Preserved Topic: Warning DreamHost Users

If you host your site with DreamHost, this may affect you.

I signed up in January of last year with their Sweet Dreams plan. As I remember it, the price at the time was $19.95/mo. if you signed up for a year, or $24.95/mo. if you went monthly. I went monthly.

Looking at the DreamHost plans today, I didn't see anything about the $24.95 price. So, I looked a little deeper. Turns out, it's $19.95 either way you go. I've been paying $24.95 this whole time.

I wrote DreamHost about it and got this reply:

quote:

---

You can upgrade your plan to the new Sweet dreams plan anytime through
our web panel. Just go into the billing tab and then Service subtab. From
there select the service you would like to upgrade, and there will be an
upgrade option for you to choose. You will then want to upgrade to the
new monthly sweet dreams plan. This will put you on the $19.95/month
price.

Anytime we change our service plans we send out e-mails regarding the
change, so that you have the option to change when you want to. If you
have any further questions for us, please let us know.

---

So, apparently, in order to get the new price, you have to "upgrade" to the same plan. If you've been paying the same thing for a while, I recommend you go have a look and see if you can save some money.

Additionally, I'd like to know if any of you remember an e-mail about a price drop. I searched the support history (which seems to include the newsletters), as well as the announcement list, for "19.95" and came up with zip. When I get home tonight, I'm going to search Outlook for any mention of this price drop.

If, in fact, there was no such announcement, do you think I have grounds for a refund of the price difference for as long as it's been in effect? Of course, I may not if there was any kind of "prices may change without notice" stipulation in the agreement.

If, however, there was an announcement about a price change, but they didn't say you had to "upgrade" for the change to take effect, then I'd say I do have grounds. That's why I'd like to find this mysterious announcement. If you have it, please let me know.

Either way, I advise any DreamHost user to review what he's paying.

It wouldn't hurt to ask for a refund. Seems kind of silly that you have to say taht you're switching plans, when in fact your are just doing the same one?? That doesn't make sense to me. Seems like they should have just sent you an email telling you that "Hey! You don't have to pay $24.95 anymore! We are going to change it to $19.95!"

I say do what you can to get a refund

Later,
C:\


~Binary is best~

you can look through the announcements area in the webpanel. Not too long ago they changed pricing and services to be more competitive with the Aletia/hostrocket type offerings and I believe at this time they altered their payments as well, the monthly became the same as the yearly but you would incur a setup fee is paying monthly that was waived if you paidd the year in advance.

They are extremely accomodating on billing errors and quick to fix them and refund if need be. Shoot them a nice email asking what the ? and I'm sure they'll work it out to your satisfaction.

They are running an upgrade (upgrades only, if you already have a sweet dreams or cdi plan) sale to the Code Warrior Plan this weekend only, 29.95/mo instead of 39.95,that's 120/year off. Heckuva deal, you can host 7 speerate domains fully, 35 users, 35 subdomains, 175 pop3 accts, 900mb storage. Snatch it up and host em all in the same spot with room to grow on.

Jason

Wes: I seem to recall the Doc a while back mentioning something about this (price changes) ... and obviously it can't hurt to do a bit of name dropping. <bg>

JK, that's the deal that got me looking at the whole thing. That's when I discovered I was paying too much for what I had.

I searched through my own e-mail and found nothing about a price change. If they sent anything, I've completely missed it. It's not in the support history or the announcements (that I can find).

I replied to their response telling them so and expressed my annoyance at having to go in and "change" my plan to the same plan to get the updated price. Makes me feel cheated, especially when I get all other benefits automatically.

We'll see what they have to say.

what do all the people have with dreamhost anyways?
i mean, they are kinda expensive, arent they?

I don't consider them expensive at all, especially for what you get. Plus, the control panel is the best I've ever seen and support is always quick to reply and usually very accommodating.

I've gone with cheaper that looked like it had just as much and gotten nothing but frustration.

Anyway, here's the reply I got:

quote:

---

I'm very sorry that you feel this way. Our prices are always very clearly
displayed on www.dreamhost.com. We also announced that plans were
upgraded on March 26th 2002. Though it didn't specifically point out a
price change it was an indicator of changes made.

I have gone ahead and downgraded your plan to the new price schedule.

I apologize for the inconvenience. If you need anything else just let us
know.

---

No rebate, but I don't think I'm gonna push it. It would have been nice if they had said the price had dropped for monthly users, but technically, I suppose they aren't obligated.

Ooh, sometimes these price thingies can be annoying. I lived for some time on an outdated plan that offered more for less money, that was cool till I upgraded again. You probably *could* throw a limited tantrum and get a rebate, but I understand if you decide not to (you only get a certain number of tantrums each month, read the TOS, I'm sure they must mention it in there somewhere. :-) I just upgraded my plan to level 3 myself, and 3 days later they offered aq special rate for people like me to upgrade (from my old plan to the new one I just paid for.) I'm debating whether to use one of my tantrums for this special rate, hrmph.

Did I mention I upgraded? I did! This means that I now have 450MB more storage space, so I can hold a (shitload) bunch more threads in here! The Asylum takes about 200MB as it stands right now, so you can do the math, good thing. Now that I've done this I expect I'll be free to upgrade my software to a PHP/MySQL solution too, yay! Still, that will have to wait, as some of you may have noticed, I've not been around much, I am *so* frigging busy!

Say, does anyone need or want a neat bit of code? I developed this neato-keen drag & drop module for a client. In order to cut the price down to a level where they could afford to hire me I did this as a piece of code that *I* own, rather than them. See http://mk.labs.tk/ for this code, if it looks interesting I'll bundle it up for you.

Hey, did I hijack this thread? Sorry Wes!

Your pal, -doc-

Hi there Doc

That was/is an extremly nice piece of coding!
I've done something similar for classification of uploaded images but that didn't work nearly as nice as this. I can directly see some use for this in sorting menues for instance and would love to test it.

/Dan


{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-

Hi Doc,

I'ld also like to comment on your nice pice of code!

I might use it for at least learning from it.

Wow Doc. you never stop amazing me with your code!

Only one thing (and I am sorry to mention this) it doesn't work in Moz 1.0

Later,
C:\


~Binary is best~