I think Dreamhost handled this effectively and reasonably quickly. And if you’re using a credit card for payment (you are, aren’t you?), there’s really nothing to worry about.

Even though I’m on the cheapest hosting plan, I got a personal email response a few hours after I questioned the billing:

“Hi xxxxxxxx!

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attempted
to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY
(it was all due to a fat finger)!

I’m really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing
to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have
received recently; I’ve already removed all those bum future charges on
your account (#nnnnn) and already refunded the $nnnnn charge on your
credit card.

You should get the money back on almost immediately, within a day or
two max, and there’s no need to contact your credit card company or bank
for the refund.

Again, I feel terrible about this whole thing.. there will be a blog post
soon at blog.dreamhost.com fully explaining how this bug was even allowed
to happen..

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE
this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless
of course you have any other questions at all!

Sorry again,
Josh!”

I knew something was amiss when I received two e-mails telling me my acccount was past due since November 2008…!

No harm, no foul. I think the $7.5 million figure just got a lot of folks all riled up.

what a stupid company, how retarted.

I’m a dreamhost customer. A quite happy one. Their communication isn’t the best - I’ve had issues too. But their support rocks. I’ll forgive ‘em.

I don’t have hosting with DreamHost, but I wonder how the company would react if one of their suppliers were to double bill them? I wonder if they’d be in a joking mood.

All those people who are telling those over billed to get over it should get bent. It’s easy to talk shit when it isn’t your money that’s been taken.

The billing department can make mistakes. But when it’s a mistake that affects a good portion of your customers to the tune of 7.5 million…that’s a bit difficult to overlook. I won’t be using DreamHost for my hosting needs.

Dreamhost could have hidden behind “someone input the wrong date”, but the gent who made the mistake came out, explained exactly what happened, told us what they were going to do to keep it from happening again, and offered to make good on overdraft fees.

That may be “retarted” from a 3-piece-suit point of view, but it’s stupendous customer service. Bravo, DH.

Anyone who knows anything about Dreamhost knows that they always blog in this funny way. Their Newsletter is also the same. — They made a mistake and corrected it immediately. I’ve been a customer of dreamhost for a long time and will continue to use them.

I noticed that they did that for me, and when I called up to complain, they told me that they could refund the money but then my account will be halted/deactivated as soon as they processed the refund. I still had about 3 weeks left on my account, but to accept the refund, I had to accept their offer of deactivating immediately!!!

RIDICULOUS! SCAMSTERS!!! ……… so I promptly took my business elsewhere. Never again with DreamHost.

I am going to take the same attitude as I did when discussing down time. For as hard as it is for companies - in this case a company - we as consumers are just at risk as much as companies. This is definitely a sad story. Commend or not DreamHost for owning up to it - not sure I would have been so jokefull about it - but the truth is that consumers of their service got the short end of the stick. In some cases even more than others.

This is an esoteric from of downtime.

How many Dreamhost staff can post comments on Techcrunch in one day? - answers on a credit card please

You get what you pay for. 5.95 a month and people think they are running a serious business off that?

I signed up to host a few static page for a couple of months, but their interface was so retarded I asked for my money back as they promise. I didn’t get it. I was kicked out, account deactivated and their support told me to fuck off.

DREAMHOST IS A RIP-OFF

I’m now convinced that Dreamhost could kill all their first-born customers then post a Moses-themed lolcat on their blog, and you would still have people chiding any complainers for being such downers when there’s such a cute kitty around.

Vividly reminds people of that totally fucked up registerfly.com

Even though I saw the twitter from @dhstatus this morning, I just now read the blog post on the issue because I never got any billing emails. Reading it now doesn’t make me cringe (and I do agree with some other posters that the “jokes” are taken out of context), but keep in mind that my perspective is from a customer who was not erroneously charged. Still, Dreamhost can’t ignore the message from their user base that’s coming in loud and clear to turn the whimsy down a notch.

It makes me wonder whether they got the copyright from Fox to use that image of Homer Simpson in such a way? And that Office Space screen cap?

It might not just be credit card fees they have to pay out…

I think people are making the usual mistake of assuming that everything is binary: that Dreamhost could either be professional or they could joke about it.

