Dreamhost vs Squarespace: The Best Web Hosting for You

Dreamhost vs Squarespace?  Which is right for you?

While both hosting providers are great, each is better for certain needs than the other, and we’ll help you work through that in this article.

First, however, here is a brief overview of each.

Let’s dive a bit deeper to uncover the key differences between each solution so you can choose the right one for your needs.

Pricing

We both know that the “starting at” price is rarely the one representing your full cost – most of us want a little bit more than the rock-bottom offer.

Let’s compare Dreamhost vs Squarespace for the cost of a simple website with:

• A new domain name
• SSL certificate so your site runs over https
• Domain privacy protection to prevent people from easily finding your personal information
• Sales Tax

Dreamhost

We purchased the shared starter plan on Dreamhost, the lowest cost option, which comes with a free SSL certificate.  

We then bought this domain name for an additional $17.99/year. 

This cost, plus the $35.40 for the shared starter plan, gives us a total yearly price of $53.39.

Squarespace

To validate actual pricing on Squarespace for this configuration, we signed up for the monthly plan, which came out to $20.19 per month.   Even though Squarespace claims you get a free domain with the plan, I paid another $20 to get the domain name I wanted vs. a squarespace.com domain.

To ensure we have a fair comparison, we are going to use the annual cost of the Squarespace Personal plan ($168) and the domain name ($20) to get an annual cost of $188.

This works out to a monthly cost of $15.67.

✓ Dreamhost wins on pricing by a large amount.

Ease of Use

We mentioned this in our summary table above—Squarespace is the easiest to use, it’s mostly just enabling features and moving items on the screen.

Dreanhost, on the other hand, is more powerful as you have the full power of WordPress at your fingertips.

✓ Squarespace wins on ease of use.

Performance and Scalability

Dreamhost gives you access to your server configuration, which allows you to tune each website to its fullest.

Squarespace hides those details in the name of ease of use.

✓ Dreamhost wins on performance and scalability.

Other Capabilities

In large part, these two options are tied.  Each can be used to build almost any type of site.  With Dreamhost, you have more power at your fingertips for a lower price, with Squarespace you have ease of use at a significantly higher price.

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Which is right for you will largely depend on your comfort with WordPress (or willingness to hire people who have that comfort) vs. your desire for an easier to set up, but less powerful, solution.