Way to go LP! Taking that High Road, eh? Right. Acting as expected is more what I’d call it albeit, not totally “unexpected” considering the type of class act that you have going over there.

Here are the pertinent links:

DreamHost’s Blog: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/15/um-whoops/

LP’s Blog (gag): http://blog.lunarpages.com/2008/01/15/dreamhost-robbing-their-customers/

You’ll notice that LP’s comment is close to the top of DreamHost’s post. This Tiara made darn sure she got her (LP’s) stab in early. Not to mention that the title of LP’s post concerning the sad error at DreamHost is somewhat “accusatory” in nature. I don’t know that I’d post publicly a statement like that. That might be grounds for DreamHost to consult legal council. But then they’d be faced with that fantastic legal team that LP has. Oooh!

There does seem to be one bright individual in all of this mess though: HostGator’s response to this on WebHostingTalk.com was admirable. They seem to know how to take the high road in all of this without beating DreamHost down any further nor tempting their customers away with offers of their own. Their post on this topic is here: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=4906999&postcount=20

Like I said: Class act.

Lunarpages has silently added a new 404 File Not Found page to all customer accounts. The page displays the domain name of the account holder, a search box which returns sponsored ad results and a number of links (dating, mortgage, ringtones, etc.) to…

Well, I’m glad you are a fan of the company you work for. Several employees were customers before they got jobs working for LP, and continued to be customers even after leaving voluntarily. So, sure some might have been “former employees”, but that misses the point.

I was never an employee and actually turned down a Mod position on the forums because I wanted to retain the right to call LP when they messed up on things. In this case, they definitely messed up big time. The majority of complaints I’ve seen are from customers who (as far as I know) were never employees of LP.

As for the so called “test”, this is something they put in place with NO announcement to any customer. I think it was a “test” in the sense that they wanted to see if anyone noticed and/or complained. And boy did they get an answer to that one. There has still never been an official posting regarding this “test”. The closest thing that I’ve seen were posts in the threads that have been removed from public viewing where they stated it was to help fund the free educational websites. This didn’t appear until all hell had already broken loose and word was spreading around the internet about it like crazy. LP’s solution? Move threads out of public view, ban users from the forum for discussing it, etc. Then, almost a week later, they apparently send out an INTERNAL memo saying that it was just a test and they wouldn’t be implementing it.

Well, why not post that to the forums? Oh that’s right, how can they announce that a “test” involving customer sites has ended when they never announced the test in the first place? All this would do is stir up more problems with people who never knew about the problem to begin with. My guess is that a lot of LP customers still don’t know that this happened, even though they were directly impacted by it.

And I still don’t think LP realizes the degree to which they have harmed their relationship with existing customers over this. I used to trust that LP had the best interest of its customers in mind when making decisions, but this shows that I was obviously wrong about that. I don’t fault LP for technical issues that come up beyond their control and always felt they provided a reasonably good service. In many ways, I still think they provide a good service. The problem is that I can’t trust them any more when it comes to policy and TOS changes that might not be in my best interest. I don’t want to wake up one day to discover they’ve changed their TOS in a manner that has an even greater negative impact on my site/domain than this did. And, if I can’t trust them in that area, I begin to loose trust in other areas as well.

To your credit though, at least you were honest in admitting you were an employee before posting the nonsense that you did…