[jwr]

You get what you pay for. I used to be a dreamhost customer a couple of years ago, tried to actually use the storage tied to my hosting account. Dreamhost threatened to terminate those accounts that used significant amounts of storage (the storage people supposedly "bought" with their hosting account).

I learned my lesson — there is cheap hosting and real hosting. Just as there are "unlimited" data plans (that get capped) and the real ones that you actually pay for. These days I always look for solutions that have a real business model behind them, not overbooked marketing gimmicks. Which means that amazon and rackspace are in, dreamhost is out.