Well, Dreamhost is an excellent hosting solution provider among others, especially here in Mexico because Mexican companies do not provide good service hosting pages, in Dreamhost tou can host you website "a big site or small site", but you can also just register your domain "www.xXxXx.com/net/org/info", it's a cheap service but ti's good too, less than 10/month. and of course also includes support for "e-mail: pop IMAP etc, full support for Java PHP MSQL CGI etc." also includes support for audio and video store...

DreamHost is a great host for any number of things. They offer a lot of leeway to their shared hosting customers, allowing (even if not supporting) things such as custom PHP builds and advanced tricks that other hosts might block.

They include pretty much unlimited everything on their hosting plan, from MySQL databases to disk usage to bandwidth. It's great not having to worry about paying extra for unexpected resource usage.

However, there are some caveats.

WordPress is included in the One-Click Install system (a great way to install popular packages like WP, MediaWiki, trac, etc.) but your mileage will definitely vary. My WordPress site is constantly having issues on both the front- and back-end sides, mostly related to DreamHost's annoying process-killing bot.

Yes, that's right. DreamHost servers run a daemon that watches every account for processes that exceed some unspecified memory usage limit and unceremoniously kills processes that violate the limits.

I have asked DreamHost support a few times about related issues, and they told me to reduce my memory usage. Without a target, of course, I could spend the next five years tweaking and tweaking away with no results. (Am I allowed 30MB per process? 50MB? 100? They won't say.)

As long as you don't run afoul of that memory daemon, though, DreamHost is pretty great. The server almost never goes down (I'd estimate 98% server uptime, at least) and it'll do nearly anything you might throw at it (if it doesn't involve heavy processing).

DreamHost is a good home for static sites, to be sure, and dynamic sites that have little need for extensive processing. Running a CMS like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla! should go fine, if you don't install several dozen plugins.

Give them a try. They do have a two-week (used to be 30-day, IIRC...) free trial program, after all, and it can't hurt to test out their system to see if it works for you.

Pretty good for the price!
Given that you can find some pretty wicked promo codes for Dreamhost I'd say it's a pretty good value. In the 6 or so months that I have been with them I haven't really had any serious problems. A number of one click installs are available including the popular Wordpress. I've tested almost every one of the one click installs on my various domains.

It's easy to use, cheap to start, not down very often, they try to fix any problems quickly, and it's great for anyone just getting started messing around with hosting/comics/startups.

Dreamhost shared hosting really rocks but I don't their VPS rocks too. Their VPS is as worst as not even thinking of trying it at all. I am their happy customer of Dreamhost shared hosting for around 3 years, I tried using their VPS service but my website not only lost traffic but also the up time. Their VPS hangs so many times. After restarting request, it takes around half an hour and this time is enough to loose a good amount of traffic on not even a very busy site. I had to do the restart 3 times a day effectively 1.5 hours of down time.

I am hating their VPS and planning to move VPS to some other hosting provider.

DreamHost is probably one of the most reliable hosting provider out there. Their server rarely down, speed was blazing fast (powered by 100Mbps ports), datacenter located in Los Angeles, and support is amazing (live chat available in control panel, support ticket responce are normally within 4 hours, sometimes are instantly). Their features are unique, which includes a free domain, unlimited bandwidth, disk space and transfer, unlimited ftp accounts, with ssh, custom php.ini, free ipv6 addresses (shared, but still better than other hosts), a user-friendly control panel and MORE. The only thing about the host is their price being higher than other hosts ($8.95/month for 24 months, $9.95/month for 12 months) but I think it worth every penny on the host.
To be honest, I would recommend DreamHost if their price is lower, but if you are a new customer, then don't rush, wait for their promos (sometimes only $10 a year, with a domain, for the first year) and signup. This way will save you over $100 for the first year.

DreamHost totally Rocks! They have not had any down time since I have been with them. I use iWeb and and am just learning and anytime I have a problem even with iWeb they go out of their way to help me. I have had problems uploading and they help me right out and get it fixed so I am up and running in no time. I also like that they are very kind and understanding with a great sense of humor. I also like that they don't make me feel like a dork when when I have a Dorky question either. I truly like this Hosting company and I have not been able to say that about any other Hosting other company before.

