One of my hosting accounts is at Dreamhost. I love the company and it’s unlimited hosting accounts. I even read it’s friendly tongue-in-cheek newsletters and blog posts occasionally.
I pay for my for “My Crazy Domain Insane” once a year on Halloween. Today, the gremlins took over the Dreamhost billing system and I was charged for the period from 10-31-08 to 10-31-09. I wasn’t alone. And there were a lot of unhappy customers.
Dreamhost promptly responded to customer complaints and refunded the credit card charges. Later in the day they sent an email apologizing and directing folks to their blog for a full explanation of what happened. Read the post Um, Whoops. if you want to know more.
It was a tiny programming error that created havoc with the billing system. While testing an updated module, they decided to go back to Christmas 2007. Unfortunately, the manual test entries used 2008 instead of 2007 so the system billed $7.5 million overnight. Oops!
I know from personal experience that the most vexing and hard-to-find errors a programmer makes are caused by little things like typos, missing punctuation, and flawed dates. Fortunately, my errors have never been as public or caused as much grief.
The Dreamhost biller no longer allows future dates. Some folks were bent out of shape and vented a bit in the comments on the blog. Most took it in stride. I continue to be a Dreamhost fan.