By now you've probably read a thing or two about the typing error at DreamHost that caused the company to accidentally bill customers for roughly $7.5 million earlier this week.

DreamHost, characteristically, was quick to own up to the mistake, and let customers know what happened, through its blog. Of course, with a mistake of this magnitude there's really no alternative to the honest-apology approach. I can only imagine that trying to keep something like this from getting out would at best cost the company its customers' trust, and at worst make the whole incident indistinguishable from credit card fraud.

But I wonder how much damage DreamHost might have done to its reputation with this particular gaffe, and more specifically with the form and tone of its apology.

This is particularly interesting to me because of DreamHost's successful past work in the areas of apologies and their tones. I've held up DreamHost in the past as an example of how to go about apologizing for mistakes. After a 2005 outage, it was precisely the way the company blogged about the outage that earned it, in many cases, the appreciation and respect of its customers.

(We ran a story about that situation and its outcome here)

This time, though, the company might have taken the wrong tone in its apology.

It's a tricky thing, being glib. Particularly in the context of an apology. And there's a world of difference between informal/forthright, and jokey and (as I've seen it described in several places) condescending.

Specifically (and I'll keep this brief, since this point has already been made elsewhere) the offenses here are: the title "Um, Whoops" and tone ("Ha, the joke is on you! I guess. Um, okay, no, not really, I'm sorry."), as well as the picture of Homer Simpson accompanying the post seem destined to be taken badly by customers who are understandably upset to find their bank accounts missing considerable sums of money.

This time, it seems, DreamHost's personal and transparent mode of interacting with customers appears to have misfired.

Customer reaction, even the reaction revealed in the blog's comment section, served to illustrate the affection DreamHost's customers had for the company and its methods following its previous problems. The more than 600 comments on Monday's apology post paint a different picture. While not every comment is negative, and certainly some are supportive and appreciative, the usual DreamHost feel-good atmosphere is decidedly absent. And a good portion of the posts are of the "Jokes are NOT APPROPRIATE in this situation" variety.

It remains to be seen just how significant the impact of this error is on DreamHost's business, and how many of its customers actually set off in search of another service provider. But it's certainly a change for me to be pointing out DreamHost as an example of a company doing a bad job of handling a volatile situation.

I can't even think, off the top of my head, of who I'm going to use next time I need an example of "here's how you should have done it" from a customer service standpoint. Will I really have to look outside the Web hosting business.

I hate to be glib myself, given the subject matter, but is it really that hard to get this right? Customers appreciate your candor. But they're not your buddies. Especially when you're messing with their money.

[Note: and here we're just talking about the effectiveness of the apology. Of course, there's the entirely separate issue of just how many major catastrophes necessitating large-scale public apologies are acceptable from a single service provider, and in what span of time.]

To someone who covers Web hosting news for a living, the of-the-minute issue of last week was the level of customer outrage stirring around the incidents at C I Host (a break-in and theft) and NaviSite (a week-long server outage).

Though the incidents themselves were very different, their impact on each company's relationship with its customers was nearly identical - in a nutshell "my website is down and I want it back up."

Outrage is an interesting thing. It sometimes seems that a certain percentage of people are inclined to be outraged about just about anything. And I have no doubt that a certain percentage of the customers a Web host deals with in a given day is going to be angry, regardless of how good the company's service is.

This hardly falls into that category, however. In each of these cases, messageboards, blogs and - most interestingly, from a publishing-a-website perspective - the comment sections of the stories we've run on both issues have been spilling over with customers venting their frustration and recounting their own personal tales of lost service, lost business or unresponsive hosts.

And in both cases, the complaints seem to have a lot to do with the confusion surrounding the problems. Customers of both companies - in some cases, people whose sites had been offline for as much as a week - seem most concerned with the fact that they're not getting the kind of explanation they want from their service providers.

There are two sides to this kind of situation (or maybe there are more than two, but lets say for the sake of the next couple paragraphs that there are two).

On the one hand, obviously neither of these companies wanted their services to go down. Obviously, both companies want to get those customers back online as fast as possible. I can only imagine that in both cases, the company threw everything it had at the problem of getting things back online (we can probably all agree - priority number one for a Web host).

And yes, that's priority number one for customers too. But customers also want to know they're being treated honestly.

The other side of these situations is that hosts too often seem to want to cover up or downplay the mistakes they might have made. I wouldn't implicate any host in particular here. It seems that almost every time there's an outage, customers report having to fight to get the cause of the disruption out of their hosts. Sometimes they point to explanations they believe to be outright lies. Those claims may or may not be true, but they illustrate the point - confusion is a problem.

A major outage isn't exactly a find-the-silver-lining sort of situation. You'd probably spend a lot of time looking for it and not come up with much. But a problem is always, at least, an opportunity for a company to demonstrate to customers that it's ready to handle a problem.

