Having been in the “hosting business” for over 11 years, Dreamhost is one of the most well established games in town. In fact, Dreamhost is offering a pretty cool birthday package that includes great benefits for their next 1,111 new customers. Basically, the service breaks down like this; unlimited disk, transfer and a variety of freebies for $5.95 per month.

Dreamhost’s birthday package has been well received and is expected to finish up really quickly as many of the 1,111 slots have been filled. As for their price of $5.95, it is very competitve with many of the other hosting services out there, but the unlimited options as well as freebies place Dreamhost head and shoulders above the rest. I mean, Dreamhost has thrown the kitchen sink at folks with all the giveaways, I mean they’re giving away almost everything from micro sd cards to kitchen sinks. Well, maybe not, but you ought to check out their package while it is still available!

DreamHost came out of the holidays and noticed that billings were a little light.  They dug into their billing process and reran some server jobs to make sure everything had been covered correctly.  As they did this, they noticed some accounts that had not been charged.  Eventually they isolated the issue relating to a missing upgrade for 64 bit something or other, and then went back and reran the server jobs to the date when the upgrade had gone in (with the missing something or other).

The only problem with this tactic is that when they reran the job, they used the year 2008 instead of the correct year of 2007.  Their system then processed a years worth of charges in advance and that triggered  their Um, Whoops. blog post.

Now on the serious side, its good that they figured things out.  The bad thing is that a few accounts reportedly may have been shut down temporarily due to lack of payment.  Its unclear if any customers credit cards were actually billed for a years worth of service in advance.

From our perspective here, its great that DreamHost figured out the problem, its nice that they have a sense of humor in diffusing the situation, but if you are one of the customers that may have been impacted by the mistake, we hope that you get a little something for your time and trouble, maybe a discount, maybe a free month of service, maybe a free trip to Branson Missouri, but something to take your mind off the problem.