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Dreamhost mistakenly bills customers for the entire year

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icekin:
I got one of these emails last night, telling me that they could not charge my card and I had a limited time to pay up. I've been with Dreamhost for a year and a half now and had no major problems, but I suspect they will be losing a few customers over this screw up.

<a href="http://digg.com/tech_news/Dreamhost_mistakenly_bills_customers_for_multiple_years">DH Billing Issues Page</a>

<a href="http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/15/um-whoops">DH Blog Entry</a>

tranglos:
I was just going to post after I've read the comments...

Dreamhost is one of the best - probably THE best, friendliest, most human and most attentive company I've ever dealt with. I'm really sorry this happened to them.

Two lessons there: one is contained in the blog entry, for coders. It was really dumb to let the system accept a future date for billing, and not even flag it for confirmation as suspicious.

The other lesson is never to leave your credit card in the hands of an automated billing system, at least if you have that option. DH gives you an option to keep your CC on file and rebill automatically, but you can say no to that easily on the same page where you pay the bill. And even if you choose the auto option, you can limit the max amount they can charge, the default being $100 IIRC.

I remember thinking about this when I was signing up 4 years ago, and deciding that filling out the invoice form manually once a year is a good deal if I get 100% peace of mind in return. I wish all my decisions turned out like this :)

Now if enough of the po'ed customers gang up and take DH through a legal grinder, I might find myself without my domain, and then I'll be po'ed too!

Deozaan:
Yeah I wondered why the e-mail I received this morning said I had a past due amount as of November 2008 when that wouldn't even be possible until ten months from now.

I asked Allen, who also uses DreamHost and he had already received a "Whoopsie" e-mail and his credit card had been billed. My bank account doesn't seem to have been billed but I didn't get the "Whoopsie" e-mail until a couple hours after I got the explanation from Allen. I have my account set up to charge automatically but I had it limited to $50, which I changed to $25 today. But like I said, I still don't see any charges on my bank account.

I also tried to find information about it from DreamHost's website and I didn't see anything about it anywhere.

I'm not too mad about it because I wasn't really affected by it. Just a little scared from the first e-mail telling me I owed so much money. If my bank account had been charged and become overdraft or whatever, then I'd probably be a bit more upset. But I've worked in customer service before and I know about billing errors and how if a respectable company overdrafts your account due to errors they'll pay any fees you incur, so I wasn't worried.

jazper:
Strange, I got an email saying I was billed but didn't think twice because I was due to be billed anyday now, so it didn't really affect me.

tranglos:
Strange, I got an email saying I was billed but didn't think twice because I was due to be billed anyday now, so it didn't really affect me.
-jazper (January 15, 2008, 07:39 PM)
--- End quote ---

In the DH blog comments some customers say they've been billed twice, so maybe double-check.

I expected my payment notice to come in early Feb, so the email totally made sense, until it said "You also have $119.40 past due (owed since 2008-11-09)", which was a red flag.

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