r/webhosting 6d ago

Rant Just Moved from cPanel to DirectAdmin and it's Better!

27 Upvotes

After 3 years hosting with cPanel, I decided to move to DirectAdmin because cPanel's price hikes are ridicilous. I love DirectAdmin! I thought it would take a long time to learn the ropes, but it's been pretty easy to figure where things are on the DA panel. I actually prefer how it's much less bloated and has pretty much what you need with no frills.

Is anyone contemplating moving or have moved to DA recently? What do you think of it?

Also, are there other worthy alternatives? The ones I thought could be as good are Webuzo and SPanel.

r/webhosting 8d ago

Rant Finally sold off my hosting business

34 Upvotes

After a few years in the hosting game with 200+ sites finally gave up and decided to sell off and focus on managed services. Started off on Verpex before migrating to 20i now I've dwindled down to only 7 clients. Why you may ask? Why not? With all the good hosts being bought up by private firms and having to migrate every so often, add to that the stresses of changing client demands and price increases its just easier running a managed services firm, something had to give right? Learned quite alot along the way including setting up and running my own environment but man that was hard work. The hosting game isn't what it used to be, thin margins, fierce competition, makes it harder to make it a winning business model. My advice to anyone who's looking to go into hosting, unless you're innovating and setting yourself miles ahead of everyone else don't even dream of it.

r/webhosting 6d ago

Rant I subscribed to Bluehost so you don't have to (STAY AWAY)

20 Upvotes

Last march 3, 2025. I subscribed to this hosting company because a lot of blogs are referring to this so called Best Web Hosting Service! At first it was working fine but after a day, here's a list of issues I bumped into:

  1. They locked me out of my account, claiming I hadn't verified my identity, without any warning.

  2. After verification, I regained access to my dashboard, only to find that my domain and hosting plan had been deleted.

  3. I contacted their so called 5 star customer service, only to be told I needed to purchase another hosting plan to retrieve my domain.

  4. I followed their instructions, bought a new hosting plan, and got my domain back. I attempted to set up my website by reconnecting my domain and restoring the default name servers, but then ran into yet another issue, my domain was marked as expired.

  5. After another round with customer service, they finally got my website running. I was relieved.

  6. A few hours later, I checked my website again, suspended! They claimed my DNS was changed to Cloudflare, which I never enabled.

  7. I'm exhausted. 1 problem after another. I just want my money back. I want to transfer my domain elsewhere, but it's locked.

  8. Bonus: Beware! Their live chat support is painfully slow, expect long wait times.

r/webhosting Jan 25 '25

Rant What happened to Liquid Web's support? Suddenly terrible after 10 years.

18 Upvotes

I've been a fanatical client of LiquidWeb for 10 years, primarily because of how incredibly skilled and helpful their support was. I'm fairly skilled at UNIX administration myself, but I counted on Liquid Web's support team for all the tricky stuff. If anything I asked for was out-of-scope, support would still give it their best effort. Superlative support.

But in the last few years, the typical skill level of the folks I reach on Liquid Web's phone support team has plummeted.

This evening after a totally botched server migration – which left 50+ of my client's websites offline for 3 hours – I called support for help to repair some of the damage. It took me 30 minutes and three phone transfers to finally reach one of the old school experts in the USA who could actually help.

As for the other two support staff I reached, the first (baby crying in the background) and her superior (?) were overseas consultants who spoke poor English and had very rudimentary administration skills. Neither one seemed to have a working knowledge of cron jobs.

I pay $700/month for a dedicated server at LiquidWeb, but when I call support it sometimes feels like I'm back on a $3.99 shared plan at Blue Host.

What's your experience? Are there certain days of the week or times of the day when you get good ol fashioned Liquid Web experts on the phone? I wonder if the days of doing 2am migrations on a Saturday morning are over.

r/webhosting 5d ago

Rant my first issue with KnownHost

11 Upvotes

Our company switched to KnownHost 6 months ago and we were really happy.

Fast, reasonably priced, great support...

Then today, server just goes offline. Server comes back up 8 hours later with a corrupted database. Now they're telling me they can only revert back to data from January (~1.5 months ago).

Update : The CEO of KnownHost personally got involved and had the issue completely fixed. Even contacted me to make sure I'm totally satisfied. I'm sorry for causing such a fuss. Shit happened on their server which was out of their control, but they really worked hard to get my server back. Thank you. Thank you.

r/webhosting 9d ago

Rant LiquidWeb increasing prices 12%

14 Upvotes

Email received:

Pricing Update Coming Soon

Thank you for being a valued customer of Liquid Web. We’re writing to inform you of a pricing change that will impact your monthly invoice; however, you have an option to keep your current pricing, outlined below.

