We had a teensy eensy weensy little billing error last night… my first clue something was up when I saw this morning’s daily billing report (so far): $7,500,000.

It turns out due to my excessively fat fingers, nearly every one of our customers has been seriously over-billed in the last 12 hours.

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The end to this story is that of course, I’m very very sorry, we’re very very sorry, and I’m sure you’re very very sorry this happened. I really am. I understand the sort of problems that an unexpected large charge to your credit card (or worse yet, your debit card) can cause. If the tone of this blog post seemed a little light, I apologize I don’t mean to offend and I realize how serious an issue this is. I’ve been up since 3:50am trying to undo the damage and maybe I’m a little shell-shocked.

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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.

Source: dreamhoststatus.com and blog.dreamhost.com

The email sent to Zoso.ro’s owner from DreamHost states that the Google bot’s activity on Zoso.ro’s sites was creating a heavy load on the DreamHost Web server. DreamHost says that this surge in traffic was affecting its other customers on Zoso.ro’s shared server.

The email proceeded to notify Zoso.ro’s owner that “in order to maintain stability on the Web server”, DreamHost was “forced to block Google bot via the .htaccess file.” The Web host then suggested to Zoso.ro’s owner that he make files unsearchable by robots and crawlers, since this usually adds to a greater number of hits.

DreamHost says it hosts more than 500,000 domains, which it doesn’t explicitly identify as parked domains, but which may very likely be the case.