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?