Dreamhost
I’ve been using Dreamhost for one year now, and I thought I’ll write a review, to see how the referral system works (disclaimer: I get referral fees for everybody who signs up following a link from this page).
The lowest plan costs about $10/month, and comes with about 180 GB disk space, and 1800 GB transfer/month; this is rather huge. I look on the status page for my account (that I share with two friends), and I see that together, our disk usage is at 1% of the space available, and out traffic usage never got as big as 1% (it always stays at 0%). So for practical reasons, the disk and transfer seem unlimited.
You can create up to 75 Linux user accounts, with shell (bash, ssh) access. You can host any number of domains, with any number of subdomains and mailboxes; all this free.
Dreamhost offers one-click installs of WordPress, phpBB, Joomla!, MediaWiki, activeCollab and many others.
I’ve installed and I’m using Django (Python web framework) without any problem (with FastCGI). Dreamhost also supports Ruby on Rails, although I don’t use Rails myself. For databases, DH supports MySQL (with many storage engines: MyISAM, InnoDB, BerkeleyDB, etc — InnoDB supports transactions) and of course SQLite (PostgreSQL is not offered yet, but may be added in the future if there is demand for it). Of course, you may have an unlimited number of MySQL databases. Dreamhost supports FastCGI. As web server, Apache versions 1.3 and 2.0 is available, with full .htaccess configuration (including mod_rewrite). PHP (versions 4.4.2 and 5.1.2) is of course available.
Dreamhost also offers subversion (svn) that you can use either through ssh, or access with the browser. I keep my development svn repository at DH, thus taking advantage of their data security and backup (if my laptop gets stolen, or if my hard disk explodes, I won’t lose my source code). DH also offers webdav (mod_webdav in Apache).
It is possible to compile and install at Dreamhost the applications or libraries that you need (if they are not already offered by DH) — this comes handy when developing a web application. For example, I’ve installed on my account: Python 2.5, Django (svn version), GDB, SCons, GeoIP, ImageMagick, readline, ares, and the most recent version of SQLite.
You also have low-level access to the DNS records (so you may add any DNS records on your domains: A, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, TXT, etc). And the greatest thing: even though wildcard DNS is not officially supported, the DH support team was kind and, at my request, has just activated wildcard DNS on one of my domains (thanks DH, this is great!).
And Dreamhost offers a free domain name registration (com, org, net — which typically cost $9/year) with any account.
What’s more: on my Linux laptop, using FUSE and sshfs, I remotely mount my DH account directory as a mount point on my local filesystem. This way I can work with and edit all the files from DH just as if they were local on my laptop, which is very useful.
About the DH drawbacks: the DH servers do not seem as responsive as they could be. And an account doesn’t come with a dedicated IP included (you may add IPs at additional cost). Because of this, it’s not possible to do SSL (https://) on the hosted domains ‘out-of-the-box’ — you need to add a dedicated IP, which costs $4/month, for that.
In conclusion, Dreamhost offers a huge amount of liberty; it is as close to VPS (virtual private hosting) as it gets, while keeping the cost in the low shared-hosting range.
If you read thus far, don’t forget to use the promo-code WILDCARD when you sign up: it will get you the one year plan (which normally costs $119.40) down to $29, with one domain registration included (isn’t that incredible?).