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Video hosting

So I decided to sign up to a shared hosting plan with DreamHost. They seem to be well rated, but my experience so far has me scratching my head.

After hitting the 'submit' button after entering all the required payment and personal information the site redirected to my login dashboard, albeit with a banner at the top of the page reading:

This account was disabled March 25, 2022! Please contact us if you have any questions
Click to expand...

I have a log-in and can view all of my account settings and billing information, but I can't do anything else.

A minute or so later I received two emails simultaneously.

This:

This is an email receipt for your recent payment you just made to
DreamHost Web Hosting.

Time: 2022-03-25 08:37:52
Transaction ID: 27601781
Amount: $35.40 (USD)
Applied to Account #: 2647703
Pay Method: "******### (ex ##/##)"

Thank you for your payment! We appreciate your business!
The Happy DreamHost Billing Team
Click to expand...

All fine there, but then this:

Hello Glen,

Unfortunately, your DreamHost account has not been approved.
A full refund has been issued for your credit card payment and will appear on your card statement within a few business days.
We apologize that we weren't able to accept your business, and we wish you the best of luck in your search for a web host.

Thanks,

The DreamHost Approvals Team
Click to expand...

Hunh?
Must be a glitch I figured, so I clicked on "contact us" and submitted a ticket with technical support:

Message #: 10705205
Time: 2022-03-25 09:00:31
Hi,
I just signed up for my first (shared hosting) plan with you guys and immediately after payment I got this at the top of the screen:

"This account was disabled March 25, 2022! Please contact us if you have any questions"

I can't imagine why this should be the case. Is this a systems glitch?

Glen
Click to expand...

After a wait I received this:

Re: Unable to approve new account.

Message #: 210737313
Time: 2022-03-25 09:24:02
Hello,

Thank you for writing in. Unfortunately, your DreamHost account has not
been approved.

We are unable to provide specific details as to why the account could not
be approved as this would defeat the effectiveness of our abuse/fraud
prevention system.

After a review of the signup process for this account, I am seeing the
transaction was voided at signup, which means that your card was not
actually charged. There may be a charge appearing in your financial
statement, but the charge status should still indicate "Processing" and
it should resolve to "voided" or "denied" within a couple days.

We apologize that we weren't able to accept your business, and we wish
you the best of luck in your search for a web host.

Regards,
Joseph N
Click to expand...

Eh?

I quoted that response in full in another ticket beginning with:

Unable to approve new account.

Message #: 10705356
Time: 2022-03-25 09:51:55
I'm sorry but this is ridiculous. I have not committed any form of abuse or fraud and there is absolutely no legitimate reason why my business should be rejected.

Is a real person actually reading this or was the boilerplate reply below automatically generated by a bot?
Click to expand...

I've been tapping my fingers on the table for a while now and am not particularly confident that I am going to get any kind of productive response from these idiots.

I have a working log-in, but besides being able to edit my personal info and submit more support tickets, I cannot do anything else with it nor can I see a way of deleting my currently useless "membership" altogether.

Untitled.png

Perhaps my log-in will expire soon?

So now I'm left hanging, wondering if I should try to sign up with them a second time.

Has anyone else out there had a similar experience with these numpties or can offer a knowledgeable explanation as to why their system might have rejected my attempt to sign up?
 
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Just in:

Hello,

Thank you for your reply. Truly, I am sorry for any inconvenience. The
account was not approved.

My sincerest apologies that we were not able to accept your business. I
wish you the best of luck in your search for a web host.

Regards,
Joseph N
Click to expand...

Unreal!
 
I payed with a perfectly valid, current VISA card too and I have the highest credit rating attainable, so that can't be the reason.

I logged back in to my useless account and submitted another support ticket with some perfectly valid questions:

Unable to approve new account.

Message #: 10705985
Time: 2022-03-25 13:21:24

Have I now been blacklisted or am I free to make another attempt to sign up to a DreamHost plan?

If this account will not be approved then why do I still have a valid log-in and why am I able to keep logging in and submitting support tickets?

How long will my ability to log in to this account remain active and why isn't there any obvious way for me to delete it?


