Dreamhost hosts over half a million domains, luring customers with cheap rates and acres of storage and bandwidth. They've also been historically pretty good in terms of using open tools and standards. Amid tales of web hosts being miscellaneously annoying and prohibiting basic tools like ssh, Dreamhost always seemed like a decent option. (I myself have never been their customer.)
In January they lost a lot of friends when they mis-billed their customer base, then added insult to injury with an overly irreverent apology.
More upsetting to me is the host's recent decision to make Procmail, the classic and powerful mail-filtering tool, unavailable to users, after providing it for years.
A few of my own web apps take instructions from users via email as an alternative to a web interface, and Procmail is part of that signal chain. That's not uncommon these days. Fortunately my apps are hosted elsewhere.
Dreamhost is not replacing Procmail with Maildrop or Sieve or another non-proprietary tool. They're replacing it with their own in-house filtering mechanism, which they plan – at some point – to make "more robust so [sic] mimic many common procmail jobs".
Seems like a move away from good things like interoperability, portability, standardization, and giving your customers what they've come to expect.
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