Well, that’s it. Yahoo! is finally shutting down GeoCities.

This is a sad moment for the Internet in general, and it’s especially sad for us. I’ve always felt a sort of special connection with GeoCities.. lemme ‘splain you.

GeoCities was one of the first web hosts on the Internet, being started as “Beverly Hills Internet” in 1994. About four months before we started New Dream Network, in December of 1995, they became “GeoCities” and started offering FREE hosting.

By the time I had heard of them, we were already offering some PAID hosting, and I remember thinking something along the lines of “Damn it! They’re cheating!”

How could a bunch of (completely) broke college kids afford to compete with somebody just giving away hosting? At the time, I figured it could never last.

I was right.

15 years and $3.57 BILLION later.

But that’s not the only reason GeoCities has a special place in our heart.

The main reason is WebRing!

WebRing was a free service for people with related sites to automatically trade links, written by co-founder Sage (it’s not just me and Dallas around here!) back in 1994, while he was still in high school!

A couple of years later when he ended up at our college and we conned him into our play-company, we helped him run WebRing on our server(s).

WebRing itself never officially became a part of New Dream Network, since Sage had started it on his own years before. What we got out of it was Sage wrote DreamBook for NDN and put links to it all over WebRing!

In 1997, WebRing was starting to grow too big for us full-time college students to handle, especially with our newest little project taking off.

So, Sage got Starseed, Inc. to take it over for him. A friend of his from high school worked there and they made a deal where Sage got a percentage of Starseed, an annual “consulting” stipend, and certain creative controls, and they took over everything to do with WebRing.

It didn’t take long for Charley, the head of Starseed, to figure out that the best chance to make the most money off of WebRing was to sell it and sell it fast!

Greetings Geocities

And, sell it he did… to GeoCities!

I believe originally the offer they were going to accept was around $1 million.

However, irrational exuberance was on Charley’s side, and the timing couldn’t have been better for everything that happened next.

At the last minute, another bidder came to the table.. GeoCities however, decided they simply must have WebRing, and closed the deal at around $3.5 million!

Of course, this was all for GCTY stock options, and I’m sure they (rightly) figured that it wasn’t real money anyway.

Now the Starseed team (plus Sage) just had to wait and see which came first, the vesting of their options or the popping of the bubble…

The Vesting

Well, while everybody was nervously holding onto their approximately 1% ownership of GCTY, a funny thing happened. In January 1999, Yahoo! bought GeoCities for $3.57 billion, putting GCTY at more than ten times what it was when they did their deal!

And so, Sage’s options in GCTY were now converted over to YHOO. He still had another year before he could cash them all in though. And things were already a teeeeeensy bit over-valued.

Luckily, by the time Sage was able to cash out (and he did) in early 2000, Yahoo! had tripled yet again… meaning that Yahoo! had effectively purchased little old WebRing for about $100,000,000!

The Downfall

So, Yahoo set a team onto merging WebRing into their system.

By 2001 they were done, and everybody hated it.

Users were dropping faster than YHOO stock, and in 2002 an engineer from GeoCities bought WebRing back from Yahoo for an undisclosed sum (rumored to be around $10,000!)

Since then, I don’t really have any inside information on what’s gone on with WebRing. Just from the Internet Archive history, it looks like he more or less kept the Yahoo look and ran it “respectably” until around 2005:

… when they started to really pimp it out for ads!

Then in 2007.. Social Networking!

And today… Web 2.0!

Reminiscing

WebRing’s been around just about as long as the Web, and now that I ponder it, has been a sort of microcosm of the Web the whole time.

It went from a tiny ad-free community service, to hyper-growth, to showing ads, to being acquired for an INSANE price, to being forsaken, to doing anything to survive, to “social networking”, to “web 2.0″, to today!

Back in 1998, who would have thought WebRing would outlast GeoCities? Who would have thought DreamHost would outlast GeoCities?

DreamHost acquires Geocities

Well, not really. The thought sort of crossed my mind, “If they sold WebRing to that one guy, maybe they’d sell GeoCities to us!”

But then I realized.. Yahoo understands the only real value in GeoCities left is those millions of potential upgrades to PAID hosting.

If you go to GeoCities right now, Yahoo! has a big ad for their ($12/month) hosting.. with the first three months half off!

Whoop dee do.

“In honor of WebRing” or something, we are now offering to the first 1000 GeoCities users who sign up TWO YEARS of a completely free DreamHost account (including domain registration)!

No strings attached.

All you have to do is verify you are an existing GeoCities customer by creating a page on your GeoCities account (or editing an existing page) to have the phrase “I’m off to DreamHost!” on it!

Then when you signup for us, simply put the full url to that page as your “promotional code” and you’ll get a 2 year plan (normally $214.80) free!

And we promise to never shut down.

Sucks Sites.

I’m sure you’ve seen them. Wikipedia calls them gripe sites. They’re usually set up by disgruntled customers and then typically disappear a few weeks later once the creator has had time to cool down.

Oh yeah, they’re out there. NoDaddy.com, for example…but in their case it turns out they may actually be on to something!

Thanks to some great investigative journalism by Andrew Allemann over at Domain Name Wire, you can now read in great detail the lengths that GoDaddy has gone to to conceal its involvement in its own domain name warehousing operation.

