SiteGround and DreamHost are two of our top recommended hosts: fair pricing, value, and great overall features. At the end of the day we recommend SiteGround as the overall winner. Read on to see why.
PRICING | VALUE | SUPPORT | UPTIME | SPEED | FEATURES | CONCLUSION
SiteGround is one of the fastest growing hosting companies in the world, and probably the best host for most people. With impeccable customer support, great features, and low pricing there's a lot to like about this global hosting company.
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DreamHost is another one of those large, cheap shared hosting companies that's just been around forever. Founded in 1996, they have some satisfied customers going 20+ years strong. If you're looking for cheap mass-market hosting, DreamHost is one of the best.
Pricing
Score: 4.5
SiteGround's pricing starts ridiculously low for the features you get. The one complaint from most users is the fact that pricing jumps up to full price after the first year, at almost double. SiteGround offers amazing discounts most of the time – so you can always find a good deal. Everything from SiteGround shared to dedicated hosting is a very affordable price.
| StartUp | GrowBig | GoGeek | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sale Price | $3.95/mo | $5.95/mo | $7.95/mo |
| Normal Price | $11.95/mo | $11.95/mo | $34.95/mo |
| Best For | Beginners | Intermediate | Pros |
Score: 4.5
DreamHost used to be more expensive than other shared hosts, but now they're right up there with the cheapest. With a yearly shared hosting plan you can get in the door at just $2.59 a month. If you don't want the commitment you can go monthly at just $4.95/mo. The best part? DreamHost doesn't jack up the price on you after the initial period – they're cheap and fair all around.
| Shared | DreamPress | VPS Business | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yearly Price | $2.59/mo | $16.95/mo | $27.50/mo |
| Monthly Price | $4.95/mo | $19.95/mo | $30.00/mo |
| Best For | Beginners | Intermediate WordPress Sites | Growing Small Businesses |
Value
Score: 5.0
You're not going to find better hosting value on the market than SiteGround, we can't sing their praises enough. With 24/7 support, daily backups, and free SSL, SiteGround covers all the basics you need to start.
We highly recommed upgrading to go for the GrowBig plan – you get unlimited websites, double the storage, and WordPress staging (trust us you want that). In addition, you get free migration, which saves a lot of hassle. Our only complaint with SiteGround value is the limited disk space, which can fill up quickly.
Score: 4.5
When it comes to value, DreamHost is one of the best. Low pricing combined with helpful features and a super-generous 97-day money-back guarantee is a win for small businesses.
Plus, they offer unlimited bandwidth, free domain names, free SSL certificates, and compensate you for dips in uptime. They truly provide one of the greatest service level agreements available.
Compared to Bluehost and HostGator, DreamHost comes out strong. The only host with a better value proposition may be SiteGround.
Customer Support
Score: 5.0
SiteGround customer support is seriously epic. You get 24/7/365 support via phone, email, and chat. Support agents are friendly, helpful, and truly go above and beyond to solve your problems.
Check out our full SiteGround review to see the praises their customers sing – it all comes down to support. They've cracked that cookie. If you're a beginner, support should be your #1 priority, so go with SiteGroun over any other host for that aspect.
Score: 3.5
One area DreamHost just isn't perfect in is customer support. Support is provided via email and live chat, or you can request a callback. Hmm, kind of a head-scratcher. They don't have the 24/7/365 support that most hosting companies have.
In addition, even while on the site as a prospective customer you're told to come back during business hours. The reality is that hosting support is a 24/7 job – and DreamHost isn't up to snuff.
Hosting Uptime
Score: 5.0
SiteGround promises 99.99% uptime, which is just about as good as it gets. Third-party testing confirms, showing the range from 99.95% to 100% month after month.
SiteGround offers proactive monitoring with their custom software stack, and AI to help fend off aggressive bot attacks. Don't worry about uptime with SiteGround, they've got it covered.
Score: 4.0
Reports across the web show DreamHost uptime fairly strong at 99.99% to 100%.
The best part? Their 100% uptime guarantee. If for any reason your website is down, they will credit your account with one day of free hosting for every hour that it’s down.
The good thing is that their uptime in the past year has been about 99.98% on average – so don't expect a need to cash in that credit.
Speed
Score: 4.5
SiteGround offers multiple levels of speed optimization: CDN optimization, Cloudflare, dynamic caching, and memcaching. All of these help improve your site speed with SiteGround-built technology.
In addition, their customer support team is always available to lend a hand and offer tips on how to speed up your site. There may be faster hosts out there, but this is one of the best for the value.
Score: 4.0
DreamHost has great reports on speed and is solidly in the top 25% of hosts as far as load time. They don't focus on it as a main feature, but you're not seeing many complaints from customers.
On their DreamPress plan they've optimized their databases just for WordPress, as well as implemented Memcache. So they have speed in mind for sure. Be sure to chat with their support if it's a huge concern for you.
Features
Score: 5.0
SiteGround has some of the best array of features out of all hosts. Not only do they offer their own custom tools to make your life easier, but they leverage cPanel, Cloudflare and other 3rd party technologies.
My favorite of the features includes WordPress staging, memcached speed technology, and the whole array of upgrade options SiteGround provides.
Score: 4.0
Pound-for-pound, DreamHost offers some the of best features of any cheap hosting company. Their cheapest shared plan includes a free domain, unlimited bandwidth, WordPress pre-installed, and a free SSL certificate. Their DreamPress WordPress hosting is a strong value-proposition for fully-featured WordPress hosting that can compete on some level with WP Engine and Kinsta.
You don't get free migrations, and you're missing out on 24/7 phone support that other hosts offer, so we have to dock them a point. Overall – great host, great features.
Conclusion
Final Decision: SiteGround vs DreamHost
Comparing SiteGround and DreamHost is just like comparing SiteGround vs Bluehost and SiteGround vs HostGator. When pitting mass-market budget hosts vs a budget specialty host like SiteGround, go with SiteGround. You get better value and better customer support, rather than dealing with lower quality customer service and features.
If you take our advice with SiteGround, be sure to go with the GrowBig plan. It's going to cost you a few more dollars a month, but you get unlimited websites hosted, as well as double the storage.
Want absolute rock-bottom pricing to start, and can't afford much more? Well then DreamHost is your answer between the two of them.
Looking at DreamHost plans, we can see they start the pricing very low, at just $2.59 if you sign up for the year. They also run the gamut in quality and allow you to scale up to VPS hosting.
In a nutshell, there's really not a great reason to choose DreamHost over SiteGround, except for low pricing. If you can't decide, just trust us and go with SiteGround and claim their huge sale going on now.
Want more ideas? Take a look at our top WordPress hosts or our fastest web hosts to get some more ideas.
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Last Updated on September 5, 2019 by Joe