In case you missed it, Dreamhost, the shared hosting provider, mistakenly charged its customers nearly 7.5 million dollars on January 15th, 2008.

Well, I was one of those customers. I’ve had my Dreamhost account for years now, and they’ve always been swell for me, performance issues aside. I didn’t gripe about it because I was only charged around $52 on my credit card, not $200+ like some folks.

Anyways, after a few weeks, Dreamhost’s refund appeared on my credit card statement. Unfortunately, there were a few inconsistencies.

Here’s the mistaken charges (2 of them) appearing on January 17th, followed by a single credit four days later. Notice the amount – it’s a full dollar less.

Then on January 31st, a final credit, presumably for the 2nd mistaken charge, is over two dollars short:

I’m going to assume that Dreamhost knows what it’s doing, and has attempted to refund me the proper amount—in USD. But the Canadian dollar has been fluctuating, such that the exchange rate has shifted by 3 cents between January 15th and the 31st. The numbers don’t work out perfectly (I don’t know what my credit card charged me for the exchange, nor do I know the exact moment the charges/debits went through), but they’re somewhat in line.

Long story short, so we’re only talking a couple of bucks, and I’m not too bothered by it. But at the same time, it kind of stinks to be out $3 because of somebody’s “fat finger”.

Anyways, I’m sending an e-mail to Dreamhost and hopefully they’ll sort it out.

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve made the switch from shared hosting to my own virtual private server running Ubuntu Linux, courtesy of the folks at Slicehost. Dreamhost has been good to me, but I’ve reached the point where I want complete control over my production machine, not to mention better performance. I’m now serving benlog using a simple Lighttpd + Mongrel server combination I put together last night, and the difference is night and day.