You're welcome. They all have bad reviews out there--unless you go to a review site full of paid/referral links, of course. They're hard to beat for the price, but they're not for everyone. I've had an account there for years, but I use other hosts as well. It just depends on your needs. I wouldn't put anything that requires 100% uptime on a single shared host, whether it's Dreamhost or somewhere else. Also, when counting bad reviews, keep company size in mind. They're hosting over 350,000 domains across somewhere near 1,000 servers, so if they had 100 unhappy customers writing bad reviews, it could still be a much lower overall percentage than a tiny host with 5 bad reviews.
Jessica, i think it's safe to say that there isn't a perfect host out there. it all depends on what your requirements are and in my search for a web host, besides the specifications, i've looked for those with 30 day money back guarantee (with at least a 7 day money back guarantee) to test them out. cos sales copy is one thing, the reality is another. in any case, you have a 60-day chargeback period if you're using a credit card, so it shouldn't be an issue. it's just that without a formal money back guarantee it takes longer to intiate chargebacks against the smaller operators.
I'd avoid the charge-back method. If you agree to a company's terms, then use a charge-back to break those terms, you're committing fraud... and will quickly see your charge-back reversed. If you don't trust a host, you shouldn't sign up. Period. If you don't trust them, a charge-back shouldn't make you feel safe. Think about it... why would you voluntarily give someone you don't trust your credit card number and all of the info they need to use it? Dreamhost does have a 97-day money back guarantee (as long as you use a credit card, rather than PayPal). Even if you don't like them, they're not frauds, so there's nothing to fear with giving them a try. If they work out, great--if not, you get your money back. I do believe the 9999 promo code has expired, though (but feel free to try it -- it will show a discount if it still works), so you'll have to use one of the thousands of $97 codes out there. If you can't find one, or don't want to use one that's spammed at you, you can PM me and I'll give you one that gives the max allowed discount on any plan. You should know that if you refer people, the person that referred you will get $5 each, even if they give you the max discount.
chargebacks are a last resort, if the company has one thing in their ToS and they do another thing. i've had bad experiences with the smaller resellers, so i'm using the bigger hosting companies, even though they're more expensive, but the service and support is more professional.
I take back my opinion about dreamhost beeing a good price...Since yesterday the database has been down for 3 !!! times.... Everything else has been working fine during that time. So for people not using a DB it could be a good deal.
That is a REALLY good idea... I just wish it could be automated, like your site goes down and GoDaddy automatically changes DNS info.
DNS Made Easy offers that service for a fairly cheap annual fee. Your domain needs a dedicated IP on each account. They have more info and a tutorial on their site.
I am a former dreamhost user. I was with them for about 6 months. I never really got my sites together much. I think they are good for noobs like myself because they have a lot of one click installs and things and I've enver had an issue with anything as far as my site loading or working or being able to edit stuff. Plus I could pile on a lot of websites to test things out. And hell, its so cheap, what do you expect? But, I always thought my sites were slow as hell to load. They were all wordpress sites and any time I needed to do anything within wordpress, it always took a long time to save and reload. I've heard it all depends on which server you get placed on. SOme are good, some are bad. Mine was slow but it was always up. I never experienced downtime that I noticed. Overall, I'd say you get what you pay for. They are super cheap and it can be a roll of the dice for servers. I just switched to another host and damn its fast. And I can email/IM/call them any time of day or night and someone responds in a couple hours. They are still small though and are still getting things set up with better cpanels and one click installs. Im having a lot of issues with getting wordpress to work because a lot of things aren't automatic(like read/write permissions) like they were with dreamhost. For a noob, that sucks. But they have been very helpful in working with me to solve my problems.