Yes. Sure. Computers often crap themselves, but problem often exists between keyboard and chair, i.e. the actual users. Around 10 minutes ago an account executive at work called as all the site customisations are gone. It turns out she explicitly clicked on the option to wipe out all the customisation and had made no back up. Now she needs to dig up old backups from October last year and try to fill in all the missing pieces.

S*** happens. Some are big s***, however, a few are bigger!

DremaHost made a huge blunder this week, when they overbilled their customers up to $7.5 million of hosting fee, and it turns out to be a PEBKAC issue as well, where its co-founder Josh Jones accidentally ran its billing software at the wrong dates. Digg reports it, and it is also on TechCrunch. In fact it is all over the news.

As a DreamHost customer, I too was hit with around $380 of charges. However fortunately it was covered (just) by the referral credit I have in my account (which I wasn’t sure how I accumulated so much) so I did not even realise I was wrongly billed until I saw their story on other web hosting related forums. Although it did no harm to me at all, I can image the losses from both DreamHost and their customers.

It is also interesting how other hosts react. Lunarpages has already blogged about their competitor’s billing fiasco, and offered a special coupon code for DreamHost refugees, possibly in response to DreamHost’s blog post with the same title. Search result for “dreamhost” on Google is still populated with $97 off discount (which is no longer valid). However don’t be surprised to see Sponsored Links filled with competitors’ ads trying to gain at DreamHost’s downfall.

Well. A simple catch on the future dates would have prevent the PEBKAC that we have here. An automated backup + a few warnings before wiping out the database would have prevent the PEBKAC that my account executive had as well.

/me back to do some more coding.