What bugs me about them most right now is their new control panel design. The log out link is at the bottom left, so it gets pushed off the screen when you expand the menus.
I have sent at least 3 tickets to them over the course of about 4 months telling them that they need to move the log out link to the top of the page, somewhere in the copious amounts of empty space they have up there. They have responded every time saying they would look into it, pass it along, etc. But nothing's changed. I could fix it myself in 30 seconds by copying and pasting the code in the template.
And I can't help but wonder, if they are so incompetent as to not realize that, when the log out link gets pushed off the page, their design is broken, what else are they incompetent with? Security? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how broken it is--do their middle managers or higher-ups not recognize the problem? If not, what other problems do they not recognize? And if my messages to them are not getting through to those who could fix them, that's a problem in their support system.
So I would keep an eye on them. I hope they are not beginning to decline.
I started with them in high school when I was just getting started and I don't use it for my own real projects anymore but it's perfect for friends/family and the occasional wordpress I need to throw up. One last thing, I also used bluehost for a while but I found dreamhost to have a better interface (even though they are both pretty bad)
I'd take the article with a pinch of salt, they admit they haven't got anywhere near capacity yet, and it doesn't seem like they'd done any real load testing before "final layout". They could easily go the way of most low end VPS providers, day one benchmarks look great and then a few months later when the node fills out and people start using it performances sinks with no lower bound to be seen anywhere.
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2016/10/11/dreamcompute-us-ea...
I've been with them for about the same amount of time. A few domains registered, personal email, a few website projects, a couple cron jobs, and an OwnCloud install ...
Generally they deliver. Not spectacular, but much better than any of the other shared hosts.
The reason why I haven't moved off them completely is because for smaller web projects it's easier to have everything in one place, ready to go and managed, without dealing with deploying and maintaining the stack (which can be overkill for hobby stuff).
All of the other shared hosts went to shit about 5 years ago. Dreamhost may eventually get there as well, but for the time being they are still decent, and get the job done.
I'm not sure what your requirements are, but I've been very happy with nearlyfreespeech for a few years now. I just host a simple static site so YMMV.
Some say EIG killed shared hosting.
Side note: an EIG company has given me free hosting for years because their botched takeover of my previous favorite caused them to stop billing me.
I've also had really poor experiences with Dreamhost.
EIG took over a Small Orange in 2010, but thankfully left them autonomous for while. Unfortunately in 2014 Douglas Hannah (ASO founder) left and since then things have gone downhill.
This happened around the same time EIG took over HostGator. HostGator founder Brent Oxley and (no coincidence) friend Douglas Hannah have gone on to start a new venture with their big time profits from selling out to EIG.
2014 and 2015 were riddled with major outages at both A Small Orange and HostGator.
I'm sure you remember the 4-day Small Orange VPS outage of Christmas 2015 ?! That was fun.
I got my last client off them after that and never looked back. Just now I looked at their status page and looks like they never really recovered: https://status.asmallorange.com/
No need to be embarrassed. I used DH for many many years, starting probably about 13-14 years ago. Since moved to Linode and DO in order to fully control a stack even for small personal things, however fond memories are having a managed environment for a very low price, wildcard emails, bundled domain, and mostly, sticking to their promise which got me to sign-up in the first place: any new pricing plan will be offered to existing customers at the same rate as new customers, which 10-15 years ago was almost unheard of.
Azure has been more reliable, faster, more convenient, and cheaper.