I need help—-or at least, just to kvetch. You remember that big $7.5 million snafu Dreamhost made? Well, I received an invoice the day before and trustingly paid it with my credit card. Then, I learned—-from Consumerist, no less, not from Dreamhost—-about the billing mistake. Nowhere did Dreamhost mention that legitimate invoices were *also* sent out. I looked at the invoice they sent me and noted the error in the date:

This is just a notice that your DreamHost Account [redacted] ("jasmin's Account") has a balance of $119.40 (including any charges not due until 2009-01-15), with $119.40 due (since 2008-12-15).

You also have $119.40 past due (owed since 2008-11-15), and if by 2009-01-15 you do not pay at least the $119.40 part, your account will be automatically suspended until payment is received.

I waited a couple of days—-no e-mail from Dreamhost, no refund, so I took matters into my own hands and called my credit-card company to reverse the charge. Then, I got this lovely note from Dreamhost the next day:
From: DreamHost Billing Department Subject: ccard Chargeback

Dear Jasmin,

We have received a notice from your card service stating that there was a chargeback made by the owner of the card that you paid for your account with. This is a very serious matter. I have deducted the amount of the chargeback, $119.40, from your account and added our standard fee of $25.00 as well.

This is a time sensitive issue and must be resolved promptly at the request of the card service. Please email the billing team using the link below or using the Web Administration Panel with information about how you are going to deal with this situation. I have disabled your account on the basis of fraudulent charges and non-payment. I thank you for your time and hope to hear from you soon.

Turns out it was a legitimate charge; my account was up for renewal, despite the screwed-up dates, but this was never communicated to me in any form, until the above pass-aggressive e-mail. Oh, and my account was suspended immediately, without any dialog whatsoever, which could have prevented a lot of agitation. I called my credit-card company again and reversed the chargeback. I e-mailed Dreamhost again ... and again ... and again. It's been a week and I haven't heard one peep from them, which is proving exceptionally frustrating. And to make it worse, even though a brief phone call would have resolved this whole issue, you can't call Dreamhost unless you're one of their VIP accounts.

I've been a customer since 2001 but I'm now at my wit's end and this close to closing my account and taking my URLs elsewhere.

Thanks for reading this far at least. I really appreciate it. And thanks for the great site.

Cheers,
Jasmin

Anyone have an email address or other contact info for Jasmine? They've sealed the base and she really needs those recall codes.

First, a complaint:

You might be interested to know the situation is getting worse and customers are still being billed. In fact, they are not responding to emails/faxes from their customers regarding this issue...
DreamHost is incommunicado at this point and most users are left wondering whether their funds have disappeared to St. Petersburg, the Caribbean or Mexico...

And now some praise:

FYI, this morning I created a support ticket with Dreamhost's support team (as recommended on Dreamhost's official blog — http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/16/the-aftermath) requesting a service credit for the NSF fees I'd received. I created my ticket at about 10am, at 11:30am I got a ticket from a CSR requesting I resend the copy of my bank statement that I'd initially submitted (which I did), and then at 2pm got an email stating that the credit I'd requested had been placed on my account. No muss, no fuss, no argument.

So I'd say that Dreamhost has been far from "unresponsive" on this issue. They're clearly bending over backwards to resolve the problems they created, and I really think you guys ought to give them some props for it.

Feel free to post your experiences with Dreamhost in the comments, or send them to tips@consumerist.com.

(Photo:Getty)

Tom, friend of the blog, and master of the internet, was among those affected:

Well, this morning I got a billing email from them:

This is just a notice that your DreamHost [redacted] ("zug's Account") has a balance of $380.87 (including any charges not due until 2009-01-14), with $340.97 due (since 2008-12-14).

You also have $321.02 past due (owed since 2008-11-14), and if by 2009-01-14 you do not pay at least the $321.02 part, your account will be automatically suspended until payment is received.

Ok, that's confusing... WTF, I ask myself. Looking farther into things...

WHAT DO YOU OWE MONEY FOR?

We have the last payment on this account to be $12.46 on 2008-01-15 06:48:38.

Since then the following charges have been made to the account:

2008-01-18 - $19.95 for "CODE MONSTER!" through 2008-02-17.

2008-01-18 - $19.95 for "CODE MONSTER!" through 2008-02-17.

2008-02-18 - $19.95 for "CODE MONSTER!" through 2008-03-17.

2008-02-18 - $19.95 for "CODE MONSTER!" through 2008-03-17.....

From Dreamhost's blog:

I'm very very sorry, we're very very sorry, and I'm sure you're very very sorry this happened. I really am. I understand the sort of problems that an unexpected large charge to your credit card (or worse yet, your debit card) can cause. If the tone of this blog post seemed a little light, I apologize I don't mean to offend and I realize how serious an issue this is. I've been up since 3:50am trying to undo the damage and maybe I'm a little shell-shocked.

A new service is running right now (in parallel on all the controllers) that fixes all those future charges, re-enables your account if it was erroneously suspended, and if your credit card was automatically rebilled, refunds the payment automatically. You don't have to contact us or your bank, and you'll get an email when your account is finished fixing up. It's going to take several more hours to complete. There are (or were, after this incident) a lot of you these days!

If, because of this billing mistake, you somehow incurred some fees from your bank or credit card company, please let us know after tomorrow (today we are just replying to all 10,000+ billing messages with a generic explanation) and we'll do our best to make it right for you.

Dreamhost fucks up bigtime! [ScatteredGenius]
Um, Whoops. [Dreamhost Blog]
Billing Issues (846 comments) [Dreamhost Status]

Senate of the United Mother***** States, indeed. (Thanks to Cameron!)