If you were a large company that subsists on customers paying monthly or yearly subscription fees, what's the worst possible thing you could do? While a number of things come to mind, automatically billing customers for a year in advance by mistake has to come in at the top. Now, how about when you're a hosting company that has a reputation for being a little too casual, a little bit unprofessional?

Yikes.

Today is not a good day for DreamHost.

Last night a mistake was made that caused virtually every single DreamHost customer to be billed for a full year of hosting up until December 2008. This caused automated charges to be processed against these customer's credit card or other accounts from a few hundred dollars, to literally thousands of dollars. By their own admission, this was a $7.5M mistake. Seven and a half million dollars.

Calling that a mistake is an understatement. The right term starts with the word "cluster" and ends with something that's not printable here.

Given that DreamHost has a bit of a PR issue in that their cool and casual reputation is starting to look a little juvenile and irresponsible, how would you expect them to respond? Probably not with "Um, whoops," but that's exactly what they responded with.

Double Yikes.

DreamHost, it's time to grow up. The cool kid or class clown loses his charm when it becomes clear he's just a screwup.

Whenever you go to purchase something online, do you pause when you come across a field for a coupon code or promo code, and think "I need to find one!". Us too. Well, it turns out that if you're going to sign up for a hosting account with Dreamhost, it's really, really easy to find a promo code just by doing a quick search. There actually seems to be millions of them!

It turns out that any Dreamhost customer can create their own promo code to help sign up new customers, and receive a kickback. It all seems too good to be true, but there's a perfectly reasonable explanation behind it. So if you're in the market for some web hosting, and you're planning on using Dreamhost, make sure to read this article at Hosting Fu explaining Dreamhost's promo code scheme first.

I've been a user of Gmail since late 2005 and have loved just about every minute of it. The revolutionary webmail interface, the vast popularity among power users and plethora of scripts, add-ons and doodads - but the one thing that always bothered me was the loss of integration with the rest of my computing. Sure, there are some great tricks and bookmarklets we found for our Top 10 Gmail tips and hacks post, but I've missed real integration with Mac OS X apps like iSale that can show me emails related to an auction I created with it, iPhoto that can compress copies of 20 images and attach them to a new message and even simply double-clicking a .VCF I've downloaded to quickly add it to Address Book and keep on working. Heck, toss in a dash of Automator and I really find myself longing for a desktop email client and the synchronized wonders of IMAP.

Thus began my journey to figure out some sort of a hack or workaround for using Gmail over IMAP with my preferred and well-integrated desktop email client, Apple Mail. It wasn't too difficult, but the setup requires your own web host who offers IMAP email that can scale up to around 2GB or more (for example: I already pay for hosting at DreamHost which offers IMAP with every account, but some companies offer free IMAP, and other hosting companies offer flexible solutions as well) and a little bit of incoming/outgoing server trickery. Another necessity is some sort of tool or plug-in to enable one of Gmail's most well-known features: tagging, otherwise known as labels. While Thunderbird is probably the first fairly mainstream email client to do tagging out of the box, it drops the ball on my need for integration; it doesn't support Apple's built-in Address Book (which so many other apps do), and it doesn't plug into all the other handy tools that allow so many of Mac OS X's 3rd party apps move data from one to another so effortlessly. For what it's worth, I also found a plug-in for Outlook on Windows called Taglocity that should get the job done, though I can't test it because I don't own Office. That said, all my setup instructions are written using Apple Mail, but you should be able to apply them to any IMAP-capable desktop email client and tagging plug-ins you find. As a bonus, this trick will also work for mobile devices that support IMAP, including Windows Mobile, BlackBerries and, of course, your shiny new iPhone. Following is my 7-step trick for using Gmail over IMAP, leveraging the power of desktop software while bringing the innovation of Gmail's tagging and conversations along for the ride.

Host to many, many a website, DreamHost decided it was time to bring some new hotness to their web admin control panel. Gone are the dark blue roll-out headers in favor of a much lighter AJAX + full CSS design, with subtle gradients and even a pseudo-tag area under the Home > Overview section (we only rank it as 'pseudo' due to its tag-like appearance, but rightful lack of actual tagging features). Some may question why such a robust new system is necessary for a bunch of web admin nerds, but we say bring on the well-designed, über-functional CP any day.

A post at the DreamHost blog explains all that is new about the redesigned CP, and hints that some truly new features are still to come.