I used dreamhost for all of my hosting currently.it used to have performance issues about 3-4 times a week, and short outages (less than 10 minutes) about 6-7 times a month. In the last 2 years, that has dropped to almost never.
I wouldn't recommend it for a production system that has to be always up, as they don't offer any sort of SLA. However, their services are amazing, their cost even better, and their support is more than adequate. I've only ever used email support, and I've always gotten a response within a few hours.
I would highly recommend it for any project that doesn't require an SLA.
As far as mail - dreamhost has their own mail (mediocre), but they recommend using google domains for mail (it's all integrated), so that you'd actually have gmail for your domain hosted through dreamhost. The basic google domains is included for free as a dreamhost subscriber.
The only recent issue that's affected me was a major service outage last month - it lasted for around 6 hours and was caused by a network failure internally.
Nathan
On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 2:01 PM, Jonathan Hutchins
<hutchins@tarcanfel.org> wrote:
On Wednesday 30 March 2011 01:48:18 pm David Ambs wrote:
> I manage two sites that are at dreamhost. The downtime used to be insanely
> high, talking hours per month. About a year ago, his account was moved to
> a new server, 8 core Xeon box. The site response time has gone down quite
> a bit, and the server load in general is a lot more appealing than in the
> past.
That sounds like what I found on various forums - lots of outage complaints
from 2006-2008, nothing more recent.
A big concern is mail, with decent spam filtering (no over-blocking) and not
being blocked outbound. Web site's pretty trivial. Budget is $40/mo or
less, needs to have responsive support.
The web page is flat html and we only need 3 mailboxes.
--
Nathan Cerny
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone."
--Bjarne Stroustrup, Danish computer scientist
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------