Dreamhost Screws Up Yet Again
Published January 15th, 2008 in Ridiculing StupidityOh Dreamhost, how often you have screwed up! At first, I was one of those optimistic guys: “Crap happens; at least DH informs customers about their problems.” More mistakes were made, and I shifted toward the sarcasm defense mechanism. “Oh, someone hacked into a few thousand DH accounts. Dreamhost security is the best.” Now… now, I am done.
I’ve been planning to move on from Dreamhost in April when my cycle runs out, but I had maintained a relatively decent opinion of them. I would have recommended DH as a “value host” that gives you quite a bit for your money. “Good for a personal site but probably not for business,” I would have said.
Today has had some downtime for DH, but not as a result of the usual trouble. Instead, customers were charged a total of over $7.5 million with some customers being charged several thousand dollars. “Um, Whoops,” says Dreamhost.
Dreamhost owed me about $250 from referrals, but this morning I got an email saying:
This is just a notice that your DreamHost Account #1234567
(”Ian’s Account”) has a balance of $136.30 (including any charges not
due until 2009-01-25), with $136.30 due (since 2008-12-25).You also have $136.30 past due (owed since 2008-11-25), and if
by 2009-01-25 you do not pay at least the $136.30 part, your
account will be automatically suspended until payment is received.
And a little farther down:
We have the last payment on this account to be $52.00 on 2008-01-15 03:20:47.
Since then the following charges have been made to the account:
2008-04-25 - $190.80 for “My Crazy Domain Insane” through 2010-04-24.
2008-04-25 - $190.80 for “My Crazy Domain Insane” through 2010-04-24.
After draining all the money that they owed me, they tried to charge my credit card $136.30! Fortunately, the credit card I had on file with them expired in 2006. Apparently, that’s how I fight the man!
The explanation was that “Josh” put 2008-12-31 for the billing date and so virtually everyone was charged. But I didn’t receive that explanation through an email. I didn’t even receive a “whoops, we’re looking into it” email. Instead, I tried to go to the account panel to find out what was going on and the panel was down. I went to their status page to find out what was going on with the panel and saw a short blurb and a link to their blog post about the account problems.
Obviously, ONE SINGLE PERSON should not have the ability to cause this kind of trouble. More importantly, though, is the fact that a company HAS to communicate quickly when issues like this arise. It’s been 11 hours since the problem first came up and no official email has been sent out. To me, that is a bigger issue than the money (and the complete lack of any checks and balances).
I can’t, in good conscience, ever recommend DH to anyone again. Downtime is to be expected, especially on a cheap account, but being charged hundreds or thousands of dollars with no quick explanation? That’s ridiculous.
Sorry Dreamhost, I’m done. I won’t be renewing. I won’t be sending any more referrals your way. I might stay subscribed to your feeds to see what else you can screw up though. Good luck trying to best this one, but, somehow, I think you will find a way.
BTW, did anyone notice this:
Anyway, it turned out there was no 64 bit version of the PFProAPI module we use to interface to the credit card transaction server. No big deal, there’s a new module that interfaces with their new and preferred https interface, and it was only a couple of lines of code to change to get us switched over!
I sure hope that means they were using an “old HTTPS” interface and not an “old HTTP” interface…
I’ve been entertaining myself with other blog posts on the subject.
Some people are actually praising Dreamhost’s reponse.
LunarPages has the best response.
Yeah, it’s amazing that some love Dreamhost’s response; somehow I think those people aren’t the ones who were charged thousands. I finally received an email from them a little after I posted this, but I’m still wondering why it took them half a day to send out. It obviously wasn’t to fix typos (”embarassed”) or to ensure it was of the right professional tone.
Billing errors happen. Security errors happen. DNS errors happen. Downtime happens. If you want it to all happen in a short period of time, join Dreamhost!
Heh, I got the very same email. I got charged around $300 and I immediately emailed their billing support people after receiving the email receipt. Within 15 to 20 minutes I got an apologetic email response assuring me they will credit my card and that I can ignore all these charges.
I also noticed that the panel was down, but all in all I was satisfied with the email response time so I went on with my day. I figured maybe they just glitched out on me and few other customers.
$7.5 mill however is a pretty big mistake, and I don’t really like the tone in which they are talking about it. Honesty is one thing, but if “accidentally” over billed my customers this much money I wouldn’t be saying “Whoops” - I would treat it very seriously telling people measures have been taken, people have been hired, and new policies and quality assurance procedures are in place, and btw, your next month is free on us. Or something like that.
I guess it’s time to start looking for a company that actually takes this shit seriously. I hate server moves.
Maybe that was my problem: I didn’t immediately email their support team. I thought that since they had posted about it on the status page I would be better off not adding my email complaint to the support queue. I also thought they were surely drafting a professional email to send out at that point… not half a day later!
They did another blog post about it (”they” being Josh) with a more professional tone. I think he got the order backward: first you solve the problem in a serious and professional manner then you joke about it.
Had the newer post been the original post and an email sent out immediately after discovering the issue, I would have had respect for them. The way they chose to do it was flat out terrible.
Looking for hosts and changing is a PITA! I am in the process of switching to Slicehost and have been very pleased so far (of course, I have only been with them a short time). I didn’t really want to take on basic server admin duties, but I finally gave in and decided that the power would be worth it after the initial fumbling on my part.
Have you tried running “df -h” on your DH server?
Slicehost you say… I feel really spoiled by the DH offer though that the Slicehost plans seem tiny. Naturally the resources they say you have on DH are not really realistic since they oversell so much.
Now that DH as done yet another blog post on the topic, maybe you can forgive them
Yeah, the resources of hosts that don’t oversell like crazy seem so tiny, but then you realize that you actually GET that amount and it isn’t slower than dialup on a 2400 baud modem. I looked through all of the files I have on my account and determined that 10GB would be plenty of storage space. The majority of mine is used up by backups that I just leave on the server since there isn’t an incentive to delete them after I download them when using DH.