Disturbing, to Say the Least
I’m going to officially not recommend Dreamhost for anyone looking for hosting. They have enough outage problems that in the first 6 months, I only paid for about 2.
However, today, their billing system went insane and started billing people hundreds thousands of dollars. According to comments on their complaint page, they didn’t even mark it as a high priority until after many complaints. There are all sorts of stories of people being overdrawn, or maxing out their credit cards, and there’s no update at all. In fact, even though they are aware, there’s no email apologizing for it or acknowledging it.
This is an error that screws with people in a big way, not just pulls their webpage offline for a little while. As soon as they discovered the problem, they needed to send an email to all customers explaining and apologizing while giving an estimation for when charges will be refunded.
UPDATE: You have to love their response:
The best move for you is to just sit back and pretend you never got those weird billing email(s) talking about owing lots of money!
Let me tell you, that’s a professional response. My card said the second it shows up they will decline it if Dreamhost hasn’t fixed it by then. Still, considering they now say it was an error because someone who was doing billing for December 2007 typed in December 2008, that tells me they aren’t terribly concerned about their billing structure and have no checks in place for running charges for every single customer (or damn near close) for the next year in a way that billed them twice for each month.
Hosting suggestions?
No obviously related posts.
Yeah, they just tried to bill me for 249 bucks for last month. I switched to Dreamhost from Hosting Matters, because HM’s tech support sucks so bad, and they have no interest in being helpful. I wouldn’t go there, if I were you (they still haven’t changed my DNS info, because they can’t be bothered). I’d be looking for another hosting provider, except that I paid for a year.
They billed me not once in error, but TWICE, for a total of $534.54. I’m fortunate enough that it wouldn’t put me in overdraft if I were using my checking account (although I was using a credit card for this), but it’s really hurting some people if you read the comments (especially those who were paying monthly and who got billed for a full year at once).
I know, Aubrey. It’s really quite sad. Their posts that joked about all of their problems were fine, but only as long as they are supplemented by actual professional communication (which I usually received from tech support). However, the fact that they have made zero effort to email their customers about it is really disturbing to me. That, coupled with their comment above, tells me they are hoping they can hide from this.
The email probably wouldn’t be quite as bad if their status page, blog, and webpanel hadn’t been out for a good part of the morning since the crush of people had to go there for information. Some are reporting that they can only get information by Googling and seeing what others are finding out. That’s bad when you’re talking about dealing with a $7,500,000 mistake.
The question is: Can they handle the hit of all the fees per transaction, plus the standard percent fees they will incur, added to any refund fees they will have, and the costs they should eat like money lost through exchange rates, international fees, overdraft charges, and the like?
It’s definitely going to cost them a pretty penny for all the charges they’re going to incur (hopefully we won’t get jacked in the form of higher rates later).
But their cardinal sin in this whole mess has been a failure to notify everyone via email. Cutesy blog entries and their status blog are insufficient. They managed to notify us via email that we were being billed, so they should also be able to notify us via email that they screwed up.
You could always move to Sebastian’s TV.
Heh, then we’d all go offline when his ex turns the tv off.
I haven’t been able to get to panel.dreamhost.com yet, nor have I gotten a reply. See, I PRE-PAID for a year, and now, they want to charge me a year’s fee for last month — and they threatened to cut off my service.
Only if they actually charge my card will they honk me off like Hosting Matters did, though.
Well.. finally an update. They sent an email about 15 minutes ago that said they’d refunded the charges.
It appears that instead of doing a mass “we’re sorry and we’re working on it” email, they’re sending an individual “we’re sorry and we’ve credited you” email as they get around to fixing your account.
In terms of damage control, they could have probably saved themselves a lot of aggravation (not to mention thousands of help tickets) by just sending a mass “we’re sorry and we’re working on it” email.
No freaking kidding, Aubrey. That seems to be the most common complaint in their comment sections. I can’t fathom who screwed up that one.
I really think the communication issue is the biggest problem with me. There were no updates on panel outages, they kept people who were incorrectly billed shut out of their accounts needlessly, and they didn’t address the situation with the seriousness it deserved (a “high” priority rating) until quite a while after receiving complaints that indicated something was off. Those are big freaking problems on top of the fact that their system is so flawed that something like this could happen in the first place!
Oh, and prof, check again. I’ve had panel access most of the afternoon, though it has been very slow.
I lucked out because a) I only use a credit card for automatic billing; b) that credit card’s monthy payoff was in process so there wasn’t room for the bill, which was 5 days early on my cycle; and c) even if all of that wasn’t true, I selected the option that puts a limit of $30 of what they can charge to my card per day… so the charge they tried to put through that failed was only for $30 even though the outstanding bill according to the email I got was something on the order of $430.
DH has had my business for a number of years, but lately I’ve been getting upset with the number and severity of the outages, along with the lack of direct notification for problems, though feeding status.dreamhost.com into my RSS reader has helped. I just don’t know of a better service for comparable money. MediaTemple was looking good, but they’re having issues according to many clients, same with LunarPages.
“though feeding status.dreamhost.com into my RSS reader has helped”
I have a custom feed through mine, but it’s still worthless. I get things that aren’t for my servers, or I don’t get major general outage issues. They typically don’t post there until either hours after an issue is discovered or until they’ve already resolved it.
Force him to buy a dedicated server with a UPS. That should keep the site running.
Most of the hosting providers I know of are for dedicated servers, which are more expensive.
My info on webhosters is outdated. Dreamhost may seem bad, but there are lot worse out there. It is probably best just to use what someone else you know is using.
It is probably best just to use what someone else you know is using.
I did.
I just now got my notice of refund. I’m logging in to check it since I don’t trust them.
GoDaddy.com works for me!