So, if any of you haven’t heard – Dreamhost, my web hosting company, had a royal screw-up the other day. They were apparently trying to run some clean-ups on their billable accounts in order to generate payment invoice e-mails to users behind on their bill.
Unfortunately, there was an error on the date they generated the billing cycle for, and it ended up billing every customer for the following year’s web hosting. I was sent an e-mail saying I owed them somewhere around $320. Before I checked the site for any major malfunctions though, I had already fired off an angry e-mail to the Dreamhost billing team. I never got a response. I guess they assume I read the news about the big mistake.
It wasn’t a big deal for me because my bill date isn’t till later and they already corrected my account. However, statistically there were others who had their bill date that day, and their credit cards bounced or their bank accounts were overdrawn and other payments were caused to bounce, like rent and mortgage payments. I understand Dreamhost is probably dealing with this on a case-by-case basis, but when a screw-up of that proportion happens, I can understand why some people would want to leave.
I think ultimately it’s going to be up to how Dreamhost handles the situation whether or not they come out a winner. I think the trying-to-be-funny approach they usually take might not have been the most professional way to handle it in their apology e-mail. But Dreamhost has been pretty good to me in the past, and you can’t beat the features for the price. Their support is pretty phenomenal, and even with this unfortunate accident, I’d still recommend them to anyone looking for a good host.
If you want to give them a try yourself and see if I’m right, I can offer you $50 off any of their plans as a Dreamhost customer. Just go to Dreamhost.com and use promo code RTBLOGFIFTY when it asks for a promo code.