Dreamhost is a good choice if you want to get the cheapest one year deal and only if you can afford your website being down for a week without advice.
I have 2 joomla sites going extremely slow and one RoR site down since a week ago.
What do I get from DH support? Just useless answers and when the problem is big I get a :
"Hi there,
This is just a note to let you know that although it’s almost been
24 hours since you sent in your message, we haven’t forgotten about
you!
We strive to answer all questions within 24 hours, but due to the
large number of questions we have right now we’re afraid we may have
to go over a bit this time.
Please hang in there and we’ll be getting back to you as quickly
as we possibly can!
Our apologies again, and we appreciate your understanding."
My website is down, i am loosing money and what you say is wait another 24 hours???
Thanks to DH to make me decide going for a dedicated server.
BTW, 4+ years with ixwebhosting and they are great, I signed DH to diversify and because it was only $24 a year, this las year was $120, plus $4 a month for https.