DreamHost
I’ve been using DreamHost for quite sometime now. Overall, I have to say i’m quite impressed. They use their own, custom backend and not CPanel or any other sort of 3rd party control interface. I find the interface to be quite simplistic and intuitive (about as much as you can get, anyway). They don’t use fantastico, but opted to develop their own 1 click installer, which works pretty well for the most part (about as well as 1 click installers get). In fact, the installer can upgrade some versions of installed software, but it usually overwrites changes you made, so you have to becareful about this.
I’ve never used support, so I can’t comment on it. But from what others have told me, their support is usually pretty decent with reasonable load times.
The thing with Dreamhost is that, experiences overall are good, but i’ve heard some so-so stuff, ranging from the control panel being loaded (or not loading half the time), to some of the settings security they have configued that can be rather restrictive.
Dreamhost’s control panel lets you choose rather to use php 4 or 5, extra security, among other feature when setting up a domain and will even let you change those options later on without having to delete and readd the domain. This is importnant, because their PHP 4 has more open configuration/security settings then their installations of php 5 do. In their install of PHP 5 the register_long_arrays directive is disabled. They also note that in PHP 6 register_long_arrays directive and $HTTP_*_VARS array variables will not exist. I suppose this is better for security and since it’s being omited down the road, it’s better not to use it at all. Also, using fopen for external calls has also been disabled but you can use CURL instead.
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Register_long_arrays
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Allow_url_fopen