By treating a recent billing cycle for DreamHost customers as if it ended in December 2008 rather than December 2007, the company billing clients for what may have been in excess of a collective $7.5 million dollars.

Jones explained in a DreamHost blog post how he manually ran the billing service for what he thought were dates last month. But in appending 2008 instead of 2007 to catch up on any missed billings, Jones nailed a swath of the firm’s customers.

Commentary at the status announcement of the problem ran the gamut of relief that the error was caught, to white-hot anger. Similar remarks appeared at Jones’ blog entry.

“A new service is running right now (in parallel on all the controllers) that fixes all those future charges, re-enables your account if it was erroneously suspended, and if your credit card was automatically rebilled, refunds the payment automatically. You don