For what it's worth a co-worker was using the $9/mo DreamHost plan and it was painfully slow. While he was working on his project, he had a static html page as a landing page. It only had an h1 tag that said "Coming soon". It took about 10-12 seconds on average to load the page. DreamHost also broke his rails installation (basic rails set up) and they told him that he must have broken it because he was using a "custom build of rails". They later admitted they broke it with a server update.

I convinced him to move to a 512mb Linode and he has been extremely happy since.

2nd'ed Also here is a promo code to get $97 off you first year... so you end up with 1 year of hosting for $13

HN97OFF

Tried to sign up for this, but it puts you directly into a two week trial for free, and I can't find any way to tell it that I have a promo code so that I can pay for the year. Any suggestion on what I might be doing wrong?

Just in case anyone else runs into this - if they are running a promotion at the time (in this case a Veteran's Day sale), they give you the code to enter, but then the system automatically applies the discount - which somewhat begs the question of why they give you the code. You can see the discount in the not immediately apparent invoice that is generated.