Oooh this is a comparison I've been waiting to do for quite some time now. How does Hostmonster web hosting stack up against Dreamhost webhosting? We wanted to know for ourselves so we did some extensive research to help you decide which is better. We have put together only the facts to help you decide as the customer which professional web hosting service is best for you. At the end of the day that's all that counts.

Dreamhost

Here is the rundown of all the benefits and features of Dreamhost web hosting. This is straight from their website www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html:

• $8.95 a month (paid 2 years in advance, $5.95 a month if paid 10 years in advance)
• Free Domain Name
• 500 GB of hosting space at signup (increases weekly by 2 gb)
• Unlimited E-mail Accounts
• Host Unlimited Domains on 1 account
• 5TB of monthly Bandwidth at signup (increases weekly by 40 gb)
• Unlimited MySQL Databases

Misc. Items on Dreamhost
SSH access is offered with Dreamhost. You can also have an unlimited amount of FTP users and Shell users. What's appealing with Dreamhost is the unlimited MySQL databases and the consistent increase in allotments for storage space and bandwidth. This shows an honest commitment on their part for giving what they actually claim to offer. Dreamhost also claims to be offering Custom DNS services so that you can completely control your DNS records for each domain.

Hostmonster

Here is the rundown of all the benefits and features of Hostmonster web hosting. This is straight from their website www.Hostmonster.com

• $6.95 a month
• 1,500 gb storage space
• 15,000 gb of bandwidth
• Free Domain Name
• 2,500 Email Accounts
• Host Unlimited Domains/Websites
• SSH Access
• 50 MySQL Databases
• Up to $100 in Free Advertising Credits

Misc. Notes on Hostmonster
1,000 additional FTP accounts and unlimited subdomains are also listed as part of the package. Hostmonster is offering a large amount of space as well (1,500 GB) but is backing that up by allowing you to host unlimited websites at the same time.

User's Point Of View

In a blog conversation thread on blog.forret.com a few webmasters gave their review & comments to help us get a better insight on what is being discussed on this subject:

"Thanks for the comparison; I am in shopping mode. My confidence in Hostmonster has been a bit shaken as of late: two significant outages (1.5 - 2 hours) in the span of one week has me wondering if I shouldn’t migrate to Dreamhost or Media Temple.This is especially true since there has been precious little communication from the company about what exactly happened and how they intend to avoid it in the future. Up to now, I have to say that I have been very happy with their service, although the way they handle subdomains is less than ideal, as you have pointed out. What has been your experience with downtime on Dreamhost, compared to Hostmonster?"

"Dreamhost has a series of multihour outages over the last couple of weeks, and ongoing mail problems for the last few months. It’s unclear when they will stabilize again; I’ve been happy with them for several years, but am looking to move on if they can’t fix their problems soon. It seems like every hosting provider goes through bad periods, and moving from one to another is time consuming; I’m skeptical about the chances for anyone to run a hosting service on razor thin margins and not having similar issues. I’d like to find someone offering more reliable service at a higher price. I’m also considering running my own machine, but that seems like even more trouble."

"A month and a half after Jeff's comment (see above) and Dreamhost is still experiencing frequent outages. They do have a pretty-well-updated status page and alert system, but the outages DO continue. There have been several ‘promises’ that recent upgrades will fix the system for good, but none have done so. After being a happy customer for years I will give them some more time, but my patience IS starting to wear thin."

"And about a month after I left the above comment, Dreamhost has (or so it seems) resolved all the problems."

"have been with dreamhost for about the last 6 months (late 2006, first quarter of 2007):
- their websites are frequently very slow, with server load averages spiking from 3-5 to 50-100
- they always have excuses, always are very sorry, are very immature while thinking they are being cute
- their one-click installs may fail one month due to configuration errors, and then fail again two months later because the same configuration errors are back. In my case it was mailman mailing lists not working with the
-request admin alias
- there are frequent outages, sometimes lasting days, blamed on DDOS attacks The servers are quite slow is the main thing. Hostmonster demo mode seems very snappy and I am considering making the move even though I am just a few months into this whole thing. I want a company that is more professional than DreamHost. They make a cute joke out of what screw-ups they are in their blog. It’s not “refreshingly honest” or anything of the kind, just immature and definitely unprofessional. Results speak for themselves and right now they are not providing a good service. I’d pay 2x what I am paying for just that service, but I am not convinced they are capable of providing a good service anymore."

"I've personally had very good luck with Hostmonster. Downtime has been practically unnoticeable, and I can’t begin to express how nice it is to have 24/7 phone and chat support that responds quickly. And someone should probably note that some of the things in the DNS management section of the article that it states Hostmonster can’t do are CPanel issues, not Hostmonster issues. The third bullet point, about the subdomain problem, sounds like it may not be easily remedied. (I don’t know exactly how CPanel handles subdomain creation.) But the first two issues are with DNS records that can be changed with a quick call to tech support. It would be nice if they could be done without Hostmonster's intervention, but with live chat support and their minutes-long turnaround on those, it’s the next best thing."