My DreamHost site along with hundreds(thousands) of others have been down too for the past 24+ hours.

Reading from posts made by more knowledgeable people it seems like it could be DH's fault for poor maintenance and monitoring.

Here are their 4(yes, thats right) update messages:

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Update - 12/14/08, 5:19 PM PST: So it turns out the file server is in a bit of a reboot spiral due to a few bad drives. Our admins are in the process of preparing and swapping the bad drives and hopefully things should level out soon. More updates will be posted as soon as things are all clear.

Update - 12/14/08, 11:13 PM PST: As it stands, the file server is going through disk checks to make sure that nothing has been lost and that a bigger problem isn’t going to bite everyone affected by this unfortunate outage later on. This is going to take a few hours to do — but once the file server is happy, we’ll update this entry.

Update - 12/15/08, 3:31 AM PST: I’d like to say that the checks were a complete success — but they weren’t. The operations center technician who is left in charge of this is getting a hold of one of our senior admins and they will be working to resolve this. More as things progress.

Update - 12/15/08, 3:31 AM PST: Unfortunately it was determined that if we could save the filer at this point, it may take longer to do that than to replace the hardware. One of our admins is currently handling that. There isn’t an estimate for restoration of service at the moment, but another update should be coming soon.
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I'm not necessarily upset with DH as my sites haven't gone down often since I've been with them since 2006 but this kind of has me worried. I'm not inclined to switch hosts and pay more but my account is up for yearly renewal next month on the 14th.

My question to anyone willing to answer is: Is there a way to properly get some sort of compensation for this downtime or is it standard to ask for a percantage of the renewal cost knocked off to keep me as a customer?

If so, what is the best method of doing this with a host?

Dreamhost has hundreds of servers. If their site is up, it doesn't mean all of their other servers are up too. 

If they've been reliable since 2006, I would wait it out and ask them for any compensation after they get things back online.