[DamnInteresting]

I've had various sites on Dreamhost since 2003, I even won their once-vaunted "site of the month" contest in 2005. I've used their shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers. I've also hosted plenty of sites elsewhere (Hostgator, Bluehost, etc).

There was a period around 2009-2010 where Dreamhost tech support became bad--aggressively bad. Replies to support requests were very slow, and when they did finally arrive they were terse and unhelpful. I think that period really damaged their reputation. Due to the crappy support I was planning to migrate my sites elsewhere, but it was a big job that was easy to put off.

Around 2011 they must have changed something, because the quality of tech support improved considerably, and they've been a great host since then.