They are the worst hosting company ever!
Once my site started to get lot of visitors and I believe it started consuming more server resources they just closed my shared server hosting account without explanation and without notice!
They never answered any of my emails after that and I've sent many emails asking them for the reason of suspension, but they couldn't care less...
If you are serious with you hosting you will stay away from dreamhost!

I have been administrating a plan on DreamHost since November 2010 and I can say that they are a great web host, offering cheap plans.

Their one-clicks used to be limited, but things changed when in December 2010, allowing app developers to get their applications an initial boost to a large base.

I also like the fact that they also offer Subversion repositories free with every plan. This is good news for open source supporters like me.

DreamHost's shared servers is great for small to lesser large sites, then you should use their PSes (which are also cheap).

I am a happy DreamHoster with a large website using about 8GB of space and 30GBs of bandwidth on their shared servers.

I’m a new to hosting, so I'm glad I started out with Dreamhost. I like their company overall, and respect the fact that they are employee-owned especially in this day and age of corporate layoffs/BS etc. I also like to read their amusing blog. As far as hosting goes, I was worried about their Californian location at first. However, they assured me that with investments they've made in technology and remote data centers that my websites will remain operable in case of small disasters.

I had two web hosting accounts initially, one with Dreamhost and the other with GoDaddy because I didn't understand that domains I registered with elsewhere I could just point to my Dreamhost account (registration and hosting are separate issues! Google it). So in comparing the two, I prefer Dreamhost's interface and support way over GoDaddy's dizzying assortment of menu and popups littered with advertisements for add-on sells. Everything on Dreamhost is organized well and there is small help documentation at the top of each tab with a link to their wiki for additional documentation.

If you are starting out with a wordpress site then you'll find that Dreamhost's interface in a lot of ways imitates the wordpress admin interface with a left hand pane and drop down tabs. Lastly, its hard to screw things up unless you intentionally go ahead with some of the more advanced options. Their interface is like a sandbox. When you want to do more advanced stuff, Dreamhost will warn you that you are going into an advanced area where they might not be able to support you. At the same time they will link to the part of their wiki that helps you find out more about the advanced features you are tinkering with.

Down time is no stranger to Dreamhost as it is for every web host but I agree with most other Dreamhost customers who say that they are open and honest about downtime and work diligently to get people back up again. Their communication and support is very good, i've hardly had to wait very long when I emailed my requests for help.

Ok so what are the drawbacks? Well shared hosting does have its limits. When I first signed up I thought I had everything I needed with the $45 or so I paid for two years. I thought it was a steal and I was under the impression I was set for life with unlimited bandwidth and disk space. My intent was to set up a business website so this is where my lack of understanding on my hosting needs went. I learned quickly that CPU and memory are important resources to shop for when looking for a web host. This is not to say that you can't have a business blog on the Dreamhost shared server option, I just believe that you have to be more knowledgable on how to get all your wanted website bells and whistles working while still coming under the resource allotment they allow for each user. Wordpress has the potential to use a lot of memory. I found out that a few of my wordpress sites were already reaching the limit and thus were shut down by an automatic Dreamhost script to prevent overuse. When I inquired with Dreamhost they gave me some pointers on how to reduce my usage, pointed me to one of their wikis about the subject and tried to up-sell me on the Dreamhost Virtual Personal Server (VPS) option.

So back to the Dreamhost VPS solution, I wasn't happy with my memory dilemma at first but I eventually took them up on VPS because I just didn't want to deal with the script errors anymore. I now have two personal servers and one mySQL PS. I found that one of my personal servers (PS) is good for only so many wordpress sites (mind you they hardly have any traffic now). I realized it was better to order two PS at $15/300mb each level rather than order one and up the memory to around the $24-30/450-600 level.

All in all I think the memory is a bit pricey but I have a hard time comparing them apples-to-apples to other web hosts. This is because competitor VPS and cloud options don't come with Dreamhost's easy way of getting your websites set up on them. Those other VPS come barebones, are designed for professionals, and require you to know everything about managing a server on your own. Dreamhost VPS on the other hand, acts just like your shared hosting account. The only exception being is that you have more resources available to you at touch of the resource slider. One-click installs still work just like they did on the shared server which is wonderful thing.

