How not to do it

Everyone’s favourite shared host, Dreamhost, has had a major fuck-up. They accidentally billed a lot of their customers for a year in advance. Some of them were billed repeatedly. Some had accounts suspended for non-payment, others incurred overdraft and credit limit fees.

Ignoring the fact that it never should have happened (test, test, and test again where money is concerned), Dreamhost responded in their standard way. An update on their status page and a jokey blog post. The status page is good - an apology, they pinpointed who made the mistake (rather than hiding behind corporate anonymity) and stated what they were doing to set things right.

It’s the blog post I have an issue with. When you have made a $7.5million mistake (that’s what they claim the extra billing adds up to), you shouldn’t make light of it. When you have caused your customers to incur bank charges and fees, you don’t joke around. But, fair enough, that’s Dreamhost’s style (and originally one of the things that I liked about them). Where I really have problems is with this statement:

Really, it’s sort of amazing this never happened before in the last ten years.

When you’ve fucked up royally, especially when it comes from not testing your systems properly, you can’t (in a joking manner) say “ho ho, well it was always going to happen one day, it just happened to be today”. It doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that it isn’t going to happen again in a couple of months.

It just ain’t good enough, is it?

Posted on January 16th, 2008 | By: Rahoul Baruah | Filed under General

One Response to “How not to do it”

1. Rahoul Baruah Says:
   January 21st, 2008 at 10:06 pm

   Getting better … http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/16/the-aftermath/

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