Standard Tactics, LLC: How GoDaddy Profits from Expired Domains

The Go Daddy Group allegedly uses a complicated web of subsidiaries and anonymized whois records to hide its involvement in its domain warehousing/auctioning scheme.

Check it out. It’s a great read to get you into the Christmas spirit. If you’re the Grinch.

I guess when you’ve got a $2 million Christmas party to throw and a $3 million Super Bowl commercial to put on, that money’s gotta come from somewhere!

There seem to be quite a few things that everybody knows are good for you, and yet nobody likes doing.

You know, things like: Exercising daily. Staying away from fried foods. Being nice. Taking your medicine. Sleeping until noon.

Ooooh, here’s another thing that NOBODY likes to do that I’ve been doing a lot of lately:

Trying new things.

Whoa man, trying new things really SUCKS.

Anytime you try something new, your poor, flabby, brain is catapulted out of the la-z boy chair of “routine” only to land directly on the nordic track of “growing more synaptic pathways for my neurons to communicate better.”

And, based on my experience, that process can very easily be PHYSICALLY painful!

Yep, it actually hurts my brain to learn. Not only that, I’ve also noticed it hurts a lot more to grow pathways that conflict with old pathways I’ve already got!

I can only imagine (fortunately!) how terrible it would be to get in some kind of gruesome camel crash that squishes my brain in such a way that a vast swath of those comfortable brain pathways are completely WIPED OUT.

Assuming it was even possible, I bet it’d take years of painful and frustrating rehabilitation, like, just to learn how to walk again. Do you remember how frustrating and painful it was the first time you learned? I don’t, but based on my mom’s stories of my tantrums, I doubt I’d want to go through it again!

Well, every time you try something new, your brain has to go through at least a little bit of that uncomfortable process, and I know I at least subconsciously avoid it like some kind of (subconscious) diarrhea!

Nonetheless, I’ve recently started taking surfing and ping-pong classes (two separate classes, sadly), and man, it’s annoying being that bad at things. I should have just taken it easy and signed up for Dr. Mario classes. Or maybe a class at something I’m really awesome at… aw yeah, the ladies know what I’m talking about!

Not the Point

Okay, the point of this post was NOT (just) that I’m taking surfing and ping-pong classes.

Let me ‘splain.

I’m kind of a developer. I pretty much just develop for DreamHost, in Perl, with Emacs, on Windows (XP). I’ve been doing it like that for over a decade, and to be modest, I’m pretty awesome at it… aw yeah, the ladies already knew that!

It’s a widely-held belief that being an awesome programmer is exactly like being an awesome athlete. Not just in that you can get any cheerleader you want, but that even if your specialty is Perl (or basketball), you’re not going to have too hard a time if you decide to take up C++ (or other important sports).

Which is why I decided five weeks ago to go ahead and just churn out all the fantastic iPhone applications I’d been dreaming of!

Straightforward Enough

I really knew nothing about iPhone development. In fact, it took me an hour or so to realize that you need OS X to develop iPhone apps.

Well, no way was I going to go buy a mac, especially after I’d just picked up a $450 EEE 1000H, which can be HACKINTOSHED!

So, my first day was spent “hackintoshing”, and it was relatively easy, and everything worked how the people on the nice Internet had said, and the only thing broken was sound didn’t work (like they said it wouldn’t).

Major Pain

At that point, it’d been kind of a fun project. It was somewhat new stuff, but I’ve installed operating systems by following instructions on a forum before, so my brain really wasn’t growing too many new pathways.

To make a long story short, I soon thereafter realized in order for me to program iPhone apps, I had to switch to developing for the iPhone, in Objective C, with XCode, on OS X.

And. Every. Single. One. Of. Those. Changes. HURT.

Just trying to use OS X, and having to re-learn keyboard shortcuts, how to open programs, how to open folders, how windows work, how to page down, where system settings are, and so on and so on was enough to almost make me run crawling back to the warm bosom of panel.dreamhost.com.

But, I persevered. And then I spent a lot of time reading documentation. And searching for tutorials. And slowly taking apart the example applications.

And finally, after about a week, I had actually finished my first app! It was called Ponger and it was well under 100K. All it did was show an image of a ping pong paddle on your iPhone that when you swung it, made ping pong noises!

Pretty fricking sweet. The inspiration was whilst lobby ponging we noticed that iPhones themselves actually make pretty good paddles (go ahead, try it at home). In fact, I was this close to making Ponger a more authentic “paddle simulator” by not even making it play noises (the noises were a lot harder than you think… and not just because my sound didn’t work)!

Well, I (triumphantly) submitted my app to App-le for inclusion in the App Store (but free) on August 12th, just getting it in in time to catch the ping-pong panedemonium that was sure to be incited by the Beijing Olympics (remember those?)!

In fact, I also started writing this blog post way back then, but I wanted to hold off on publishing it until Ponger was approved so everybody could enjoy it for themselves!

From: devprograms@apple.com
Date: Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 4:40 PM
Subject: Ponger: Application Submission Feedback

Hello Josh,

We’ve reviewed your application Ponger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store.

If you choose to provide additional features that utilize iPhone functionality, your application can be reconsidered for the App Store after you resubmit a new binary to iTunes Connect.

The current version of Ponger may be very appropriate to share with friends and family, and we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing.

Best Regards,

Allison
Worldwide Developer Relations
(Cr)Apple, Inc

SON OF A!

I would have posted this earlier, but I’ve spent the entire last week throwing my HACKINTOSH.