What I don't like about Dreamhost's VPS is the fact that mySQL PS and the VPS are sold separately which is a bit of a waste of resources because mySQL doesn't even come close to using its minimal allotment of 300mb. Furthermore, if they were on the same server they would be even more optimized for websites as is my current understanding. The only thing that has me staying with their VPS at all is fact that there is a 20% discount on all servers you add to your account.

Memory does operate a bit differently on all their VPS offerings which is also a bone of contention for me but I've learned to live with it. Specifically, there is no swap/burstable memory and you have to account for an "invisible" 100mb or so overhead for regular operations at all times. I say invisible because it doesn't show up on the pretty graphical representation of your server that they provide on your account. You have to go into the ugly shell to see this memory usage more clearly. What is a shell you say? If you don't know what that is don't worry I didn't either. Again, you'll learn how to set yourself up with the Dreamhost wiki at your side. I became a shell pro in a very short amount of time.

All in all, I am fairly happy after educating myself on everything I need. It is in fact Dreamhost which makes it easier. I feel like i'm on webmaster training wheels! I may move on eventually with a second account somewhere that provides a more authentic VPS option, but I'm sure I'll always be with Dreamhost for one reason or another.
In conclusion, I say Dreamhost is great for basic/intermediate websites and I highly recommend them for the beginning webmaster.

Well its been 10 months since i am using dreamhost its quite early to write up a review but still i would like to share , the experience so far have been satisfactory i cannot say that there was no downtime, actually i have seen a lot of them :) still i am happy with it.

There have been instances when my hosting was altogether shifted by the support team to a different server to resolve issues, the support is excellent, the hosting plan in itself is good at least for shared hosters you get everything unlimited i.e. u can host unlimited website i currently host a dozen of them, and yes the One Click Installs are amazing, The affiliate programme is amazing i paid for first year of hosting and already i have earned much to pay for my next few years of hosting with them

DreamHost are great because they are only host that combines great hosting features with amazing prices, I can't single out any one feature of DreamHost because they are all amazing.

One click installations, some would say too limiting with only a few choices compared to others running cPanel, but the fact that DreamHost allow direct SSH access to your home server without requiring any further setup is incredible.

I have had to jump through so many annoying hoops with other hosts to have SSH access applied.

.htaccess management, web stats, google apps integration for mail, fast subdomain and redirect setups... its all fantastic.

The best thing though? DreamHost Hosting Codes program, you get people signed up to DreamHost, and credit is applied for your own site. This ENTIRE YEARS hosting has only cost be USD $9.95 so far!

Last of all, the support is the quickest I've had, ask a question, get an answer in under an hour in most cases and if thats to slow the almost instant live chat has been the difference between a small change for DreamHost or a critical failure of my site.

I can't praise DreamHost enough!

I have used dreamhost for more than a year. Back then I'm needing an hosting with ssh access and svn repositories. After review similar hosting that provide features that I need, Dreamhost fulfill all I want, so I'm proceed to create an account there.

In fact, Dreamhost provide more than what I expect. With relatively low price, I can get what other hosting company provide for higher price. This make me very grateful hosting my web in Dreamhost.

List of Dreamhost features that I like:
1. Super control panel. I'm often confused with cpanel that used in most of hosting, but Dreamhost using their own control panel that easy to used.
2. SSH access.
3. SVN and GIT support. I even can compile the latest git instead used already installed git to get the latest version work. Initially I'm using svn but now I've converted to a happy git user.
4. Sharing privileges. I can share the panel access to my fellow friend easily.
5. Unlimited everything. Bandwidth, space, mysql database, ssh user, domain, all unlimited. I even get 50GB backup space for free, outside regular hosting space

There are many more features, but that's the top 5 features that I'm using everyday. Thank you Dreamhost.

