DreamHost $7.5 Million Mistake

Dreamhost has been running through bumpy downs for quite a while now. Customers have been complaining about frequent downtime, but that’s just a common thing to happen for such a huge web hosting company. Earlier this week, they did something which would virtually kick any web hosting company out of the game.They mistakenly billed all their customers a year in advance. This mistake sums up to around $7.5 million, but their PR folks decided to go through their usual, old-fashioned humorous way to apologize with a blog post entitled “Um, Whoops? Here’s an excerpt of their post:

“We had a teensy eensy weensy little billing error last night… my first clue something was up when I saw this morning’s daily billing report (so far): $7,500,000. It turns out due to my excessively fat fingers, nearly every one of our customers has been seriously over-billed in the last 12 hours”

The mistake happened because they accidentally ran their billing system for 31/12/2008. It should have actually been 2007. This wasn’t a machine error, but a human Error! Instead of admitting it was their fault, they go on to blame the programmer that made their billing system! Apparently it’s their fault for allowing dreamhost to put in future dates.

After reading the comments which follow their blog post, it doesn’t look like the humor worked. I would have been rather annoyed, if I was a Dreamhost customer. Last time, when Lunarpages changed the 404 page of every customer who had a default 404 page, Dreamhost ridiculed them on their blog. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other web hosts do the same to Dreamhost. Bad! Too bad!

This is one mistake that you just CAN’T joke about, this is peoples money we are talking about, not an eensy weensy little mistake. Just imagine how many people had bank charges for over-drafting or bounced cheques! I personally think they should drop the humour and start acting professional about their business.

Update: They’ve asked a better apology in their next blog post. They are willing to pay your bank fees, if you were running on over draft or had your cheque bounced. Those wanting to shut down their Dreamhost accounts will also get a full refund for the unbilled period.