The sushi bar is a decent analogy. I use dreamhost as a sort of project sandbox, and for that it works pretty well. If you need a place to do a one-click inst

The sushi bar is a decent analogy. I use dreamhost as a sort of project sandbox, and for that it works pretty well. If you need a place to do a one-click install of wordpress or some other project, or just a shell to bypass some firewall, upload some large files for a while, it's great. I would never, ever put anything where I needed real uptime on Dreamhost, because performance varies wildly. If a project was getting serious, I'd use Linode, Rackspace, or Amazon. I also recommend to everyone that they separate out their domain name purchases from their hosting provider.