Dreamhost Launches Premium Managed WordPress Hosting

FORWARD MULTIMEDIA’S host Dreamhost announced a few days ago the launch of its premium managed WordPress hosting touting that it was “designed from the ground-up for entrepreneurs, Website designers, developers, and bloggers” and that “DreamPress is a highly optimized and reliable managed WordPress service that is perfect for customers who want a scalable, optimized WordPress hosting experience”. Just to quickly shortlist the main benefits they claim here (I’ll provide the link for the full explanation at the end), they are:

• Virtual Private Server (VPS) instances running on isolated, highly scalable and tuned-for-WordPress physical servers
• Superior Management, Security, and Support
• DreamHost and WordPress has a long partnership- since 2005 and is recommended by WordPress.Org
• Rocket-powered speed + memory cache
• Pre-configured features of DreamPress can deal with high traffic load

So what does this means to you? Well nothing yet as I haven’t fully evaluated it as something that would be suitable for my clients, most of whose sites run on the WordPress platform, and for specifically those on my Shared Hosting account with Dreamhost.

I’ve been monitoring these sites in 2013 and their usage of shared server resources on the account to see whether an upgrade to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) may be necessary. This was also one of the reasons why I enabled Cloudflare (read that article here: Website Security in Trinidad & Tobago: Keeping Safe From Hackers), as Cloudflare is also a Content Delivery Network service (CDN) for optimizing site speed.

Do you need Premium Managed WordPress Hosting?

High traffic sites may do well with it but it depends on how much traffic is considered ‘high traffic’. There is no standard definition as it depends on the kind of site, the size of its demographic and the geographic area. 10,000 visitors per day may be high by some measures but tiny by others, it all depends on where and what site you are.

The number one Trini site on the top 100 sites in Trinidad & Tobago is Trinidad Express (#1 overall is Facebook, Express is #15), and while I’m not privy to their actual daily visitor count, reasonable unofficial estimations put the number around 15,000 visitors per day. The number one ‘private’ Trini site boasts around 7,000 visitors per day.

As most of my clients are small/medium business in niche markets the probability of hitting such numbers is small. Generally speaking, barring unusual spikes in local traffic, there shouldn’t be any real need for such a specialized WordPress hosting in terms of site performance that can’t be obtained via a regular VPS or plain old hosting. This means that the I’ll have to evaluate the other selling points of Dreampress.

Shared Hosting/Own Hosting Choice

For the record I don’t actively market Shared Hosting as an option. it’s really for clients who don’t want to be bothered by having a website where they manage anything and instead have me do it for them. The majority of new clients come to me with their hosting already in place and there are some sites for which I definitely insist on own hosting account with either their host of choice or my recommended host Dreamhost.

Final analysis: analysis is not yet final, I’m looking into it.

Get the full details about Dreampress at the Dreamhost Website