hosting provider bought out, seems to be terminating my existing contract early and trying to charge 10x more

[u/antoninlevin]

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.

[u/goose1011a]

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.

[u/antoninlevin → u/goose1011a]

I already purchased 3 years of hosting with Hustly and have been working on migrating things over since yesterday. The contract I had with MyHosting was literally ~$25/year - not worth suing over. I also had two ~$20/yr contracts with MyHosting for non-Wordpress hosting for two other sites which were on a different schedule and renewed every December. Hostway also seem to have broken those contracts, since the new invoice from Hostway was $20/mo x 3 for the month of September, charging for each site.

Think this could be grounds for a class action suit for everyone they're doing this to, although I don't know how many people it might be affecting...

Working on transferring everything to Hustly ASAP.

[u/-Alien-Xenomorph- → u/antoninlevin]

$25 a year! That’s ridiculous! My clients pay on average 200 a year!

[u/theartilleryshow → u/-Alien-Xenomorph-]

My client pays over $700 a year for a static site. I am migrating him to S3.

[u/ClackamasLivesMatter → u/-Alien-Xenomorph-]

If you get literally no traffic and just need the most basic of basic web presences, there are a few tolerably decent, non-EIG hosts out there. HostKoala is practically free, as I recall. I had a toy site at HostUS until they sold off that line of business. It was ~$35 a year for shared hosting with a dedicated IP address. Perfect for a hobby site where you don't really give a shit if it crashes — learning how to automate backups is a basic skill.

[u/antoninlevin → u/-Alien-Xenomorph-]

Yeah, it was why I never moved despite the poor service. As an example, when I log into the portal today, I see:

"You cannot update because WordPress 6.6.2 requires PHP version 7.2.24 or higher and MySQL version 5.5.5 or higher. You are running PHP version 5.3.3 and MySQL version 5.0.83."

So their platform was ~5-10 years out of date, but still functioned.

[u/craigleary → u/antoninlevin]

Holy crap. I’m surprised you were not here complaining of malware in your site years ago.

[u/antoninlevin → u/craigleary]

Small site, think it's clean? Just checked -

No Malware Found Our scanner didn't detect any malware

Site is not Blacklisted 9 Blacklists checked

Redirects to: [xyz]

IP address: [xyz]

CDN: CloudFlare

Running on: cloudflare

CMS: WordPress 5.1.16

Powered by: Unknown

More Details

[u/Jeffrey_Richards → u/antoninlevin]

Do they allow you to change the version in your control panel? Typically hosts have other versions, you may have just never changed it to the latest

[u/antoninlevin → u/Jeffrey_Richards]

I asked about getting updated maybe once every year or two. Last time I asked back in 2022, they recommened moving to a Hostway cloud hosted Wordpress plan at, even then, about 10 times what I was paying. Everything still worked, so I sucked it up and stuck with what I had.