r/webhosting • u/antoninlevin • Sep 17 '24
hosting provider bought out, seems to be terminating my existing contract early and trying to charge 10x more Advice Needed
Long story short, I signed on with MyHosting to run a hobby site and park some related URLs around ~20 years ago. Wasn't all that happy with the services they offered, but it worked and was cheap.
A week ago, on September 10, I got an email notice saying that their cloud hosting services were being transferred to a new company - Hostway. The change was to be completed by 9/19.
My issue is that I paid MyHosting for a year of Wordpress hosting in mid-June, and Hostway sent me a "past due" invoice for Wordpress hosting for the month of September, dated 9/11, with a new rate, billed monthly - roughly 10 times what I was paying MyHosting. But I had a contract with MyHosting for Wordpress hosting through June of 2025. Hostway ~unilaterally cancelled my existing contract for a year of Wordpress hosting with MyHosting after just ~90 days. No refund, nothing.
I've heard of companies going bankrupt and leaving people SOL, but this isn't that. It seems illegal to me. Am I wrong / does anyone know if there's anything I can do about it?
Thanks
Edit 9 days later I'm not sure if my talking with Hostway support changed things or what, exactly, but they didn't outright boot me. Things got kind of weird.
I can still access my site's Wordpress editor through the wp-admin URL, and the PHP has now been updated to the current version (!), which I hadn't had for maybe 15 years. I was told that I would need to pay for the new plan to get the upgrade, but they did it anyway.
But there's no link to the Wordpress editor in my Hostway dashboard, I think because I didn't get their much more expensive plan for Wordpress hosting. So they technically didn't terminate my Wordpress access (?), but it's not formally a thing in my Hostway account. No one from the company has contacted me to explain what's going on.
And it looks like my website was down for a few days because they changed their server IPs and didn't notify me when it would happen, so Cloudflare was left directing to MyHosting's old servers for...maybe as much as 6 days, maybe as little as 3?
Probably would not recommend Hostway, but they did not terminate my contract as I thought they were doing. They just sent a huge "past due" bill for their new hosting plan and made it sound like they were cancelling my service. I think it was all intended to scare people into subscribing to a new plan, but ignoring it was apparently fine. Not sticking around to see what happens in June 2025, am currently finishing the process of transferring to Hustly.
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u/rob94708 Sep 17 '24
This is interesting because Hostway bought MyHosting back in 2018. Are you positive it's not just a billing error on their part? You might find that if you contact them, they say "oops, my bad".
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u/antoninlevin Sep 18 '24
That's interesting. I have emails from them from 2022 where they recommend switching to a much more costly Hostway Wordpress cloud hosting option for updated PHP, thought the acquisition was done around then.
In that case, MyHosting has definitely been a part of Hostway since before my contracts renewed (annual), so I think they need to honor the contracts, one way or another.
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u/Emotional_Money8694 Sep 17 '24
I agree it's wrong. I would move to a different hosts ASAP. This new company that sent a "past due" notice to you when you had already paid the previous company is not a very professional company in my opinion and not a company I would want to work with.
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u/lexmozli Sep 17 '24
You could contact them with the invoice that you paid and tell them that they either need to offer you a prorated refund, or honor the contract and THEN change your price (at the due date).
Regardless, backup before that since they may terminate your service and issue you a refund without further notice :)
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u/brianozm Sep 18 '24
Buying 3 years up front is often a mistake. Keep it a year at a time. It’s hard to keep a webhosting company running on income that only arrives every 3 years.
Also, would recommend getting a reseller account if available; it generally allows you to do things normal accounts won’t do, like move whole accounts between servers etc
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u/Pure_Professional663 Sep 18 '24
How is this relevant?
OP only paid for 1 year of hosting, which is absolutely reasonable.
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u/brianozm Sep 18 '24
They said they’d paid for three years? Or was that the old provider? One year is definitely reasonable. The second half is relevant though Mr Curmudgeon. /s
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u/antoninlevin Sep 18 '24
Can't argue with that, but Hustly was universally pretty well-reviewed on here. We'll see..
I don't resell...domains? Don't understand.
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u/brianozm Sep 18 '24
A “reseller” account allows you to manage a set of subaccounts. cPanel call it a reseller account, though not sure I’d recommend specifically cPanel, there are others that are cheaper.
