DreamHost / DreamPress WordPress Hosting Review (2016)

DreamHost participated for the third year in a row in WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. Last year, I wrote:

DreamPress improved their performance a lot over last round. In fact they did fantastically well on every load test once I got the opportunity to actually work with their engineers to bypass the security measures. However, they failed pretty badly on the uptime metrics. I have no idea what happened but I experienced a huge amount of downtime and ran into some very strange errors. If it wasn't for the severe downtime issues, DreamPress could have been in the top tier.

This year, they made even further progress and earned that Top Tier status. DreamHost also are the second highest rated shared hosting company here at Review Signal in terms of customer opinion.

Products

Company	Plan	Monthly Price	Visitors Allowed	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Sites Allowed
DreamHost	DreamPress	$19.95	Unlimited	30GB	Unlimited	1

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Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Company	Total Requests	Total Errors	Peak RPS	Average RPS	Peak Response Time(ms)	Average Response Time(ms)	Total Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Throughput (MB/s)	Average Throughput (MB/s)
DreamHost	295685	43	224.1	164.27	15063	339	16.06	13.5	8.922

LoadStorm test logged in thousands of users to simulate heavy uncached load on the server, scaling up with more users on larger plans after the $25-50/month range. DreamHost did exceptionally well with almost no errors and fast aerage response time.

Blitz Results

Company	Hits	Errors	Timeouts	Average Hits/Second	Average Response Time	Fastest Response	Slowest Response
DreamHost	29337	0	1	489	4	3	7

The Blitz test is designed to make sure that static assets (which should be served from cache) are being handled properly and can scale to very heavy big spikes in traffic. If the LoadStorm test was a clinic, this was absolute perfection. DreamHost was near perfect with a ridiculously quick 4ms average response time (which is likely due to being physically close to the testing server) and 4ms spread which is excellent.

Uptime

Company	StatusCake	UptimeRobot
DreamHost	99.97	99.97

Not much to say here beyond DreamHost had good uptime at 99.97%.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

I mention these because they are in the full testing but I won't bother putting them here. No company had any significant issue with either and it's not worth writing about. If you're very interested in seeing the geographical response times on WPT or what the raw computing power test of WPPerformanceTester measured, read the full results.

Conclusion

DreamHost continues to step up their performance game. Last year, a severe uptime issue knocked them out of earning awards. This year, there were no such problems. They handled every test near flawlessly and earned themselves a Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance award. I always am happy to see companies continually improve their performance. It's good for the space to have another strong competitor at the entry level price range.