DreamHost is a website hosting service with features such as managed VPS hosting, public cloud computing, and dedicated servers. Managed options include WordPress with the DreamPress upgraded service with staging and coaching, WooCommerce hosting, as well as dedicated server hosting.
$3.95
per month
Rackspace Managed Hosting
Score 1.0 out of 10
N/A
Rackspace Managed Hosting is cloud computing company Rackspace's managed IT services and IaaS offering. Its infrastructure options include bare metal servers, virtual single-shared servers, and cloud multi-tenant environments.
If you're not too technical, don't want to spend time managing a server and want something quality while sticking to a budget, DreamHost is the best it can get. We may be able to save money by switching to something like AWS, but for our usage it doesn't totally make sense even with potential cost-savings and improved speeds. The support and ease of use cannot be overstated here.
I would choose zero, but it's not an option. In my opinion, STAY away from this company. Problems can occur, but responsiveness should occur when problems do. In my experience, I've been on hold for more than 9 hours, waiting for promised callbacks for more than 30 hours, and don't have any hope for a near-term resolution.
Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone.
Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform.
There was one instance where DreamHost support caused unnecessary downtime because they misread my request. Unfortunately I don't have access to that account anymore (it was an old employer) so I don't remember the details. To avoid this, make it very clear whether you're just asking a question or want support to handle it (they can be quite eager to fix the problem even when you've just asked a question), and be VERY clear what you need when doing the wrong thing may cause serious problems.
Pricing is competitive, but other providers do beat them out with some of their pricing "features".
The Cloud Files offering is relatively slow and wasn't usable for us.
The automated backup feature that is offered for the Cloud Servers is pretty limited and wasn't usable for us.
There are 2-3 different web management panels, with different logins. It's hard to keep track of which one is which, and can be frustrating/confusing when trying to log in to your panel and choosing the wrong one.
We have every intention of staying with Dreamhost, but we are a tad concerned with the company's recent involvement in high profile litigation and controversial topics. While we don't take a position one way or another on what type of content they should host, one concern we have is that repeated attacks on their infrastructure have caused significant downtime during business hours for us, and that's something we'll have to take into consideration going forward.
If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!
The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability
Whether we're calling in on the phone, live chatting or emailing, we get immediate high-quality, native English-speaking support. This cannot be overstated when it comes to hosting, because support tickets are usually time sensitive and high stress. I've always had great experiences with the limited times we've needed to use DreamHost support. We've dealt with support for many other providers and no one comes close to DreamHost.
We've tried a few other WordPress-specific hosts, as well as other shared hosting providers (Rackspace, WPEngine, and others). We have found that DreamHost gives the best balance of cost, performance, and features, for our needs. All vendors have their own pitfalls and shortcomings, and DreamHost isn't without its own, but it works for us.
Rackspace is a premier IaaS company with vast resources and an excellent reputation for reliability and support. We have used AWS and Rackspace extensively over the last 10 years, while trying other providers for smaller, less mission critical, requirements. Rackspace has been solid throughout that time, experiencing very little unplanned downtime. During their planned maintenance windows, they were incredibly responsive and helpful in coming up with solutions to deal with the scheduled downtime so as to minimize, or eliminate, the downtime experienced by our customers. We originally started working with Rackspace due to a major outage in the AWS platform, which opened our eyes to needing to diversify where our servers are located so as to reduce the risk on a single point of failure with any single provider. Compared to Linode and Digital Ocean, specifically, Rackspace's offering is much more robust. While those other companies do have a good offering, they did not provide cloud servers with enough resources for our needs (MySQL databases with fast solid state disks, and large amounts of memory available). We did host many machines with Joyent for a time, however, they were very focused on the SuSe operating system, which we wanted to move away from due to it's waning community support and relatively esoteric package management system. Ultimately, Amazon and Rackspace were our two providers for hosting our infrastructure, consisting of several (4-10) application servers, database servers (typically 1 MySQL master with multiple slaves for reporting, backups, and failover), and micro-service host machines.
