[Lava Lamp Freak]

Dreamhost web hosting service erroneously charged all of their subscribes last night due to a bug in a script they run on the server to clear out old accounts from 2007. Everyone was billed as if it was 12-31-2008, which in my case double charged my account for $240 since I haven't yet paid for this year.

I'm not sure how many people have automatic payments set up as I do, but there are perhaps tens of thousands of paying subscribes to this service. There may have been millions of dollars in false charges in this mess up. Seems to have the potential to break the company to me. I'm definitely reconsidering moving away from them after this. At the very least I'm going to make sure my credit card info is removed.

DreamHost Status

[Lava Lamp Freak]

The post on the Dreamhost blog says that $7.5 million in charges were collected during this mishap. This was an expensive error on their part, considering the charges it cost them to collection payments from a credit card. What is it normally, like a 15% charge when you accept CC payments?

DreamHost Blog

[goMac]

I got hit by this issue this morning. I thought I'd email them to clear it up, but once I read the email I figured they were probably going to get a few thousand emails about the issue anyway...

My bank account is pretty nicely padded against this sort of thing so I didn't get hit with an overdraft or anything.

[starman]

Same. No biggie, they'll fix it.

[Dork.]

Originally Posted by Lava Lamp Freak 

What is it normally, like a 15% charge when you accept CC payments?

Not for vendors that accept CC's normally as part of their business. It depends on volume, but even for smaller shops it will probably be less than 4%,.

Plus, as long as the error is found out quickly, merchants may be allowed to cancel a charge and not pay a fee. But $7.5 million is quite a bit. Count on Dreamhost not having to pay their normal fee for all that, but probably getting billed by their CC processor for the time of their employees that have to sort the mess out....

[mdc]

I just checked my account and I didn't get hit by anything. Thankfully I wouldn't have been overdrafted or anything like that, but I'm sure there are going to be people who might be overdrafted, then what? I wonder if Dreamhost will refund them their overdraft fee.

[starman]

Just got an apology from DH. Love these guys. They'll fix it.

[Mastrap]

Originally Posted by Lava Lamp Freak 

What is it normally, like a 15% charge when you accept CC payments?

We pay 3.2%.

[nonhuman]

As far as I can tell, I got billed $0 (normal because my referrals more than pay for my hosting charges), and then refunded $50+.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by starman 

Just got an apology from DH. Love these guys. They'll fix it.

I loved the apology letter, especially that they laid the tone so effectively by starting it with the word, “Ack!”.

I wasn’t billed anything, either, but I don’t have automatic payment set up anyway, so that’s probably why

[alligator]

I was nailed by the bug. I thought it was just me and e-mailed them. It just bounced.

[turtle777]

They sincerely apologized, and they are fixing it right away.

That's good enough for me.

-t