I'm a web developer, and I've been hosting with Dreamhost for nearly 5 years. I started just hosting personal sites, then I moved my business site over. As I started working with smaller companies, I would recommend hosting their web sites at Dreamhost. In the 5 years I've worked with them, service outages have been minimal. They keep adding new features to my plan (strictly business) while the monthly fee has been the same. I'm pretty sure the features they've added for me they have also added for the smaller plans, too. The web panel is powerful and easy to use, but novice users might get overwhelmed at all of the capabilities.

For the price, you can't beat the features. Service is only available via email/web panel, but I've seen that they're beta testing a phone-back support system. I've never had the opportunity to use it, though. The email support has been more than adequate.

The webmail interface uses squirrelmail which hasn't been completely reliable, but it keeps getting better. Other than that, my clients haven't complained, and neither will I. I highly recommend this host.

Recommended: Yes

Monthly fees (US$): depends on level, $9.95 basic
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: MySQL
Main focus of Web site: Customer service and retention