DreamHost Goes Super WordPress: DreamPress

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June 4, 2013

16 Comments

The WordPress Managed Hosting world is getting even bigger players, like DreamHost which has just announced a new WordPress-specific hosting option called DreamPress:

DreamPress is a highly optimized, extremely reliable managed WordPress service that comes pre-configured to stand up to higher traffic loads and serve up server-intensive themes and plugins.

This means it’s engineered for speed, advanced security, excellent reliability, and ease of use – all features that were created to make your lives easier!

So, what do you get Bob for your money’s worth?

You get a managed VPS system with scalable and tuned servers build for the WordPress configuration. You also will get such things as robot-assisted migration services using the likes of wp-cli tool, easy control panel, and more. Technical details not listed on the marketing site are as follows:

Each DreamPress instance is actually made up of two VPS instances: one web, and one MySQL.

The two VPS instances:

are provisioned automatically
are configured as a pair
are hosted on isolated clusters of hardware so other sites won’t interfere with their stability or performance. All of them are hosted in our Virginia datacenter as of June 2013.
root and sudo access are not allowed (unlike the standard VPS service)
customers cannot modify the RAM allocation for these VPSes (the RAM will auto-scale)

In addition to the standard VPS setup, we have added Varnish as a caching layer, which:

is set up automatically for the DreamPress customer
listens on port 80
responds to web requests as a proxy in front of the Apache and PHP WordPress stack
is extremely efficient at caching content
allows this set up to scale to very high levels of traffic

It’ll cost you $24.95 to get setup although if you sign up soon you’ll get $5 bucks off for an introductory rate.

Personally, I have a number of hosting accounts scattered across the web all built and maintained for different types and sizes of projects. I have a DreamHost as well and have been a customer since 2007. Although not perfect (as no host is perfect) they have done a good job of hosting and managing my more smaller sites and experiments. I have been very happy with them in many ways and have recommended them as a place to start for a number of clients.

At $19 this isn’t a great “starter” solution but one that may appeal to existing users who love the DreamHost service and have needed a bump in their speed and performance.

Thought on this not-so-surprising expansion?

There are 16 comments

June 5, 2013 #

Dave Clements

That’s a move in the right direction for them and at a nice price point. But do they still not provide support for wildcard subdomains (and thus, WordPress Multisite)? I’ve never even considered using them since coming across that huge annoyance.
- June 5, 2013 #
  
  Kevin
  
  I’d never even consider MultiSite on a shared hosting platform aa it would be incredibly slow. A VPS could do it, obviously not this one, you’d just need to use external DNS like Route53 or Rackspace’s DNS service.
June 5, 2013 #

Sridhar Katakam (@srikat)

GatorPress or HostPress or WordGator could be next.
- June 5, 2013 #
  
  John Saddington
  
  OMG. LOL.
  - June 5, 2013 #
    
    Sridhar Katakam (@srikat)
    
    Come to think about it, “HostPress” is not bad. Someone serious about (yet another) WordPress specialized hosting can go after that domain name.
    - June 5, 2013 #
      
      John Saddington
      
      ah. that is pretty slick.
June 5, 2013 #

Chip Bennett

What does “single site” mean?

In the (nearish?) future, I’ll probably want to move from shared hosting to a VPS. DreamHost’s standard VPS is $15/month. I’d likely be willing to pay an extra $5/month for a WordPress-optimized VPS, but I don’t know what they mean by “single site”. Does that mean a single WordPress install? That would be a deal-breaker, when I have multiple installs (including multisite installs) for different purposes.
- June 5, 2013 #
  
  John Saddington
  
  great question. i bet ipstenu can help clarify…
- June 5, 2013 #
  
  Mike Schroder
  
  Yes, this means single WordPress install. The price point works that way because we’ll scale your VPS(s) based on your utilization, and it covers increased WordPress support as well.
June 5, 2013 #

Kevin

This is pretty cool and a great step for DH. The only problem with a VPS platform is that it’s still shared. The VPS might be isolated, yes, but if any other VPS on that same physical host got attacked (like DDoS), it would cripple the rest…unless the management system was smart enough to detect that and migrate the VPS to other, unaffected hosts…which I’ve never seen before. Quick! To the patent office!
June 6, 2013 #

Grant Palin

An interesting initiative from Dreamhost. I’ve been with DH for several years on their shared hosting, with multiple websites. The idea of a WordPress-optimized setup is appealing, but it’s a harder sell when the pricing is on a per-site basis. I currently run my personal site on WordPress, and am looking at converting two sites over, so monthly costs would rise quickly. And be in addition to shared hosting fees for any non-WP sites. I just get the feeling that a VPS will be more versatile for multiple sites, WP or otherwise.
- June 6, 2013 #
  
  Mike Schroder
  
  Yes, absolutely, a VPS is more versatile. Part of the point of the new offering is to have something specific for WordPress, so that we can offer a higher level of service for those installs. Having a homogenous platform helps that out a lot.
  
