Moustache

How (and how not) to handle a customer service snafu

I had two separate technical issues this week with web hosts. The first was with Dreamhost, who hosts this blog. They accidentally billed their customers for almost $10 million in extra hosting fees this week. The people who weren't successfully charged had their accounts and websites disabled. It was a pretty big deal. How did they notify people that they totally screwed up? With this joking blog post. That is their normal tone, and it's ok when they do something simple like erase your server accidentally (which has happened to me with them) or oversell their hosting capacity, causing awful performance (constantly happens). But when they try and charge their entire customer base for a whole year's worth of hosting at once? Not really the time for jokes.

Compare that to technical issue number two this week: Intermittent down time this weekend for Tumblr, the awesome blogging service I'm totally in love with. They had trouble because their big hosting provider went down. Even though it wasn't Tumblr's fault at all, they (and by they I mean he, it's basically a one man show) issued this straightforward, sincere apology and even released a new feature as compensation.

I guess it isn't too hard to tell who I am happier with right now.

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Posted by Mark Allen on Monday, January 21, 2008 Comments (9)

9 Comments »

  1. I totally agree about how Dreamhost handled that situation... I am one who was also (and still is being) effected by it.

    Comment by Jesse — January 21, 2008 @ 10:40 pm

  2. [...] Moustache wrote an interesting post today on How (and how not) to handle a customer service snafuHere’s a quick excerpt I had two separate technical issues this week with web hosts. The first was with Dreamhost, who (for now) hosts this blog. They accidentally billed their customers for almost $10 million in extra hosting fees this week. The people who weren’t successfully charged had their accounts (and websites) disabled. It was a pretty big deal. How did they notify people that they totally screwed up? With this joking blog post. That is their normal tone, and it’s ok when they do something simple like erase [...]

    Pingback by Web Hosting » Blog Archive » How (and how not) to handle a customer service snafu — January 21, 2008 @ 10:54 pm

  3. Haha, Love Dreamhost.
    I think it was hilarous!

    Comment by yeaj — January 21, 2008 @ 11:00 pm

  4. I love Tumblr too. I even took a screenshot of the apology at top of my dashboard and filed it as excellence.bmp

    and I give some noise about the event on newsvine.

    http://jansegers.newsvine.com/_news/2008/01/22/1245806-excellence

    Comment by jansegers — January 22, 2008 @ 7:19 am

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  9. Hi,
    Amazing post. I like both Dreamhost and Tumblr.

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