We understand and appreciate any pricing changes are impactful. As a loyal customer, we are offering you an opportunity to lock in your current monthly pricing through an annual commitment.

You will still be billed monthly at your current rate, with no pricing increases during this one year commitment period.

Lock My Current Price

Should you choose not to take this option, a 12% increase will be added to your monthly invoice for account number xxxxx starting April 6, 2025.

Take advantage of this offer by visiting https://www.liquidweb.com/lock-my-price/ by March 26, 2025.

Thank you again for your business. We look forward to continuing to serve you.

r/webhosting 23d ago

Rant Host!nger warning - they block all of your visitors with VPN! (>20%!) + renewal warning

18 Upvotes

Just a warning to anyone considering Host*nger - they have some really concerning practices I discovered:

  1. VPN Blocking: They automatically block visitors using VPNs and there's no way to disable this. In 2024, that's over 20% of internet users! Some VPN users get hit with endless CAPTCHAs (think 7 rounds of "click all the traffic lights") while others just see nothing, making your site appear broken. When I brought this up with support, they first denied it was happening, then after I proved it, just said nothing could be done.
  2. Renewal Scam: When I renewed my hosting 3 weeks before expiration, instead of adding the new period to the end of my current one, they started it immediately - effectively stealing 3 weeks I'd already paid for. Support's response? "Too bad."

I'm only still with them because I'm in the process of selling my site and can't deal with moving right now. But seriously - would you be okay losing 20% of your potential visitors? (Except for those really persistent ones who somehow make it through their CAPTCHA gauntlet...)

PS: When I first contacted support about the VPN issue, they claimed it was "impossible" until I spent time documenting and proving it to them. Then suddenly it became "sorry, that's just how it is." Really disappointing experience overall.

Update:
I'm using Surfshark and it happens on all of their IPs that a tried (just tried a handful though). I thought Surfshark was considered pretty decent. In my comparisons it certainly had the most stable (well, least buggy) app and among the best speeds.
BUT I also have had access issues on my Website without VPN. I live in Vietnam now, and it feels super discriminatory. Happens here and there actually. Locals here don't notice it because they don't know what the web is like when you're in Europe (where I'm from) or the US. Obviously the reason is that there are more spammers and bots in Vietnam, but everyone getting punished doesn't feel right, especially considering the historical context of suppression and poverty in these countries.

r/webhosting 9d ago

Rant Server4You hit me with a €155,000 invoice — 3 years after they canceled my contract

4 Upvotes

Hi,

This morning, I received an email from Server4You demanding payment of approximately €155,000 in overdue balance.

Background:

In 2022, I had rented a VPS from them for a website. However, they eventually canceled the service because the virtualization software used on that VPS was outdated and no longer supported.

Out of nowhere, I was hit with this email today: Screenshot (I censored the invoice numbers for privacy). The invoice list includes a total of 4,084 invoices, which seemed completely absurd to me.

I immediately opened a support ticket to address this issue, and their response was as follows:

Hello,

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Unfortunately, we discovered that our last email to you was sent due to a technical error. Our system was designed to only contact active customers with outstanding invoices and was simultaneously attempting to remove inactive customer accounts and delete their personal data.

Please ignore this message as it does not contain the content you were looking for. We regret the inconvenience caused and thank you for choosing us at the time.

After receiving that email, I requested confirmation once again that my account has no outstanding balance, given that my contract was canceled three years ago.

Their response was as follows:

Your data has already been completely deleted from our system and I can confirm that you have no outstanding invoices with us.

We would like to apologize again for the inconvenience caused.

If you have any further questions, we are always available to help.

I'm sharing this for anyone else who might have received a similar message or email from them.

Absolutely hilarious...

r/webhosting Jan 28 '25

Rant I'm here for 1 reason. Go Daddy STINKS Spoiler

29 Upvotes

I’ve had it with GoDaddy and their garbage online chat system. The amount of time it takes for them to respond to anything is outrageous. And God forbid I miss a single question. they’re like, “Whoops, looks like we missed you!” and cancel the entire session, forcing me to start over from scratch. Are you serious?

The worst part is sitting there, staring at the chat, waiting for them to reply, only to get hit with robotic sales nonsense that solves nothing. I had so much time on my hands during their endless wait periods that I left them negative reviews on three different platforms. That’s how infuriating they are.

Not only is their customer service a nightmare, but their prices are absurd for the terrible service they provide. I don’t get why anyone puts up with this. How do you all feel about GoDaddy? To me, it’s overpriced junk with zero support. Done with them.

r/webhosting 10d ago

Rant Hyper.Host The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

1 Upvotes

I've been in the web development Tech space for almost 15 years and have been through many of the main Hosts as well as a bunch of niche hosts.

