Jan 16
How Dreamhost lost a bunch of customers in one day
I need to start by saying that I’m a Dreamhost client. This blog is hosted with them. And to be perfectly honest I really like them.
They are are renowned for their sense of humor which I do enjoy, specially the monthly newsletter. Now and again there’s a bit of downtime, but that’s to be expected. Their support works great and folks are very helpful even when I accidentally borked one of my websites by accident.
But this Monday they’ve fumbled the ball big time, by triple charging almost all of their thousands of clients. Apparently I wasn’t affected, at least no money went missing from my credit card. I’ve only received an e-mail stating that I was all paid up until 2009 which left me scratching my head but I didn’t bother to check what was happening.
But hundreds of others clients weren’t so fortunate as me and flocked to the support phone lines and e-mail. Not a very good day to work at support I’m sure.
After some time, Josh Jones offered an explanation to what had happened on Dreamhost’s official blog. Which only made matters worse, because the tone of the post was light and jovial, using The Simpsons pictures to illustrate their mistake.
I surely understand the frustration of some clients who sites were down, and some whose bills/rent/mortgage bounced. I would be pissed too. I would be more pissed to find that the explanation of the error apparently makes fun of the whole situation.
Despite their immediate action to return all the money and even cover the charges that some clients have incurred due to this error it’s obviously a mess, and the end result is lots and lots of cancellations, threats of legal action and probably some guys showing up at the Dreamhost offices with baseball bats.
5 Comments so far
Leave a comment
Bad move. There are many things out there people will make light of, but never their money. Dreamhost probably came off as unapologetic.
Think of my shock when I opened the email saying my account had been suspended due to non-payment of charges for months that hadn’t even happened yet! And I pay by the month, through PayPal thank goodness. What made it so bad-they acted as if it was no big deal, our sites were down for about 5 hours AND later that night I get into it with a tech person because they took my site down yet again saying I was using too much memory. I had to delete several plugins just to get it back up and they had the nerve to tell me I should consider paying the additional money and get in line for their little virtual server project since my site has the heaviest load on the shared server. DreamHost was once an excellent host-the tech support fast and friendly, but in the last year too much down-time and too many issues-and making promises they can’t keep.
Good thing my credit card had just expired! I love Dreamhost, I’ve had my issues with them in the past, but it all seems fine now.
Nice blog. I’m a new RSS subscriber.
It happened to me too. I still will stick with Dreamhost for most of my sites. But I have a dedicated server also.
Money really is one thing that can piss people off. I know from experience as a customer service rep doing work a for a company during the holiday season.
I don’t use dreamhost, but I had (before this) heard very few major complaints against them. I think the real test will be how well they recover and if any noticeable changes are made in the next couple of months that would indicate how big the fallout has been.