I don’t do this professionally so I don’t keep up with trends, but after reading some of the posts on here and dealing with my own webhost, it seems like they are using a lot of dishonest business practices lately. Is it because we’re picking the bottom of the barrel type webhosts or is this the game now with all of them? I know domain registrars are scammy but didn’t know how bad it was with webhosts.
I used to never even think about my webhost. 20 Years ago, I just read a few online reviews, found one that looked alright (Lunarpages) and went with them. I did not have to think or worry about it for about 15 years because my renewal rates were as cheap as they were when I first signed up and even after I moved over to WordPress, not once did I get a peep or complain about overuse of system resources.
Then Lunarpages got bought by Hostpapa and all of a sudden all these complaints came – our system resources were going over the limit. At first, they were helpful and gave some tips to lower them- update the robots.txt, add a plug-in, etc. but then we went over our email storage limit of which previously we had none and we got an email about. So I just deleted 2 gigs of emails to shut them up.
Then last month while I was dealing with a family medical emergency and was not in the right state of mind, I got an email that we had gone over our I/O usage and the sale person disguised as support convinced me to upgrade to their pro plan which MIGHT fix the issue or upgrade to elite or whatever which WOULD fix it. I went with the pro since it was pretty much the same rate we had before but it put us on the hook for the next 3 years.
In the last couple of weeks though, I’ve been getting emails saying that I’m over our automatic backup limit. I didn’t remember having that…i usually just make a backup when I update WordPress. When I looked into it, that sneaky sales person slipped in a free year of automatic backup with an automatic renewal for $35 and in addition 2 other services – COM-Protection and COM-ALPHA-SSL, whatever they are so had I not looked at it, I would have been charged an extra $200 a year for basically nothing.
Also, the renewal rate for the hosting itself is triple what I paid for.
What is going on? Technically it might not be a scam but is the goal to just catch people sleeping or are they all doing this now? Are there any good webhosts? I’ve marked my calendar a month before our plan expires and will move then but where to? Are there any good hosts? I was leaning towards HostGator because their tech support forums actually helped me with an issue that I was having!
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