DreamHost in my opinion is no dream. Recently I had a referral contact me for helping setting up a WordPress site for their client. DreamHost taunts a “One-Click Install” for WordPress as demonstrated below. I do agree this is probably accurate but when you give the user of a DreamHost account little information to which option to select…things get pretty messed up. Yes, there is a “wiki” but if you've never done this before it could get confusing. They even charge for calling technical support. That is insane!

The very first main reason why they could never install WordPress after 3-4 tries is the domain they were using was on www.1and1.com but they were hosting the new site on DreamHost. I had to change the name servers on 1and1.com to point towards DreamHost. This solved the first big challenge. Now behind the scenes I didn't know they had email running through 1and1.com so that broke their email as well. Thankfully this happened on a Friday evening :). On my next post I'll talk about that fun circus!

Typically when you register a domain name you probably will be using that company to also host your website. I would highly recommend doing this to keep your investment cost down and things organized. WordPress isn't for every website or every person/ business. It helps provide a feasible back end administration panel that can help them easily change things out as needed. [Read more…]