I usually find three major uses of Dreamhost: Firstly (and importantly), as a backup dump, Secondly for SVN (Oops, not any more since I switched to github for good), Thirdly as cheap and slow hosting for mostly personal / hobby-network / friends sites. Contrary to people's complaints about Dreamhost, I find them extremely value providing (for shared hosting) for the money you pay them.

Now Drupal, as resource hungry as it is, is a pain on Dreamhost servers. I've had repeated painful experiences of the {menu_router} table getting half-rebuilt (or lesser) when I visit admin/build/modules before Dreamhost terminates the script for memory overconsumption, resulting in broken pages (and the annoyance of manually regenerating the table externally)