Dreamhost is hit or miss. Some sites run really fast... others slow. It depends on what equipment you end up on in their network.

I thought as much. A private server is not an option right now at least until they see a benefit. I'm planning on scaling down my drupal modules to just a few modules to see if that helps (CCK, Views, Core, Date, etc.) We will just have to hold off on the forums and podcasting till later.

I submitted a ticket to dreamhost. They responded saying they have had problems with my SQL and Web servers and that they were in the process of moving and migrating users off that server to help with congestion.

I've got 2 separate drupal sites on my Dreamhost.. (Yeah, I haven't figured out how to run multiple site on one Drupal install........Once I get the hang of Drupal, then I'll try it)

Usually things are pretty "fast" for me. I have noticed that things go a bit crazy sometimes.

As far as uploading stuff to the server? Things go pretty fast for me.

But I think it is, like Matt said, hit or miss.

It's part of the economics of a shared hosting environment. The way it works is new hardware arrives, and the service starts selling pieces of it. Time passes, and more and more sites are loaded onto it. Eventually everything starts to bog down, and the loads need redistributing. Every service has a different load threshold they have to pass before the time spent redistributing the load is economically feasible.

Some groups form "co-ops" to go in together on a dedicated box, that way they keep the price down and control the loads at the same time.

We use Dreamhost and do get the occasional outage or lag, but it's much the same with other providers. Put this RSS feed in your favorite feed reader so you'll at least get a heads-up.

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/