Another disabled account

Okay, I realize rules are rules, and I'm not complaining about that. In my case the company I work for had invalid charges on their credit card, got them charged back, and accidentally included the DreamHost charge in that. DreamHost's policy is to freeze the account of any customer who gets a charge back. Fair enough. The problem is the tone they take, the way they respond, and the inability to get any complications resolved.

In addition to being accused by a DreamHost staff of committing fraud because I'm the one who registered the site, our company now has no email. We rely on email, just like most people. And DreamHost is not bothering to respond to my emails to their support that we need it up again NOW and that we sent them payment overnight express and faxed them a copy of the payment (because now they won't take any credit card from us and yet they also refuse to speak to the owner of our company and/or the credit card company -- which has been informed already to reinstate auto-deduction for DreamHost -- to clear up the fact that the charge to DreamHost WAS NOT FRAUD).

In addition to not being able to get a hold of anyone at DreamHost by phone (because they apparently don't have a phone or just don't want customers to be able to talk to them), they claim they only have mail delivered to them twice a week. So the overnight payment we sent? Probably not going to be registered for a while. In the meantime our email is completely out. All of our customers and distributors and suppliers trying to get in touch with us via email cannot. Which screws us.

I keep waiting for any kind of response to my tickets so that we can find some kind of solution.

I can't get a damned human being at DreamHost to do anything about it, no matter what kind of backflips I do. And I'm willing to do just about anything to get our email back up.

While I understand DH's initial policy, their customer service has proven to be the most ridiculous I've ever encountered. If I cannot pay by credit card and my only choices are to mail payment, then for Pete's sake they should check their mail more than twice a week. ANY business on earth, in ANY industry you can think of should do that.

There is absolutely no way of resolving an emergency problem in a timely fashion with DreamHost, at least if their lack of response to my problem is any indicator.

Even though this was obviously your fault, dreamhost should not disable accounts without warning. Every other host that I've been with would send several emails before disabling an account.

Dreamhost doesn't really think about the fact that many businesses are entirely run on their servers. Downtime for a business can mean many dollars lost!

Maybe Dreamhost isn't the place to host business accounts.

I would suggest that you host your email elsewhere (I do). You could use Google Apps for your Domain, which is nicely integrated into Dreamhost.

Thanks for the reply. I will definitely look to implement Google Apps as soon as I can. Additionally they did send me a notice, but didn't give me a timeframe, only an ultimatum on sending payment. Which we've done.

Unfortunately a day and a half after the notice, which I responded to asking about payment options, the service went off. And now no one's answering.

And yes, I do realize that it was our fault that this mess started. Still, my complaint lies with the fact that I seem to have no way to resolve it since I can't actually communicate with anyone at DreamHost.

I'd be pretty peeved if I was DreamHost and a customer "accidentally" (carelessly is a better word) initiated a charge back. That costs DreamHost money, and at this point, they don't mind losing you as a customer.

Really, if you're going to be declaring fraudulent charges, you should be careful of whom you accuse of fraudulently charging you.

At this point, you should quickly set up hosting elsewhere so you can get your email up and running again.

-Scott

You may have tried this already, but try sending another support request.

One time I sent a support request that was not answered for three days. I sent another one, and it was immediately answered. They said that the first request was not answered because it had automatically been assigned to a Tech who was on vacation.

So I imagine that these support requests automatically get assigned to specific people, and it's possible that one person is faster to respond then another.

I understand being peeved. I really do. But it was in fact a mistake, which does happen occasionally. It was not carelesslessness, as we informed the credit card company which charges to charge back and this one was one we specifically asked not to be added to the list. It was a mistake. One for which we take full responsibility.

That said, I expressed that we'd be more than happy to pay whatever fees there might be. In point of fact, they are already charging us whatever they were penalized. And we already sent payment on that. I'm not exactly sure what else we can do to make up for the mistake at this point.

Frankly, if they really don't mind losing us as a customer without even allowing us to try to resolve the problem then they're not much of a company, are they?

In reply to:

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That costs DreamHost money, and at this point, they don't mind losing you as a customer.

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I dunno if this is also what you have in mind, but the blood-sucking credit card companies also take chargebacks into account in determining merchant fees.

So chargebacks don't only cost on a single-payment basis, but are contributory to percentage fees on all credit card revenue.

BTW, to the OP, this means that your offer to pay "any fees" might include the marginal contribution your chargeback might have to which merchant fee tier Dreamhost ends up in this year. As you can imagine, this could be hundreds or thousands of dollars.

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Post deleted by michael

I suspect it's because your site not only has lots of connections, but that given your bandwidth usage, that a lot of these connections are very long ones downloading lots of data.

Too many of these and you'll impact server performance for everyone else on the server.

BTW, congratulations on a very popular site. I hope you're able to monetize your 30 connections per second to pay for a dedicated server that can support your level of traffic.

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