It all started with a tweet by Mitchell that said: “Dreamhost says I owe $388.05 from 11/20/08″

This piqued my interest as I just noticed a bill receipt from Dreamhost in my InBox this morning. When I opened the message, imagine my surprise when I discovered that Dreamhost had just charged me $526.54. What the…?! The worst part is that it’s not billed to my credit card, it’s billed to my debit card — which is tied to my checking account. Never again. I’ve been with Dreamhost for YEARS and never have they made a billing error, especially not of this magnitude, so I figured it would be safe. As soon as this fiasco is cleared up and the money refunded to my account, I will promptly remove the auto-bill.

The worst part of it all was the moments before the Twitterverse came to the rescue and pointed me to the Dreamhost status page and the Dreamhost blog which both explained, in great detail, what the heck happened. This massive billing faux pas was the result of a big, fat finger according to the blog. Prior to that, I was beginning to think that Dreamhost was going out of business and running off with my money. (Sorry, I’m cynical.)

I was later to find out, it was an error to the tune of $7.5 million. I suppose that would be enough to run away with to some faraway, foreign land for a very long time.

There are a lot of not-so-happy Dreamhost customers out there right now. I’m sure the 1149 comments on the Dreamhost status blog is just a small representation of the mountain of angry hate mail awaiting Josh Jones, who is apparently the cause of this huge billing debacle. I kind of feel sorry for the guy.

This whole episode taught me a few things: 1) Twitter has once again proved to be a very useful tool for information (and comfort!) during a time of need, 2) never put an auto-bill on your debit card, because you never know if you might be the victim of a billing error or outright fraud (read: disgruntled employee in Accounting, perhaps?), and 3) never mess with your customers’ money, because most of them won’t take it lightly.

I wonder how many folks have decided to take their business elsewhere because of this blunder? As for me, it crossed my mind for a fleeting moment, but then I realized how much trouble it would be to move all of my domains somewhere else and I reconsidered. Dreamhost has served me well all of these years, they deserve a second chance. Right?

[tags]Dreamhost, web host, billing, error, Twitter[/tags]