I've used Dreamhost's $10/mo. shared hosting (one of the few shared hosting providers with shell access) for the past four years, and I can confirm that when it

I've used Dreamhost's $10/mo. shared hosting (one of the few shared hosting providers with shell access) for the past four years, and I can confirm that when it works, it works -- but there have been at least two outages during my time with them that have lasted upwards of 24 hours. Obviously, that's unacceptable for most businesses, but if you think your business won't get sunk by that type of outage ... then I'd say Dreamhost might work well for you. For me, it's handled occasional heavy bursts of traffic without crashing, and I bet its resources are enough to handle most startups' demands. Once you hit the point at which it can't keep up with your demands, you should probably be able to afford something better -- assuming you have a viable business model.