What Josh should have done is to make a professional apology and brief explanation immediately after the incident, then a week later, when everyone’s tempers had cooled and hopefully some of the personal damage to customers had been rectified, write the humorous, long-winded explanation. It would have gone down a lot better.

Joking about something that is giving your customers bad credit ratings and lost business is going to go down very, very badly with those customers, and shows a major lack of judgement and professionalism.

Don’t get me wrong, the post is funny, and I read all the way to the end without even noticing its length. It’s great that he can run a business and write well - many suits who try to be funny fail miserably. But there’s a time and a place.

Funny is getting you account shut down for “non-payment” and still not having access to them, FTP or anything 24 hours later, after everything was “fixed”. The best part was minutes after I got the “Everything is OK with your account” email, my site access disappeared. Oops.

At least I could get into the control panel and start moving my databases to a new host.

Mistakes happen guys and it is how the company handles them that matters. I think Dreamhost has handled this situation very well and they are working for their customers. I’m not dreamhost fan but they did do the right thing here.

Ross
http://www.hostdisciple.com

I got the same email that Alaska (comment #1) did-

Honestly, I felt like it WAS a straight apology. Even if the tone of the email wasn’t stodgy & “professional” (ie, “really really embarrassed”), it conveyed a degree of authenticity and genuine apology that you rarely get in a “we screwed up” letter from an online service. Usually they won’t even come out and say it. They were able to take the issue (and their customer) seriously, without taking themselves too seriously.

That’s what I look for when I pay for a service.

it’s not so much JUST this screw-up… it’s the fact that dreamhost has had other very dumb mistakes recently, such as keeping all users’ Ftp login credentials in a plain text document.

you might’ve guessed it… hackers hit as many accounts as they could… rewriting every site’s index page with some ad junk.

i’d never recommend this host.

I’ve hosted with them about 3 years, and it’s one screw up and lame excuse apology after another. I’ve never seen more down-time, massively slow servers, failed hardware, configuration errors, or BS in 13 years of hosting. This screw up is completely par for the course. The tone and speed of reply were fine. As far as the fact that they constantly screw up everything and I recommend everyone stay away from them, this is just another straw on the broken camel’s back.

# Good job

January 15th, 2008 at 5:05 pm

These guys did everything right:
1. Owned up to the screwup
2. Put it right
3. Said sorry
4. Ensured it would not happen again.

They didn’t cover it up, and did the apology in an entertaining way. I am sure there will be loads of people trying to get a free months hosting or a refund or so, however I think these guys should be commended. Accidents happen…

Great work guys…

—–

Let me just respond to this nonsense comment.

1. Owned up to the screwup

A: On a blog that is not known to most of their user community.

2. Put it right

A: All overdraft and credit card fees have been set straight? People have been compensated for their time and inconvenience? Yes?

3. Said sorry

A: Oh my, did you eat glue when you were younger? There, you probably think that was a compliment.

4. Ensured it would not happen again.

A: It has happened before. Let me say that again. It has happened before. It has happened before. It has happened before. It will happen again.

I appreciated the full apology instead of some legal bs. They fixed the issue and apoligized. I’ll continue to due business with them.

I’ve used dreamhost for a few years now for my non-profit site because a hundred bucks or so a year is a pretty good deal for what I get. I would never trust them to with a serious for-profit site though even without this latest mess up.

LOL

The “Sign-up Now” link on Dreamhost.com is returning server errors!!!

Didn’t someone above just say something about them being a lazy company?
Proof is in the pudding, eh?

I use Dreamhost for some small sites and have been a customer for almost 2 years. I’ve always appreciated their honesty and light-heartedness, they really are unlike any other company I’ve worked with. However, I do think this is one situation where a bit more serious tone would have been a good thing. But at least they were honest about it, apologized, and are refunding everyone.

Worth pointing out that if informal English went down as well with disaffected people as an alien might infer from this comments thread, everyone would use it to apologise. Instead of “The US Government regrets the death of 100 innocent Iraqis at a wedding ceremony, we received credible intelligence that the mosque was being used as a terrorist hideout” we’d get “We’re really really sowwy we killed 100 people at a wedding, we thought they were nasty bad people, no foolies :-(”.