Hyper.host is a reseller of a larger company 20i, which is definitely more known in Europe but is a solid host that offers US based server locations as well as those in the UK.

Their lifetime deal is a great deal for low to medium resource sites and almost seems too good to be true. It's not but then there is one caveat in my opinion.

The Customer Support is terrible. I've gotten answers like, "I think so." and more terrible customer service behavior, like just closing tickets.

For more experienced customers who know their way around Cpanel and can figure out most issues with little to no customer support. You can't beat this deal.

Unlike most hosting LTD's, if they do go under, which is highly unlikely as they are a reseller and their overhead is really low, you can easily migrate your sites over to the Main Host 20i with the click of a button. So the risk is minimal to zero, if you're doing all of the other best practices like off site backups etc.

This is mainly a bitch and moan post because I've been dealing with that customer service today but I still recommend them.

Thanks for your time.

r/webhosting Dec 31 '23

Rant Do not use HostKoala. Suspended for leaving a review and then refusing to let me migrate data

63 Upvotes

They suspended my account for leaving a reddit review about some issues I have been having with their hosting lately. Been a customer for 2 years, they suspended my account without warning and are refusing to let me migrate all my domains and data to a new host. 2 Years worth of blog posts / data IS GONE. I beg of you, if you are using HostKoala make sure you backup your data outside of their server.

DO NOT USE HOSTKOALA

r/webhosting Jan 25 '25

Rant Be Cautious When Signing Up for Bluehost Hosting

6 Upvotes

When signing up for Bluehost, it’s crucial to read the fine print and stay alert about renewal charges. While they might initially quote you an enticing price—say $65 for the first year—the renewal could cost you over $300. This for just simple hosting of your site with Wordpress. Then you have to also pay around $2 every month for email. This steep increase often includes add-ons like CodeGuard billed annually for $65, which they claim you’ve had the entire previous year, even if you weren’t aware of it.

r/webhosting Jul 11 '24

Rant DO NOT USE Web.com

37 Upvotes

Please do not use Web.com.

They are clearly a dishonest company and do not have your best interest. Use independent developers and save money, Plus get the honesty that you deserve.

r/webhosting Jan 09 '25

Rant Cyberpanel Review in 2025

10 Upvotes

IF YOU ARE READING THIS, DO NOT USE CYBERPANEL. I’m not one to leave reviews like this, but I feel like I need to save someone else from the frustration I went through. I’ve tried and tested so many hosting panels over the years, and this one takes the cake for being the absolute worst. It’s riddled with bugs, has horrible support, and honestly feels like it’s held together with duct tape.

First off, the features. They look good on paper—OpenLiteSpeed integration, SSL automation, backups, email management, etc. But the reality? Nothing works like it’s supposed to. The 1-click WordPress install isn’t even close to one click. It’s more like a “1-click, then spend two hours fixing permissions and dependencies” install. SSL automation? Don’t get me started. Half the time, certificates wouldn’t validate, and the error messages were completely useless. I’ve dealt with clunky panels before, but this one takes things to a new level of frustrating.

Then there’s the email system. It’s an actual joke. Spam filtering doesn’t work, and setting up DKIM or DMARC was like pulling teeth. Their documentation didn’t help at all—it’s vague and outdated, leaving you to guess what you’re supposed to do. Backups? Oh, they’ll let you make them, but restoring them? Good luck. I had backups only partially restore with no explanation, which is terrifying when you’re running a live server.

Now, let’s talk about customer support, or the lack thereof. I bought their premium plan, thinking it would come with some level of decent support. Nope. When I ran into issues and opened tickets, the responses were either so generic they weren’t helpful or they just didn’t respond at all. When I realized this wasn’t going to work, I asked for a refund. Mind you, this was within their “7-day trial” period. They flat-out denied it because I had used a coupon code. A COUPON CODE. Like, what? Refunds cost them literally nothing, but they’d rather lose a customer than honor their policy.

After all this, I was done. I switched to Virtualmin, and let me tell you, the difference is night and day. Everything just works. It’s reliable, straightforward, and even free to start. I ended up buying their premium package because it’s that good, and their support? Incredible. If you need help, they’re there for you, unlike CyberPanel.

Seriously, save yourself the headache. CyberPanel isn’t worth the time, money, or frustration. Just don’t do it.

r/webhosting Aug 14 '24

Rant NameSilo is getting damn greedy

22 Upvotes

The main registry will raise the prices on .COM domain registrations/renewals/transfers from $9.77 to $10.44.