Don’t Bother

Anyway, the moral of the blog post is, “Trying new things hurts your brain, so don’t.”

Or wait, maybe the moral is, “It’s not too late for Josh to relate this to DreamHost a tiny bit if he just says,

Hey, we’ve now made a “live demo” of our panel at https://demo.dreamhost.com/ so all you potential Happy DreamHost Customers can now try one more new thing without it hurting quite so much, and we now make the first week of DreamHost PS FREE so you don’t have to worry about money while you deal with all that brain hurt as you find your appropriate resource level!

“?

There’s something I’ve always hated about the web hosting business.

No, it’s not the cut-throat competition, the crazy customers, or the California climate.

And NO, it’s not the 5-hour work week NOR the oodles of money either… those are fine.

It’s the domain names.

(And, by extension, ICANN.)

The problem with ICANN, as I may have mentioned before, is that they are an organization created to serve a need that just doesn’t need serving.

They do get things right once a decade though, like finally fixing the “domain tasting” problem.

But do they really need meetings in Fiji, Geneva, South Africa, etc…, along with a $20 MILLION annual budget to finally do what registrars had been telling them to since the Clinton presidency?

And now, ICANN’s made a bold new move that they claim results in “a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the Internet.”… the open creation of new TLDs (top-level domains).

So… what does this “open creation of new TLDs” actually mean.

Well, what it DOESN’T mean is that you’ll be able to go to any registrar and just register joshisawesome.believeit. Which is too bad, because if that were the case, everybody would finally have to belive it.

Nope. Instead, all that’s happening is now “anybody” can apply to start a new TLD… as long as they explain to ICANN how it will be used, prove to ICANN they have the technical prowess to run a registry, and pay ICANN an estimated $100,000 to $500,000.

Call me crazy cuckoo, but I believe that’s exactly how the new TLD creation process works now!

You know .info, .biz, .coop, .asia and all those other new TLDs? Pretty sure those went through a process exactly like ICANN is describing now for future TLDs.

In the announcement they did say that people aren’t going to be able to register trademarks (like .pepsi), nor offensive words (like .dreamhost), nor I assume TLDs less than 3 letters (like .i).

What exactly is changing here?

As far as I can tell, the only thing ICANN is saying is that they’re finally standardizing the process for applying for new TLDs. The goal I guess being to make it faster and easier to add more and more TLDs in the future…

Which is to whose benefit?

Have you ever met a person (or company) not involved in the domain name industry suggest the need for a new TLD? Ever? I haven’t!

There is honestly no demand for new TLDs (besides that for newly created countries, which are known as ccTLDs, and are not what we’re talking about here) from anybody who doesn’t stand to make money from the registration of domain names.

And that is because there’s only one thing that makes a particular domain name desirable for legitimate use: clarity.

That’s it. That’s why brand names and generic word domains are valuable, that’s why short domains are valuable, and that’s why no matter how many new TLDs are created, everybody still wants .com.

It is a huge obstacle for any TLD to offer a domain that is clearer overall for its intended use than some still available .com. Blame it on consumer ignorance, but I know I’d still rather have jjflowerslosangeles.com than flowers.la.

(And who types URLs anyway these days?)

Again I must ask, all these new TLDs are to whose benefit?

As far as I can see, the only possible beneficiaries are those actually in the domain name monetization industry.

More possible TLDs means more possible typos, more defensive registrations by trademark holders, and possibly some money to be made from the few suckers who don’t realize that flowers.la is not a clear domain.

What new TLDs will be made?

Hmm… we’re not going to be seeing company-based TLDs (e.g. .ibm, .coke) anytime soon; I doubt IBM is that interested in switching over from ibm.com. And since ICANN announced people can’t register trademark infringing TLDs, IBM won’t have to do it defensively either.

I guess I could see a case being made for TLDs that better categorize the type of site being visited, perhaps things like .blog, .wiki, .forum, .shop. Except, we’ve already got sub-domains for that!

In fact, www.blah.blog is exactly the same number of characters at blog.blah.com; all we’d be doing is switching a .com for a www. (And don’t try to say people would just use http://blah.blog/… that’d be even less clear!)

Not to mention, where you once had just one domain name to manage (and pay for), you’ve now got dozens… all with different registries, different rules, and probably different expiration dates.

Maybe there’s a case for making more location-based TLDs, perhaps things like .nyc, .sf, .miami, .toledo. But again, we’ve already got the country-code TLDs, and besides, isn’t the Internet supposed to be international? Just use local search to find local stuff.

(Can you really see people just guessing the URL “www.taxi.chicago” directly on their iPhone 4G. Ha, it is to laugh!)

What about price?

I don’t know if ICANN is going to just charge just a flat fee per TLD, or if they’re going to keep charging a per-domain fee like they do now. If it’s the status quo, then there is really no hope for interesting new uses of TLDs.

If, however, there is no incremental fee to ICANN for more domain names… welcome to the dawning of the age of domainius! Free domainius, that is.

Of course, any free TLDs would have to be tied to some particular application, otherwise squatters would immediately register every possible domain and put them up for auction.

I can see a free email provider getting .mail, a free blog host .blog, a free photo site .pics.

(There’s not that much of a benefit in having josh.blog as opposed to say, josh.blogger.com … but I guess since you’re going to be the 10,000,000th result on Google, you might as well go for the shorter URL!)

