Good Reminiscing Friday

Well, it was a little over two months ago that we had what I think is pretty safe to call the worst disaster in DreamHost history.

In retrospect to me, it’s kind of funny that the worst disaster didn’t turn out to be due to a security breach, a power outage, a loss of data, or actually anything related to our actual hosting service. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that people care a lot more about their bank accounts than they do their websites.

I have realized that billing is the one issue where how important we feel it is is completely at odds with how important you guys feel it is.

What I’m trying to say is, we’ve always been ultra-flexible and lax about how people pay, when people pay, or even about giving credits, discounts, or refunds. We figure, whatever, pay us when you’re ready, we’re not sending anybody to collections or ruining anybody’s credit over some measly bandwidth bill.

What we’ve always tried to focus on more (even though it might not seem like it at times!) is our hosting system’s stability, performance, and features.

I guess I’ve always figured that any billing-related error can be easily undone (worst case scenario, it costs us a little money); there is no lasting harm done to the customer. Whereas having a website or email problem could potentially cause permanent damage to somebody’s business or personal life or something?

Well then, let’s go back and see just how little money a worst case scenario actually costs, shall we?

Credits and refunds to cover people’s bank fees: $52,000.

Sigh, if only everybody kept a big cushion of cash in their account! The main damage that can be caused by a billing snafu is for people who get their account overdrawn, and because of that aren’t able to make a critical purchase, or have a check bounce, causing hassles and incurring bank fees. We offered to pay people any amount their bank charged them for going negative, and in the end that total looks like it came to about $52,000.

Accidental refunds: $170,000.

The worst part of this whole process (for us) turned out to be just after the accidental billing, ironically when we were trying to make things right!

If you recall, our system was not actually charging about 75% of the time we thought it did.. and so we refunded thousands of people who were never charged (but, 75% of the refunds didn’t work either). Well, out of all that, and after two months, there are still about 600 accounts who were credited a total of $170,000 in excess of what we charged them that we haven’t been able to get back from them or their bank.

It is slightly annoying when the same guy who complains to the high heavens when he thought he’d been over-charged $9,000 by accident conveniently disappears when we realize that actually, he’s been over-refunded $9,000 by accident.

Extra credit card fees: $82,000.

Another slightly annoying thing is that credit card processors don’t credit you back any fees when you refund a transaction. Overall, the extra credit card processing we did resulted in extra fees of about $350,000! Fortunately, after a whole lot of groveling and explaining the situation (and waiting two months), we finally got all but $82,000 of that back from First Data, American Express, and Discover Card.

Extra support messages: 20,000.

As you may have surmised, people wrote to us about this thing. About 20,000 times… and it would have been tens of thousands more if we hadn’t put up an “emergency block” against new messages for a little while in there.

How much this extra support actually cost (in terms of your wased time, tech support overtime pay, and other questions taking longer to answer to) is hard to say, but normally we only get about 45,000 messages in a whole month!

Accounts canceled: 1000.

It’s also kind of hard to say how many people actually closed their account because of the incident, but in January we did have about 1,000 more accounts closed than average. Assuming each of those accounts would have stayed for maybe another year, that’s another $120,000 down the Intertubes. It’s crazy… from all our power problems back in 2006, we hardly lost any accounts at all.

Goodwill lost: Priceless.

Yeah, it turns out this whole blog post is nothing more than another clichéd MasterCard commercial parody.

P.S. I guess it’s nice to know, less than two hours away from our biggest data center move ever, that we’ll cause a tiny fraction of the disruption to our customers that one unexpected fat finger did!

P.P.S. Thanks RIM, for scheduling a blackberry outage exactly at the same time. It makes us look better. And, maybe some of our Happy Customers will blame their lack of email tonight on you!

Friendless Summer

It’s hot in LA!

Which makes me think of summer!

Which makes me think of interns!

Which makes me think of hot summer interns!

Which makes me think of how sad I am to not be in Advertising!

Now, I know there are lots of other cool-sounding summer marketing internships available around this Internet world of ours, but hey, they’re not going to be very cool when it’s 96 degrees with 98% humidity in Manhattan and they’re on a street corner handing out flyers!

