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.