I must say, though, that my experience with Comcast in Atlanta has been nothing short of stellar. They installed service at my new apartment within a day, gave me a great deal, and I’m getting far more bandwidth than I was promised. No complaints so far, though I might have to send them a bill for the time it took me to read the email below.

Dear Sunil Garg,

Thank you for contacting Comcast Email Support. My name is [removed], I will be your Comcast representative that will assist you with your concern.

I understand Sunil that you need your Comcast login and account number information to access your Comcast online billing account at Comcast customerCentral. I can completely understand the importance of being able to access your Comcast.net account and be able to view and make payment online. I can only imagine the inconvenience that this log in failure had caused you and I know the importance of getting this resolved the soonest time.

I will be more than happy Sunil to provide you detailed information on how to retrieve your Comcast logins and rest assured that your Comcast user name and password concern will be taken care of.

Sunil, Comcast is now giving you the new customerCentral. the one place for you to pay your bill, manage your account settings, and get help and support for all Comcast products. You can easily access Comcast customerCentral from either Comcast.com or Comcast.net. But you need to use your Comcast User Name and Password to access the site.

I would be more than happy to assist you with this matter, however, for your security more account information is needed. You will need to chat with us to provide this information, and to get the assistance you need. I am sorry to say that we here in Email can not generate the password for your email account because there is a need to verify further your account information.

Asking for this account information is for your own protection and guards against someone changing your account information without your permission. This also helps our agents process your request quicker.

You may chat with one of our Online Customer Support Specialists 24 hour a day, 7 days a week at

http://www.comcastsupport.com/chat

Please have the following account information ready when you chat with us:

1. Account holder’s full name
2. Complete service address
3. Comcast Account Number
4. Last 4 digits of the Social Security Number, and
5. 4 digit security PIN (if you have Comcast phone number)

Thank you, I know your time is important. I am really sorry for all these troubles. If you need further assistance, please feel free to respond directly to this email. You can also call us at 1-800-266-2278 or chat with us at http://www.comcastsupport.com/cdvchat. We appreciate you taking the time to contact us.

Thank you for choosing Comcast as your provider. Comcast appreciates your business and values you as a customer. Our goal is to provide you with excellent service. It is with gratitude to have you as my customer on this email and I appreciate the opportunity you have given us today to resolve your issue. Enjoy the rest of your day, Sunil and take care.

Sincerely,

[name removed]
Comcast Customer Care Specialist

Unfortunately, because of the file server problems, in order to get your
sites back up, you will now need to REUPLOAD all your content. We are
still trying to recover the data from peeler, but at this point it looks
like that process may take a few days, if it is even possible at all.

So, while I’m somewhat at fault for not doing my own offsite backups, Dreamhost has tremendously failed by:

1. not maintaining their servers appropriately
2. not having redundant backups
3. not communicating with their customers in a timely manner (it took over 30 hours of downtime before I was sent an email)
4. expecting customers to keep local backups of all of their content
5. spending their energy promoting unlimited bandwidth and disk space to new customers instead of fixing the above issues

I can only hope that they will redeem themselves with some extraordinary customer support over the next few days. I can still say that Dreamhost has provided excellent service for the most part, but it’s the times like these that can make us forget about all of that in an instant.

For more information about this particular issue, see this post at the Dreamhost Status Blog.