DreamHost was founded in 1997 as the hosting division of New Dream Network. The company was created by four computer science students (Josh Jones, Dallas Bethune, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil) in Claremont, California and started life with just one Pentium 100 web server. Eleven years later and it hosts more than 700,000 websites across some 1,500 servers. Unlike many other web hosting companies it is owned by its employees. DreamHost is famous for their users' dedication.

Company and Services
DreamHost is based in Brea, California (outside Los Angeles) and has 70+ employees. The firm also has offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston, Massachusetts. DreamHost's revenue in 2006 was more than $13 million and it boasts a loyal customer-base, which the company puts down to it's customer-focused approach.

DreamHost offers shared web hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated hosting packages, all of which run on the UNIX platform. The standard shared option comes with 500 GB disk space and monthly 5.0 TB bandwidth. These increase automatically after each week - 500 GB of storage goes up by 1GB after a week and a monthly bandwidth allowance of 5TB increase 16GB. This is a move designed to reward loyal customers. When you sign up with Dreamhost, you also get a suite of other features including multiple e-mail accounts with spam filtering and unlimited domain hosting.

Next up the ladder is the VPS option (DreamHost PS) with scalable RAM of 150MB to 4,000. Even more demanding customers are served by the dedicated server packages with DreamHost’s “Strictly Business Enhanced” package. All packages include a “no-quibble” 97 day money back guarantee.

Customer support is available by ticketed email, which support staff aim to process within 24 hours. The best way to get an answer quickly may be through the Wiki support on the DreamHost website.

DreamHost may have a strong customer base today but it's not been all plain sailing. The company had a disastrous power outage in April 2006, which infuriated huge numbers of users whose sites were badly affected. The crisis prompted DreamHost to create a systems status blog at dreamhoststatus.com from which customers can find out about main server maintenance and outages.

DreamHost has also had experienced high profile of billing problems, most notably in January of 2008 when some customers were mistakenly billed for the whole year up to December 2008: a massive $7.6 million total over-charge. Some customers were subject to extra charges from their bank of credit card, others had their site automatically suspended when they didn’t pay the erroneous bill.

On the plus side, DreamHost is proud of its green credentials and is a “certified carbon neutral company”. It was listed in Inc. Magazine's Top 5,000 Companies in 2007.

DreamHost also offers free hosting to some American non-profit organizations and charities.

Server Location
DreamHost's 1,500 servers are held at a data center in Los Angeles, California.

Related Links
Official DreamHost Blog
Unofficial DreamHost Blog