DreamHost vs BlueHost
I’ve been thinking about switching from DreamHost to BlueHost. My main reason is price: I’m paying around $10/$9/$8 per month (1/2/3 year term respectively). However, I’ve come across a coupon that causes BlueHost to charge me $5/$4/$4 per month (1/2/3 year term respectively). My DreamHost term expires in June, so I’ll need to either pay month-to-month or sign up for another year.
My difficulty with BlueHost is that you need to pay up-front: there’s no free trial term. I want to lock in this cheap hosting for as long as I can (3 years preferably), and BlueHost will reimburse you if you quit early. But I want to make sure I don’t regret the time I spend switching hosts—and I definitely don’t want to have to undo all my changes sometime in the future. If anyone has any experience with both DreamHost and BlueHost, let me know (in the comments for this post).
Here’s a comparison with the services I’d be interested in:
| Service | DreamHost | BlueHost |
| IMAP Email | YES | YES |
| WordPress | YES | YES |
| SSH | YES | YES (but 1 account) |
| ZenPhoto | YES | YES |
| Backup Space | YES | NO |
| SSH tunneling | YES | ? |
| Mail Filtering | SORT OF | SORT OF ? |
| HTTP-SVN (SyncPlaces) | YES | NO |
| Shared SSL | NO | YES |
| SSL | YES $4/month | YES $2.50/month |
| IkiWiki | NO | NO ? |
The “SORT OF” entry under Mail Filtering isn’t merely a pun: I just mean that both hosts provide mail filtering, but they don’t (for example) do custom sieve scripts.
Between DreamHost and BlueHost, the main difference is in off-site backups. BlueHost does not provide them, so I’d have to continue paying Amazon. (I use Jungle Disk’s interface to Amazon S3.) This isn’t so bad: Jungle Disk’s solution is set-and-forget, with very little intervention required. If I decided to use the FTP space that DreamHost provides, I’d probably go with manent. I haven’t tried it in a while, but it looks really good, and they’ve just added a Windows installer.
For SSL, BlueHost is better since they offer a shared SSL site and they offer unique IP’s (required for SSL) for cheaper than DreamHost. I don’t know if BlueHost provides SSH tunnelling. However, if I can use SSL, I don’t need it (I use SSH tunnelling to secure my HTTP traffic.)
I’ll probably stick with DreamHost for now. But, I’ll continue to obsess over BlueHost. If anyone has any information to tip me in either direction, I’d be relieved to hear it.
Hey, Are you still with DreamHost or have you moved to Bluehost? How is the performance on Bluehost server? How is server response time on your new hosting company? Since Google is now considering page speed, one need to consider the server response while changing to the new hosting provider. What’s your though?
Dhruv
27 Apr 13 at 1:32 am