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.