http://www.bluehost.com and http://www.dreamhost.com
Plans & Features
BlueHost was founded in 1996 while DreamHost began their operations in 1997. BlueHost has over 775,000 domains hosted while DreamHost serves as host to more than 500,000 domains.
Now that you have a couple of basic company information about BlueHost and DreamHost, let us take a look at how each individual webhost measures up against the other in terms of the following factors: plans, features, reliability and support.
First up, here’s a quick overview of the types of packages offered by the two companies:
1. BlueHost, $6.95/month, includes:
- Unlimited domains hosted
- Unlimited hosting space
- Unlimited file transfer
- 2,500 POP/Imap e-mail accounts
- Free domain forever
- Free site builder
2. DreamHost, $5.95/month, includes
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited SQL databases
Despite the $1 difference when it comes to the monthly fee, BlueHost still has the distinct advantage when it comes to giving customers the best value for their money. With DreamHost, you need to pay a $49.95 set up fee if you will pay monthly – this is only waived if you sign up for a 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10-year contract.
With BlueHost, there are no setup fees required and the set of features included in the basic package that they offer is more extensive than DreamHost.
Reliability
Next, let us take a look at how each company measures up in terms of reliability. When you read the online reviews for DreamHost – they are usually good reviews which are interspersed with bad ones. When you visit their website, there really is not much information about the type of data center that they use. When it comes to all the other aspects of the service that they provide, DreamHost is pretty good overall.
But the one thing which could become a problem is the occasional outages that your website may experience. Although they do inform customers beforehand of planned maintenance, outages will still affect the overall reliability of the services offered by DreamHost.
The opposite is true when it comes to the web hosting service provided by BlueHost. They are completely transparent in revealing the type of equipment that they are using. As a consumer, you should consider this as a plus point because the web hosting provider is somehow letting you know that you can completely rely on the quality of web hosting services that they offer.
The type of equipment which is being used by BlueHost is a quad-processor server – which is one of the fastest and more reliable types in the market today. They also have a completely dependable backup and security system. Based from the fact that they have been in operation since 1996 and they have almost a quarter of a million domains currently hosted, there’s no doubt that reliability is the name of the game as far as the services offered by BlueHost is concerned.
Support
As a final note, let us check out the quality of customer support offered by both companies.
To compensate for the fact that they do have outages, DreamHost makes up for it by having a pretty excellent customer support team. When you give them a call in case there are technical problems, DreamHost practices a hundred percent transparency to let you know when and how immediately the problem will be solved.
As for BlueHost, all lines of communication are open including e-mail, live chat and telephone. They do have a quick response time – and due to the reliability of their physical network, there is hardly any need to get the assistance of their technical support team. But in case you do encounter problems, they are there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to serve their slew of customers.
Based from these facts, which company do you think is more superior? BlueHost or DreamHost? You be the judge.
Visit the BlueHost Website (http://www.bluehost.com)