Auctions Smauctions

Did you see recently that the guy in charge of domain auctions at GoDaddy was discovered bidding up their own auctions?! That is some real bush league crap; to be totally expected throughout the entire domain name industry.

In fact, in case this blog post isn’t loooooooooong enough for you, let me now take a moment to relate a personal anecdote of mine about a domain auction.

Back in January, my wife was starting a floral design business, and had decided upon a name for it. Unfortunately, the obviously best domain name for her website was already taken, and being used by a squatter on sedo.com. Rather than dealing with them, she just registered a slightly longer variation that was still available.

Well, her birthday was coming up, so I decided to see what it’d cost to get that “best” domain. I went to the site, clicked the link to “make an offer”, and entered $100.

Immediately my bid was rejected!

It said the minimum offer the owner of this domain would accept was $777! Highway robbery!

After thinking about it for a little while, I figured, what the hey, it’s a birthday present, and I want to see how this thing works, so I made a (completely insane) bid for $777.

Automatically the system responded saying the owner had made a “counter-offer” back… $7770!!!

(How iiiiiiiiiiiiiiinteresting… sedo has a completely automated system for domain owners to counter-bid on domains.)

Well, harrumph. I raised my offer to $800. Immediately I got a “response” from the seller staying firm at $7770, and that was their final offer!

At this point I was curious… would they lower their price at all? So, I countered back with what I pretty much figured was the most I’d spend for this (completely of no value to anybody but my wife) domain, $1150.

What happened next really surprised me… I got another automated message stating that I had surpassed some secret minimum offer the seller had set at which they were, no not willing to actually sell the domain for, but at which they were okay with automatically putting it up for a seven-day auction on the front page of sedo.com… and my offer was the starting “bid”!

Gee thanks!

That explained why there are so many domains on that page with just one bid yet really high prices!

Well, at that point I figured I’d just sit and wait… nobody else was going to be bidding more than $1150 for this obscure domain name! And, the auction was ending the day before my wife’s birthday anyway, so the timing worked out.

I waited the whole week, and of course, nothing happened. The auction was going to end at 8:04 AM on a Saturday, but I didn’t even plan on waking up to watch the end.

Whoops. When I did wake up, at 8:12 AM, I (sneakily) immediately checked on the auction… only to find that somebody else had won; with a bid of $1175 at 7:56 AM!

I wasn’t horribly upset; after all $1150 was an order of magnitude more than I’d intended to pay. But I just knew in my gut of guts (I have four) that the winning bidder was either the original seller, somebody working for sedo.com, or somebody who figured I’d pay even more to buy it from them later! One thing I knew it wasn’t was anybody intending to actually use the domain.

You’re still here?

That, in a large ostrich nutshell, is why I hate domain names. The secondary domain name industry exists purely to squeeze profit from consumer confusion, artificial scarcity, and literal extortion. No actual value has been added to the universe, just a redistribution of money from people who have a valid use for a clear domain to people who registered that clear domain first.

And this is not, I repeat not, sour grapes of wrath by me, just because back in 1994 (when I first discovered whois) I checked all these big public company domain names like honda.com, toyota.com, and mcdonalds.com, (I wasn’t too creative back then) and found them all to be AVAILABLE.

I thought to myself, “Whoa. These companies would probably pay hundreds of dollars for their domains in a year or two!” To top it off, way back then domain names were completely free… you only had to apply for them with Network Solutions.

But, I decided against it, entirely because I thought it’d be sleazy. I swear it was not because I was afraid of getting sued, nor because I didn’t actually know exactly how to apply for a domain.

Nope, it was solely due to my irreproachable morals and incredible dignity.

You see, I decided to take the noble path and start DreamHost Web Hosting, where we earn our money fair and square: through over-selling, over-charging, and, every once in a long while, even over-blogging.

The other day I bought one of those new banana creme-filled Twinkies!

It seemed delicious enough, and it was!

After eating it in six seconds, I noticed on the wrapper they had some kind of cool contest going on!

It said I could enter by visiting their website or by sending a text message to them.. how modern of Hostess!

Since I couldn’t find anything about the contest at hostesscakes.com, I decided, what the hey… I’ll text em to win!

I’d never done any of those “text blah to 1234 to win” things before, so I was mostly curious to see if I’d start to get mobile spam…

Well, I texted. And, I got:

Sorry, UR not a winner. Play again tomorrow! Thx from Hostess. See rules at www.hostesscakes.com. Std/other txt msg rates apply. Help? Txt HELP.

So I decided to send them “HELP”. I got back:

4 help w/the sweepstakes, pls email us incl cell number hostess@promosvcs.com or call 8663510327 2 stop, txt STOP. Other charges may apply

Hmm, okay, I figured I’d better send them “STOP” now. So I did, and received…

This message confirms that u have unsubscribed and will no longer receive messages from Hostess sweepstakes. Questions email hostess@promosvcs.com

Alright, fair enough… I figured after that perhaps they were nice and legit and weren’t going to keep sending me messages or sell me out to 3rd party lists.

Two Days Later

I got a text message.

It was from “757-14″, and it said:

RingAZA! Enter UR PIN online to get UR BONUS TONES & Credits! 9.99/mo UR PIN = 2679. Info=HELP or 1-866-616-6067 Quit=STOP. othr chrgs may apply

Twinkie the Kid had sold me out!

