Comments on: SRSLY WTF DREAMHOST

By: dhsux

dhsux — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:49:33 +0000

DreamHost’s poor customer service has led to a serious privacy invasion. When my client attempted to sign up for an account, the transaction hung halfway through. When customer service (which can only be reached by tedious email exchanges) “fixed” the problem, the pay by credit card option was no longer available. The customer service representative insisted that we use Google Payments. I proceeded, and then my client realized his financial information is now in the Google system. The worst possible scenario then came true. Instead of completing the transaction, Google called my client’s bank for “preapproval”. This was not to complete the transaction (which was never completed), but to gather information for Google’s marketing. My client is furious, reviewing everyone’s privacy policy, and is looking into ways to bring this problem up at the political, and possibly the legal, level.

Throughout this whole situation, Dreamhost has been nothing but pig-headed. Every customer service representative ignores the case history and either refers us back to Google Payments or says patronizing things like we could have paid with the original credit card system. I offered them a solution where I quietly pay for the account using Google transactions, and they won’t even let me help bail them out!!!

I will never refer another client to dreamhost. Right now I’m looking for the best place to air this complaint publicly in as many places as possible. People have to know that when Dreamhost pushes people into using Google Payments, Google then has their financial information to aggregate and deploy for their own purposes.

Also, one of the customer service reps hurled abuse at me on the forum, and then slipped up and used his forum ID in an email with the customer service issue header on it.

By: Mari

Mari — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:20:18 +0000

@Rhiannon

Indeed. And if people haven’t kept their email addresses up to date, that’s their fault. It’s just stupid not to tell everyone about planned outages. They could even have just put something up on the admin panel, even…

Yes it has, and yes, Mari does remember. Vividly. Mari was really sweating that one out, because Mari was pretty near her card’s limit when they pulled that stunt.

By: Rhiannon

Rhiannon — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:07:27 +0000

I don’t mind a bit of downtime every now and then but the 12 hours a few days ago was ridiculous. Dreamhost’s reasoning was that they DID let people know, via RSS. Not everyone cares to use RSS, let alone subscribe to a feed Dreamhost supplies. They should have sent everyone emails instead.

I don’t know, Dreamhost’s service has really gone down in these past few months. Remember when they automatically rebilled practically all of their account holders who paid by credit card?

By: Mari

Mari — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:18:12 +0000

@Joana

Yeah, people may not keep their contact info up to date, but still, it’s totally irresponsible to not send an email at least, or put it on the admin panel (Dreamhost doesn’t have a cPanel - they have their own admin thing). Mari shouldn’t have to find out about PLANNED outages when things suddenly don’t work.

Mari definitely decided to move, and is in the process of backing everything up.

By: Joana

Joana — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:03:41 +0000

Someone mentioned this on one of the message boards that I frequent and I was rather flummoxed to see this going on. Someone posted a follow up comment about how they worked for a hosting company and how surprised one would be that people don’t keep their contact information up to date. I hardly thought that was an excusable reason to not notify their customers of what was going on. Host Gator had to move stuff once, and they notified us via a notice in the cpanel AND an email. So what if people don’t keep their information up to date, that would be their fault. They still have an obligation to properly inform their clients. And posting a notice, when it’s happening, on a blog is not a proper means of communication. That’s like a local business assuming that posting an article in the newspaper will reach all customers. It won’t because
1. they might not read it regularly or at all unless their is something significant.
2. the information can easily get buried and lost. Feed readers are packed after all.

So yeah, an email should have been sent. And an alert on a cpanel would have been the easiest method.

After this, I say move. That was definately the straw that broke the camel’s back.

By: Mari

Mari — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 03:07:56 +0000

@Jaclyn

See what Mari’s been going through? *growls*

The worst part is that they screw things up and don’t even credit our accounts for downtime.

Though, Mari will miss being able to go complain on that blog and direct traffic to Mt every time it goes down. *snicker* Also, the off-network blog is pretty handy. Mari wonders if she should suggest that Holdfire do that.

By: Jaclyn

Jaclyn — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:58:58 +0000

Thank GOD you’re moving. Your site/ftp has been down today for like 2 hours I think. But the severity is “MEDIUM” even though 300+ people are having problems of not seeing their site or not being able to use their FTP.

By: Ivy

Ivy — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:21:06 +0000

Happy moving to Holdfire! Hope everything goes smoothly!

By: Mari

Mari — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:20:59 +0000

@Veronica

Yeah, Mari has it figured out. Mari is moving (did you notice the edits).

By: Veronica

Veronica — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:33:32 +0000

Well, I’ve had some trouble logging in to my FTP and such lately, yes. I think you should move to holdfire, and keep the hosting please <3

Hope you’ll figure it out with the domain and such =)