Sixteen BILLION Gigabytes

Today I found this message in my inbox:

Hello Pig Monkey, This is just to let you know that per your request, we have now "throttled" your domain pig-monkey.com. You requested to have your domain "throttled" when its usage for this billing cycle was about to reach 40 GB. Since you have used 16211826332 GB in the first 27 days of this cycle, it follows that most likely you would exceed your limit within one day. Therefore, we've now "throttled" your domain! What that means is now instead of showing the regular contents of your web directory, pig-monkey.com is now showing the contents of "your web directory.throttled" (that is, your regular web directory, but with ".throttled" at the end). You should put up a very small page there explaining to your site visitors that you've temporarily closed your site to save on bandwidth. You may want to even set up a DreamHost Donations link there (see the "Home > Donations" area of our web panel!). If you'd like to "un-throttle" your domain right NOW, please go to the "Status > Bandwidth" section of our web panel and click the "Throttle" link you see there. Otherwise, your domain will automatically switch back to its regularly scheduled web directory at the beginning of the next billing cycle! Sincerely, The Happy DreamHost Throttling Team P.S. Our web panel is at https://panel.dreamhost.com/ .

I sent this reply:

I do hope you've misplaced a decimal somewhere. How is it even possible to use 16,211,826,332 GB? According to the Status -> Bandwidth tab, my pig-monkey.com domain has only used 15114.29MB and my cycle estimate for the entire plan is 18.434GB. If, by some miracle of a higher deity, I have used as many gigabytes as you've claimed (and your data center hasn't imploded from the sudden use, leaving you all disabled or at least otherwise occupied), you might as well claim my soul now, as there's no way I can pay $3.242365254x1010 in overage charges. -- -Pig Monkey ~ http://www.pig-monkey.com ~ http://www.pig-monkey.com/key.asc

To which I received the following:

Hello, Wahoo! We're rich! :) Seriously though, I don't think you need to worry about this. Your bandwidth usage is well within your plans limits (as you can see from your web panel), so it's probably just a bug in our system somewhere. If you receive any further messages about this, or these numbers actually show up in your web panel (yikes!), let us know and we'll be happy to investigate it further for you. Thanks!

Oh, Dreamhost. You’re such a silly goose!