"Dreamhost has a great Dashboard to control everything in your account, from domains to billing to MySQL. They have one-click installs of several apps like Wordpress and Joomla, but they don't use Fantastico, so they are missing some like Drupal. However, I love the dashboard so much that I'm willing to try installing things myself if needed. The dashboard is better by far than 1and1 or Site5. They have become more transparent in the last year or so. They have a status Twitter feed, a blog of maintenance and any emergency messages, and the ability to see your server's status on your dashboard. I have never had a problem with up-time, but my sites are low-traffic. I contacted support this summer regarding a couple of Wordpress web sites which suddenly threw errors. It turned out to be a bad DB host name (I deleted it), and support even fixed it for me, even though they could have easily tossed it back to me and said "You can fix this in your dashboard" and been right to do so. You can submit support tickets easily right from the dashboard, and choose the level of severity of your issue. When I first started with Dreamhost, there was some lag on my Wordpress sites when submitting posts or loading pages. This has gotten better as time goes on. Like I said, my sites are low-traffic and not e-commerce, so I'm not too concerned. I ran into some issues a couple of years ago using PHP. They don't let you simply reference 'localhost' in some cases "for security," so I had to figure out how to use cURL. The support wiki was rather frustrating to nagivate and find info. I never contacted support for help because they say right up front that they don't troubleshoot the stuff you install or code on your sites. Makes sense to me, so I trolled PHP forums to find my answers. It would take a great package -- and good dashboard -- to make me leave Dreamhost. My plan has unlimited domains, subdomains, email, and MySQL databases."

"I have been using Dreamhost for over 4 years on shared servers. I would recommend Dreamhosts' shared servers to anyone needing a website for personal use or small business. Everything is very easy to use and they give you many resources for the small price they charge. Their customer service has improved drastically since I started the account. It started out with a ticketing system, moved to email and pay for calls to 24/7 instant messaging support. I've had outages, but nothing too long. I was down for over an hour once, but they kept me informed about what was going on. The price is right for personal and small business needs and the customer service representatives are helpful."

"Well, I see the common plethora of negative comments about Dreamhost and a couple positive ones. Has anyone really noticed how a large amount of them rely on "magical" disappearances of their sites? Perhaps they didn't read the ToS because I bet most of them went tl;dr on it. Yes, you can not host certain kinds of content, yes you can't host some kinds of web apps because of the stress they cause to the server. It's shared hosting. But overall DH provides a LOT for what you pay. I got on it back in 2005. Granted, I don't have heavy traffic sites, I've barely had issues with the uptime, as well with customer support. It just works. If you have issues they are corrected quickly. If you are lost in setting up something in their servers there's a wiki. Great CPanel. Etc, etc. The only thing I haven't liked from them was how now they only have one package, which added 3 bucks of monthly payment for me. But hell, it's still good."

"Very bad technical support. If you are someone non-technical, NEVER buy into this server. I am a full time web developer myself and trying to ask for help to alter some settings in php.ini file. I've followed every step in their WIKI documentation, which seems to be very helpful and they are knowing what to do. But my site gone down, so i submitted a support ticket as a matter of urgency and this is what i've got back: I'm terribly sorry but we do not provide technical assistance for custom PHP.ini installations.The only answer i've got was a 'sorry feeling' and asking me to post into a forum, let the site break and wait for an answer? Very bad technical support. To be honest, i develop a lot of website on different servers, never met any as bad as this one. "

"A few years ago, Dreamhost was excellent. Good prices, good service, good uptime. Then, earlier this year (2009), they seemed to be slipping. First, it was billing errors, then I had problems renewing my hosting. In the last four months of 2009, their servers have been down several hours a month during peak business hours. I run several sites, and all were messed up by server migrations and their other problems. They are no longer very cheap, and their entertaining newsletters don't make up for their frustrating lack of reliability. I have already begun my migration of all my sites to another host, even though I have 18 months left on a two-year pre-paid plan with DH. That's how dissatisfied I am. Perhaps DH will get its act together and return to its former goodness, but until then I cannot afford sites that are MIA."

"Terrible. After three years of being with them they take all the sites down for some TOTALLY random reason. Apparently the All In One SEO plugin which is a standard Wordpress Plugin is now "Blackhat." As a result they drop all my sites and hold my domain name ransom that i have had registered with them for 3 years. Who knew your host could take a perfectly good domain name from you and refuse to give it back... that's pretty close to stealing. They are terrible, unreliable, and very very dirty."