Well, I've been with Dreamhost for over a year now (almost 15 months I think) on their cheap "Crazy Domain Insane" program, and I never got around to thanking this forum for helping me find a host provider.
So I thought I would post my review of Dreamhost in hopes that it will be useful to someone out there, much like many of the posts were useful for me when I was searching for a host.
The summary: Dreamhost has been great for me, though I might not be your typical user. If you know what you are doing and don't have heavy MySQL (I've heard from others that can be slow) Dreamhost will likely be great for your needs.
OK on to the details...
Uptime
Uptime has generally been great. They got hit with a huge DDoS attack the first few months I was there which took them down for 8+ (24+ maybe?) hours. Their response to this was what first made me think that these guys were great. Not only did they have a detailed explanation of what went wrong, they also listed the steps they were taking to prevent it from happening again and learning from the experience. Also, if nothing else, they haven't gone down due to a DDoS since.
One of the things they promised was an offsite status page so customers could get updates even if the main Dreamhost network was offline. Two days later, this site was up and running. Big deal, you say... getting a web site up is something I do in my sleep. Well, me too. But I'm not a big corporation with lots of red tape. I appreciated the fact that Dreamhost could implement changes quickly.
Other than that one period of extended downtime, uptime has generally been good. They had a problem at one point where my server was crashing every night, but that was resolved within a few days. I ssh into my account, and it's not too uncommon for my shell to remain connected for over a week. (Eventually something will come up, either general net latency, I need to reboot, etc.)
Customer Support
I haven't had much need for their customer support, but I have contacted them a few times. Here is the full list of why I contacted them, including initial (non-automated) response time. The first line is me to them. The second is them to me:
Feb 12th, 2004 - 11:59:04 :: My weblog stat script didn't run
Feb 12th, 2004 - 14:55:52 :: DB problem, should be fixed
Feb 26th, 2004 - 18:36:40 :: My server has been rebooted 4 times today
Feb 27th, 2004 - 05:32:17 :: We're looking into the problem
Mar 14th, 2004 - 17:13:55 :: My server is rebooting daily
Mar 14th, 2004 - 21:02:50 :: We know there is an issue, trying to fix
Mar 29th, 2004 - 17:46:18 :: I can't access my machine at all
Mar 29th, 2004 - 20:39:18 :: We got DDoS'd. Sorry about that.
Jan 21st, 2005 - 17:16:03 :: Billing question
Jan 21st, 2005 - 17:23:39 :: Billing answer
Jan 31st, 2005 - 16:39:18 :: Web server crashed
Jan 31st, 2005 - 17:03:11 :: It got rebooted and should be working now
Feb 7th, 2005 - 10:41:44 :: New site access logs aren't being written
Feb 7th, 2005 - 12:01:23 :: There was a synch issue, should be fixed now.
Feb 22nd, 2005 - 16:27:44 :: I need a perl module installed
Feb 22nd, 2005 - 16:31:40 :: OK, installed.
Looking at the customer support logs, you might wonder how I can say that uptime is great given the tickets I created. One of the things to realize is that I'm on that shell account almost all the time -- all during the day, and many nights as well. If it's on the weekend or while I'm asleep, I won't notice right away, but I'll notice the broken connection as soon as I get back to my computer. The Feb 26 and Mar 14 incidents didn't cause extended downtime. I was more annoyed at my shell being dropped and losing httpd for the 2 min or so it took the machine to reboot. The Jan 31 incident resulted in under 2 hours of downtime.
I'll leave it for you to judge whether the response time is adequate. It was fine for me, but I'm not the most impatient person out there.
Features
This is where Dreamhost really shines. Their control panel is nice, but that's not what I cared about. Full shell account, emacs, cron, perl scripts, full .htaccess support -- everything I wanted to do I could do. When I needed a CPAN perl module installed, they installed it quickly with no hassle.
I did have a minor problem where after I created a DB user, I was unable to change the password via the control panel. But that's a pretty minor problem.
Reponse Time
None of my sites or scripts rely heavily on a MySQL database, and I've heard some people complain of MySQL slowness. Personally I haven't had any problems. I keep track of load average fairly often (especially when I am writing new scripts to make sure they aren't too draining on CPU), and even at peak the load average on my machine is around 2-3, spiking to 5 once in a while. I've never seen it sustained in the double digits, though of course, I might just be on a lucky machine.
Caveats / A Little about Me
I know there is a tendency to not trust people with low post counts (like me). I posted a bit a year or so ago when I was looking for a host... and then I found one, and didn't really have much of a reason to post again.
I run several different scripts/sites. Almost all of them are accessible by going to my domain at:
http://www.cardplace.com 
These scripts run either on PHP or Perl and many of them connect to a MySQL database in some way.
As a caveat, I don't come anywhere close to the 120gig limitation on bandwidth. I consider myself a "power-user" in terms of taking advantage of the features that dreamhost offers, but I'm also careful to play nice and not hog system resources. I don't need a lot of customer support (as an aside I did find Dreamhost's Knowledgebase very useful) and I'm happy to be just left alone with good connectivity.
In summary, I love Dreamhost. If you have similar needs to mine, I think you'll love it too. If you have different needs, I still hope this post has been informative for you. I won't go out there and proclaim that any one host is the end-all-be-all for all people. But I certainly have nothing negative to say about them.
I hope this helps someone. I'll monitor this thread for a few days, so if anyone has specific questions post away and I'll answer.
Thanks again for providing a great forum -- when I was searching for a host, the sheer number of host providers out there was seriously daunting, and this forum really helped me narrow down my choices.
Host and Domain
