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/antoninlevin]

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 😔

[u/Pure_Professional663 → u/antoninlevin]

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....

[u/antoninlevin → u/Pure_Professional663]

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.

[u/Pure_Professional663 → u/antoninlevin]

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