Reply to comment

Thanks for the useful comments. Much further down the road, I maintain the same thoughts regarding DreamHost: I really like their online tools, and their support is still fast, fast, fast. 

Here's something I haven't yet written about much, though: For a long time, I was getting increasingly poor performance on my shared server, to the point I sometimes simply couldn't work on Drupal sites – and whatever the good points of the service, that problem obviously makes the whole deal unacceptable. I worked with support a lot, but it always boiled down to my Drupal sites demanding more memory than the shared server could offer. 

In the end, while I flirted with changing hosts, I bit the bullet and decided to at least try DreamHost's Private Server service. It's an extra cost, but at the minimum level of service, still reasonable. I was  dismayed for the first couple of weeks, though, as my sites' server usage was still ridiculously high, especially in terms of memory usage. But through some combination of my hamfisted tweakings and (possibly) optimizations made by DH, things have calmed down to a VERY stable and responsive level, under which my main server's memory usage is safely about 2/3 my limit, and my MySQL server's memory usage is about 1/3 my limit. (Both servers' CPU usage barely registers.) Not bad for a dozen or so Drupal sites (though, admittedly, not yet high-traffic sites)!

So I'm staying with DreamHost under my current, happy Private Server environment, and continue to recommend the service to the newbie or general Drupal user.