544.
As I sit down to pen this, that’s the number of comments DreamHost have received in the last seven hours on their post about “some billing inaccuracies” they encountered this morning.
Talk about the understatement of the year.
An hour and a half ago, they finally explained exactly what happened — they ran a simple little script to clean up past-due accounts.
Unfortunately, the biller was run for 2008 (December 31st, 2008 to be exact). This caused everyone to be billed as if today was 2008-12-31, wreaking the havoc that we are so sorry you had to be put through.
Yikes. I feel tremendously sorry for these guys; one “little” mistake has resulted in, oh, a few million dollars of erroneous credit card charges, if I were to hazard a guess at their annual revenues.
Our condolences go to DreamHost in this tough time; it’s a brave decision to roll your own billing service, and this is an excellent, unfortunate demonstration of how it all can go terribly awry. A simple one-character typo has resulted in a multi-million dollar mistake; here’s hoping they manage to pull through this tough time.
Copyright © 2000-2007
2:59 pm
I feel sorry for this guy (http://blog.dreamhost.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/josh2.jpg). I am sure it was an honest mistake with some very very bad consequences. I would imagine he lost his job over this.
3:12 pm
That’s Josh Jones, their CEO! At least responsibility travels all the way up.
6:53 pm
Well then that is pretty funny, probably a little funny to those that know who he is and those that weren’t affected by the mistake.
5:33 pm
With so many in this world living on thin margins this kind of thing could be devastating.
I’ve thought about whether or not the company should compensate for any NSF fee’s or any other penalties suffered by the customers.
At first glance I would say yes. But then thinking about it. It would depend on what their billing contract states.
All i know is some law-talking dude’s are going to get involved and it could be a mess.
I guess it’s a lesson for both companies and customers.
For companies, be very careful about your billing.
For customers, don’t pay for online services from the same account that you eat from, and try not to live check to check.
7:55 pm
I have a couple of sites hosted on dreamhost and for the most part they’ve been really helpful when things go wrong and their uptime is good. However, considering that even people who were not setup with automatic payments were affected, Dreamweaver should pay for any NSF fees.
Dreamweaver automatically charges you once your 1 year (2 year, 3 year…) hosting contract expires. The only way to stop them from charging you is if you close your account. So when they ran their script, they automatically charges thousands of customers, whether or not they were setup on automatic withdrawals.
They messed up so it’s their responsibility to correct their mistakes. Still, I like the way they admitted their mistake right away.
5:52 am
How did Adobe come to be involved in this? (read above post - LOL!)
I do feel for Dreamhost in this unpleasant situation, but the real question here is how much interest can 7.5 million dollars make in the better part of 24 hours Josh?
I guess that will help offset the mess this created?
6:28 pm
At 4% Interest Annually:
$7,500,000 x 0.04/year = $300,000/year
/days per year 365.25 = $821.36 USD/day