Well this was interesting to find out about today. DreamHost appears to have accidentally billed all customers a full year in advance. I can only imagine how stressed out their customers’ got when they received these emails.

Some customers will billed in excess of $400! Here’s what DreamHost had to say about it:

Scripts are still running to correct the original problem. Last night, this guy ran a standard billing cycle to clean up stragglers from 2007. Unfortunately, the biller was run for 2008 (December 31st, 2008 to be exact). This caused everyone to be billed as if today was 2008-12-31, wreaking the havoc that we are so sorry you had to be put through.

We’re going through and fixing everything right now, but it may take several hours before all affected accounts are corrected. You will receive an email when yours is fixed, and if your credit card was charged, the charge will be refunded automatically.

We’re very very very sorry about this!

The unfortunate part is the fact that customers were actually charged for this billing blunder. If people provided DreamHost with their PayPal or debit card which pulls directly from their banking accounts, this will be an absolute nightmare including, but not limited to, bounced checks, under $xxx.xx fees, and overdraft fees.

The part I didn’t like about DreamHost’s message is:

Also, you needn’t contact us or your credit card company/bank about this.. we’re fixing it right as you read this (and maybe already have for your account)! The best move for you is to just sit back and pretend you never got those weird billing email(s) talking about owing lots of money!

This post will be marked as resolved once (we believe) we’ve fixed everybody’s account.

Once again, we are all *extremely* sorry for the mishap. Thank you for your continued patience while we clean up our mess.

Insane. Your customers’ can’t ignore this if they got charged! I do hope DreamHost will credit people’s banking fees.