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)

. Enabling or disabling module through the UI itself is a pain in that admin/build/modules takes ages to load (or is usually terminated prematurely).

The life-saver is that Dreamhost thankfully provides decent SSH access, and that there are bigger life-savers like Drush. Drush doesn't seem to work out of the box however, since the Dreamhost php cli normally defaults to PHP4 (While Drush needs atleast PHP 5.2.0)

All it takes is this: Add this to your .bash_profile instead

alias drush='/usr/local/php5/bin/php /home/your/path/to/drush/drush.php'

And then run source .bash_profile.

Being rid of browser intervention + running the script locally makes it mostly painless apart from other cool features Drush offers.