"Hello,
Thank you for your reply. Truly, I am sorry for any inconvenience. The
account was not approved.

My sincerest apologies that we were not able to accept your business. I
wish you the best of luck in your search for a web host.

Regards,
Joseph N"
Click to expand...

Lets see how this farce continues.
 
Maybe they didn't like your email address? Are you using protonmail or similar?

Even if they changed their minds, would you really want to go with them at this point? Support is one of the most important aspects in hosting. Not worth it if every encounter is frustrating.
 
My email ends with .on.net rather than .com. The only other thing I can think of is that the on-line form automatically filled my name in the "personal info" section from the data I gave for my CC details. However my name as stamped into my CC starts with my first and middle name initials, so I edited the "first name" box back to just my first name.

At this point I'm reasonably sure that I'd rather not be a DreamHost customer(!), but I might be able to wring a little entertainment value out of submitting a few more tickets to technical support.
 
GK2001 said:
Lets see how this farce continues.
Click to expand...

Got a reply:

"Hello,

Thank you for your reply. The abuse/fraud prevention system considers a
totality of factors involved in the signup process. The account is
created, which is why it is able to have a login and support contact,
however, the system disables the account which prevents pretty much every
other access to the account.

You are free to try the account sign-up again using a different email
address, but we are not able to guarantee that attempt will not be
approved either, my sincerest apologies for any inconvenience.

If you have any questions please reply to this message.

Regards,"
Click to expand...

So it now seems that I have been granted a perpetual account which I cannot delete and cannot do anything with except for using as a log-in for submitting tickets to technical support who will do absolutely nothing to help activate the account. As this account is associated with my email address (which I'm blocked from editing) I will need another email address if I am to attempt to sign up to any other plan in the future.

The "totality of factors" in the sign-up procedure which got me here involved my CC details, my name, email, phone number and address - all very basic, totally innocuous stuff.

I don't quite know what to say at this point.
 
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It sounds like their spammer detection is some "deep learning" crap that even they don't understand. It's pretty funny that they actually encourage you to try again.
 
When a company has security that blocks you instead, a real customer and paying one at that, that's pretty much a deal breaker. You might be able to charge back if they don't immediately fix it. (Edit, and yes, they are refunding you already!)
 
Well that is interesting. I have always been extremely pleased with Dreamhost. Been using them for oh... At least a decade, probably longer.
 
Yea, you're in some kind of fraud check black hole. They will never explain it to you, they will never talk to you. They don't trust you, so they're not going to listen to you.

You can certainly try with another email address, perhaps they got spammed/scammed/slammed by others using "on.net" and have dumped the domain entirely.

But they won't tell you that either.
 
I wouldn't have picked Internode (my email account provider) as a particularly nefarious domain: https://www.internode.on.net/

For good reasons I like to keep my website domain registration and hosting with separate entities. In the DreamHost sign-up process I had to enter my http domain. I was hoping to make use of DreamHosts free SSL certificate offer to finally upgrade to https. I wonder if they didn't like being linked to an "insecure" domain? Honestly my website has only ever been plain text and graphics and embedded youtube videos and nothing more so I've never bothered, though https is still useful to score higher in search engine rankings I suppose.

Anyway, all of this is academic now because I'm not interested in maintaining another email account and I think I'd almost rather stick a cactus up my butt than attempt another signup with DreamHost.

--------------------------------------

Back to the topic of video hosting - I have since completely abandoned the idea of avoiding the use of an external video host for any of my videos due to both the crap performance of HTML video and the woeful lack of consistency in support across browsers.
 
I have most of my DNS on gadaddy and the sites themselves on dreamhost, or the reverse. I agree with you vis a vis spreading things around so that one bad actor can't cancel all your stuff all at once. I don't know about account creation, but all you have to do is tell your registrar to use dreamhost's DNS and everything magically works.

This is rather concerning though. I shall have to look into these things further.........
 
Trying to do anything on the WWW these days is like taking part in a virtual reality adaptation of Kafka's "The Trial"
 
Yeah, it looks like I can get an SSL certificate for next to nothing from my domain provider too.

Amateur web page developer question: how fastidious should I be in changing the page and file links throughout all of my HTML from http to https?
 
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