Control panel: this is not Cpanel - it's home-grown, and it's _better_.
* File organization is excellent:
/home/user/my.domain.com
/home/user/my.domain2.com
/home/user/logs/
/home/user/Maildir/
/home/user/whatever/
/home/user/rubyproject/.../preferred_public/
* Shell/ftp users: you decide, grouping specific domains to specific shell/ftp users
* Mail users: unlimited on separate server if you have lots of mail users, but you can give preferred shell users mail privileges!
* Jabber hosting, media streaming, etc.
* Assign your preferred subdomain to any mysql db - for instance - mysql.domain.com.
* Compile your own cgi php, rails, etc. if theirs doesn't suit your needs, but they offer so much, it's hard to think they couldn't.

While I've never spoken with anyone at Dreamhost, they have been courteous on the support interface.

If you know what you're doing on linux, you can do almost anything on dreamhost except run a persistent service on a shared ip - for instance, you cannot run your own voip server - very sensible limits. (You can get a private server for that.)

They have an official forum and wiki, and a customer voting schema for feature implementation. Forum members are well-informed and courteous, even with noobs like me. Wiki is amazingly complete.

They could have more solid uptime. At 99.35%, (average since 2005) it's perfect for experimental, small non-profits, small commercial ventures or personal websites where uptime is not mission-critical.

Other customers may squawk about uptime, but really - every host has some downtime. If you can't take off your spock ears and play hackeysack for an hour until they get it together, what's your deal? Manage.

I wish they had postgresql.