Billing nightmare for DreamHost customers
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DreamHost customers woke up to a nightmare on Tuesday after the Web hosting company made a major billing mistake overnight that has resulted in many getting their credit cards charged automatically for hundreds -- and even thousands -- of dollars.In an official blog posting, the company said that Monday night it ran &quot;a standard billing cycle to clean up stragglers from 2007&quot; but by mistake set the overdue-payment parameter for the end of 2008.&quot;This caused everyone to be billed as if today was 2008-12-31, wreaking the havoc that we are so sorry you had to be put through,&quot; the posting reads.The wording on the posting seems to indicate that all of DreamHost&#39;s customers were affected by the billing mistake. DreamHost hosts more than 600,000 domains, according to its Web site.WebHosting.Info, a research and statistics portal focused on the Web services industry, lists DreamHost as the 11th-largest Web hosting provider in the U.S. and the 15th-largest in the world .DreamHost, which has been in business since 1997, didn&#39;t immediately reply to requests for comment.At press time, DreamHost was in the process of issuing refunds to customers who got charged automatically.Among the hundreds of mostly angry comments that customers have made to the blog posting are complaints that the billing pushed credit card accounts over their limit, triggering bank penalty fees and locking up cards.&quot;If I end up having to pay special interest fees because you trigger an overbalance, I&#8217;ll be contacting your billing team for compensation,&quot; wrote one customer.Other customers commented that they are spooked that DreamHost could make a mistake of this magnitude with something as sensitive as billing, and have thus decided to cancel their accounts.&quot;My account is due for renewal at the end of this month, and barring something spectacular, it looks like I&#39;m taking my business elsewhere,&quot; wrote another customer.A quick scan of the company&#39;s DreamHost Status blog shows that it has encountered a steady stream of system outages over the past month or so.
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Dreamtranet is a GPL Intranet project primarily developed for the Dreamsite company (www.dreamsite.es), which tries to focus in modularization so that it can provide useful code to be reused in similar projects.   Hoy por fin (y ya iban unos cuantos meses con este proyecto abierto) subo la primera pre-alpha de la Dreamtranet. Muy bÃÂ¡sico y con pinzas todo, pero vaya, asÃÂ­ voy moviendo esto en la esfera pÃÂºblica.  Today at last (and it's been a few months since the project started) I'm uploading a first pre-alpha of the Dreamtranet. Very basic and crude, but then again I start moving this in the public sphere.
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Still no accounts, now a profit warning too...
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Registerfly.com may not be a very big company, but an extremely ugly falling out between the owners of the registrar of Web site domain names is causing a major headache for 200,000 site owners who registered their sites through it.
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SAN JOSE, Calif.  -- Repairs were underway Monday at PayPal as the widely used online payment service struggled to get customers back on track after several days of "intermittent" outages...
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This domain will self-destruct in five seconds "In the past couple of weeks, over 70% of the non-jurisdictional contacts my Office has received have concerned registerflyâ¦ In most circumstances, the matter would be refered to Mr. Mike Zupke, ICANN's Registrar Manager, and he would in turn pass along consumer concerns to the registerfly contactâ¦ If, however, Mr. Zupke determined that the matter you are complaining about is unrelated to the Registrarâs Accreditation Agreement, or any other ICANN policy, he will likely encourage you to work out the situation with the registrar..." ICANN Ombudsmanâs Blog, February 12, 2007â¦
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Did you know you can download SourceforgeEE for 15 users for free. You'll find it on Sourceforge.net and it comes in a VMWare appliance. That version will accommodate 50 users if you want to pay for more than 15 seats. From an enterprise point of view, the cost is quite reasonable.
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Marco Tabini (of php|architect) has posted some thoughts to his blog about the PHP4 end-of-life announcement and its relations to the current push to go PHP5 - mainly how it relates to hosting providers.   I'm sure that a large number are owners of small hosting firms - which, by far, provide the vast majority of PHP-powered websites that Netcraft carefully tracks for us - that sell cheap shared hosting. [...] If you provide shared-hosting plans, it's likely that your servers are still running PHP 4. Upgrading to PHP 5 is a logistical nightmare for two reasons: first, you don't necessarily know that you'll be able to properly set up and secure your systems; second, you don't know that your customers' applications will keep on running.   Both reasons can cause very different kinds of hassles for the hoster, especially when it comes to their customers. As Marco puts it "hell hath no fury like a customer scorned". When things are going smoothly, everything's good, but the second that you try to explain that the update is what's good for them, all they see are things breaking and freak out.   He suggests only one real solution - make the move and tell the customers now that things are changing. Help them all you can (with information about updated software and resources) but ultimately it's up to them to make the change.
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Some users of PayPal are having trouble logging onto the site and are getting security warnings -- problems apparently tied to an SSL security certificate used by Omniture, which is gathering data for the online payment site.
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A GoDaddy.com customer is seriously concerned that this domain registrar and hosting company may not be ready for the switch to DST (Daylight Saving Time) on Sunday.
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Net payment system Worldpay is under attack from hackers delaying transaction times for hundreds of online retailers.
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PayPal, the online payment service owned by auction firm eBay, has been suffering intermittent glitches since Friday. Some users have been locked out of their accounts for long periods, and
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OCTOBER 13, 2004  - Four days after its online payment Web site was slowed and only intermittently available to users due to a coding problem, PayPal.
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Are you being charged unnecessary fees? You can do better.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Repairs were underway Monday at PayPal as the widely used online payment service struggled to get customers back on track after several days of &quot;intermittent&quot; outages.
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Update Slammed for touting unavailable but unlicensed content
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Despite more than a decade of experience with e-commerce, many major online retailers continue to experience outages, slowdowns and outright glitches on their websites. Why can't they get it right?