DreamHost offered me a good plan $9.99 for an entire year of web hosting plus a free domain - I couldn't resist. They offer extreme fast email support {which I have used 2x so far; which they proudly resolved}. The first email I sent them was a billing question and I got a ersponse in exactly 4 minutes. The second email I sent them was regarding a technical issue with mysql and I got a response within 48 minutes.
Even though they have fast email support, they however, require that you pay them on a monthly basis for live support help. I don't like the fact that they don't use cpanel. they have their own custom managing panel which can be slightly confusing too use, but you'll get the hang of it after you use it a couple of times. Their support is a bit lacking. They only provide email support for free and for live chat or phone support, you have to pay. But their uptime makes up for it as I have had 100% uptime so far.
Really I don't think you can get a better deal ever - a year of hosting plus a free domain for 9.99.
i would definitely recommend people to go sign up with dreamhost since the uptime is very excellent and since they have a good plan going. The support is relatively fast - email.

DreamHost is awesome, I have never noticed any downtime on the server my site is on. They have a real easy to use hosting panel once you transition to it from cPanel. Most hosting providers use cPanel so there is a learning curve if you are used to using cPanel. They offer a good amount of customization through the panel. I would say that any person could learn to use their panel and setup a website fairly quickly. DreamHost is suitable for anyone looking for a web host. I think the best thing about DreamHost is that they provide lifetime free web hosting to 501(c)3 (non profit) organizations which is good for churches looking for a place to put their website without the large amount of cost.

DreamHost rocks!

Since feb 2008 a friend registered a site with hosting from DreamHost. I helped him to do the website, and administrate it,even now. So i have more than a year of experience becoming an estable user from DreamHost.

The best from DreamHost is the price and the PERFECT support.

You can decrease money by reffering friends to register to DreamHost, that's simply great. There's also promo codes like DS30 (USD $30 discount for the first year).

The speed is great, all the users from the site are from outside US (so it's international speed) and they NEVER had problems viewing our site.
The bandwith is simply perfect, we never had problems with that, and our site has a lot of users!

The Panel is really user-friendly, it was easy to configurate mails, subdomains, FTP accounts, database, and all the things works perfectly.

Our plan really fits with our demand, all is perfect, we don't want more or less, and price is the best!

I used a lot of hosting services, since 1998, and i have to admit i always had some problems with everyone (server down, database error, even damaged discs!).. until i met DreamHost!

So if you are thinking in real, pro and cheap hosting... DreamHost is your Dream Host!

Dreamhost are great because the suport is very great, i get responses less than 10, 12 hours. Have a wiki avaible, a very active forum and a special domain dedicated to state for a hosting.
The values are cheap, but for me just a free hosting, i dont add advertising, the control panel interface is very intuitive and the speed is good.
On the technical side supports several php modules, although not allowed to fopen, I curl scheduling solutions without any problem.
I had other hostings before, but were expensive and space was very little, so I am now contracting with a few but they are very good, among them this dreamhost
Sometimes when I'm traveling and need to make some adjustments on some file or change a few lines from a script, I have no problem login from a mobile device via ssh and make the appropriate changes.
so far have had no problems with dreamhost, apart from which he had commented on the php module.
I always recommend to my friend that hosting.

DreamHost services are widely praised. DreamHost offers a solid web hosting with a reputable name. DreamHost is a bit expensive if you do not buy their annual plan, but many web hosting services require that. DreamHost is certainly worth the few extra dollars. You get what you pay for after all, and delivers on its promise, DreamHost has great customer service. Dreamhost also has one of the most abundant reimbursement policies, giving their customers full 97 days to try the service. That is perhaps the best industry.

DreamHost offers a wide range of features such as excellent VPN! Many webmasters are enjoying, it is hard to find the webhosting affording VPN, while Dreamhost offers such reputable service class. What I mean by that is, most of the time, good web hosting services that offer such great features are more expensive, and cheap hosting services web service does not offer great customer of Dreamhost.

DreamHost's services are very unique. They are one of the few to offer affordable access VPN with its strictly business plan. Their plans are competitively priced and are loaded with features, and a large corporate atmosphere. DreamHost is also a web hosting company green regardless of the climate change debate, it is always a good thing to reduce harmful waste, and Dreamhost is powered by renewable energy. Dreamhost also maintains a corporate environment which are handsome, casual, and funny, something the cold professionalism of other web hosting companies.

