justen

And now, for a programming note.

Update: Wednesday morning, day two. Most of you visiting between noon yesterday and sometime late last night got the lovely “Site Temporarily Unavailable” message. Sorry about that. You can read more about why from InfoWorld. In the meantime, in case something else goes wrong before I save this blog from DreamHost, you might have noticed that FixKP kept humming along. I actually moved it, a few weeks ago, to Yahoo! web hosting. They’re not the most flexible webhost, which makes running an up-to-date WordPress blog a bit of a hassle, but I figure with the traffic surges FixKP sometimes deals with, it’s helpful to have the folks who run the most trafficked website on the Internet behind you. Meanwhile, I’m finally able to finish moving things over to HostMonster for my other sites. More actual KP news soon…

Update: One poor guy got erroneously billed for $1,860. Wow. Ouch. Keep reading if you’re just joining us…

I’m imagining many thousands of DreamHost customers are quite unhappy this morning. DreamHost, which encourages its clients to store their credit card and bank account information in their systems for automatic billing, went nuts overnight, charging most of their customers hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. DreamHost’s official blog post on the matter is up to 500 comments, with pleas for help with overdrafted accounts, upcoming mortgage payments, and the like. DreamHost’s official response? “Sorry. Blame this guy.” Seriously.

I, for one, got an email bill, this morning, dated December 25, 2008. The bill said my account was suspended because I owed them $301.33. My normal monthly bill these days is $10. They “charged” me six times for hosting in February 2008, and twice for most of the other months coming up in 2008. Mind you, normally, with DreamHost, I pay a month in advance. Thirty months in advance? Not liking that much. Fortunately, I have my DreamHost account set to absolutely not bill my credit card automatically. I feel very sorry for the poor souls who weren’t so lucky.

So, a bit of, background. I’ve hosted one website or another with them since at least sometime around 1999. In December, while I was helping a friend resolve a technical issue (caused by a DreamHost outage, no less), one of their especially humorless representatives took offense to a joke I made about DreamHost “inflicting emotional distress” on their customers and advised me that I had a month to find another hosting provider.

I did some research, and what an enlightening experience that was. When I last changed my account plan, I chose an option that was about $40 per month, and included up to four or five “support call backs” each month. Which meant, if something was broken, I could send a request for help to DreamHost, and they would call me back within about thirty minutes or so. A year or two (or four, I can’t really remember at this point), they discontinued that feature. I still paid $40 per month, but now to a hosting company with no realtime way to reach technical, customer, or billing support.

After some research, I’ve decided to switch to HostMonster (which appears to be the same company as BlueHost). Their web control panel isn’t as sophisticated as DreamHost’s, but they do offer around-the-clock, toll-free, telephone technical support. Did I mention they’re about the same price as DreamHost?

The past year has been a nightmare in terms of downtime at DreamHost (yes, I believe they are considering renaming their company Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect). In this case, web visitors are at stake (instead of lives), but it’s still embarassing and a hassle to deal with whenever your site is down. Admittedly, I went through several stages of withdrawal after being told I was no longer wanted as a DreamHost customer in December. I eventually picked myself up off the floor (from laughing) and realized the humorless representative was serious. I think the next emotion was frustration: frustration that there was no way to contact anyone else at DreamHost who might actually recognize this guy was absolutely tripping with his Hosting God Complex. Then, confusion: what do I do next? Where the hell do I begin migrating the files, the images, the databases, the domain names, the DNS records, the years of stuff that had accumulated in the dusty corners of my DreamHost account…

I’m about done with the migration, which brings me to the point of this post: if this blog or the FixKP blog goes down over the next few days, I apologize. I could coordinate it better if I had more time and more energy, but at this point I’m planning to just do it as quick and dirty as I can (how’s that for good information technology strategy?).

Just looking around the blogosphere and the web this morning, I see I’m not the only one paying attention to DreamHost:

Geek News Central: Dreamhost bills many customers months early
Janicek.com: The #1 way that a web hosting company can screw up
Buffawhat.com: Dreamhost and the “Billing Issue”
Digg: DREAMHOST *UCKS UP HUGE
Another Digg: Dreamhost mistakenly bills customers for multiple years
Web Hosting Talk: Dreamhost billing issues (drawing money for orders made in the future)
Q Daily News: Talk about a good reason to disable auto-pay!