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Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:24 pm
by Benjamin
Apparently this guy http://blog.dreamhost.com/wp-content/up ... /josh2.jpg ran a billing script with the wrong year set, causing all their customers to be charged for an extra years service. Even some accounts were canceled as a result. They overbilled by 7.5 million.

LMAO

Wow I am glad I stopped using them a few years ago.

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/15/um-whoops/

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:26 pm
by s.dot
LOL, that is a pretty big setback.

I have had clients using dreamhost before. It's been pleasant for me. :)

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:30 pm
by Inkyskin
Yep - as I have a dreamhost account, and was charged.

Luckily I pay by paypal - so never paid anything. I feel sorry for those who pay by debit or credit card

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:08 pm
by alex.barylski
Ick...dedicated hosting is the only way to go...pay per month.

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:14 pm
by Zoxive
Dreamhost Newsletter wrote: New Office!

Another important thing I’ve been doing instead of writing newsletters
is looking out the window of our NEW OFFICE:

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2007/12/21/we ... -even-know

If your next web hosting bill from us is mysteriously tripled, now you
know why.
I guess maybe its just me, but I wouldn't like a Company joking about charging customers more money, after they just did so.

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:15 pm
by RobertGonzalez
Read some of the 550+ comments on his um...woops post. Not a lot of their customers liked that joking style either.

WOW, those poor bastards. I am so glad that is not me.

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:35 pm
by matthijs
A good incentive to close my account there. Hope closing an account is faster then their servers

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 4:27 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
It didn't effect me since I have a habit of using prepaid credit accounts so rebilling against my card is never possible ;). I remember Hostrocket a while back made a fuss over rebilling a two year old account for another two year period without any notification beforehand.

Anyways, it's done now. I haven't received any automated complaint about failed charges either so someone was just quick enough to disable notifications sent out to anyone hitting their credit limit.

I think the main impact it will have it to temporarily make people stop being lazy, and examine their hosting with DH more. I don't mind DH, but they do suck at uptime esp. for their MySQL servers. I suspect a lot of leavers from DH saw the billing cockup as the final straw...

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 12:11 pm
by Kieran Huggins
They sent me a "failed charge" for about $1200 - fortunately the credit card info they had expired in '07 8)

Oops indeed!

I have to say, I'm really liking slicehost. I'm also really intrigued by Amazon's service cloud now that they have a DB component.... Sounds like they're playing for the trifecta of hosting... and doing a damn fine job of it!

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 12:46 pm
by RobertGonzalez
Yeah, I am getting a lot more interested in slicehost. I just wish I knew a little more about making a vanilla OS install into a web server from the CLI. That was a little tough for me.

But I may just ditch my current Cari.net dedicated for another slice. At 25% of the cost, it is hard to not want to do it.

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 4:58 pm
by Kieran Huggins
There's a slicehost wiki with suggested walkthroughs for common setups

.... too lazy to find them though :oops: I think it's under the "community" tab somewhere

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 5:40 pm
by Josh1billion
I'm glad I didn't switch to Dreamhost yet! I've been planning on making the move for a while now...

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 6:12 pm
by Ambush Commander
Hmm... Slicehost does seem to be quite interesting. One of the reasons I went for Dreamhost was their flexibility (I've always known about their spotty uptime, which is why I'm still using ICDSoft for my email).

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 6:22 pm
by RobertGonzalez
The one thing the slicehost docs don't point out (as least that I could find) was how to set up a mail server so that your web server can send mails through the PHP.

Setting up sendmail is easy enough, but setting it up correctly is the hard part. In fact that little gem got our IP blacklisted within days of our new server setup. If it wasn't for Chris Corbyn's mad ninja skills as a server admin no one would be getting mails from us.

Everything else is really easy to set up and manage because I know what I am doing with Apache, MySQL and PHP.

Re: Ya'all hear about Dreamhost

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 6:34 pm
by Ambush Commander
Oh, so that's what PHPDN is running on! :-) I'll have to be really careful then, if I decide to test my server-fu.