SimianLogic

First off, a little disclosure.  Before signing up for Dreamhost 6 months or so ago, I found a TON of blog posts on how much people love them and blah blah blah… all riddled with referral links.  And discount coupons, etc…  Their referral network is pretty… pyramid-ish.  You won’t find any referral links here, but if you’re desperate for one leave me a comment and I’ll go cook up a discount code.

When I started looking for another host (this blog is hosted on Yahoo, which I continue to love and have used for over 5 years), I just wanted somewhere I could tinker with Ruby on Rails.  Dreamhost doesn’t support it fantastically (they do it through Apache & Fast-CGI), and by that I mean it’s slow as balls.  But that’s okay.  They let you host as many domains as you want out of your space/bandwidth allocation (Yahoo only does 1), so I’m free to come up with an idea, register a domain, and have a prototype up (in either PhP or RoR) in a manner of hours.  So in other words–it’s a perfect canvas for tinkering. 

Aside from the fact that the service gives me what I want (speed doesn’t matter if I’m the only one using it), I actually give them bonus points for not taking themselves too seriously.  I got an email this morning saying my bill was past due–and that I should’ve paid it back in December of 2008.  Yes, 2008.  They sent me a bill for next year (actually two–they sent another shortly after for 2009).  If this had come from Yahoo, fantastic as their hosting is, I would’ve groaned and prepared to sit on hold and deal with customer service for a few hours.  With DH, though, I just fired them an email back and it was resolved in an hour or two.  Their response:

Hi Will!

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attempted
to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY
(it was all due to a fat finger)!

We’re really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing
to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have
received recently; we’ve already removed all those bum future charges on
your account (#323382) and fixed everything up.

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE
this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless
of course you have any other questions at all!

Sincerely,
The Foolish DreamHost Billing Team!

Rather than try to say it was some kind of server hiccup or whatever corporate excuse one might expect, they instead did what every consumer really wants–own up to it and make the problem go away–which gets them brownie points in my book.