  A VPS is also more technical, and DreamPress makes it so that you don’t have to worry about as much optimization settings as you would if you had multiple sites (or multiple platforms) within the same VPS.
June 6, 2013 #

Andy

I like the idea of this hosting but being a newbie, I have a question re. the new site I’m about to launch… Won’t I need two WP installs for my site?… one for the `live` site and another for the test version of the site that I can have a developer make changes to (and me test) before they go live?
- August 11, 2013 #
  
  jonkruse
  
  You’ll probably just want to start off with dreamhosts basic service. You aren’t going to need all the power the dreampress has until your getting a lot of traffic.
  
  Having two dreampress installs would just be crazy if you are using one just to edit. Also most developers have their own hosts that they can test things on.
June 14, 2013 #

Thomas Zickell

yay for dream host they really have never been anything special for a hosting company. In my opinion.

This makes them look like somewhat of an amateur as I hope most of you no and if you don’t Apache is very slow I don’t see any Nginx offerings? or lightspeed ( a much faster version of Apache but still no Nginx)

Putting a so-called duel VPS set up shows that you are sharing resources. It tells me there’s more people on this VPS otherwise are you going to be excited when the other server crashes that has your database on it? there vulnerable either way.

Their VPS is really what’s called a shared stack and it’s not private.

added Varnish as a caching layer well I would hope so I don’t mean to be harsh here but let’s look at a couple competitors of theirs their infrastructure is not as advanced as WPengine, Zippykid, Pagely, web synthesis or Presslabs

they offer no content delivery network there not talking about backups off-site or personal are they running sucuri? what exactly do they have for firewalls?

I’m sorry but I’ll spend an additional $4 to $9 a month for solutions that have proven to offer a lot more. In addition Kevin said that you would have to have off-site DNS I agree but Kevin I can’t agree with your selection of DNS companies. Honestly if you want speed you’re going to have to use something similar to DynECT and if you think that’s too much DNS made easy is very inexpensive.

I think that and the situation there’s too much quality competition out there for them to come out with a Apache using varnish ( I like varnish) however let’s take Pagely a company running lightspeed + varnish well you get a much faster Web server

and in the case of everyone else I’ve mentioned Nginx does very similar things to varnish and can be used with it or without it it still faster than a Apache set up.
- June 15, 2013 #
  
  Kevin
  
  I’m a Linux admin for a very large hosting company, I’ll preface everything with that.
  
  You have a good argument for Apache/Nginx/Lighty, but for a single site installation like this offering, there wouldn’t be a noticeable difference assuming Apache is properly tuned, especially since they have Varnish on the front end. The web server isn’t always what slows WordPress anyway, usually it’s a lack of tuning on the database side.
  
  These VPSs are isolated, meaning that while yes, there are multiple VMs on the same stack, Joe’s VPS can’t interfere with Bob’s VPS, so your argument about the whole database thing is wrong (sorry). The only things that could affect your VPS would be a DDoS attack on another customer or a host hardware failure. I’m assuming they have things in place to mitigate attacks and have plenty of hardware monitors to make sure the hosts are always healthy.
  
  You’re also wrong about this being less complicated than WPEngine and the other smaller guys. This is equally complex in a different manner. Running a VPS stack at this level is complicated at lots of levels. Routing, firewalls, and provisioning to name a few.
  
  DH likely won’t talk to you about their firewalls, but they have them. CDN you can do yourself, DH doesn’t need to re-invent that wheel when there’s plenty of companies that already do the job well enough. Backups you should always handle yourself. Security is usually the customer’s job. If you’re concerned about it, be a big kid and handle it yourself.
  
  Experience has also taught me a lot about the type of customer this will attract; that’s why I mentioned free DNS services like Rackspace or R53. These customers are obviously not spending a lot of money on their hosting platform, so logic tells me they’re clearly not going to spend a lot of money on DNS providers (assuming they even know what DNS is). DynECT is great, but R53 is equally fast and its free. Keep your TTLs low and everything is fast on any platform. Or you could be a cool kid and run your own DNS servers (assuming you know how to do that).
  
  You’re right about quality competition, there’s always another option out there. This is a good service though and a really neat step for DH. Based on everything you wrote, you should look into dedicated hosting or another cloud stack (I’m personally a fan of Ubiquity).
  
  Also, grammar.

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