In a conversation with theWHIR, C I Host's chief corporate counsel James Eckles said "we're just as victimized as our customers."

NaviSite's chief marketing officer Rathin Sinha said "If we look at this issue as something where unanticipated things happened and the company did everything it could to resolve that and restore services, I think that is where the focus ought to be. And that's where most of our customers focused."

Neither of these is an outright offensive point of view, or blatant buck-passing per se, but I'd bet neither one is exactly what their customers are waiting to hear.

A little free PR advice from somebody who sees a lot of PR: if it sounds like spin, it's not very good spin.

Better than any spin, in my opinion, is transparency.

A great example of that is the major outage DreamHost suffered about 16 months ago (you can read our article about it here). The company used its blog to keep customers appraised of the situation at every turn, and assure them that it was doing everything it could to fix things. It left posts and comments up, creating a forum for customers to discuss things. And it took responsibility for the mistake.

Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of customers who offered up opinions on the incident were understanding and even grateful.

At the time, Seth Godin summed it up really well by writing:

"Lesson one: when things get messed up, being clear, self-critical and apologetic is really the only way to deal with customers if you expect them to give you another chance."

It's important to understand that if you fail to deliver on your services, you could end up backing up your relationships with customers to the point where you're basically selling them on your services again. A good start would be giving them a reason to trust you.

This past Sunday and Monday, separate incidents at Rackspace caused significant outages. Now, Rackspace is quite a bit bigger than DreamHost, but it took much the same tack, keeping customers appraised of its repair process, and most importantly, remaining accountable.

In one of its posts (which are still up on the company's site), the company said another thing I'd like to borrow to help make my point:

"We cannot promise that hardware won't break, that software won't fail or that we will always be perfect. What we can promise is that if something goes wrong we will rise to the occasion, take action, resolve the issue and accept responsibility. If you are a Rackspace customer and don't think we've lived up to this promise at anytime during the outage, please let your Account Manager know."

I'm not really interested in making any distinctions between the quality of the services Rackspace provides and those provided by C I Host or NaviSite, or any other host for that matter.

But I do think that even though the company is living through a very comparable situation, I'd be surprised if Rackspace lost many customers over this outage.

With all these sinister forces out to undermine the security and stability of the Internet - or its democratic nature, or any of the other things that are apparently in constant jeopardy - it's comforting to know that just about every company doing business on the Internet is apparently determined to represent the best interests of the little guy.

It sometimes seems that every dispute in cyberspace becomes a fight for freedom, with both sides accusing the other of standing in the way of what's right. Sometimes that's warranted - say, in discussions of the Patriot Act, or Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

And sometimes it seems like that freedom stuff might just be the tiniest bit of a put-on.

A few weeks back, Go Daddy announced that its representatives were in Washington, campaigning for the accountability of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Most of Go Daddy's ICANN concerns relate to the group's deal with VeriSign for the management of the .com registry.

In its press release announcing the campaigning, Go Daddy included a quote from CEO Bob Parsons who said, among other things:

"Our legal team and Washington, DC representation are continuing to fight for the future of the Internet. We believe this is in the best interest of Go Daddy's customers and all Internet users."

Last week, Champ Mitchell, CEO of Network Solutions, another vocal opponent of the ICANN-VeriSign deal, submitted a letter (PDF) to the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, outlining what he sees as a threat to national security inherent to the deal as it stands now. The letter includes several frightening prophecies:

"The monopoly terms, unjustified price increases and lack of meaningful security requirements in the proposed .com agreement have real-world implications for the future security and stability of the Domain Name System."

VeriSign sent theWHIR its official comment on the views of both Parsons and Mitchell. I must admit I wasn't totally astonished when I discovered that opposition to the deal could be considered a threat to the security and stability of the Internet.

"This agreement was approved by ICANN because it strengthens the security and stability of the Internet. It has been well vetted, having gone through 2 public comment periods, 3 public ICANN meetings and 3 congressional hearings. Any delay at this point plays into the hands of a couple of registrars who place their own narrow financial interests above the security and stability of the Internet."

Ironically, while waving the "security and stability of the Internet" banner, the comment makes the very valid point that the other companies' concerns might be just the tiniest bit overblown.

This is not to suggest that any of these companies, or their representatives, is a liar, or a hysterical scaremonger. Far from it. They all have an obvious vested interest in the security and integrity of the Internet.

However, all the posturing does tend to gloss over the fact that these folks are all shrewd businesspeople. And I feel it's safe to say that Go Daddy's biggest concern about a .com price increase would have to do with its own bottom line. The same goes for Network Solutions. And for VeriSign.

And yes, I realize that "I'd prefer to make more money," is hardly a rallying cry that will swing public opinion in a company's favor. But I'm ever so slightly concerned that all this ostentatious posturing might make the real threats to the Internet's security and integrity that much more difficult to spot.