Just a quick update. I ended up choosing Linode as my virtual private hosting provider, and am very pleased with the service so far. I've migrated all of my sites from Dreamhost to Linode and they are all running much faster. Linode's custom control panel is fantastic, and having full root control of the box is a nice luxury to have. I can do *anything* I want with the box. They give you a choice of 4 different data center locations (I chose New Jersey) and will even let you set their DNS servers up to do slave DNS for your domains.

The storage and RAM that comes with the cheapest plan is rather pedestrian (12GB storage, 360MB RAM) but are enough for what I'm doing, and I can always add extra if I need it. As I mentioned before, I no longer need massive amounts of storage on my hosting provider now that I'm using Amazon S3 for my backups (the cost for S3 so far has been about $1.50/mo.)

Dreamhost was only $11/mo, and I'm paying $22 now for my Linode and S3 accounts, but I think the extra cash is worth it. I now have a server I can do anything with, doesn't get bogged down due to overselling, and a backup solution that won't get taken away from me due to vague terms of service.

All in all I'm pleased with the new setup. Anyone else who's considering the VPS route will be well served by giving Linode a look.