Dreamhost hosting problems?

DreamHost’s poor customer service has led to a serious privacy invasion. When my client attempted to sign up for an account, the transaction hung halfway through. When customer service (which can only be reached by tedious email exchanges) “fixed” the problem, the pay by credit card option was no longer available. The customer service representative insisted that we use Google Payments. I proceeded, and then my client realized his financial information is now in the Google system. The worst possible scenario then came true. Instead of completing the transaction, Google called my client’s bank for “preapproval”. This was not to complete the transaction (which was never completed), but to gather information for Google’s marketing. My client is furious, reviewing everyone’s privacy policy, and is looking into ways to bring this problem up at the political, and possibly the legal, level.

Throughout this whole situation, Dreamhost has been nothing but pig-headed. Every customer service representative ignores the case history and either refers us back to Google Payments or says patronizing things like we could have paid with the original credit card system. I offered them a solution where I quietly pay for the account using Google transactions, and they won’t even let me help bail them out!!!

I will never refer another client to dreamhost. Right now I’m looking for the best place to air this complaint publicly in as many places as possible. People have to know that when Dreamhost pushes people into using Google Payments, Google then has their financial information to aggregate and deploy for their own purposes.

We are running a popular communities portal hosted by Dreamhost.

A few weeks ago, some lunatic or maybe a competitor contacted Dreamhost claiming that he allegedly has copyright on a paragraph and a picture in a blog posted by a user in the website.

Dreamhost, without inquiring the matter at all, without checking with us before, without giving us the opportunity to suspend the alleged copyright content until we investigate the matter with the user, they simply shut down the whole website immediately and then went home for weekend. Unbelievable!, there was no one to talk to there for 5 whole days. For 5 days, our service was down! The business damage was huge. We tried to contact them through all communication means, filed numerous support tickets. Nothing.

A childish irresponsible and rude person in Dreamhost that calls himself “Robert R.” and who is supposed to be in charge of copyright couldn’t understand what he did wrong simply writing to us among other things: “I do not work weekends”. Furthermore, not only he didn’t acknowledge his negligence, he refused at the beginning to bring the site back to operation and was misleading and completely uncooperative.

He couldn’t even understand that his hasty and arrogant course of action is actually an excellent opportunity for anybody who has a competing website hosted by Dreamhost to bring the website of his competitor down whit no need for hacking. All he/she has to do is to contact this Robert S. with a false copyright complaint and this Robert will do the job for him. Incredible, no?

We tried to file a complaint about this person with Dreamhost but the company simply ignored our repetitive requests to get a contact person for complaints. Having no direct way to file our complaint directly, we decided to share our misfortunate experience with others.

We are planning to disclose in public the full correspondence with this “Robert R.” so that others will understand the scope of the problem there and we are considering filing a law suit to charge damages. We are of course looking for a new hosting for our websites and those of our customers.

This severe incident is in addition to constant network and infrastructure problems and inefficient support service.

To sum it all, the people at Dreamhost simply don’t care and apparently there is no true managerial level there to tell them that they should. It appears that “employee owned” business is not such a good idea after all. We are strongly advising others to think twice before making our mistake and instead to evaluate and select a serious and professional hosting service, even if it charges a bit more.