They have many other features. Webhosting features available include: full UNIX Shell, server side includes (SSI), and support for Crontab and ruby on rails.

Dreamhost also has, in large measure, the longest warranty in the industry. You have a guarantee of 97 days with Dreamhost. That's more than enough to satisfy any claim of DreamHost you might have a big fat refund check. Please keep in mind that fixed fees and domain registration fees are always non-refundable with any web hosting company.

Dreamhost offers great features including VPN.

The company currently has over 700 servers installed in a data center and employs over 40 people.

Provides web hosting over 300,000 domains, although the number of clients is not known, since each client can accommodate any number of domains.

I bought dreamhost hosting about 7 months ago now. And its bought for my main domain www.henegamacc.org which is non profit school project. And that time dreamhost had promotion for 1 year hosting for $9 with free domain name with whois protection. So think about that, that's a great deal! And I thought Ill face problems soon because the hosting package is cheap and its selling hard! But never had problems till now. Now I host more than 5 of my autoblogs and other 2 sites. Non of them didnt had any of problems or data loss so far!
Dreamhost gave me surprising speeds and worth for buck! Their custom control panel is very easy to manage than Cpanel. The only problem on their custom control panel is it doesnt have web stats system like awstats or webalizer. That should be fixed by dreamhost that's the only problem I seen on their cpanel! Their support team is great and they always answers my support tickets less than a hour. (I cant believe that too :D ) And they always keeps you updated on their status blog that is the the best way to know their info!

Although I'm very much satisfied with dreamhost! and I'm hosting with them next years!

DreamHost offers one click installs, which reduces the burden of uploading web software's, FTP etc., and thereby saves time. It has an easy to use control panel. It has a toolbox to quickly reach the necessary menu options like 'manage database' , 'domain management' etc.,

The menu is very easy to use. I pay 120$ per year on the hosting and I believe I get every dollar is worth it. Domain expiry warnings, registrations and billing are also handled well.

The support queries are answered effectively in less than 10 minutes time, this is one of the worth mentioning facilities on DreamHost. The DreamHost team is fair enough in answering questions, they even provide technical assistance accordingly.

And, every referral is paid 97$ which is another motivating factor. On the whole, the features, support and up-time are pretty good.

I have been using DreamHost for the past two years, I hardly experienced any difficulties or issues with the hosting and other services. Yes, I do recommend DreamHost to my friends.

Thanks and Regards
Srikanth AD

Before being a customer i heard both good and bad things about Dreamhost.
So i decided to check it my self.

First of all i must say that they have a fairly good customer support service.But i must say that my site experienced down time in few occasions with in the first week.They did managed to fix it reasonably quickly as i complained but that created a bad image in my mind about Dreamhost.

Well talking about the customer expertise needed, i found that they do not provide much assistance with the mysql options.Here is an email that i got regarding an inquiry about an PHP installation,
"Hello Thelahera,

You are using the default. If you'd set up your own, you'd know. As far
as I know, our default PHP installation does meet those requirements, but
if you do run into problems, bear in mind, we can't offer assistance when
it comes to custom configurations, but you can always turn to
http://discussion.dreamhost.com for help from your fellow users (who
maintain much of the custom configuration and 3rd party software articles
on the wiki anyway).

Please let me know if you have any other questions!"
but i must say i'm pretty satisfied with the support service.

I would say dream host is suitable for any kind of customer from beginner to large site hoster.It will be good if they can improve the features in the c panel though.

Finally i say i can recommend Dreamhost to my friends..but must not forget the fact that they have to improve in some areas to be a better hosting provider.

I was with a local reseller web hosting company ManasHosting here in India, and I had a nightmare for around 3 years with them. They provided me cheap windows web hosting but the service was poorest of poor. Then I migrated to Dreamhosting and I am proud to be associated with them. Their service is superb. They treat you like a valued customer and try to help you in every possible way. They also possess some very good technical experts who go out of the way to solve your issues.

Their control panel speaks for itself. It is full of everything that is generally required by a website owner.

Their knowledge base is again filled with everything. I like their portal where they keep posting status of the server. If something happens to the server, you can track it there (http://www.dreamhoststatus.com).

