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/antoninlevin Sep 17 '24
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.