Yesterday I talked about the important personal finance lesson derived from Dreamhost’s accidental over billing of their customers. Today let’s look at the PR lesson.
Dreamhost addressed their colossal blunder with their usual tongue in cheek style, even though many of their customers were seriously hurt by the error. This wasn’t some simple downtime, large sums of money were lost resulting in overdraft fees and missed mortgage payments.
The nature of the billing error (”I hit the BILL ALL button twice! Oopsie!”) exposed Dreamhost as a bunch of incompetents. Eventually Dreamhost realized that this was not a situation to make light of, but by then the damage to their reputation had been done.
Compare that with the direct and professional way that 37signals and Fog Creek Software handled their recent outages.
I have been a satisfied customer of all three companies, but guess which one I will never recommend to anyone again.
