Shared hosting is tricky. There are a million brands and lots of flavors of the week. The really small guys, some of them are probably great. It's really hard t

Shared hosting is tricky. There are a million brands and lots of flavors of the week. The really small guys, some of them are probably great. It's really hard to tell though, they are 1-2 person operations that last for who knows how long. The scaling/growth problems causes a lot of pain for the owners/operators and customers. Scaling up takes a lot of skill, and then many of them get bought out by a bigger company. And then your service and experience change, especially if it was a couple person operation. All those unscalable things they did for you to get and keep your business? They don't last forever. So you decide to use a bigger company. And it's not the same, but it's generally more reliable. And some of those companies do a much better job than others. Some are actually pretty good. You like RackSpace, there are a few companies out there that people like as much if not more too. A few even compete in the shared hosting space. I track most of these big companies and dreamhost is middle of the pack. Better than GoDaddy but below some other brands. Take a look for yourself: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare Maybe next time someone asks you about it, you can let them figure out what they need. No company is perfect, but some are definitely better liked by their customers than others.