One point to note is that I never had to deal with their support in all these years, this is saying something about the quality of their services, on the other hand Bluehost may have some chat or email support but I had to deal with serious misunderstanding on their part when sending questions about some higher tier services they simply moved my account to it, same when some email redirect rules refused to work, their “tech” guys/gals pasted me some steps in both the chat and email support section on how to reset an email account password, now I understand that this is not a premium service, but I would rather not have any real time service, but more relevant support.

Also, DreamHost moved their regular shared servers to SSD drives, it made my sites hosted on their service fly as much as the equivalent sites I have on the DreamHost “PRO” plan (my client is paying, but I don’t think this is the right choice at the moment).

Basically, it seems your impressions come from comparing the offers on all these hosts product pages and building a list of features… toss in some misplaced c-Panel bias and mark a winner… the best and only way is to build sites on each services and run a series of speed tests, try out their support to see how they actually responds to requests (I found answers to everything I ever needed on the DreamHost wiki).. so on and so forth, this may be a lot to ask for a quick blog entry, but this remains the only true way to evaluate anything.