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.