re both great services at a great rate, I prefer Bluehost’s pricing and various plans.

Winner: Bluehost wins plans and pricing by offering more plans at rates that are more stable.

Features

Both Bluehost and Dreamhost offer similar features such as free domain, SSD storage space for a single website, SSL certificates, and unlimited bandwidth. They also have their servers in the US, with average speed for Dreamhost at 231ms and Bluehost at 361ms . Dreamhost offers Cloud Dedicated hosting while Bluehost supports WooCommerce and dedicated hosting.

However, only Bluehost offers a free professional email for your marketing. At the end of the day, Bluehost offers more bang for your buck.

Winner: Bluehost offers users more features even at the starter and basic plan levels.

Performance and Uptime

Both Bluehost and Dreamhost have a similar uptime rate of around 99.8%, which is pretty standard for the industry. Bluehost servers had an average uptime of 99.854% over the past 30 days, while DreamHost servers had an average uptime of 99.8% over the past year.

Bluehost wins this comparison for the simple fact that Dreamhost offers customers a 100% uptime guarantee and don’t deliver on this guarantee, being up 99.8% of the time. However, the guarantee ensures you’re compensated for any downtime through a rebate on the billing cycle.

Winner: Bluehost wins by not offering an uptime guarantee that they can’t, well, guarantee.

Security

Bluehost and Dreamhost offer similar security features such as free SSL certificates. DreamHost offers DreamShield for $3 a month while Bluehost offers SiteLock ranges from $6.99 a month to $29.99.

However, Dreamhost also offers a bunch of other great security features to keep your website secure which are included at every plan level, including A high-performance, reverse proxy web application firewall, HTTP/2, A standard security protocol that’s encrypted by default, and Mod_security, A web application firewall for apache that helps safeguard websites from various attacks.

Your site is in good hands with Dreamhost.

Winner: Dreamhost has a lot more security features enabled by default and even the premium security features are less expensive.

Support

While Bluehost has been dominating these matchups pretty handily up to this point, support is where both Bluehost and Dreamhost drop the ball a bit. While DreamHost offers technical support 24/7 year-round, you can’t call the support team on a high-priority basis. You can, however, schedule a callback for a fee. Other support options are available for free, but paying to have a call returned left a bad taste in my mouth.

Overall, Bluehost’s support seemed good. However, its support chatbot made it difficult to reach a live person, and when I finally got into the queue for a support representative, it took a long time for a support rep to come online to help. In one instance, it took almost an hour over two chat sessions before I could connect to a support technician.

They could both use some work in the support department, but Bluehost was a little more responsive than Dreamhost and won yet another category.

Winner: Bluehost wins, but only barely — reaching a rep via live chat worked and they were responsive, but, it could be a lot better.

Recent Improvements

Of course, Bluehost and Dreamhost put a lot of work into keeping the services they provide competitive and up-to-date. Both have deployed a bevy of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements over the years and are clearly committed to giving customers as good of an experience as possible.

However, I was particularly impressed with some of Bluehost’s recent improvements such as the launch of Bluehost WordPress Academy, a set of online tutorials to help new users get the hang of how to host and build a website on WordPress.

This isn’t to say that Dreamhost isn’t also doing a lot of work behind the scenes, I just found Bluehost’s improvements to be more helpful overall.

Winner: While it’s close, Bluehost pulls ahead for a win in the final category.

Final Thoughts

Bluehost and Dreamhost are both popular web hosting providers that offer similar features such as free domain, SSD storage space for a single website, SSL certificates, and unlimited bandwidth. They both also have their servers in the US, with average speed for Dreamhost at 231ms and Bluehost at 361ms.

Although DreamHost offers a great balance of server performance, dedication to security and privacy, and 100% guaranteed uptime, Bluehost is the web host that we would highly recommend to most.

Ultimately, whichever hosting solution you choose depends heavily on your needs and preferences — you can’t really go wrong with either.

How We Evaluated Bluehost vs. Dreamhost

I test web hosts based on the following factors:

• Plan value: What plans are available, and do they offer a good value?
• Ease of use: Is the dashboard easy to navigate?
• Support: How fast can you get help when needed, and is support genuinely helpful?
• Features: What features does the host offer, and how do they compare to similar competitors?
• Security: Does the host offer SSL certificates, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection, backup services, and scans for viruses and malware?
• Speed and uptime: Does the provider offer a fast, stable environment for your website? How does it perform in tests, and what kind of servers does the hosting company use?
• Recent improvements: What has the host done lately to update its technology and services?

Learn more about our review methodology.