Till now I am hosting my four websites with them and have already recommended DreamHost to 3 of my friends.

I got >99% uptime for two consecutive months which I never got from my previous host.

I am really loving it and I would definitely recommend it to as many people as I can.

I got my hosting package from dreamhost for only $9 year when their discount prices going on. Im happy about their service because their custom c-Panel looks very good and very easy to do things there. Also their customer support is very good and normally answers my support tickets quickly. But i have had bit down time thats the only one problem i have faced there. My site sucks more than 6GB bandwidth a day but seems very good on the traffic! Im satisfied about dreamhost!
Ruchira Sahan

I purchased a 2 year hosting from Dreamhost for about $25 during a spceical promotion. It had unlimited domains and unlimited bandwidth. It is amazing for the price. It comes out to about a $1 a month for all my domains. Awesome deal! I recently had an issue with them when all my sites appeared to be down...I sent them an email. They sent me an email back within 10 mts informing me that one of their servers was having an issue and about 1/2 hour later the sites were up...It was amazing. They tend to be slightly slower a couple of times in the last 3 months but other than they are great especially for the money I paid them. I would recommend them to everyone!

If you don't care about 99.9% uptime, they offer a lot of features. If you want 24/7 phone support should your site go down, and it will, you may want to check out their competition. Dreamhost makes no phone numbers public, so try contacting them when your site has issues on their servers, it is impossible. Your only support is when they get around to reading their e-mail. Your site can be offline for days, or your server has been hacked or has a virus, and try getting in touch with someone. I will never host with them or anyone else that does not offer 24/7 reliable tech support. In today's competitive environment, stick with a company that offers reliable 24/7 phone support. Don't get hooked on all the unlimited bandwidth or goodies, most sites offer that, stick with reliability, 99.9% uptimes hosting companies etc. You will notice that not on any of their advertising or reviews you will see they do not brag or bost about 99.9% uptime, because it's more like 82.1% one of the poorest uptime ratings and when you run an e-commerce site, that can be costly when your site is offline and their servers were hacked or had a virus. For a company that has been around for 12 years, you'd think they could afford better customer support.......imho

I was reading a blog when I came across a article stating Dreamhost was giving free domains to Yahoo Geocities customers since they bought them out. I remembered creating one a long time ago, but decided to host my site at home so I could have a bit more power of configuration. For free, I have unlimited disk space and bandwidth along with my domain, http://newbieworks.org for 2 years. I was a little disappointed because they have no common control panel like cpanel or vistapanel. Their custom panel takes a little getting used to and I had to wait until the next day for the account details and FTP to start working flawlessly although that is expected. Since my site it still small, the speed some relatively good. I've only had my site for around 2 weeks now, but everything seems to be working. I was able to transfer my forum, http://newbieworks.org/pceasies , from a free byethost account over with little problems (after a I cleared the Wordpress cache). Transferring the MySQL database was easy. Dreamhost has one-click installers which are nice. They also offer some easy to setup services like streaming video and setting up Amazon CDN. Once you have everything setup (you need to manually enable PHP, which I found to be a bit annoying) you really don't have to worry about the control panel anymore. I haven't had to deal with customer support yet, so I can't comment on that. I'm going to stream some videos pretty soon (although my site is still very, very small and just starting), so I'll have to see if they like that. If you know the basics you can get started pretty easily. You may want to play around in the control panel to get the feeling for it and where everything is. They do have phpMyAdmin once you setup MySQL. If you know how FTP works then it's not very hard to get started. They also offer FrontPage Extensions for those people for still use Frontpage. To me, a newcomer to paid hosting, it seems like they offer everything expected of a paid host. As I've mentioned time and time again, the only issue is the odd custom control panel they have. I think anyone who wants to start a website should atleast look at Dreamhost (GoDaddy does not have a cpanel either). If I could choice again, I probably would go with Bluehost instead, but it's more of a user choice on what you want.

I appreciate the openness of their customer facing communications. I've personally experienced excellent uptime. Their services are feature rich and easy to use. I've been with them for about two years and look forward to future years!