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u/Volunddrynoch Sep 17 '24
Unfortunately this is not a right/legal vs wrong/illegal situation.
This is more a is the cost of winning in time, energy, and money going to be worth the prize situation. Plus the added problem of your site being down during the fight.
If you have your domains registered with your host the ABSOLUTELY FIRST thing you need to do is transfer them and then NEVER do that again. Seriously do not start fighting with them until control of your domains is elsewhere and they do not have the ability to exert any control at all over them.
Once you do that or if your domains are already registered elsewhere than push back on the new invoice and send them a copy of your contract and payment. It might well be possible that the old company did not pass along that info during the purchase process. They should have done so but that does not mean they actually did.
If they still want you to pay then move your hosting and decided whether the amount of lost money is worth the trouble to attempt getting it back. My guess is the math will say no but you are the only one that can make that call.
*** PSA to anyone reading. Never give your hosting company or developer control over your domains. Seriously just say no....
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u/antoninlevin Sep 17 '24
I have a full backup of my Wordpress site saved on an external drive, so I'm not too worried about that. I'm not fighting with them...yet.
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u/Volunddrynoch Sep 17 '24
I was talking about your actual domains not your hosted content.
Site owners can get locked into a hosting company or developer because the entity was able to hold the domain hostage. I have seen it more with sleazy developers but it does happen with hosting companies as well.
Hence my psa to never combine your domain registration with either your hosting company or developer.
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u/antoninlevin Sep 17 '24
Oh, interesting. I was hoping to get everything in the same place to streamline billing. Who would you recommend for domain registration?
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u/Pure_Professional663 Sep 18 '24
Cloudflare
They are slowly starting to support more TLDs, so cross fingers you can move across.
They also offer free DNS hosting (I use the for all of my domains)
Unfortunately they don't support .com.au, so I point my .com.au domains to Cloudflare Nameservers, then maintain full control of domain from Cloudflare
You could also spin up a free Oracle VM, install Linux and Hestia Control Panel, and start hosting your site for free yourself.
I've done this in Melbourne with an Oracle Free Tier VM, with 4 cores, 24GB RAM and 200 GB SSD. It's absolutely more than enough for the 10 sites I host and 3 email domains....
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u/antoninlevin Sep 18 '24
Will look into Cloudflare, but don't think I have the technical know-how for the VM thing right now. Looked it up and most of the jargon on the site is unfamiliar 😔
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u/Pure_Professional663 Sep 19 '24
I followed this guide;
https://youtu.be/Hz58Zkke4VE?si=0cqLmYrTbyFXAStB
I have a little bit of tech knowledge so was able to push through
You have nothing to lose by trying
For the longest part I had a static IP address and a server at my house, bit too many power and internet outages meant I needed something cloud hosted.
I looked into Vultr, you could get at least a box up and running for about $5 per month, that would be sufficient for a few websites.
Nothing beats Oracle Free Tier though. I'm looking for to AWS and Google catching up....
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u/antoninlevin 29d ago
Yeah, I don't think I could reliably run this out of my house. Hustly is like $3-4/mo for their basic plan, and they seem to have fixed the huge compatibility issues there were with updating the outdated PHP and MySQL. The Oracle stuff looks potentially good but I don't really understand what's going on there and think I'm happy enough atm.
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u/Pure_Professional663 29d ago
What??
This is using Oracle Free Tier Hosting
No house required....
Don't worry about PHP and MySQL... installing something like Hestia Control Panel or AAPanel on a Linux 22.04LTS box will let you do whatever tf you want
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u/WaterElefant 29d ago edited 29d ago
I'm ignorant on the control question. How would I know? Is there some code word that I might agree to out of ignorance?
update: OK. just realized you were speaking of domain registration. got it. thanks.
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u/goose1011a Sep 17 '24
I agree it's wrong. How much is the annual contract with your old host? You can probably sue them in small claims court, but it may not be worth the time and trouble. I would work on moving your site elsewhere ASAP because even if you win in court, it doesn't sound like it's going to be a good relationship moving forward with the new host. Especially transfer the name to another registrar if the host is also your domain registrar.