I couldn’t believe it. Well, I sort of could. I guess I asked for it. Nevertheless, I texted back, “STOP” though I did it with the same feeling one gets when trying to stop a tsunami with a paper napkin.

RingAZA! U have been unsubscribed from Text Alerts. You will not receive any additional messages going forward. More info 866-616-6067

Hmm, well, maybe I was in the clear after all…

The Next Day

RingAZA! Great Job, Ur Ringtones R Ready! Reply YES now & Pick all Ur Bonus Content! UR not being billed 4 this msg. 4 info: http://75714.net. Sub = 9.99/mo

There’s just something so creepy about TXT-speak in corporate messages (and spam).

Just for the hey of it again, I once more sent back “STOP”… and again got exactly the same unsubscribe message.

RingAZA! U have been unsubscribed from Text Alerts. You will not receive any additional messages going forward. More info 866-616-6067

The Next Day

To my absolute surprise, nothing!

And actually, I haven’t gotten a single sms spam since then. Maybe there IS some sort of higher level of accountability to txt spamming, since for your “short code” (e.g. 75714) to work you have to actually make a deal with all the major cell carriers?

I dunno why, but this incident got me thinking a little bit about what the “state of the spamming world” must be like these days.

It’s got to be getting at least a little harder to get people’s email addresses as a spammer, right? It used to be everybody had their email address on their web site, or in their WHOIS info, or publicly posted to a newsgroup or a mailing list, or used it when registering for anything online.

Nowadays, it seems like everybody’s just got a contact form, uses Domain Privacy, just posts in online forums (where their email is hidden), and uses throw-away hotmail/yahoo/spam.la addresses when creating online accounts.

And on top of it all, spam filtering is finally getting a bit better. I bet them’s some lean times right now in the email spam business.

One More Anecdote

In fact, I have another little story about how desperate times seem to be for spammers!

My wife recently started a floral design business, and so she got a couple of those door magnets for our car advertising her business URL, phone number, and email address.

Well, one time we got back to the car and noticed one of the two magnets was gone! How strange we thought.. had it fallen off? Had somebody taken it? If so, why? As a prank? Was it a competitor? Maybe a potential customer who didn’t have a pen handy?

That was sort of annoying, but not a huge deal; it was only $17.

But then a funny thing happened.

About a week later, my wife got her first spam ever to her newly-created business email address.. the one that’d been on the magnetic car door sign!

Man, those spammers must really be desparate to stoop to such labor-intensive, low-brow email address-harvesting techniques!

And what was that spam for?

Magnetic car door signs!

Ha, I couldn’t believe it! And ever since then, she gets about three spams a week to that address.. all for magnetic car door signs!

It’s not spam, it’s blackmail!

Hey, you know what’d be fun on a boring Monday in May? A little role play!

And I’m not talking about 12-sided dice and renaissance faires either, I’m just talking about some simple role reversal.

More specifically, I’m going to complain to you about a web host!

So, about three years ago I was trying out some competitors to, you know, test the waters in case I ever decided I wanted to switch hosts.

I used three places, and they all absolutely stank. I mean, they were horrible. I’m talking worse than us!

Every server I tried with these places was pretty much just not working. Besides that, their support was all universally useless, and their panels were a weird hodge-podge of different systems they’d cobbled together I guess. You also either couldn’t get shell access or had to fax them your driver’s license to enable it?!

The worst thing was, they were all difficult to cancel, and a few even tried to get out of giving me my money back (I was in their “unconditional” guarantee!)

Finally, I decided to splurge (I’d been spending like $7.95/month) and tried a VPS place for a whopping $49 a month!

Well, they were great! I mean, they still had a weird hodge-podge of different panels, and they sure laid stuff out differently than I was used to, but my VPS at least stayed up and I could do anything I wanted.

I never needed to contact support, which was fine with me, and luckily for them, I never really did too much with the account but kept paying them anyway for the last three years (I’m willing to bet a few of you are in this boat as well… thanks!)

Finally

Last month, I finally decided to transfer my little bit of crap I had with them over to a DreamHost PS! When I went to cancel, I decided to check my credit card statement and noticed that for February and March I’d been charged $89 instead of $49?!!

Eh? I searched through all the emails I received from them and the only thing I could find that seemed possibly related was one that mentioned they were upgrading all the features on their VPS, but don’t worry existing users would get them all at the same price!

So, I wrote them a nice email:

Helllooooo….

I just noticed this and that somehow you guys upgraded me without my permission from $49/month to $89/month!

Uh, what happened? It wasn’t my choice.. I did get one email saying resources were going up .. for FREE.

Please refund the extra $80 you’ve charged to my credit card asap.

Also, I’d like to cancel my service as of April 30th, I believe what I’ve already been charged for.

Thanks,
josh!

To which they replied:

Sir,

On 02/17/08 our support team notified you to tell you that your server had run out of resources, and that the only way they could keep your server from staying offline was to upgrade you. They did so for free for one week, and asked you to get back to them to work with them to resolve the issue. They stated that if they didn’t hear from you they would leave you on the higher package level instead of leaving you down completely.

After a week, and a followup reminder sent to this address that the account was being left at Signature level so that you could remain operational, your package was upgraded.

Admittedly this was an atypical situation, but most would probably agree that after not hearing from you the decision to leave you up and operational was preferrable to the decision to simply let your server fail.