Of course, enough of that and it would become the accepted style taught in marketing courses. Then another Josh would come along and use a different style, and be praised for being different. Repeat ad infinitum. It’s how language works over time.

Formal or informal, it’s just English. It’s just a language. It’s just a sequence of glyphs chosen thousands of years ago by people speaking a different language entirely to represent arbitrary sounds produced by the human vocal organs in order to convey concepts, objects and actions to each other. What matters is:

Is Dreamhost genuinely contrite? Yes, probably.

Did they convey that well in their apology? Hell no, for reasons very well covered above.

Are they going to get their act together, without which the act of apologising is hollow at best and cynical at worst? On past evidence, probably not.

I’ve used Dreamhost for several years, but I put my one serious commercial site over on MediaTemple after Dreamhost’s series of outages two summers ago. Dreamhost is great with unlimited everything, and I’m able to have multiple sandboxes going at any time. Their corporate communications are unprofessional and annoying, but consistent, so I’m not surprised.

I don’t believe it was mentioned, but regarding the $7.5 million annual - I think the “overbilling” was for those accounts that are set up for auto-renewal, which may be only a small subset of all account. I have no idea the size of their user base, but I wasn’t affected, as I don’t have auto-renew.

whatever people.

here’s what i wrote back to Dreamhost after they overbilled me, and then fixed it without me having to do anything:

what service!
what forthrightness!
what aplomb!

maybe your Happy Credit-Charging Team had one of those mornings where you feel like you’ve lost a year–literally.

i mean, just last week i woke up at 2am thinking: “oh my god it’s 2010 and i’m still a bum with no direction in life!” fortunately, i realized my mistake within 48 hours–that i was, in fact, a bum with no direction in 2008. which means i just got two years of my life back.

and now that you’ve so graciously fixed the billing problem, it’s like adding yet another year.

what to do with 3 extra years?

…

i’ll let you know when i figure that out. but i’ll still be your Happy Customer Guy,

nic

They messed up and they fixed it. I’m sure if my credit card was pushed over Dreamhost would cover it if I asked them. They still have crazy storage for the price.

I don’t use Dreamhost.

And if this is how they do business, I never will.

Glad I saw this info, it helps me know which hosts to avoid.

I was/is a Dreamhost customer and I did get the apology email, but saw no account activity on my card. After being rejected from an affiliate program because the site was down, it lit a fire under my butt to move my sites off of Dreamhost to a more reliable host.

I like Dreamhost and I like their back end tools for users, but my constant emails to support and the constant outages and 500 errors were too much for me to keep my important sites on their service. I made the decision to leave last month and haven’t regretted it in the least. The difference between my new provider and Dreamhost is night and day.

It is important to note that $7.5 million is not an appropriate estimate of their annual revenue. This is only the customers setup for AutoPay. However, there are much larger issues that I’d like to address. I am a recent previous employee of DreamHost and would love to get in touch with Michael Arrington to discuss bigger problems.

If you are looking for a company that manages their finances with professionalism, check out ICDsoft, they claim to be completely debt free. I’ve had accounts with both ICDsoft and Dreamhost and ICDsoft is better at everything. check em out if you want.

a) It’s a value-priced host. You get what you pay for. When people flip out about Dreamhost not being perfect, those people come across as lame and sad and a little bit feeble, not to mention they’re the worst of cheapskates.

b) I can imagine other businesses waiting for the customer to call them to point out the error. A LOT of other businesses. So kudos to Dreamhost.

c) It was a really damn stupid screw up and a lot of people are going to have to deal with the consequences of this “billing error” — but realistically there’s not much DH can do but say “sorry,” so there you have it.

I’m a Dreamhost customer and I’m not disturbed by this.

It was clear that it was a mistake and it was fixed before I could get worried about it. And an apology right afterwards. All around well done. If you don’t like the light tone, you are with the wrong host.

But Dreamhost is my secondary host - I wouldn’t keep anything serious with them. My business class hosting is elsewhere.

I can see how if I were keeping business accounts on Dreamhost I would be annoyed. But anybody running an important business site on Dreamhost isn’t taking their business seriously enough. I use Dreamhost for backups, SVN and weird Ruby on Rails experiments. Their hardware is oversold, but their techs are competent and polite. I wish Dreamhost would increase the prices and improve the quality of service. 70 KB/sec download is not good.

