Decided to try out a dreamhost VPS, the free trial is nice and even though they don't offer cpanel their custom cpanel is relatively intuitive...
The problem with DreamHost is their support. It looks like they have live support but it's actually bullshit. They actually have little to no support for things you might expect from a 'managed' account. Nearly everything you might need done (I personally needed some sites transferred from one account to another, and ioncube loder installed, which were extremely basic support requests on other hosts) they won't do. They'll simply reference their wiki and tell you to do it yourself.
http://www.dreamhost.com/vps-support.html This is what they advertise as support but it's not what you get. Maybe their support is good if you're having some actual server problems or something like that.
My advice is unless you're looking for a VPS that you will actually manage yourself (which there might be cheaper options in that case) DO NOT go with dreamhost.