I woke up this morning to find that my daughter in England had messaged me to say her website wasn’t working. I called her and she said mine wasn’t working either. Both sites, as well as many others, are hosted on my dedicated server at Dreamhost web hosting. I created that account in 2002 and have been paying them $137 per month ever since. That’s over $25,000.
I checked my ‘yahoo’ email to see one from Dreamhost saying:
DreamHost Account SUSPENDED!
I pay my Dreamhost account every month and wasn’t aware that I was overdue a payment. I logged into my account and saw they suspended my account over a $9 charge that was 60 days old. I have no idea what that charge was for but know that I paid $137 last month. I immediately got onto tech support and was told I had to pay the entire amount outstanding; including the new month’s billing which I would have paid in 30 days.
Unless I paid my entire bill (not just the phantom $9), my account, my emails, my customer websites etc would all remain suspended.
In 18 years I have never been suspended and I have always paid my bill.
I paid the entire bill and got an email from Dreamhost saying:
Your Account has been Re-Enabled!
I contacted tech support 2 hours later because none of my websites were back. They looked at my account and said, yes they’re coming back now and referred to one website; which was registered at Dreamhost but hosted on another server. The tech support agent didn’t even check that the site was hosted with them.
Apparently something got screwed up with the DNS entries when they shut me down. After a few more minutes the websites re-appeared.
2 hours passed and I realized that my emails were not working. None of my emails were sending and none were being received. Another call to Dreamhost tech support, and another 20 minutes. The tech support agent apologized and soon after, my emails started working.
I wasted over 5 hours, lost access to my websites and email because of a $9 charge that was 60 days old. Even after I paid everything, it took Dreamhost over 5 hours to get everything working, and that was only after multiple support tickets and tech support calls.
This comes at a time when utilities companies, mortgage companies, insurance companies and many other companies are assuring customers that through the Covid-19 lockdown, no accounts will be suspended. Dreamhost shut down a loyal customer of 18 years who has spent over $25,000 with them for a $9 late notice. I will be shutting down my server with Dreamhost and moving all the hosted websites to other servers. Dreamhost has lost a loyal customer through appalling customer relations and customer service.