I was not impressed with the fact that I was overcharged $500. And to top it off it seemed mocking to respond in the fashion that they did. But I’m a lazy wimp and I will probably stick with them because up until now they were pretty damned good.

I did, however, turn off any auto-rebilling on my account…

http://www.nerdgirl.com/2008/0.....a-fat-one/

Dreamhost deserves a break. They offer full-featured web hosting for dirt cheap. Their response actually made me smile. They did everything right.

My landlord doesn’t find it so funny that I can’t pay my rent this week.

I got one of those and paid both of them. What a load of crap.

I did get the “doh” comment on the end. I didn’t find it funny to say the least.

In response to Tippy Hedren:

a) This mistake is unrelated and inexcusable for any company. You are paying them to provide you a service, not to automatically charge you in error or without authorization. These are serious offenses that could easily cause them to lose merchant agreements.

b) Admitting your mistake is not admirable. It is your duty, and responsibility as a company to notify all customers that were overcharged. If you’re reading the customer’s comments correctly then you’ll notice that they were not properly informed. The only action DreamHost took was posting a status update and blog post on their website. Many customers won’t find out they were incorrectly charged until their debit cards decline. They should have emailed them immediately, which they did not do.

c) A lot of people are going to have to deal with the consequences. Fortunately customers can contact their financial institutions and explain the situation. If they incurred an overdraft, the bank will automatically side with the customer and issue a chargeback against DreamHost. Because this is DreamHost’s mistake, they will have to deal with it.

As a Dreamhost customer who was overbilled I have to say that the hoopla is extraordinary. I was automatically refunded before I knew there was a problem. I had no issues, no downtime and a minor amount of entertainment from reading the blog post.

I sincerely appreciated the explanation.

Compare this to the typical networked service utility customer service (IE cable, cellular and/or telco). I have never yet ever had a positive experience with them. THey have never yet owned up to an error. They have never apologized. THey routinely make billing errors. They build in cancellation penalties. But yes, they are ‘businesslike’ - as for me, I’m happy to see a bit less corporate responsibility-avoiding gobbledygook.

Yes, people may have gone over their limit, and incurred extra charges. But *also* in that post by Dreamhost, they invited anyone who had that situation occur to contact them and they said they will deal with it.

After reading the comments on the blog I’d say more people were happy with his light toned sense of humor than were annoyed and turned off by it.

This Techcrunch article is ridiculous. Dreamhost is a company that has always been cool and have always used jokes in their newsletters even when there has been problems such as downtime. Yesterday’s problem is a critical and very serious one, but I don’t see why Dreamhost should all of the sudden stop being themselves. If they suddenly started being serious, would it be just yesterday? Or forever? In their blog entry, they DO have a serious part where they frankly appologize, this is what is important. For the polemics, some people take themselves too seriously, Arrington included. Take it easy.

What a load of crap.

Sure, when I noticed they billed me for 2008-2009 I sent them an email calling them unethical and expressing my unhappiness. But I got a letter the next day saying the charges had been reversed and I was fine with it.

The fact that they were able to fix up such a big boo-boo in such little time actually impresses me.

Thanks for the great hosting Dreamhost. I’ve tried 3 hosts and yours is the only one I have been happy with.

!! What a load of crap.

Sure, when I noticed they billed me for 2008-2009 I sent them an email calling them unethical and expressing my unhappiness. But I got a letter the next day saying the charges had been reversed and I was fine with it.

The fact that they were able to fix up such a big boo-boo in such little time actually impresses me.

Thanks for the great hosting Dreamhost. I’ve tried 3 hosts and yours is the only one I have been happy with.

They also had over 3,000 passwords stolen before, and tried to make it seems not as bad by saying “it’s only about 3 percent of our customers.”

Humor can only get you so far, but when mistakes like that are made, it seems ironic that dreamhost is trying to appeal to the public with Homer Simpson.

It’s not just this billing error that has people pissed, but when you lay it on top of the problems that have been occurring more and more over the last 12 months you tend to get annoyed.

DreamHost are really starting to show how their cowboy attitude affects their business in the long term. I’ll probably be jumping ship closer to when my hosting has expired. Maybe I’ll take up Lunarpages DHRefugee coupon code.