Hi, I am a software development veteran but a web development/web hosting newbie. I'm learning PHP/MySQL as fast as I can and I've taken on a project to suport a friend in a political campaign.

He has some experience with Dreamhost and likes them and wants to use them for our project. After looking at their site, knowledgebase and user comments I'm very impressed.

My concern is that I saw some comments on epinions that leads me to believe that they are growing so fast right now that, even though they can claim great uptime, the customer experience is that pages are served extremely slowly; even to the point of timing out.

Can any of you comment on that? Is this a common issue? Would I be better served by spending a bit more for a different web hosting service?

BTW, I have read a lot here about the slow customer service response and I'm not as concerned about that issue.