Bluehost vs. DreamHost : Comparison

Which is the best for hosting WordPress, BlueHost or DreamHost? BlueHost and DreamHost are 2 famous web hosting providers, and have many things in common with each other. To help people understand the difference, we have reviewed them in depth, and found that BlueHost is the better for WordPress than DreamHost. According to the comparison on price, features, performance and support, we explained the reasons why BlueHost is more recommended.

Overall Review

BlueHost is one of the most popular and reliable Linux based WordPress hosting provider focusing on a budget, reliable and high performance web hosting plan since 1996. At present, it is powering for over 850,000 WordPress websites, and is still growing fast with 20,000 new customers added for every month. BlueHost has been topping the list of many hosting review sites as well as recommended by WordPress.org since 2006.
DreamHost is also a veteran web host founded in 1997. Serving for domain registration, shared hosting, dedicated server, VPS hosting and cloud hosting, DreamHost has many same features with BlueHost on web hosting at the beginning. However, with more than 16 years developments, BlueHost becomes much better than the latter one, as the following item-to-item rating comparison.

Reputation
Feature
Price
Loading Speed
Reliability
Techncial Support
In-depth Review	BlueHost Review	NOT Recommended

BlueHost or DreamHost > Price

BlueHost offers the 2 WordPress-friendly hosting plan named Starter and Plus starting at $5.99/mo and $7.99/mo regularly, but now, you can get a 50% discount for $3.49/mo and $3.95/mo effectively.
Compared with the BlueHost, DreamHost is much more expensive. It’s starting at $8.95/mo, and approximately 130% more expensive than the former one.

Plan in Comparison	Starter	Plus	Shared
Regular Price	$5.99/mo	$7.99/mo	$8.95/mo
Discount	40% Off	50% Off	N/A
Promotional Price	$3.49/mo	$3.95/mo	$8.95/mo

BlueHost and DreamHost both allow credit cards of Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover. Besides, BlueHost allows the more secure and easy online payment method – PayPal, while DreamHost does not.

BlueHost or DreamHost > Features

The BlueHost Plus plan has many similar features as DreamHost, such as unlimited disk space, monthly data transfer, sites & email accounts, MySQL databases, etc. However, BlueHost is still more rich-featured than DreamHost, seeing the differences as following,

Plan in Comparison	Starter	Plus	Shared
Free domain	Yes	Yes	Extra $12.95/yr
Addon Domains	1	Unlimited	Unlimited
Hosting Sites	1	Unlimited	Unlimited
SSH	Yes	Yes	No
PostgreSQL	Unlimited	Unlimited	No
Custom Cronjobs	Yes	Yes	No
.htaccesss Override	Yes	Yes	No
1-Click Installation	Mojo Market 200+ Apps	Mojo Market 200+ Apps	Fantastico about 30 Apps
Control Panel	cPanel	cPanel	Custom
Money Back Guarantee	Anytime	Anytime	97 days
Price	$3.49/mo	$3.95/mo	$8.95/mo
Conclusion	Limited	Recommended	Too Expensive
			-

In the comparison, with the BlueHost Anytime Money Back Guarantee, you can ask for a full refund anytime without any questions. This is the exclusive secure purchase guarantee in shared web hosting market based on the confidence of BlueHost for the world-class service. DreamHost guarantees 97 days money back, but DreamHost deducts the refund from the account for setup fee, domain registration fee, and dedicated server payments.

BlueHost or DreamHost > Loading Speed

Be different from other companies renting data centres, BlueHost has developed 3 dedicated data centres which invested over 20 million in the past 5 years. There are over 7,500 Dell branded servers configured with multiple AMD Operton CPUs, 32~64GB DDR3 memory, San storage. With the nationwide fibre connection, the bandwidth exceeds 15,000 MBits totally. All the robust infrastructures ensure the customers with the fast and reliable hosting experience.
DreamHost co-locates a data centre in Los Angeles. The sites hosted with DreamHost are loading actually faster than other common hosts on the average. However, compared with the sites on BlueHost, the sites on DreamHost is still 56% slower. We made the performance comparison for the same WordPress site hosted with BlueHost and DreamHost, see the statistics chart as below.

Averagely, BlueHost (320ms) is up to 56% faster than DreamHost (498ms).

BlueHost or DreamHost > Support

BlueHost provides 24×7 US based customer service. You could contact for support via telephone, live chat and email for your convenience. In general, the phone holding time is less than 30s, and email responds is usually within 15 minutes. For BlueHost support team is full with WordPress experts, you could get an effective help with knowledgeable and professional staff anytime.
Besides, the online Help Center of BlueHost contains tons of resources. You can get Started Wizard for step by step guides, watch Video Tutorials to learn how to use your account, search the common asked questions’ answers at the Knowledge Base, and discuss some unique problems in the User Forum.

Toll-free Telephone
Live Chat
Email Support
Ticket System

Compared with BlueHost offering the customer support via toll-free telephone, live chat, email, ticket system, etc, DreamHost support is limited via the OFFLINE methods only. If you want to contact through a phone call or live chat, you have to pay another $9.95/mo.
Tested the only email support from DreamHost, we received a respond after a coupon of hours. We could not stand this long responding time, can you? Think about when you have a serious issue making your hair white, but you have to wait to the email response in an unknown time.

BlueHost or DreamHost > Conclusion

Learn from the comparison between BlueHost and DreamHost, it’s clear that BlueHost is better than DreamHost for cheap website hosting. Choosing the BlueHost Plus plan starting at $3.95/mo or Starter plan starting at $3.49/mo, you can fully focus on the content and marketing development by leveraging the professionals.