I don’t usually like pointing the finger, but DreamHost‘s general way of conducting business is gently swaying from jovial to unprofessional. I previously wrote a post, ‘Honest practice‘ talking primarily about how a number of web hosting companies advertise a certain price, when the actual cost is somewhat different. I used DreamHost as an example.

DreamHost doesn’t take itself too seriously, a lot of their marketing and pitching takes advantage of comedy. Which is great. The issue is, when problems occur, customers begin to feel as if they aren’t being taken seriously.

On Monday DreamHost posted a customer’s voicemail message. The clip features a DreamHost customer weeping over a stolen domain name and pleading for help. I listened to the clip for a few seconds before switching off. Liam Eagle at the WHIR deliberated over the post,

“But it would be tough to argue that the purpose of the post is really anything other than to laugh at the expense of the customer leaving the message. In case you don’t feel like downloading it and listening, it’s a two-minute clip of a man who sounds very timid and very upset begging for their help. It seems like the last minute is just the man gently sobbing. That’s just my guess, because after 15 seconds I couldn’t take any more.”

It just shows a complete lack of respect for their customers. Brett assured readers that they sent him a ‘huge bouquet of flowers’. Is this to console him regarding the stolen domain or his personal humiliation? The actions of a company that generated revenue of $13.1 million in 2006.

One commenter stated,

“It’s spectacularly bad form to post this.
And then you say you sent him flowers? Yikes.
I’m a DH customer of many years. And now so embarrassed that I recommended DH to my colleagues and friends.
What were you thinking?”

Another,

“Let me get this straight… Your customer support is horrible, so to “make up for it” you expose your customers to ridicule?”

Liam Eagle concludes,

“I have to imagine most hosting companies would avoid doing something like this. I don’t get the sense that this is a calculated move by DreamHost to appear “irreverent.” So it does add to the genuine feel of that approachability that characterizes the company. However, it might also make them seem a little less like the kind of company you’d want to approach.”

We regret to announce that from today, our 45-day unconditional money back guarantee will be no more. Fortunately we’ll be introducing a brand spanking new 60-day unconditional money back guarantee. Why? Because we’re so darn sure that you’ll love our service. We wanted to make the decision even easier by giving you 15 further reasons to signup.

We’re celebrating with a promotion, enter coupon code 45TO60 at checkout and receive 25% off your initial order at PinchHost. The coupon expires 30th April 2009.

The first month since PinchHost opened its doors to… well… YOU is sadly over. But what a month! A relatively pain free month, which is unquestionably what you’d like to hear from a web host.

Let me start off by saying, all our clients have been amazing! We’d love to share with you some of the comments made. Cindy, (blogging at PouBou since 2003!) wrote a post regarding her move to PinchHost, the quoted text below describes Cindy’s situation, specifically at the moment in time when her previous host unintentionally wiped her content,

“I threw a temporary WordPress blog here that you might’ve seen if you happened to click over here. On it, I mentioned that my last manual backup of my website was from May 2008, hence my panic. (So all the entries about selling our house, moving to North Carolina, the holidays, Catie’s 2nd birthday? GONE.) Then the tech from PinchHost – the same guy who responded to me on Twitter – left me a comment telling me that he had gone through Google’s cache of my archives and found about 100 entries from May 2008 to now, and saved them to a zip file for me to download.”

This also slots nicely into our ‘extra mile’ focus. We’ve really gone the extra mile for customers and non-customers alike. Last week we helped a University student solve a problem (PHP) with their Computing work. We were even contacted by a competing web hosting company regarding country-based (IP) redirection and happily passed on our methods. Clearly, we’re still young and eventually we won’t be able to allocate resources to quite so extraneous requests from non-customers, but take advantage, we’re not planning on stopping anytime soon.

Another user made this comment through Twitter,

“PinchHost has just set up 5 domains for me and is uploading themes now brilliant service.”

We’ve also managed to pickup a page rank 4, three weeks after launch. There shouldn’t be too much emphasise on page rank, but it surpassed of our initial target, equalling that of web hosts online for a number of years. Which is a great moral boost. Wikipedia definition,

“PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.”

In terms of support methods, ticket support has been used primarily, due to its prominence on the site. Telephone support has also been great, we haven’t left a call waiting for longer than 10 seconds! We’ll be updating the support section of the site in the near future to better present all of our support methods.

Twitter has been brilliant, we’ve picked up thousands of followers, admittedly not all of which we know intimately. We see Twitter as a great way to increase exposure and communicate with our customers and non-customers alike.

Our affiliate program, although quite hidden has received some attention from external web hosting related websites, no reports of any issues with the affiliate system, it seems to be running smoothly.

In summary, an excellent first month, thanks to all of our customers, affiliate members, followers plus all those who’ve been in contact with us!