I read a lot of articles and blogs everyday using Google Reader. I had about 500 articles this morning, but this was definitely one of the more interesting ones. Dreamhost accidentally billed every single customer as if today was 12/31/2008 because somebody fat fingered the manual running of the automatic billing system. In all, customers were overcharged by $7,500,000 in just a few hours. Wow. Wrong button buddy. Sadly (to me at least), he blames the programmer for letting him make such a mistake. This is why client side validation is so important I guess and a few extra “Are you sure?” prompts can’t hurt. If nothing else, they are being transparent about the whole thing, which is good and more then I can say about some companies *cough* Prosper *cough*.

Not that I have room to talk. I’ve been known to shutdown an entire server room with one very well misplaced footstep behind the server cabinets. The still of the air and silence was deafening to say the least.

Update #1: Dreamhost obviously hasn’t learned their lesson on humility.
Photo courtesy of whitehouse.gov