As per the contract you agreed to at signup, we do require a 30 day written cancellation notice to close down your account. I can accept this as that notification and close your account 30 days from today, on May 18th. I hope that this helps.

All the best,
Christian

Ha, ha, ha… what?

So, because I was (somehow) crashing my own (private) server, they, without permission from me, started charging me an extra $40 a month, so it wouldn’t crash!

Gee, thanks guys!

I also appreciate it when my cable company notices that I haven’t been enjoying HBO and Showtime and most would probably agree that after not hearing from you the decision to give you all these great movies and original tv series was preferrable to the decision to simply let you suffer with Oxygen and TBS!

But actually, that never happened becuase that would be CRAZY!

I went back to look for this alleged email, and I found it:

Subject: 7 Day Trial upgrade to the Signature package for yourserver.com.

Hi,

This server has reached it’s limit on i-nodes which is number of files on the system.

Below is an output of where most of these I-nodes are being used:

357219 -> /vz/private/1753/root/var/qmail/mailnames/yourserver.com/user/Maildir/cur
457677 -> /vz/private/1753/root/var/qmail/mailnames/yourserver.com/user/Maildir/new

That is roughly 700,000 i-nodes for this mail account. Please clear this mail out and notify us within 7 days so that we can downgrade your account back to the Essential. Otherwise, you will be billed for the Signature package.

Thank you,
Tommy

First off, nice subject! No wonder I didn’t read that email!

Ah, I see.. I had a catch-all at the domain hosted there and it was filled with three years of spam!

It’s besides the point that there’s no mention of inode limits anywhere on their site or tos (I’m not saying who they are because there’s no such thing as bad publicity!), or that I guess their VPS solution has problems with some instances affecting others in certain inode-related areas.

The point is that it is crazy to assume that you may just UPGRADE your customer without hearing back from them, as opposed to say, just DISABLING their account.

I wrote back:

Hi Christian,

Um, actually no, I would have preffered to have the server fail.. I’m sorry I didn’t see those emails, but I did not agree to the upgrade!

Please refund the $80 extra dollars and set my service to cancel on May 18th, after downgrading back to the $49 plan for the rest of the time.

Thanks,
josh!

To which Christian replied:

Josh,

I understand that some people may feel this way. That’s why we gave you free time at Signature level before keeping you there, and the opportunity in successive messages to go ahead and downgrade. We made multiple contact attempts and then provided the service, which you used for two months.
I’ll need to look into the possibility of refund. I’m not sure what the protocol is offhand, so I’ll need to do some digging.

I’ll downgrade your account immediately but if the same problem exists I expect your server to start failing again shortly. If it does, you’ll need to upgrade an I won’t be able to authorize a free upgrade – not with a dispute pending. So make sure that if the server fails and you’re comfortable with that, that if you change your mind you will need to explicitly agree to the new $89 per month rate.

-Christian

HA! Man, at this point I was starting to get bemused and maybe even a little bit angry. Here I am, a guy who totally loved this host, had paid them about $1800 over three years while using virtually no resources, and they’re going to make me fight over $80 at the end?!

Especially when they have no chance in actually keeping it. I happen to know as something of a dabbler in the web host arts myself that it is very very hard for an Internet merchant to win a chargeback dispute with a consumer! My next email brought this up:

Hi Christian,

Please refund the $80 or I’ll have to take it up with my credit card company directly! Yuck!

Thanks,
josh!

Oooh, but he was not intimidated!

Josh,

I will need to take this up with our Controller. My personal opinion is that you were given clear and fair warning of the charges which were not put in place until after a lengthy period in which we provided that upgraded service for you free of charge. We made multiple efforts to contact you and it was your responsibility to keep your contact information updated with us, or in this case keep messages from your provider whitelisted so that we could communicate with you. As you were given plentiful and frequent notice of the upgrade and the consequences for not responding, as you utilized the resources and received benefit from them through multiple billing cycles, and as all of this can be documented, I am certain that we could be victorious contesting a chargeback request. However, as I stated previously this is not my call. What I will do is send this along to our Controller for review, and set your cancellation date to May 18th as promised. Though normally it is not allowed to downgrade and provide cancellation notice at the same time, given the odd circumstances I WILL allow that request to stand, which will save you some funds.

I hope this helps,
Christian

Oooohohhohoohoooo! Well! I hope it helps too! I am so grateful you are now allowing me to “downgrade” to the only plan I ever signed up for!

Anyway, long story short, they said it’d take two weeks to decide, so I contacted American Express and disputed the charges, and then a few days later they credited my $80.

And the moral is, billing issues are the biggest issues for consumers! Why burn up three years of good will at $49/month over $80? Before this, I honestly would have recommended them to people if I hadn’t been their direct competitor! I swear!

People can forgive a lot of bad service/bad product/headaches/incompetence/gross negligence if you just give them back their money. It’s kind of like saying, “the deal is off,” no hard feelings?

It is 100% worth it. Now, when they talk to their friends, they’ll be like “Well, I had a bunch of problems, but in the end they gave me my money back.”

As opposed to me who’ll be like, “They were fine until the end when they stole $80 and refused to return it! I PLEDGE ON MY UNBORN CHILDREN THAT DREAMHOST SHALL CRUSH THEM!”

That’s something that translates across all businesses too, because it’s just a universal way of doing business. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, nor what product or service you have, there are good ways of doing business, and there are not so good ways.

