dreamhost has failed for us so many times in the last 5 years that I don't care to keep count. I'm guessing more than 10 major fuckups. Even things that I thought they couldn't possibly screw up, they have. We have finally moved everything away from dreamhost. I now use it only for things that can go down for days on end and nobody will care. dreamhost is definitely not to be trusted with anything more critical than that.

On the other hand, I've had two domains at DH for years and, apart from the well-known problems in 2006, have never had an issue.

One of the sites got hacked because of a buggy WordPress plugin and DH support were great in helping fix it.

I agree that DNS caching is slow to catch up though. My ISP's cache took only an hour or two whereas DH's cache took several hours to reflect my new records.

Hm. I don't trust their hosting very much (it's cheap shared hosting, never really expected to), but I've kept some domains and DNS with them and never had a problem. I've thought about moving, but keep staying because there's no compelling reason to change.

Care to give me compelling reasons to change?

Honestly, there probably isn't a really compelling reason to switch, if you've been able to survive through DNS caching. Dreamhost's customer service is good, and their problems mostly stem from the fact that they do the exact same thing every other budget shared hosting platform does: oversell like crazy, cross their fingers, and hope that their users don't actually use all the storage and bandwidth they've been promised. The only difference I can see is that Dreamhost is probably the most popular such service, so that strategy bites them in the ass more often than others.

For me, though, having relied on more than just registration and DNS through Dreamhost and gotten screwed too many times, moving to Webfaction made a world of difference. Their shared plan isn't as solid as dedicated hosting would be, but at least I can say I get what I pay for. With Dreamhost, that much wasn't true.

I've actually been thinking of moving away from DH too. Out of curiosity, where did you move to, which host?

Thanks.

For shared hosting needs, I moved form DH to Webfaction years ago. Haven't looked back.

I just made this move a couple days ago after DreamHost silently dropping emails, among their history of outages and server restarts. Comparing the two, I was surprised at how fully featured DreamHost really is, but aside from a few small things the migration has been smooth and I am hoping uptime will be better.