I used the same web host from November 2004 through December 2023. They were always good to me.
In December 2023, I got caught in what was, essentially, a scam. One of the discount sites that rhymes with “Poop On” offered a “lifetime hosting” package for a couple hundred bucks. Unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited number of sites. I knew it couldn’t last forever, but I thought if I get a few years out of it before they wound down, it would be worth it. So I switched.
Well… It lasted all of about three months before the “company” that offered the package “went out of business” and just sold all the accounts to their hosting wholesaler. The wholesaler then proceeded to charge us all at more or less what I’d been paying to my original host every month.
So to be clear, some “entrepreneur” 100% just defrauded a whole batch of people out of a bunch of money, then profited again by selling all those accounts in place to the company where they were hosted anyway. I imagine it’s like the old chain letter scams—people set it up when they need a quick $50,000 or $100,000 and assume they won’t get into legal trouble.
Anyway, now my sites were all on an international hosting wholesale host… who has honestly just plain sucked, and who really doesn’t care much about supporting these individual accounts vs. their reseller accounts. To be clear, it has sucked badly. Slow, no control over site domicile (I ended up on a UK physical host), buggy, unreliable. So I’ve been meaning to rehome back to my original host for a long time. (I toyed with the idea for a while of hosting in LightSail in my own AWS account, but I just don’t have the guts or the trust in my own skills to avoid huge unexpected charges.)
Anyway, we finally did it. Here we are with the first (and most important) of the sites back onto our US-based host that served me well for 20 years. The site feels much faster and the CPanel installation actually works properly. Also, I managed to create the hosting account with a serious typo at the start and they answered my ticket and changed the string in their hosting DB within about 10 minutes, from ticket create to ticket resolve.
If you want to know who the hosts are, let me know. But aside from that detail, the takeaway is: for everyone that for a couple of years now has at times had to email me with “I think your site is down again,” that era should be over. Thank God.
And hopefully I’ll post more as well, because the crap shoot of “is the site up, and will it respond within five minutes” when I go to post should now also be done with.