And I feel like although we don’t always succeed 100% at the specific details of trying to offer awesome web hosting for super cheap, we are generally successful at running a business that doesn’t lie, cheat, or steal, and always tries its best.

Now, you guys be me and please go write a ton of blog posts I can use the rest of my life.

Thanks!

Ha, did you think you’d gotten through those stupid strike-themed posts?

Well, apparently you are!

The writer’s strike seems to be finally coming to an end, and I don’t know whether to be happy or sad. On the one hand, it means I can finally get back to writing awesome blog posts. On the other hand, it means I can no longer get away with writing these blog posts… which is bad news because this well of creativity is tapped, my friends.

The sad truth is, I did that entire “billing mistake” thing just so I’d have easy blog fodder for another week.

A Last Hurrah

I guess I’ll just quickly wrap up a bunch of stupid things I was planning on “striking” against but never got around to. I never expected this thing to end and was pacing myself.

Hopefully this strike really is settled or you ain’t going to be seeing any new posts here until at least the first Sunday after the Ecclesiastical Full Moon date after March 20th!

A Strike on Fax Machines!

How in the hell is it 2008 and everybody still uses fax machines?

Give me some widespread e-signature standard already, world!

A Strike on Social Networks

Is it just me, or do social networks only appeal to people who 1. are single 2. have no job or 3. care about what their friends are doing?

Because I, for one, am none of those things.

A Strike on Cell Phones

Why do cell phones still keep any data locally?

When you get a new cell phone, you should just have to log into it, like you do, say, a new email client, and whammo, all your contacts/pictures/text messages/themes/preferences/ETC.. are syncronized with a (non-proprietary) server.

We need IMAP for Phones.

(I lose my cell phone once a month.)

A Strike on Global Warming

Dallas warned me not to post this, but he’s in Thailand (trying to enjoy it while it’s still above the ocean.)

There’s just three things that bother me about global warming.

1. There’s literally no way we can be even reasonably sure about what will happen. There’s just no experiment we can run on our entire planet that we can set up an adequate control for!

2. Even if the earth does get warmer, we can’t really know (again, what would the control be?) all the effects that will have on us until it actually happens. The earth’s climate has changed a lot over the billions of years it’s been around, and yet here we are, over 6 billion strong and fatter than ever!

3. Even if the Earth does warm, and even if it is bad for us, there’s again no way we can possibly verify what actually caused it, nor if there was anything we could have done to prevent it.

I mean, I’m all for clean air and water and not wasting electricity and saving the whales, but isn’t just having clean air and water and more money and whales to ride reason enough?!

And if we want to focus on literally saving the human race as we know it, maybe we should be spending more R+D on stopping near Earth objects!

We know they’re out there, we know they’ve hit Earth before, and we know it’s very bad when they do!

A Strike on Getting Old

I broke my left foot playing basketball when I was 27.

It took about a year to heal, but it’s pretty much been fine since.

Now all of the sudden, 3 years later, everytime I get up after being inactive for a half hour or more my left foot kills!

And that’s the real reason why I don’t worry about global warming in the future … I refuse to get older.

Now, please feel free to hold your own stikes in the comments, before the writers settle!

Welcome back to this week’s (and the final) edition of Friday illiterative lists!

Two business practices of pretty big-name companies came to my attention this week that I thought were too underhanded/sleazy not to be shared/copied.

#1. Sending something via FedEx Express Saver:

On Tuesday I had to FedEx some stuff from downtown Los Angeles to Chino. It’s only 36.5 miles so I figured, why not save a buck (or twenty?) and choose “Express Saver” .. it must be cheaper and it must get there in the same amount of time when we’re this close!

Wrongo! I guess FedEx really doesn’t want to cannibalize their overnight delivery sales for packages that aren’t going so far. So much so that they will actually ship an envelope from LA to MEMPHIS on its way back to Chino!

#2. Checking a domain’s availability via Network Solutions:

Now I didn’t do this. But a fair number of our customers must still remember way back when Network Solutions was the only registrar, and for some reason go to their site to check the availability of domains before attempting to register them with us.

BIG MISTAKE!

Since at least January 8th, any (non-gibberish) domain you decide to just CHECK availability for via their site, Network Solutions GOES AHEAD AND REGISTERS!

Although undoubtably sleazy, this maybe wouldn’t be sooo terrible if NetSol wasn’t still charging $35/year!

I’d actually thought about this a while ago. I thought, “If *I* were a good-for-nothing cyber-squatter, I’d set up a registrar, advertise insanely cheap rates, and then whenever anybody went to check or register a domain with me, I’d just register it for myself and then offer it to them for much more!”

But then I thought, “What about when people caught on? They’d come and check completely fake domains they never wanted, and then I’d be out the $7 a year for all these worthless domains!”

Of course, all this was way before ICANN’s Add Drop Grace Period (AGP) came into effect. The AGP provides registrars with a five-day grace period to delete a domain they’ve “mistakenly” registered and to get all their money back. The original purpose was to help people out when they make typos or when a registrar is the victim of fraud; noble enough goals.

In practice, the AGP has resulted in “Domain Tasting,” the numerous ill side-effects including:

Allowing Net S.O.L. to actually implement this practice at no financial risk.

Allowing the “Drop-Catching” business to thrive… currently 100% of expired .com/net domains are re-registered immediately by cyber-squaters and AdSense fiends.

