Managed WordPress hosting for sites leaving DreamPress.
DreamHost sells hosting, domains and mailboxes on one account, and DreamPress puts a proxy cache in front of WordPress. Moving the site means separating it from all three.
What leaves with the site, and what does not.
The website is the easy part. What complicates a DreamHost move is everything else the same login happens to own.
The proxy cache in front of WordPress
DreamPress serves most requests from a caching layer the site cannot see. Once the site moves, the plugin that talked to it is issuing purges into nothing, so it comes out rather than staying installed.
An export without cPanel
DreamHost uses its own panel, so there is no cPanel backup archive to hand over. The export is done over SFTP and WP-CLI instead, which is a different path with different gaps.
Mailboxes that stay behind
Mail is a separate DreamHost product on the same domain. Moving the website does not move it, and closing the hosting plan without checking is how a company loses its email.
Shared or DreamPress, established first
The two tiers behave differently enough that the export path changes. Shared plans have no object cache and no staging; DreamPress has both, plus the proxy in front.
Panel cron, not WordPress cron
Scheduled tasks configured in the DreamHost panel do not appear anywhere in a WordPress export, so they are read out and recreated before the switch.
Separate the products before moving any of them.
Almost every difficult DreamHost migration is difficult for the same reason: the site, the domain and the mail were bought together and are assumed to move together.
- Hosting tier confirmed before the export
- Mail and DNS ownership mapped
- Panel cron captured and recreated
- DreamHost plan left active until you confirm
The cache moves into the stack.
DreamPress is quick on a cache hit and ordinary behind it. What changes here is what happens to the requests the proxy never served.
What we change when a site arrives from DreamHost
Most of this is undoing an arrangement where the website was only one of three things on the account.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| DreamPress proxy cache | Purge plugin removed, caching handled in-stack | The plugin exists to clear a caching layer that stays behind at DreamHost, so after the move it is issuing purge calls to a host that no longer serves your traffic. |
| Export method | SFTP and WP-CLI rather than a panel archive | DreamHost runs its own control panel, so there is no cPanel backup file to restore from and the usual archive-based import path does not exist. |
| Mailboxes and MX records deliberately left in place | Mail is sold as a separate product on the same DreamHost account, so cancelling the hosting plan after a migration is what actually deletes a company's inboxes. | |
| Plan tier | Shared or DreamPress identified before anything is copied | The two tiers differ in whether an object cache and staging exist at all, which changes both what can be exported and what has to be rebuilt. |
| Scheduled tasks | Panel cron entries read out and recreated as platform jobs | Tasks added through the DreamHost panel live outside WordPress entirely, so a site export carries no record that they ever ran. |
Simple, transparent pricing.
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
- 1 WordPress site
- 10 GB NVMe disk
- Free SSL
- Daily backups
- One-click deployment
- Support tickets
- 5 WordPress sites
- 50 GB NVMe disk
- Free SSL
- Daily backups
- One-click deployment
- Priority support tickets
- 20 WordPress sites
- 200 GB NVMe disk
- Free SSL
- Daily backups
- One-click deployment
- Dedicated support
Questions, answered.
Do I need to cancel DreamPress before migrating?
Will my DreamHost email addresses stop working?
There is no cPanel. How do you export my site?
What happens to the DreamPress caching plugin?
I registered my domain with DreamHost. Does it have to move?
Move the site without touching the mailboxes.
Free migration, the proxy cache unwound, and nothing cancelled until you confirm.