Dreamhost vs Bluehost

I've been a Dreamhost user for a number of years and I can honestly say I like their setup, but in recent months there has definately been a lot of downtime and server errors (I think due to overloading). This has lead me to trying Bluehost which a number of people recommended to me. Below I will do a little comparison.

Price
I got my Dreamhost account for a smokin deal. It was their one day president's day sale and I paid about $15 for a year of hosting with free domain. The current rate seems to be $8.95/month up from the rates charged over the last couple of years.

Bluehost has pricing at $4.95/month for a one year term ($3.95 on 2 years), if you get to Bluehost via a referral account the price will show as $6.95 to pay those referral fees I guess.

Control Panel
Dreamhost uses a custom control panel which although not the prettiest, it has excellent features. In particular the options for domain management include hooking into various google services and have automated processes for domain cloaking, mirroring and redirecting. They also create individual folders for each domain or subdomain which can really help when setting up some sites. Their DNS control is also good allowing you to change more than just MX records.

Bluehost uses a version of Cpanel, the biggest strength I see is the script installer (simple scripts) It's very easy to get a decent package installed with little effort. The list of scripts is considerably larger than Dreamhost's set, and includes Concrete5 which I do a lot of work with.

FTP
It may just be me but my FTP access to Dreamhost seems to always need me to kill ftp connections to get a large number of files up. Also you don't get anonymous FTP on Dreamhost for free, it's an additional $3.95/month for that feature. Each dreamhost ftp user uploads to a seperate directory on the server to give access to that directory their is only one user and password.

Load Time
As I noted in the opening paragraphs Dreamhost used to perform well for me. If you have a static html site it would still be very fast. The issue seems to be data driven sites with a lot of php processing. When it comes to the concrete5 sites I've built Bluehost is much consistently much faster in page loading time than Dreamhost.

Customer Service
I've only used Bluehost customer service once and it was only adequate. I have used Dreamhost on several occassions and usually have to reply to the ticket at least once for them to solve my problems, which is usually a problem with their system.

In the end, I did like Dreamhost but so far Bluehost appears to be better where it really counts. Having a fast reliable site is really what I want from my hosting company.