Eric Odom

If you haven’t heard about the latest customer service meltdown over at DreamHost, you’ll want to click on over and read the full explanation.

Basically, Dreamhost “accidentally” billed most, if not all of its customers for an entire year. And in many cases, clients were billed twice a month through December of 2008.

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.

As you can imagine, thousands of customers are pretty pissed off about the error, and they’re bailing out left and right.

Dreamhost has been known for two things.

1) A humorous approach with its business model
2) Cheap hosting that provides a perfect example of “you get what you pay for”

In my opinion, Josh Jones made a terrible mistake by trying to inject humor into a situation that was not in any way funny. This mistake provoked tens of thousands of dollars in bank and credit card fee’s, likely caused checks and other payments to bounce or be returned, and essentially created havoc in hundreds of people’s lives.

Bad form.

And in regards to #2, I work with a client who is using Dreamhost for several fairly large scale sites. We’re in the process of moving those sites, so while this billing issue is a huge headache, it isn’t the reason we’re moving.

No, we’re moving because the hosting, in our experience, is a complete nightmare. Our sites are constantly down, and when they’re not down they’re running so slow our bounce rate is through the roof.

So this billing issue is just another notch on the reason to leave stick. We’re done.

Who are we moving to? Most likely Siteground.com. Some people complain about Siteground, and I’ll be honest and say my experience has not gone without a complaint or two in the past. But for the most part Siteground has been a champ as far as load speed, site up time, and quick response via customer service.

We have several VPS accounts, and I personally control more than 40 reseller accounts that all run smoothly.

Of course, there are many good hosts out there, but Dreamhost just isn’t one of them.

My two cents…