Do you think that Dreamhost should be expected to hold data longer because there's a chance that some parties might have poor termination procedures and long stretches where they don't check their site or their emails?
Most of the other hosts that I've dealt with delete data from terminated accounts immediately.
Actually, I do. Not indefinitely, but 30 days would be a little more reasonable. (And I do recognize that most of the fault was on the client's end.)
Here's the thing: even at the ISP level, drive space is cheap. If they don't want to deal with drives themselves, there's always S3. Or nightly backups with an intelligent retrieval system.
And I'm not altogether ignorant about the ISP side: I worked for a small local ISP (http://spiral.com/), and they have some pretty long-term data retention that doesn't cost them anything and has occasionally made a customer really happy.
No, and I'm not about to go digging around to find one, because:
1, I have better things to do and I've already said my piece and spent enough time on this;
2, I don't think it's sensible to make business decisions based on whether or not your competitors do a particular thing. By that metric, Amazon doesn't need to provide awesome customer service because their competitors don't either. (See also Guy Kawasaki's Rules for Revolutionaries.)
So, awesome customer service is the goal. And awesome is defined as not 14 days, but 30 days. Wouldn't it be even more awesome at 90 or 365 or 1000? These organizations have to draw the line somewhere. You've drawn yours quite forcefully at 30. It's interesting that you expect so much more than any company (that we can think of) delivers, and insist that you won't deal with Dreamhost until they hit this metric. I'd love to know who you host with, or if you don't, then who you might eventually find that "fits the bill" for you.
Most of the other hosts that I've dealt with delete data from terminated accounts immediately.