My new domain is not being hosted

My client paid for a new site two days ago and we still do not have anything from dreamhost other than a payment receipt.

Has anyone else tried to sign up in the past day or so and if so have they had their site provisioned?

The control panel has a message:

"PLEASE NOTE
"This account is currently pending approval.

"If you've already made payment your account should be activated within one business day."

And that was two days ago.

What is going on? Are we supposed to be doing anything?

The client is wondering what has happened to his site.

Could be fraud detection taking a while. When exactly did you sign up?

When I signed up I was approved in minutes and up and running within a half hour.

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They've got the money, what more do they need?

It was just before midnight on December 31, Pacific Time, if I have done the time calculations correctly, but is that going to be a problem?

They haven't contacted us anyway.

Well, January 1st is a holiday and, thus, not a business day for the accounting department.

At any rate, accounts which pass automated fraud detection are approved and activated immediately. If you "fail" automated fraud detection, I think you go to some manual process that takes longer.

You can either be patient or submit a ticket through the panel inquiring about the status of the account.

Did you sign up with a direct credit card payment or did you use paypal or Google Checkout? Did you give correct account contact information that matched the billing address of the credit card you used?

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As far as I know, January 2 is a business day, and the message did say one working day.

I have raised a ticket in support and the ticket mover robot has just placed it in a new queue; other than that I have not received any response.

The payment went through Google Checkout and was approved, and we received a receipt from DH to say they had received the money. The client did all the payment transactions (I am the web technician).

Is there anything that we can do to get this actioned? What do DH's accountants need?

I still have not received anything from support (and we still have no website).

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As far as I know, January 2 is a business day, and the message did say one working day.

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You sent this at the end of the first business day after the long holiday weekend. For instance, just about everyone at my company has been gone for the past week except for the actual support staff. I was just suggesting that you were being a bit overly shrill in screaming that you've been waiting two days when you're actually sitting at the end of the first business day. In fact, since your request went in overnight, many businesses would start the clock at the start of the next business day, making today "within one business day" vs. "same day service". At any rate, I'm not trying to minimize your experience, I'm just trying to make you feel better by making you not feel victimized. Try to be patient. It will be better for your health!

In reply to:

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I have raised a ticket in support and the ticket mover robot has just placed it in a new queue; other than that I have not received any response.

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That's good! That way, you'll know if there was a technical issue. If you don't receive a response, that's when you should start "worrying".

In reply to:

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The payment went through Google Checkout and was approved, and we received a receipt from DH to say they had received the money. The client did all the payment transactions (I am the web technician).

Is there anything that we can do to get this actioned? What do DH's accountants need?

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Since you're just the tech guy, there's nothing you can do in this situation. It all has to be worked out between the Dreamhost account activation/fraud detection team and your client. Your submitting the ticket asking if there's a technical issue is all you can do.

I recommend that people be understanding and patient in these situations. Just as we have a choice about what businesses to do business with, so do our vendors. At work, I know that we make choices about what to charge our customers based on how difficult it is to service them. Dreamhost doesn't have this flexibility but they do have a choice of whether to host you at all or not. I remember reading an article in HBR about how it's important to keep the good customers and to shed the bad ones, so we all might want to be careful in case Josh reads that article!

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I'd also like to add that complaining about it by adding questions to wiki articles isn't going to help you either. Anyone outside the United States is more likely to encounter setup delays caused by the automatic fraud detection system.

-- si-blog --

They have now refused to host our site altogether, no explanation given. I would still like to work with DreamHost if we can, given that they have been recommended to us, so is there any way that we can fix this?

As to the wiki article, it should be updated to reflect the actual situation i.e. some customers may experience delays over 24 hours if they are outside the US, as you have said.

Well, I think your client may not have an alternative except finding another web host.

Fortunately, this shouldn't have any impact on your own personal ability to host at Dreamhost or the ability of any of your other clients to do so.

Good luck!

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In reply to:

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They have now refused to host our site altogether, no explanation given. I would still like to work with DreamHost if we can, given that they have been recommended to us, so is there any way that we can fix this?

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From your prior posts, this is not too surprising; others' reports here seem to indicate that things are *usually* approved rather quickly, or not at all. Your situation doesn't sound encouraging, from what you have posted .....

You might start by double-checking with your client as to whether or not there were any discrepancies in the information they provided to DreamHost at sign-up. Others have reported that things like false addresses, phone numbers, etc. have caused problems in the past; DreamHost does not host "anonymous" clients, and requires "real" information to create an account *in addition* to "payment".

At any rate, there is nothing that any of us here in the forums can do to help you; you should discuss the matter directly with DreamHost.

In reply to:

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As to the wiki article, it should be updated to reflect the actual situation i.e. some customers may experience delays over 24 hours if they are outside the US ...

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Actually, the wiki article I assume you are referring to says:

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Your account will then be set up automatically, or may be held for review and may be approved within 24 non-holiday business hours if there are payment issues.

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Note that it says
"may be approved within 24 non holiday hours", not *will* be approved.

As we don't know what the circumstances are that resulted in DreamHost declining to host your client, I don't know how the article could/should be modified.

--rlparker

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From your prior posts, this is not too surprising; others' reports here seem to indicate that things are *usually* approved rather quickly, or not at all. Your situation doesn't sound encouraging, from what you have posted .....

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Well, I signed up a little over a year ago and it also took them quite a while, nearly a week, to get my account approved. So long waiting time don't seem to mean anything really.

Jan

In reply to:

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it also took them quite a while, nearly a week, to get my account approved. So long waiting time don't seem to mean anything really.

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That's a good point! I remember that it took them quite a while to get your account set up.

--rlparker

Following discussions with DreamHost support, this has now been sorted out and we now have an account. I am now setting up the site. Thanks for your help.

Good deal! I'm glad you have gotten things resolved and can get on with building your site!

--rlparker

Yay! Congratulations!

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