DreamPress Review – Not Recommended in 2024!
DreamPress Review Summary
DreamPress is a premium managed WordPress hosting from the team, DreamHost. It excels in a few areas, like good customer support, but lacks in performance, and its uptime stands at 99.82%, below its guaranteed uptime SLA. The load handling response time is 447 ms, which is a huge drop from last year’s test, where DreamPress recorded just 119 ms. With all the negatives, they’ve been increasing their prices every year. Overall, DreamPress hosting can be avoided at any cost as there are better alternatives available even at a lower price point.
DreamPress Pros
DreamPress Cons
Starts at $16.95/month
What is DreamPress?
DreamPress was launched by DreamHost in 2013 as their Managed WordPress Hosting solution. This fully managed service ensures that customers can enjoy an optimized WordPress hosting experience without lifting a finger. It includes features such as Unlimited Email, On-Demand and Daily Backups, 1-Click Staging, and Free Automated WordPress Migrations to make website management a breeze.
DreamPress Plans & Pricing
DreamPress provides customers with three great plans to choose from. Customers can start with DreamPress for as low as $23.99 per month. Here are the details of the three DreamPress plans:
- DreamPress: $23.99 per month, 30 GB SSD Storage
- DreamPress Plus: $34.99 per month, 60 GB SSD Storage
- DreamPress Pro: $89.99 per month, 120 GB SSD Storage.
DreamPress Performance
1. TTFB
When I tested the server response time of my DreamPress website, my site responded with an average server response time of 374 ms. According to our fast data, DreamPress performance is a decent-performing host.
Last 12 months, the average speed of DreamPress:
- September 2024 average TTFB: 433 ms
- August 2024 average TTFB: 429 ms
- July 2024 average TTFB: 467 ms
- June 2024 average TTFB: 498 ms
- May 2024 average TTFB: 432 ms
- April 2024 average TTFB: 406 ms
- March 2024 average TTFB: 389 ms
- February 2024 average TTFB: 422 ms
- January 2024 average TTFB: 407 ms
- December 2023 average TTFB: 402 ms
- November 2023 average TTFB: 410 ms
2. Uptime
DreamPress recorded its worst uptime of 99.82% last year. The downtime is below their guaranteed SLA, and it’s shocking to see such downtimes for a premium-priced hosting service.
There were 42 outages totaling 15 hours and 58 minutes, nearly 16 hours of downtime. Given such downtime, we don’t recommend using DreamPress.
Last 12 months average uptime of DreamPress:
- September 2024 average uptime: 100%
- August 2024 average uptime: 100%
- July 2024 average uptime: 100%
- June 2024 average uptime: 100%
- May 2024 average uptime: 100%
- April 2024 average uptime: 100%
- March 2024 average uptime: 99.99%
- February 2024 average uptime: 99.93%
- January 2024 average uptime: 100%
- December 2023 average uptime: 99.84%
- November 2023 average uptime: 99.59%
3. Load Handling
Load handling capacity is a crucial aspect of performance. I conducted load testing on my DreamPress website by sending 500 Simultaneous visitors.
The site responded very well and recorded 447 ms. However, the load testing results were below par, as even shared hosting services recorded a much faster response time. Compared to the 2023 load testing report, DreamPress went downhill in handling the load.
4. Global TTFB
I pinged my site from 40 Global locations to measure the global TTFB score. Dreampress’s average TTFB is 664 ms, and it is one of the slowest scores out of 16 hosts we’ve tested so far.
5. Core Web Vitals
When I recently tested the Core Web Vitals of my DreamPress site, my site responded brilliantly with a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 629 ms, a ‘Total Blocking Time’ of 0 ms, and a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0.07.
DreamPress Features
1. Unlimited CDN
DreamPress provides unlimited CDN through JetPack’s CDN network. Please note that JetPack CDN is offered for free to all customers, and DreamPress has no role here other than simply integrating JetPack CDN into their platform. Every other company in this price range offers a premium CDN or in-house CDN to speed up your sites.
2. DreamPress 1-Click Staging
DreamPress comes with 1-Click Staging, which helps customers test various crucial modifications on a staging site before deploying them to the live site.
3. A Decent Backup System
Apart from this, the host comes with a unique backup system. DreamPress offers customers daily backups plus On-Demand backups. Besides, restoring a backup point is just about a single click.
Conclusion
DreamPress provided a promising start in the first few years of testing. However, as time has passed, their services have degraded, as seen in every performance test we’ve conducted so far. Additionally, their prices keep increasing every year, which is another disadvantage to consider. Overall, for 2024, I’m not recommending DreamPress as many superior solutions are available in the market.
Mohan Raj, founder of Hostingstep.com is passionate about WordPress and specializes in server management and speed optimization. With experience across top hosting providers, he launched Hostingstep.com to deliver honest, data-backed hosting reviews, helping website owners focus on growing their business instead of troubleshooting websites.