I've been using DreamHost as my cheap secondary server for over a year now. For the price and features, DreamHost has the best value of among bargain shared hosting providers.

My server with DreamHost is not as fast as my VPS... but it only costs a fraction of the price of my "good server".

I use DreamHost as my secondary server, it's where I grow my sites before they have decent traffic -- especially blogs because DreamHost makes it so easy to set-up Wordpress blogs and easy upgrades.

For me, support has been fantastic -- but I haven't had many problems except the occasional downtime. I know other DreamHost customers have had issues with major downtime, but I've only had 5-10 minutes of downtime a handful of times over the last year.

I would recommend DreamHost to anyone who does not need 100% uptime. Honestly, most mom and pop websites would be perfect here...no one will notice if Bob's local handyman site is down at 1am for 10mins.

Also: DreamHost's control panel is better than cpanel.

I have a few websites (photos, blogs, small ecommerce...) with Dreamhost.
Having all my sites and domains under one roof is very handy. They have been helpful when I had technical issues.

They are also very good value for money. I would recommend it for personal use and pro-am. I would however not recommend it if your business depends on your website.

You've hired your l33t team of hackers. The VC funding has arrived, and your San Francisco office is full of nerf guns and improbable chairs. All set with the start up? Great.

All you need now is a room full of servers and a bearded gentleman who considers English his third language after Unix and Klingon. Save yourself the effort, cash and difficult personal hygiene discussions.

Sign up with Dreamhost and you're good to go. I consider myself an experienced server admin and programmer. So, when I started my business I considered Dreamhost a stepping stone to the sort of setup described above.

I've never needed it; Dreamhost has always come through. Source control system? SVN is setup with a few clicks from the control panel. Easy creation of databases with PHPMyAdmin access? All there. Full shell access, lots of disk space, and a response time speedy enough from all the countries I've tried it.

DreamHost are not completely comprehensive; the more advanced you get, there will be esoteric (or not so esoteric but difficult to install: I'm looking at you, Trac) applications that you find you need. In these cases, somebody with decent Unix chops will still need to get their hands dirty at the command line.

Their support will back you up as they can, and I've always found responses to be very speedy. There will be times when the answer comes back 'cant be done on a shared server' but they will generally do their best and propose a word around to achieve the same goal.

Twice I've had fairly complex problems that required their direction intervention on my shared server, and they have fixed them within a couple of hours. Frankly, I have employees that don't match up to that.

On top of their professional support, Dreamhost's popularity means that whatever you're trying to do, somebody will already have done it. Hopefully, they've also posted it to the Wiki or the support forums to enlighten you, too.

They're far from perfect for every business. A reputation for downtime is not entirely undeserved, so if you're working on a web-based nuclear facility manager, I'd go elsewhere.

If you don't need five nines, I'd seriously consider accepting the occasional drop in service in exchange for the value for money and ease of use they'll give you.

Equally, remember you're on a shared host with hundreds of other users. If your site hits Digg and Slashdot simultaneously and regularly, or you're solving the Riemann hypothesis using Python's excellent math libraries - sorry, Dreamhost isn't for you.

Then again, if you're at that stage in your project you can probably afford that lavish server room and a WoW guild's worth of geeks. Until then, Dreamhost it.

I have used DreamHost for about 6 months now, its really simple. The one click installs are a nice time saving feature. Unfortunately they don't have the latest version of PHP on their servers so its been a bit restricted for me lately. Can't complain about downtime as I haven't seen any.

If you need 100% uptime or high performance look elsewhere, but if you want cheap server space and lots of features DreamHost is pretty amazing.

I have two dedicated servers with Dreamhost plus another bunch of sites in the shared environment, and while they might not be the most reliable in terms of uptime, the customer care is generally very good (you won't receive copy & paste responses that don't answer your questions), and this means I'm inclined to forgive them for hosting that is less-than-100% solid. It's probably not the best place for mission-critical stuff, but it's cheap and cheerful and undoubted value-for-money.

I've been using DreamHost for a few years now. While they're not ideal for high-traffic, database driven or CPU intensive sites, they rock for quick 'n' dirty hosting for staging sites, microsites etc. And I'll take their homegrown control panel over cPanel anyday.