Allowing these skuz-buckets to register hundreds of thousands of domains a day, testing their typo-traffic-potential, and then deleting hundreds of thousands that don’t make at least $7 a year.

Allowing these skuz-buckets to actually only require a domain to make 42 cents a year to be profitable… even the domains they intend to keep, they go ahead and delete every five days. And then immediately re-register. That way, they’re never out the $7/year.. they’re only out the interest they could be earning on the money they have to keep with Verisign in order to keep their zillions of domains in perpetual register/delete/re-register limbo!

In practice, the noble goals that the AGP hoped to solve are just not very big problems. If you’re a “legit” domain-registering entity and you typo a domain: you’re out a few bucks. It’s your fault, c’est la vie. If you’re a registrar and you’re being massively frauded every day (as we are), you quickly develop techniques to find and fight fraud and you prevent suspicious domains from even getting registered in the first place.

The AGP as it is now hardly ever saves us any money from fraud, because the vast majority of bunk registrations we catch before we even submit them, and the rest we don’t catch until long after the five days have already passed!

There is a bright side to all of this! Thanks primarily to Network Solutions’ ballsy new policy, ICANN decided last week to finally end Domain Tasting!

Hooray! This is good news for the Internet, bad news for Google!

Good thing I sold all my Google yesterday and bought Yahoo!

Good thing I wish I sold all my Google yesterday and bought Yahoo!

This week, I learned another five things I did not know before:

Monday: Although charging a credit card is instantaneous, refunding really does take 3-4-5-6-or-more business days to process.

Tuesday: You can erroneously credit an expired credit card. The money does leave your merchant account.

Wednesday: You can credit a canceled credit card. The money does leave your merchant account.

Thursday: You can credit a debit card tied to a checking account that has been closed for months. The money does leave your merchant account.

Friday: If you charge somebody with an international credit card and then refund their money, by the time the money gets back on, the dollar will have weakened!

Lucky you to learn these things the fun fun-facts way!

I recently wrote a self-described ‘rant’ describing some of the experiences DreamHost has had working with Ruby on Rails on our platform, and with some recommendations on how the Rails community might be able to improve the situation. That post has received some excellent comments, including some by DHH, the creator of Ruby of Rails, and I’d now like to follow-up with some clarifications and further comments of my own.

My original post was intended primarily as commentary for the Rails developer community as a whole and they are, of course, free to take it as simply that. 37 Signals and DHH obviously have their own agendas, business and personal, and those agendas are largely not in line with any agendas DreamHost is working to further. I hope my comments may be taken as ‘food for thought’ by the larger Rails developer community. The project will survive just fine with or without taking my advice, and the zealous user community will likely remain zealous.

DIY

Some of the response to my post was essentially ‘do it yourself’. DHH also went so far as to recommend we not treat the Rails community as a ‘paid vendor’ and to ‘wipe the wah-wah tears’ from my chin. While that is a very valid request, I don’t believe it applies in this situation.

Ruby on Rails is a pretty small part of our overall service. We have already put in a not insignificant amount of work to support Ruby on Rails, including a pretty good amount of user training to assist people new to Rails, and have in general worked to further the cause for it in the shared hosting environment. Aside from hardware, we don’t really have very many paid vendors of any kind now. We have ourselves developed all of the custom perl-based software our business relies on (warts and all). We very much believe in the DIY mentality and it’s been a major part of our business history. Additionally, our business will not be significantly affected one way or the other by the future actions of the Rails community. It simply does not have the critical mass necessary for that.

That said, I would like to see Ruby on Rails reach toward that critical mass of users, and thereby become a larger portion of our business. For that to become a reality I believe it needs to be simpler to use on the server side of things. A larger user community is a good thing for any open-source project.

Bride of PHP?

I mentioned PHP several times in original post, but I very much do not want Rails to become ‘another PHP’. That would be silly, as one PHP is plenty! Ruby on Rails seems to have a conflicted identity at the moment. It is simultaneously compared to enterprise technologies like Java Servlets as well as more average joe programmer technologies like PHP. There are more traditional web programmers experimenting with Ruby on Rails and exploring it, and there are professional enterprise programmers investigating it. The amount of attention Ruby on Rails has achieved in such a short time is awe-inspiring.

Programmers are Lazy

The fact remains that both of those groups of web application developers, and I’d go so far as to say all web applications developers, want development environments that more or less ‘just work’. They want to focus on programming and leave the server administration alone. Rails does a great job at saving programmers on programming time (which is exactly why programmers like it), but many reports I’ve heard indicate that in many cases it trades that programming time for back-end server administration time instead. The average joe programmers out there are typically using completely managed hosting environments that they do not have much control over, and the enterprise programmers are typically using a somewhat complex and large-scale established environment that they also do not have much personal control over. Even those VPS users who do have more control over their server environment do not want to be spending their time managing that VPS. They want to be spending time writing those great applications.

If Ruby on Rails were made to be simpler to use with a wider range of hosting environments, big and small, that would ultimately benefit Rails itself far more than it would benefit DreamHost or me personally.

I would be happy to provide a free hosting account to anyone who would like to help work on these issues with us. Just contact me through our contact form and we can talk about it.

UPDATE! : DreamHost makes using Mongrel much easier! This is one way we’re working to make Ruby on Rails easier to use.