I GUESS I'M NEVER PAYING DREAMHOST BACK
       
       2025-11-18
       
       About twenty years ago, after a a tumultuous life, Big.McLargeHuge - the
       shared server of several other Abnibbers and I - finally and fatally kicked
       the bucket. I spun up its replacement, New.McLargeHuge, on hosting company
       DreamHost, and this blog (and many other sites) moved over to it (At about the
       same time I moved Three Rings over from its previous host, Easily, to
       DreamHost too, in order to minimise the number of systems I had to keep an eye
       on. Oh, how different things are now, when I've got servers and domain
       registrations and DNS providers all over the damn place!).
       
 (IMG) Screenshot of a web page listing domain names hosted on big.mclargehuge.
       
       I only stayed with DreamHost for a few years before switching to Bytemark,
       with whom I was a loyal customer right up until a few years ago (Bytemark have
       rapidly gone downhill since their acquisition by Iomart a while back, IMHO.),
       but in that time I took advantage of DreamHost's "Refer & Earn" program, which
       allowed me to create referral codes that, if redeemed by others who went on to
       become paying customers, would siphon off a fraction of the profits as a
       "kickback" against my server bills. Neat! (Nowadays, this blog (and several of
       my other projects) is hosted by Linode, whose acquisition by Akamai seems not
       to have caused any problems with, so that's fab.)
       
 (IMG) Invoice from DreamHost to Dan Q dated 30 June 2007, showing an annual renewal of New.McLargeHuge for $239.40 partially-offset by six referral payments for $0.99 each.
       
       A year or so after I switched to ByteMark, DreamHost decided I owed them
       money: probably because of a "quirk" in their systems. I disagreed with their
       analysis, so I ignored their request. They "suspended" my account (which I
       wasn't using anyway), and that was the end of it.
       Right?
       But the referral fees continued to trickle in. For the last seventeen years,
       I've received a monthly email advising me that my account had been credited,
       off the back of a referral.
       
 (IMG) Collection of monthly emails from DreamHost advising of referral rewards of between $2.40 and $5.16.
       
       About once a year I log in and check the balance. I was quite excited to
       discover that, at current rates, they'd consider me "paid-up" for my (alleged)
       debt by around Spring 2026!
       I had this whole plan that I'd write a blog post about it when the time came.
       It could've been funny!
       But it's not to be: DreamHost emailed me last night to tell me that they're
       killing their "Refer & Earn" program; replacing it with something
       different-but-incompatible (social media's already having a grumble about
       this, I gather).
       So I guess this is the only blog post you'll get about "that time DreamHost
       decided I owed them money and I opted to pay them back in my referral fees
       over the course of eighteen years".
       No big loss.
       
       LINKS
       
 (HTM) One of the first times Big.McLargeHuge broke under my watch
 (HTM) Another time Big.McLargeHuge broke under my watch
 (HTM) Abnib - a community of folks who used to live in Aberystwyth and are still friends
 (HTM) My blog post about Big.McLargeHuge's eventual death
 (HTM) DreamHost
 (HTM) Three Rings
 (HTM) Bytemark
 (HTM) Iomart
 (HTM) Linode
 (HTM) News article about making a mistake 15+ years ago that resulted in them deciding some customers owed them money, which might explain my situation with them