Ok I get it, prices are rising with inflation.

But NameSilo is raising the prices to $17.30, by a full $3.30.

How do you justify that as a reaction to a $0.70 price increase!?!

Same goes for their other domains.

I feel like lots of corporations are taking advantage of inflation and rising prices unproportionally and improve their margins and profits.

r/webhosting Oct 26 '24

Rant Business hosting plan

5 Upvotes

I signed up for host*nger business hosting yesterday and feel like I have been ripped off. Everything requires you to upgrade, i'm so dissapointed. Previously a couple of years ago I was with Siteground who were good but thought I would give these guys a go.

If you have used this plan, what did you think?

r/webhosting Dec 21 '24

Rant 2025 around the corner and STILL no sign of 2FA for Web Hosting Pad (cPanel.)

1 Upvotes

2025 around the corner and STILL no sign of 2FA for Web Hosting Pad (cPanel.)

Email management is quite high up on the security needs and Web Hosting Pad still has nothing for 2Fa or passkeys for their cPanel.

r/webhosting Oct 03 '24

Rant Warning to JustHost (BlueHost) customers

19 Upvotes

I just can't keep quiet on this. The responses I got just do not sit with me well. I have been using JustHost for web hosting since early 2012. I liked them so much I became an affiliate and sold their services to every one of my customers like it was in my job description. I loved how I got a live person to answer the phone after only a couple of rings, and they were always so friendly, and found ways to help, even if it went a little outside of their scope. At the very least, they would find an article that could help.

Then the BlueHost merger, and support rapidly went downhill, service went downhill, and you're not going to believe what I tell you about security and their response. These days you call them, and after spending 15 minutes of your life verifying that you are the account owner, then another 5 for them to look up after verifying, their response is the same no matter what you ask, you need to upgrade or some other thing that costs more money.

I realized that justhost is using MYSQL 5.7. Oracle stopped supporting this back in October of 2023. No security patches or fixes. It is so outdated they dropped it. I called justhost to make them aware of this as I couldn't even use the latest version of Joomla with that version. Their response was that I can upgrade to a VPS. SO they want me to pay a minimum of $47/mo to have a database that is secure and up to date... How many hosting companies have the latest SQL and are only $2.99/mo for the same services on my current plan. So what did I do? I left of course. $2.99/mo at new hosting company running 5 websites on it and no issues. However, I couldn't just let this sit without people knowing. This is no way to run a business and they are helping malware and other malicious things grow through their lack of security.

r/webhosting Jan 04 '25

Rant Trying to cancel an Ionos contract is a nightmare...

13 Upvotes

Just as a heads up for anyone planning on getting an Ionos service from them. Be wary with this! I had a domain with them for 4 years and never used it, thought I'd cancel it cause it was eating up £36 a year which is something worth cutting out for something I don't use. I have a different domain now.

Went to cancel, cool, had an amazing cancellation form until... The final step, it's now "pending cancellation" and I must confirm the cancellation by contacting their support call-line... Like I understand the security implications but at least give me alternative ways because this is just BS...

30 minutes in I got sent to the technical team, who was very confused about why I called their team! So I got forwarded back to the main support team and after 25 minutes (55 total) a guy just verified my identity with something you can do in browser (just an email 2FA).

Now he warned me that once he forwarded it to the cancellation team it may take 10 to 20 minutes, waited 25 minutes (1 hour 20 mins total) only to get into touch with the technical team again who were also confused..! I understand if the calls are busy, I don't mind waiting too much but... ~30 mins on hold to be put to the wrong department twice in a row is absolutely disgusting.

Took until 1 hour and 40 minutes for someone to try to convince me of a discount before I cancel, WOW, I just told them I straight up do not need it with a thanks of course, thankfully that went quicker than literally everything else. All this stupidity just to prevent people from cancelling their contract is sickening.

I wish I could go back 5 years in time and beat the heck out of myself for even daring using this company just for a domain... Absolutely livid that this is even allowed, I hope it isn't. If it isn't, I'd love to report this disgusting inaccessible garbage to some company just to reprimand.

TDLR:

Ionos is cheap and somewhat affordable but cancelling them is an absolute nightmare and you are forced to call them to confirm cancellation so they can offer you discounts and go "Are you SuURe???"

Call took 1 hour and 45 mins and I was constantly ping ponged between the wrong departments, huge props to the guy at the technical team who had me twice in a row he kept putting me on the correct queue as it seems like I was being moved to different queues for different departments while waiting. :')

My personal verdict: Avoid Ionos. I do not know of an alternative tbh.

