DreamHost Alternative: The Benefits of Choosing Kinsta

How Kinsta Compares to DreamHost in a Nutshell

Before we go into detail about Kinsta vs DreamHost, let’s take a look at some of the key differences between the two hosting platforms. 

To start with, Kinsta is the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2, the world’s leading software review and comparison site:

The WordPress Hosting Leader on G2

4.8 stars · 1000+ reviews

Enjoy an 11% Faster Website Simply by Moving From DreamHost to Kinsta

We measured 3,200+ migrations over the course of a three-month span. On average, client sites that came from DreamHost to Kinsta experienced 11% faster load times.

How is this possible? Our customers enjoy:

• The latest generation of virtual machines from Google’s Compute Engine general-purpose machine family C3D VMs and The fastest Compute-Optimized C2 VMs, available across all plans in supported regions.
• A stack that’s been fine-tuned for WordPress over the past 8 years.
• Google’s Premium Tier Network to deliver website data faster.
• Free CDN powered by Cloudflare’s global network of 300+ locations.
• Built-in Edge Caching that cuts the time needed to serve cached WordPress HTML by an average of more than 50%!

Migrate from DreamHost to Kinsta hassle free with our free expert migration service. With our 30-day money-back guarantee, you can test out the service and improved speeds completely risk-free. You only lose if you don’t give this a try!

Some other key differences between Kinsta and DreamHost include:

• Kinsta is not a general web host like DreamHost. We are specific to WordPress and our team is made up of experienced engineers. 
• Kinsta has been the fastest WordPress host for 5 years in a row (independent benchmark).
• We have 37 data centers across the globe, while DreamHost only has 3, with two in the U.S. and one in Europe.
• Kinsta offers premium 24/7 support to all customers, regardless of your plan. DreamHost limits its live chat support to business hours. 
• Unlike DreamHost, all of Kinsta’s plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) and free premium DNS. 
• All Kinsta plans come with a free Cloudflare integration with a secure firewall and free DDoS protection.
• Kinsta works with Google Cloud’s premium global tier network.
• Kinsta includes free, human-performed site migrations on all of our plans. With DreamHost, you have to handle the migration yourself via a plugin or pay $99 for a migration service. 
• All plans at Kinsta include uptime monitoring. DreamHost only offers uptime monitoring features via the Jetpack plugin.
• Kinsta provides a free security guarantee on all plans, whereas DreamHost charges $199 for its professional malware removal service.
• Kinsta performs weekly automatic MySQL database optimization on all sites to ensure better performance. Database optimization is only offered as a premium service for DreamHost plans.
• Kinsta provides five types of backups
• Unlike DreamHost, Kinsta offers tools to boost performance even further, including Redis and New Relic (license required) add-on integrations for all plans. 
• Kinsta provides the feature to load your site over reverse proxy
• Kinsta allows multisite setups on the WP 2 plan and above. WordPress Multisite support is not provided by DreamHost.
• DreamHost’s shared plans don’t support HTTP/2 connections. All Kinsta plans come with HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support.
• Kinsta provides six types of WordPress backups.
• We provide our custom-built, WordPress-specific MyKinsta dashboard.
• We support the latest, most secure and fastest PHP 8.1 on all plans. The latest version available at DreamHost is the outdated PHP 7.2.
• You’ll get a free staging environment and SSH access on all plans.
• Kinsta provides a site-healing feature, and we monitor every websites for uptime 480 times per day.
• Kinsta is SOC2 compliant, which provides independent proof that we have established security procedures and adhered to those procedures over time. Dreamhost is not SOC2 compliant. See Kinsta’s Trust Report for additional information.
• DreamHost allows insecure FTP connections. We only support encrypted and secure SFTP and SSH connections.
• Kinsta has one of the most popular and appreciated affiliate programs on the market.
• Kinsta provides an SLA-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee on all plans.

MyKinsta: A Custom-Built Dashboard for Powerful Site Management

At Kinsta, we want to do everything we can to make managing your site simple and straightforward. This is why we custom-built MyKinsta, our user portal specifically designed for WordPress site management:

Let’s take a look at some of the key features that make the MyKinsta dashboard so helpful:

• Premium Amazon Route 53 DNS included, so you can directly manage your DNS records in the dashboard.
• One-click CDN integration.
• Detailed insights and analytics, including bandwidth and visitor data, performance analysis data, CDN usage and insights, and cache HIT and MISS ratio.
• Search and replace tool for performing bulk updates.
• One-click feature for switching PHP versions directly from your dashboard, as well as the option to restart PHP when needed. DreamHost doesn’t let you switch PHP versions from the control panel.
• Website redirect management.
• Option to purge site cache within the dashboard.
• One-click staging site creation.
• A built-in Cloudflare integration with optimized settings to secure and boost the performance of your site without the need for a separate Cloudflare subscription.
• Features to push staging sites live and restore backups to staging. With DreamHost, you can only restore backups to live sites.
• Ability to heighten login security by adding your SSH keys to the dashboard.
• IP Deny tool for easy IP address blocking.
• New Relic integration (license required), which isn’t supported on DreamHost shared plans.
• WordPress debugging tool.
• Free Cloudflare SSL certificates, as well as the option to import your own.
• Multilingual dashboard that’s available in 10 languages: English, Italian, Spanish, French, Japanese, Swedish, German, Portuguese, Danish, and Dutch.

