I have an account with dreamhost, how will a shared hosting fare with a small forum with say 100 members, 500 posts and 3,000 pageviews per day? Thanks
Dreamhost is doing simply overselling and they will suspend your account if your account use a bit of their server resources, just go to a better webhost if you need better website performance.
Shared hosting might be good enough for now but I'd consider getting a VPS hosting account if you plan to grow the forum. Here's are some managed VPS plans and coupons which may suit you. Andrew
site5 is a pretty good shared host, but I agree with above you may need to look into a VPS in the near future.