Dreamhost May Not be Perfect, But I Still Love It
In case you had not heard, there’s been a huge brouhaha in the past week over a massive billing error at one of the top webhosting companies, Dreamhost. I found out about it when my friend (who I had referred) asked me why she was being billed in January for a September due date. We discovered that Dreamhost accidentally billed a year in advance (inputting 2009 instead of 2008 or something like that). She got an email back from Dreamhost, felt happy that she had a refund coming, and that was that. (My account was fortunately not charged, since my credit card had expired.)
Well, that wasn’t exactly that. That might have been that for her, but for many others, the charge put them in the red and the refunds were slow in coming. The blogosphere has been aflame with the issue, and the drama has been a whole soap opera of its own. What has amazed me is seeing how many people are living so close to the edge. Dreamhost users were on the official blog, complaining that they had no money for food or baby formula. Baby formula? You’ve got kids, and you spend money for webhosting when you have no savings set aside for emergencies? Yikes.
One of the big issues for some was that Dreamhost did not write a formal, corporatey-type apology on their blog, but instead wrote honestly, with some sardonic, self-effacing humor. Some even made wild speculations that the company purposefully overcharged people so they could run off with the money and go live on an island somewhere. (I think these folks have been watching too many movies.)
From reading those posts, you might think that the world has ended for this little webhosting company. And yet, I don’t think Dreamhost is done by a long shot. Despite the constant complaints on their blogs and status pages, Dreamhost continues to be a popular option for many who need affordable webhosting. In fact, I joined because a good friend of mine had been with them for 10 years. That’s right, 10 years!
So what’s the big deal with Dreamhost? What makes it different from other webhosting companies?
First off, they are employee-owned and have no intention of selling out to a larger company. That’s a huge plus for me. I will go out of my way to support a well-meaning employee-owned company instead of a faceless corporation just making money for the top management and a small number of shareholders.
Second, Dreamhost is committed to doing hosting with the least amount of negative impact on the planet as possible. From their website:
DreamHost is carbon neutral. We’ve calculated the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use – paper in the office, electricity for our servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office – leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.
When we learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes we realized we had to do something to neutralize our emissions.
With this in mind, Dreamhost does carbon offsetting and they also work to reduce their waste both inside and outside the office (reducing travel, for example). I don’t think this is corporate green-washing. I really think they care about the environment.
Dreamhost also features a charity in their control panel each month, and they match all donations by customers.
These are the reasons I am loyal to Dreamhost. I’d much rather do business with an employee-owned company that responds honestly and with some humor when they have a major screw-up, one that works to help the planet with its policies. Sure, they are not perfect, but I’ve never found a webhost that was. Dreamhost, however, has been very affordable, mostly reliable (it has its moments), and extremely generous with disk space and bandwidth. They respond very nicely and quickly to all my support requests.
Some of these things won’t matter to certain pissed-off people who apparently want their companies to be 100% perfect, slick, faceless entities that never make any mistakes.
(Never mind the fact that anyone who is in the red and can’t buy food from a $200 overcharge might need to look to their own finances. I know what it’s like to live hand-to-mouth and it sucks, but I would never blame a company for their financial screw-up when I’m obviously not handling my personal finances any better.)
Slick companies aren’t necessarily more reliable or secure anyway. There’s no guarantee that your credit card won’t be overcharged somewhere else. Large companies regularly get their credit card data stolen. It has happened to me. You must try to be prepared, because these things just happen sometimes.
My final take on all this is that Dreamhost will lose some customers from this fiasco, but the majority will remain. Most customers, like my friend, probably have padding in their accounts for a slight dip over a week’s time, and won’t even blink. The most vocal, negative people appear to be those who were living hand-to-mouth and obviously have a lot of stress going on in their lives that has nothing to do with Dreamhost.
And then there are customers like myself, who are tired of greedy corporations, who want a different experience. For us, that experience includes companies that respond to big snafus in quirky ways. Yes, Dreamhost screwed up. No, I don’t think they did it intentionally, and they certainly aren’t having fun with this mess. And no they didn’t respond in a calculated manner, using a PR person to wash everything over. They just responded as best they could, in a human fashion. The people who read that very human response and got rubbed the wrong way have been too conditioned by advertising, in my opinion.
But as for me: I love them all the more for it. I hope they continue to have another prosperous 10 years in business, despite this most stupid screw-up. They are, after all, human. And that’s entirely the point.
Well said.