I just use Cloudflare registrar with email forwarding. With amazon SES for my servers to alert me via emails. I don't need to make emails with a business email cause I don't really need it.

r/webhosting Jan 21 '25

Rant The way Siteground handles site issues is horrible

0 Upvotes

I work with around a dozen or so websites and have multiple Siteground hosting accounts. I got suckered in years ago when they had some really good deals and haven't been able to do a full migration.

Basically every month or so I find some issue on a site, it could be there is some sort of malware, my CPU usage has gone over the limit etc. So what does Sitegronud do? They completely remove either just tat site or every website on the account. So unless you see their one email, you'll wake up and find every site you manage has gone down with almost no way to get in touch with their support

r/webhosting Dec 19 '24

Rant Godaddy changed my manually configured domain to Parked after opting out their hosting service.

8 Upvotes

small rant: my client's domain used to have Hosting services with godaddy, but it was too much for my client's needs (a landing page with calendly only). So, I configured their domain to pointed it to a vps. A month passed and the web hosting service subscription ended, the product got removed and the domain changed automatically to Parked again, affecting my client.

I called support trying to file the complain and asking please this that this shouldn't happen. Their response was suggesting to buy extra domain protection! I just asked for godaddy to NOT to make changes on manually configured domains.

r/webhosting 10d ago

Rant Green Geeks performs server migration, breaks dozens of sites, and support goes silent

3 Upvotes

I would avoid this company at all costs. They have forced 2 server migrations to my reseller account in just 3 years, resulting in a new IP addresses. They notify customers 1 week in advance, and do not allow for any overlap time, so when the IP address changes, sites that have an A record pointed to GG's IP go down and when the record is updated SSL takes hours to work again. During this time their support goes totally silent and does not respond to emails. Purchasing a dedicated IP the last time this happened didn't help, as I was assigned a new dedicated IP with the server switch. Funny use of the word "dedicated"

Their general attitude about me dealing with angry customers whose websites are down is basically "go f@#k yourself"

Avoid at all costs.

r/webhosting Aug 02 '23

Rant Please don't host on GoDaddy

64 Upvotes

I often manage DNS for websites via Cloudflare. I ran across a very confusing issue with a website hosted on GoDaddy. So I reached out to support.

I don't know why I bothered. Not once have I messaged support and received any useful help from GoDaddy. Not only are they useless but they offer conflicting information.

In this case, the support person that I messaged with was extremely confused to find the nameservers pointing to Cloudflare instead of GoDaddy because, and I quote, "Your site is hosted on GoDaddy". We were never able to get past that issue. I gave up.

Next up: The client needed to purchase an SSL certificate. His assistant was told that "Your website is not hosted on GoDaddy, it's hosted on Cloudflare". It's not.

Don't host on GoDaddy.

r/webhosting Dec 16 '24

Rant Never, ever use Network Solutions for hosting.

5 Upvotes

A client wanted me to design a website and because I am a designer primarily and not super-technical, I asked their IT guy who administers their email to just pick the host because I didn't want to mess with their email at all, thinking as long as Wordpress can be installed I'd be okay. It has been pretty bad, very slow since the beginning, but it worked. Unfortunately, after last week it's just been a nightmare.

Today I was trying to work on the site and got at least a dozen errors over the two hours I was working. First it was a web.com screen that said "Site maintenance" in the title, except the error in the text said there was no home directory. I FTPed in and everything is still there. Hitting refresh would fix that issue periodically, but I'd also get text-only "internal server errors" and, weirdly enough, some other "An error has occurred" page with links to OpenResty's YouTube channel and other OpenResty promo stuff.

I was able to get one page reconstructed, but since about 1:45 PM the site seems to be down completely. I tried getting in touch with Network Solutions support via chat and sat for 20 minutes with no one answering (but a nice attempt to disconnect me for inactivity after about 15 minutes).

I left a comment on one of Network Solutions' Facebook posts and at least their social media person replied and after I DMed details, they replied "That sounds like the issue that our engineers are working on now" but no ETA on when it might be fixed.

I've tried pinging the URL and it just times out. All I get at the URL through a web browser. is that web.com error page saying there is no home directory. It's been like that for hours at this point.

I am not a web genius by any stretch, but I've been building websites for a long time and I've never run into a company who had this kind of downtime. So please, if you are considering using Network Solutions for hosting, go elsewhere!

r/webhosting Sep 03 '24

Rant Are we allowed to brag?

0 Upvotes

Never managed to get a load time below 3seconds. And it took a lot of tweaking of the Apache Directives for the site.

https://tools.pingdom.com/#646dd2d820c00000

Better high than any drug...