I've been a dreamhost email and hosting customer for 18 years. My only downtime from them was a 3-day outtage after an earthquake disrupted power to their datacenter near LAX. No downtime since.
I did have a brief outbound email deliverability issue with yahoo in 2010 and again with a small ISP in Wisconsin in 2017. Both resolved within a few days of contacting support.
I'm glad you have had a good experience with them.
For me, in 2006, my email services was the most important thing I had. I ran a family email server that was used by a small group of us. Any outages were hard to accept. We had a lot.
It may have been the host I got put onto, the ip address of the host may have had a shared-account-bad-actor causing an RBL, or any number of reasons.
Just goes to show you that one experience is not all. Thanks!
In my experience, Dreamhost's e-mail has been the part of the service that always worked.
I'm under the impression that the architecture of their e-mail service has been some sort of HA clustered setup for ages, and I think one of their unusually outspoken blog post in the 00s said outright that their customers are less sensitive to web than e-mail outages.
I've had an account with Dreamhost since June 2007. Their web uptime wasn't great back in the day. I seem to remember that they made a bad investment in some sort of very expensive NAS or SAN architecture from NetApp that caused a lot of downtime because the filers just regularly dropped clients.
However, with the dawn of cheap SSD, I think they moved back to local, per-server disks in the early 2010s.
I still have my Dreamhost account. They don't use cPanel, which was appealing to a younger me, for aesthetic reasons, and they also gave away sub account privileges you had to pay extra for as reseller hosting at other places.
My DH account has been a Swiss army knife of sorts for doing small web and hosting related things. This was especially useful back in the days before you could just use free Cloudflare DNS for random things.
These days, I use my own M365 business tenant for e-mail, and all my web customers are on servers in Europe, largely on hosting accounts based on cPanel, which I hated before. Now I like the ease with which I can ask a new provider to migrate all my cPanel accounts. It keeps the web hosting business extremely competitive.
Dreamhost also uses absurdly old hardware, my account is on an 8-core AMD Opteron 4122 CPU. Performance isn't particularly good. They also use Debian, so they don't rely on new features that CloudLinux and LiteSpeed bring to the table for shared hosting, to limit resource congestion/noisy neighbors.
My plan is actually to get off Dreamhost during my upcoming summer vacation.
I did have a brief outbound email deliverability issue with yahoo in 2010 and again with a small ISP in Wisconsin in 2017. Both resolved within a few days of contacting support.