Meanwhile, you could be nice and cool, deep underground in one of our (assuming there’s no power outages..) climate-controlled data centres! (That was for the Brits.)

Being Los Angelenos, we don’t really know when this “summer” you speak of IS, or even really how to spell it, and because of that we’ve already “jumped the shark” and are looking to hire FIVE (5) summer interns… RIGHT NOW IN THE MIDDLE OF MARCH!

I would explain how great it is to work at DreamHost, and all the details and what-ever-for-not here, except I already wrote it once on the jobs page there, and re-hashing old content is a job best left to the professionals!

I will at least mention here that #1 this is a PAID internship, at $18.50 / hour, and #2 we’re flexible with when you want to start and how long you want to do it for, and #3 sure, this could be a good way to perhaps eventually even get a real job!

Now, juuust to wrap things up, my friend sent me an email two days ago about his experience interviewing that was way funnier than everything I’ve ever written, so hopefully he’s okay with me posting a snippet here. I can only hope that any interviewing I do for this internship will score half as many douchebag points…

So then I went to this interview at this place where really the job description was 100% me, like every thing they needed, I have done, I had all the right skills, etc. The guy there was a bit wacky. First thing when we sat down he asked me who I WAS. Like to describe myself as a whole, what type of person I am, etc. Then he started telling me how he asked some receptionist applicant that, and she said “well I’m beautiful” and then he went on this story about how she WAS gorgeous but she went on to explain that she didn’t mean her outside appearance even though it was beautiful, but she meant her inner self, she’s a beautiful person, etc. We finally got on to the interview and during it he tells me to pretend I’m a shoe salesman and I just sold him a pair of shoes but he phones me and says he doesn’t know how to tie his shoes, can I explain it to him over the phone. I was like “haha oh umm ok, sure. Haha, I feel like this is going to be one of those trick questions!” and he assures me like no, no, it’s no trick, it’s cause communication is important in this job. So I go through it, put your left lace in your left hand, pull it over to the right side, yadda yadda. Then at the end he looks at me with this smug look and goes “That was good. But you forgot one thing. You forgot to tell me to put my foot in the shoe”. Extra douchebag points here because not only WAS this a trick question, but he said tell me how to TIE them. I just chuckled and was like “oh wow yeah, I didn’t, hah yeah”, but after I was thinking how awesome it would have been to just stare at him for like 2 seconds when he said that, say nothing, and then get up and walk out and drive away.

Agreed.

Stock Tips

First Republic Bank just opened a new branch a block from my house. I was kinda bummed, because I was hoping the lot would become something cool like a Starbucks or a McDonald’s.

Anyway, First Republic has the ad you see above, and some other eerily similar ones, in the window. All the ads use such banal stock photography they never made much of an impression on me, despite passing them every single day.

They never made much of an impression, until yesterday that is! Which is when I passed the Bank of America less than two blocks from them and saw they had just put a new ad that was very eerily similar in their window:

That’s the same lady! Right? Am I right? Yeah, it is! Definitely. Right?

Ha, anyway, I thought that was kinda funny. I mean, geez, B of A, couldn’t you at least check the bank closest to you before picking from the stock gallery?!

The Web Hosting Angle

Now, I shouldn’t be one to bash stock photography… the whole concept is very much alive and well in the entire Web Hosting industry. Still I’ve never come across two hosts with exactly the same “employee” on their front page!

I know sub-prime lending is a mess right now, but come on, bankers!

Speaking of Web Hosting stock photography, I’ve decided to end this post with a little collection of some of my favorite Web Hosting stock photo hotties, each one linked to some actual people employed at the various companies…

MidPhase

(What, nobody wanted to cough up for the “in-focus” version?)

BlueHost/HostMonster

(Isn’t that the same laptop they have on all the desks at IKEA?)

FastHosts

(AIEE! How does she hold that paper without any finger tips?!)

Verio

(That’s some shiny floor they’ve got at Verio!)

1 and 1

(Hummuna hummuna hummuna…!)

DreamHost

(We try our best to make sure nobody ever uses the same stock art as us!)