DreamHost and WebHostingHub are 2 web hosting providers specialized in Linux hosting, but which one is better for personal and small business in terms of the web hosting price, features, reliability, performance and technical support? This question might be haunting those people who cannot decide which to go with due to the lack of comprehensive knowledge about them. To solve this problem, we have made an in-depth comparison between them, aiming at helping readers have a clear idea that which company provides the things they need.
Editorial Rating
At this time of writing, our editors have been hosting a sample site with the web hosting plans from both DreamHost and WebHostingHub for more than 3 months. Based on the real hosting experience, we have had ratings for them on the aspects of overall service, reliability, control panel and support. The result shows that WebHostingHub has far surpassed DreamHost in control panel and support.
Editorial Rating
DreamHost
WebHostingHub
Overall
Reliability
Control Panel
Support
Website
dreamhost.com
webhostinghub.com
Web Hosting Price
Both of the 2 web hosts have one shared web hosting plan prepared for personal and small businesses. Regularly, the price of DreamHost shared hosting plan starts from $8.95/mo, and that of WebHostingHub starts from $6.99/mo. However, WebHostingHub is now offering 43% discount for visitors going through this promotional link, thus the effective price is actually as low as $3.99/mo. Read the detailed price information in the following table.
Billing Cycle
DreamHost
WebHostingHub
1 Year
$9.95/mo
$5.99/mo
2 Years
$8.95/mo
$4.99/mo
3 Years
N/A
$3.99/mo
Website
dreamhost.com
webhostinghub.com
As for payment method, DreamHost only accepts payment through credit cards, while WebHostingHub also allows purchasing from PayPal which works efficiently to reduce the risk of malicious deduction by any company.
Both of the 2 companies offer attractive extras in the web hosting plans. DreamHost provides a free domain and free domain privacy. WebHostingHub prepares a free domain, $100 Google AdWords credits, $75 Bing/Yahoo search credits and $50 Twitter advertising credits.
Features
DreamHost and WebHostingHub have a large number of similar features, such as unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, PHP 5, Perl 5, Python, Ruby on Rails and SSH. But when we have a deep look at their features, we find that WebHostingHub web hosting plan is more rich-featured because it includes some more features that are not provided by its competitor. For example, DreamHost doesn't support custom cronjobs (which may cause troubles in keeping some certain WordPress themes and plugins working properly), but WebHostingHub does.
Feature
DreamHost
WebHostingHub
Control Panel
DreamHost Control Panel
cPanel
Custom PHP.ini
Custom Cronjobs
Premium Website Builder
Money Back Guarantee
97 Days
90 Days
Free Phone Support
Free Live Chat Support
Price
$8.95/mo
$3.99/mo
Website
dreamhost.com
webhostinghub.com
Reliability & Performance
DreamHost hasn't invested any dedicated data center. Instead, the company keeps partnering with a collocation provider for server and networking service. As we monitored in the past 3 months, the uptime of DreamHost averages 99.93%, excellent but still not as good as the guaranteed 100%.
Being different from DreamHost, WebHostingHub has 2 data centers located on the east and west coast of the US, both of which are utilizing 100% high performance Dell servers and 24x7 server monitoring. As a result, WebHostingHub delivers an average of 99.97% real uptime.
In terms of speed, the 2 companies have almost the same good performance, although WebHostingHub has a slight edge in this aspect. According to our monitoring results, the server response time of DreamHost is 500ms on average, and that of WebHostingHub is 395ms. Read the statistics of the past 30 days in the following chart.
Technical Support
Technical support is always a complaint for DreamHost customers. Subscribing to the web hosting plan, customers only get access to free support via email. If they want quicker solutions via live chat or phone, they have no choice but to pay additional $9.95/mo for the Premium Support which includes 3 phone callbacks/mo and live chat. Among the hundreds of web hosts we have reviewed, DreamHost is the only one that charges fees for phone and live chat support.
WebHostingHub, however, provides US based 24x7 support free of charge via email, live chat and phone. The 180+ support staffs are guaranteed to make a response to customers' requests within 90 seconds even in the middle night. We have called them and contacted them online for several times, and their efficiency and courteous manner impressed us.
Our recommendation
Due to the fact that WebHostingHub and DreamHost have the same performance but the former one has cheaper price and better technical support, we would recommend WebHostingHub more to personal and small businesses. Actually, WebHostingHub has also received a high reputation among its real customers as up to 98.9% of them are satisfied with the service of this company.