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.