Here are some more relevant quotes from the report:

On complaints:
“Our complaint history for this company shows the company gave proper consideration to some complaints presented by the Bureau. Although in some cases the company failed to respond to complaints.”

On licensing and bonding:
“We know of no licensing or registration requirement for companies engaged in this company’s stated type of business.”

On government actions:
“We know of no government action taken against this company.”

On advertising:
“No question about the truth of this company’s advertising has come to our attention.”

On other considerations:
“We know of no other matter or practice relating to this company that may assist you in your consideration of this company.”

If you go to the company report on BBB, and you click on “full rating explanation”:http://www.labbb.org/BBBWeb/Forms/Business/RatingExplanationPage.aspx?CompanyID=13131294&sm=#RatingExperience
you will get the definition that I quoted.

I was beign entirely factual. However I understand that quoting the definition of their rating maybe misleading, therefore I’ve included the reason for their F rating.

The first thing is that anecdotal evidence is pretty much bullshit. No matter what a host does, someone is not going to like it and probably complain loudly. The bottom line is that _all_ hosts have problems, and shared hosting is always a crapshoot. Ultimately, the most important thing is the ability to solve problems as they arise.

Dreamhost has a ton of experience in this arena. They have dealt with countless DoS, network, and usage issues over the years and have improved their systems as a result. How will Site5 handle these situations? No one knows until they happen.

I have an expensive reseller plan with Site5 have been getting the runaround for months. The server I’m on goes down on average every 2 days. This has been going on for 5 months, and support always says the same thing, “we’re diagnosing the problem and working to make sure it doesn’t happen again”. Except nothing ever changes. Dreamhost has tools to profile CPU usage (hence the complaints about getting shut off for too much CPU usage), but Site5 does not appear to have anything. I’m guessing when loads climb they just start inspecting process queues.

I’ve noticed sometimes mysqld starts consuming all the CPU causing load to steadily rise. Well Dreamhost has dedicated database servers which offers more fine-grained load management.

Dreamhost also has facilities to quickly move high-load sites to temporary servers to handle slashdottings without affecting other customers on the same server.

On the issue of disclosure, Dreamhost posts all service issues that they are working, even if it only affects one server. Site5 is attempting to improve transparency, but they have a history of censorship in their forums and in their blog comments.

Finally I’d just like to say dreamhost-sucks.com does include some flat out lies. For instance, they say there’s no way to monitor your CPU usage, however their panel does allow you to turn that on. They also are willing to work with you to diagnose CPU utilization problems. Maybe you think that it’s a better situation to go to Site5 where they don’t even know how much CPU you’re using so you can host a popular PhpBB forum or a ton of WordPress plugins. But remember you are on a host with 30 other people, and if any of them happen to be a heavy resource user then you are basically screwed at Site5.

I don’t think its fair for you to post things about Dreamhost when you’ve never actually hosted anything there. It’s one thing for disgruntled customers to air their grievances, but you’re basically just scraping up whatever dirt you can to make Site5 look better. dreamhost-sucks.com only has 4 complaints, no comments, and is full of misinformation. FWIW Pete @ Dreamhost has responded to the BBB issues “here”:http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/04/web-hostings-dirty-laundry/#comment-4845.

To the previous commenters: I use Dreamhost and I don’t like their attitude. Their customer service was terrible. Bashing BBB is plain stupid. BBB is not perfect and there is some criticism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau) but they are not an extortion company or blackmailers as Dreamhost depicts them.