Why I love Dreamhost
Squarefree.com has been hosted at DreamHost since November 2001. I like Dreamhost because for $10/mo, I can get 120GB/mo along with features such as MySQL databases that require more expensive plans at some other hosts.
My previous host, Burlee, tried to charge me an extra $3/mo to make http://squarefree.com/ work in addition to http://www.squarefree.com/. DreamHost charges extra for resources such as disk space, bandwidth, and non-shared IP addresses, but most features are free with any account. I haven't had to pay extra for the features I use: .htaccess, ssh, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Analog, Apache log access, Jabber and mail addresses @squarefree.com, and announcement lists.
Until this month, DreamHost gave me 30GB/mo. I never exceeded this limit, but I came close, and reduced the number of posts in my RSS feeds in order to avoid overage charges. This month, DreamHost permanently tripled the bandwidth limit for existing customers and new customers who sign up during December 2004. (Update: the offer has been extended to new customers who sign up through February 2005.)
The only host I know about that would give me more than 120GB/mo for less than $10/mo is PowWeb (mentioned in a host poll), which offers 5GB/day for $8/mo. But since PowWeb's bandwidth allocation is per-day rather than per-month, it's only better than Dreamhost's 120GB/mo if a site's daily variation in bandwidth is small. If squarefree.com only had 5GB/day, it might have survived the traffic spike around the release of Firefox 1.0, but it would not have survived being Slashdotted when I released Adbar, and it would not have survived me mirroring crashreport.wmv in order to add it to my del.icio.us bookmarks. Those two events each used 10GB in a short period of time.
The DreamHost knowledge base, along with Google, answer many of my hosting support questions. When I do contact Dreamhost support, they respond to all questions within 24 hours, and faster for outage-related questions.
DreamHost allows adult sites (contrast PowWeb, Pair). I don't know if Pair or PowWeb would consider squarefree.com an "adult" site due to Thumbs and Pornzilla, but with DreamHost I don't have to worry.
DreamHost even has a sense of humor. The monthly newsletters, which are written by co-founder and Harvey Mudd College alum Josh Jones, are often hilarious. DreamHost's support form contains the following question:
There are two things I don't like about DreamHost. First, Gallery, Movable Type, and Wordpress all seem slow; I haven't figured out why. Second, they don't use mod_speling, saying it would be too much of a performance hit. (Jakob Nielsen could remove an entire section from his 404 page if he used mod_speling, but he doesn't use it, so DreamHost could be right.)
Conflict-of-interest note: DreamHost gives me $65 if you sign up after clicking certain links from my site.
