Doug,
I hope this helps – did a step by step based on a local setup – that moves to a “staging” area on dreamhost – then to replace the static site. Note – I assume your site is called “yoursite.com”
1. Unzip the Concrete5 files into the htdocs folder.
2. Create a database.
3. Run the setup (http://localhost)
4. Create the local version of your site. Theme / content etc.
5. Once you are happy and want to upload it, go into the htdocs folder and zip the entire folder. It’s important to be in the folder, and not to click on the “htdocs” folder - that way when you unzip it, it is not in a subfolder called htdocs (as dreamhost doesn’t use an htdocs folder!)

If you already have an installation at dreamhost of your static site then:
6. Under Manage domains
a. Setup a subdomain on your site. If you current site is yoursite.com then create c5.yoursite.com. Use the same user as yoursite.com uses. This will be easier when moving the files over! Note – I had to use PHP mode: “PHP 5 CGI” NOT “PHP 5 FastCGI” for installation. Maybe just my Dreamhost account, but if you are having issues installing, try that out!
7. Under goodies, select MySQL Databases.
a. Add a new Hostname- call it mysql.yoursite.com
b. Make sure to add a user… it’s good to keep all of the username / passwords in an excel doc, or written somewhere safe for reference at this point!
8. At this point, upload the zip file into the “c5.yoursite.com” folder. You can access this via ftp. The file will probably be too big to unzip using net2ftp, so you will have to ssh into the server to unzip the files. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, you can just upload the unzipped files – but it will take the better part of an hour.
a. For SSH simply gotohttp://www.netspace.org/ssh/ it is a java based ssh client. Once it opens, change the address at the bottom of the ssh window to “c5.yoursite.com” and login with the username and password that you used for FTP.
b. Type “ls” – this will show you the directories on your server.
c. Type “cd c5.yoursite.com” – that will change the directory to your new c5.yoursite.com site.
d. Type “ls” – you should see the zip file you uploaded.
e. Type “unzip yourzipfile.zip” – you will see about 10 seconds of listing of all the unzipped files.
9. Now you’ll want to update the mySQL database.
a. Goto your local phpmyadmin and export the sql database as a file.
b. Goto mysql.yoursite.com and enter your mysql user ID and password. Click import and select the file you exported from your local setup.
10. Update the config/site.php file. You can open this file in a basic text editor. Change the server/username/password/database/base_url to match the new dreamhost settings. Note – Base_url should be c5.yoursite.com.
11. You should now be able to goto c5.yoursite.com. At this point you have the site running on the server, ready to be tested. QA the site to make sure that there isn’t anything on there that is not working by being on a remote server.
12. Once you are ready to move your site – its super easy. FTP into your site. You should see c5.yoursite.com and yoursite.com folders. Simply change the name of yoursite.com to yoursite.com.archive and the c5.yoursite.com to yoursite.com.
13. Note – you need to at this point go into the config/site.php file and change the Base_URL tohttp://yoursite.com.
14. Goto yoursite.com and test it out.
a. Not a bad idea to turn off all caching and to put the site into maintenance mode when moving.
Good luck and let us know how it goes!
Phil