Discourse.net

I find Dreamhost to be pretty decent web hosts, although I also could give you a short but pungent list of complaints (timeouts, timeouts, timeouts). But give them credit, when they screw up, they are world champions at writing apologies.

This morning I got a large bill that clearly wasn’t due. I wrote back. They said it was my bill. I wrote back. Then I got The Apology:

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attempted to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY (it was all due to a fat finger)!

I’m really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; I’ve already removed all those bum future charges on your account (######) and already refunded the $####.## charge on your credit card.

You should get the money back on almost immediately, within a day or two max, and there’s no need to contact your credit card company or bank for the refund.

Again, I feel terrible about this whole thing.. there will be a blog post soon at blog.dreamhost.com fully explaining how this bug was even allowed to happen..

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!

Sorry again,

Josh!

And, indeed, a more detailed explanation is now on their blog, at Um, Whoops..

This sort of stuff works on me. It is very hard to stay mad.

Update: More at Unofficial Dreamhost Blog, DreamHost Accidently Bills Customers $7,500,000.