Many of MyKinsta’s features resulted directly from our clients’ feedback. We are always listening to requests and incorporating feedback. If there’s a way to improve our dashboard and make everyone’s lives more productive, you can count on us pursuing it.

Web Performance Benchmarks (WP Pro Plans)

For the web performance benchmark tests, Review Signal created identical WordPress dummy websites with the same plugins installed (except for any tools needed for each provider’s specific caching mechanisms).

WebPageTest.org was used to measure in seconds the overall loading time in 11 different geographical locations. Let’s take a look at the results:

As you can see, Kinsta beat DreamHost in 7 out of the 11 tests. 

For the uptime monitoring testing, two services were used: UptimeRobot and StatusCake. On both, Kinsta had a perfect uptime, while DreamHost’s fell below 100%:

Now for the Load Impact test, which was used to determine whether each site was caching from the front page and assess the caching system’s performance:

Even with more requests and data transferred, Kinsta still outperformed DreamHost when it came to the average load time.

The Load Storm tests were used to simulate real users visiting the site:

Not only did Kinsta have significantly fewer errors than DreamHost, but we also had a faster response time. As the test scaled up, DreamHost showed increased response times and error rates.

Feature Comparison Overview

At this point, let’s take a moment to review some of the key differences between Kinsta and DreamHost:

At Kinsta, we only permit direct WordPress access from encrypted Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) and SSH connections. While DreamHost offers these options, it also allows unsecured FTP connections.

Expert Support

At Kinsta, our customers always come first. Our team of engineers and WordPress experts are available 24/7, regardless of your plan. Whether you’re a small blog or a Fortune 500 company, our support team treats you as a top priority. 

With Kinsta, not only do you get knowledgeable support, but you get it quickly too. 

Our average initial ticket response time is under two minutes! 

Our customer support ratings can back us up on this. In the past two years, more than 97% of our customers left a chat support session happy or satisfied:

Kinsta also offers multilingual support, including a knowledge base with resources available in 10 languages.

To make customer support as quick and convenient as possible, we use the Intercom customer messaging platform. All communications are logged, so you won’t ever have to repeat yourself between support agents. 

DreamHost has ticket and email support for all plans. While it does offer live chat support, that’s only available during business hours (Pacific Time), and only in English and Spanish.

Kinsta Has a Global Presence

Kinsta has 37 data centers (and counting) across the globe, with a presence on five continents. Regardless of your plan, we give you the option to choose a different data center for each of your sites, with no extra fees.

Our massive global footprint makes it easy to select a data center that will provide your site with the best performance possible. Kinsta locations include:

DreamHost has three data center locations: two in the U.S. (Virginia and Oregon) and one in Europe (Amsterdam, Netherlands).

Develop Locally with DevKinsta

For developers and agencies, Kinsta offers a simple to use (but powerful) local development tool called DevKinsta. With DevKinsta, you can launch WordPress sites with a full hosting stack and SSL support on your local computer with just a few clicks.

DevKinsta is fully integrated with MyKinsta and Kinsta’s hosting platform, which means you can develop locally and push updates directly to a staging environment on Kinsta! DreamHost doesn’t have an integration with a local WordPress development tool, which means there is no way to clone and push WordPress sites for DreamHost customers. If you’re a busy freelance or agency developer, DevKinsta’s advanced features and MyKinsta integration can be a huge time saver.

Turbocharging Your Content Delivery with Kinsta CDN

All Kinsta plans include a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) via our Cloudflare integration. This is a premium HTTP/3-enabled CDN, to deliver your content lightning-fast across the globe.

As part of our Cloudflare integration, our built-in Edge Caching saves your Kinsta site/page cache to any of Cloudflare’s global network of 300+ data centers.

When site visitors load your website in their browser, cached responses will be delivered from the location closest to them. Edge Caching is included free with all Kinsta plans and doesn’t require a separate plugin.

Our content delivery architecture was tailor-made for high throughput and low latency. You can enable Kinsta CDN directly from your MyKinsta dashboard.

DreamHost includes the free, basic Cloudflare plan, which you can enable from the control panel. However, to use the advanced features, you’ll need to purchase a Cloudflare Plus or Pro plan. Also, DreamHost’s shared plans don’t support HTTP/2 connections.

Join Others Making the Switch to Kinsta

At Kinsta, we’re passionate about providing our clients with access to the fastest, latest technology. We’re constantly evolving and innovating to exceed our customers’ expectations. 

For proof, simply check out our many feature updates! We release new features, integrations, and tools with frequency and speed unmatched by anyone else in the hosting industry.

We are proud of our platform, and confident you will be too. Therefore, we always offer a 30-day money-back guarantee and no long-term contracts.

If you’re ready to make the move away from DreamHost and switch to a new hosting provider, try out Kinsta risk-free for 30 days!