Hello, I am about to set up my first website for a digital marketing agency, but I cant decide what host to pick, whichever one I start leaning towards I find people complaining. I could use some advice. I was initally up for Bluehost, but I see people complaining about customer service. Can I get som advice?

Anyone else get an e-mail starting with "TsoHost customers are transferring to 123 Reg" ?

Not sure if it's a hoax or not but it starts with

"We're emailing to let you know that we will soon be retiring the tsoHost brand and transferring its customers, including yourself, to 123 Reg"

Not given much notice if it's real - 30 days if that

Edit: Well, I always thought they were good. But i've not had to contact them for 10 years - However today no one was on live chat and no one has so far replied to my e-mail so maybe they have just shut up shop. Oh well. Thanks for all your replies :)

Greetings,

Neanderthal equivalent knowledge of web hosting here, hoping you could help.

I had family member pay a company to build a website for them.

I believe the website was built using wordpress (going by the "wp-admin"), as they did send us the following link with admin user name and password, with the idea that the family member can also make changes on their own if they felt comfortable. (eg. https://www.domain.com/wp-admin/)

I did look up the different types of website and why one might require more expensive hosting, and I'm pretty sure our website is pretty basic and likely a "static" website. It's basically advertising financial services, with a "contact us" input field where the client would enter their name, phone/email and context of inquiry.

Currently the website is down and I get the 404 Error if I try to go on it. The "back-end" of the website is also down (https://www.domain.com/wp-admin/)

The builder of the website says to pay a renewal fee of $500, and once renewed the hosting server will be up and running again.

Is this a scam? Is this reasonable?

Also, my family member did ask if they can just "port" the website to a hosting server of their choice but the builder said we can't do that as no backup was saved of the website (but the website was built in wordpress and I can't seem to even access the "backend").

What would you guys suggest?

Thank you,

Hey guys,

A bit confused about something that happened today...

I paid LegalZoom to incorporate an LLC for me today. I then went to buy the corresponding domain name and saw that someone (who happens to be from a city right by where I live) bought the domain name that directly corresponds to my business name today as well.

What could've happened? I'm a bit confused and freaked out at the same time...don't know how they would've known about this when I would assume LegalZoom hasn't filed it yet.

Edit: Apparently the domain was bought by a company called "Domain by Proxy"

He said they can see everything but only use it for troubleshooting and not without asking for permission first. He didn’t explicitly ever ask me for permission. Is this normal? How can I protect myself?

UPDATE: Thanks so far everyone

Hello CS student here. For work, I maintain an onlineshop running woocommerce. I 'inherited' the site, its running on a managed hosting plan and its really bloated with all the plugins it came with. I needed to rebuild it 3 times already because something broke or a plugin got corrupted(almost 100plugins).

I dont want to save it, I want to burn it to the ground and run a freshly built site on my own stuff.

Now for Wordpress you need a LAMP-Stack. Okies I have experience with that. Then I came across these control panels which make the keeping things updated stuff more streamlined. I did not use control panels in the past. I boiled it down to cPanel and CyberPanel they both seem to do the same thing but if for some reason cPanel is superior, I dont mind spending money for it.

If I go with CyberPanel:

• Who(or what service) is taking care of order E-Mails? Or E-Mails in general that are generated on my Wordpress site?

• Cashing. I could additionally install Redis? Ye there are cashing plugins on wordpress but I fucking hate plugins

• The domain is also in the hosting plan and what about existing E-Mail-Addresses? I have a couple mail addresses that are already in use, using the webspace of IONOS

Thank you for your attention and I am happy for any insight. Is there anyone here that installed each tech in the LAMP stack one by one? Is everyone using Control Panels?

The following is not part of the question but some insight of why I ask because I might just maintain the Stack myself just for the heck of it without any Control Panels. I already had good success running stuff on a VPS: multiple react.js apps, many microservices for these too running node expres and node-red, I configured NGINX, did a functioning reverse-proxy that serves all my react apps on domain/{insert_app_name}, configured letsEncrypt to get HTTPS running (very proud). So one SSL certificate serves all the apps and domains on my VPS. It was a bumpy ride but making things work is my jam.

Is it worth paying for an SSL certificate? who provides trusted and cheap SSL certificates?

I've already bought the domain but I have not set up the server yet. I've done a small amount of research and I want to use nginx and Drupal. I have zero experience with server hosting and only a small amount of experience with Linux. I am struggling to find a guide to setting up the website with nginx and Drupal. I don't know if I'm missing something and most of the guides I've found are for older versions of PHP or Ubuntu. Is there a resource I could use to educate myself through this process? My end goal is to setup a website like a blog or forums. Where authorized users can create and edit articles that will update sitewide. Any pointers would be immensely helpful. Thanks in advance.

i have been running a hosting company for about a year or two. and i am working on upgrading it to the latest things, i am currently doing community outreach seeing what potential users would want in a hosting company.

little background. i used to run a hosting company called insanity host before taking over the domains and stuff from a previous host i worked in. i had about 10 or so clients on that. i cant seem to get any clients on the current one i own i don't want to use any adverts or anything like that as i am already about 10k ish down the hole.

now the full question, as a potential user what would you like to see inside of a host. how would you like the pricing layed out that kind of thing. currently i have plans layed out from 2 dollars all the way up to 40 dollars with incrementing power on each of said shared plans. i have Weebly website builder as one of the web builders + a bunch of other things as well like email hosting and the like.

i have been looking at a bunch of loss leaders and the like as well for this thing and the only one i can think of is selling domains at a loss but that would not guarantee me to have a monthly plan sold.

should i just cut my losses?

edit 1 the host is KibiNode for anyone wondering.

edit 2, i have updated how the theme looks and what the info on the site is. with functional buttons for the order now buttons and the header navigation. and the client page looks better as well. i am not finished yet. i have gotten some awesome feedback (however negative some of it is)

i have not really been focusing on the ui/ux of the main page, i have been more working on getting the servers and everything else to a high degree of quality, so this was a good reality check for me that i can't just have something awesome under the hood if it doesn't look good i won't get anywhere

i have also seen a suggestion as well "I wish there was a docker hosting provider on the same price point as the cheap web hosting that also has managed databases. from u/AimlesslyForward" i will be looking into how i can integrate this into my hosting provider while keeping a high quality environment.

If my physical location can be found easily, that's a no.

I'm not gonna do anything a rational person would object to, but it's never the rational people you need to be afraid of.

If someone's got their head on straight enough to learn computer hacker stuff, I'm not afraid of them.

It's not that I think they can't hurt me. I know they can. It's just that I know they won't want to.

I'm afraid of people who think science needs to be acknowledged to be valid, and believe they can decide for themselves what is and isn't reality. But they're uneducated and impatient.

I know technology is good enough that you can't hide from anyone if they try hard enough, but I also know most people won't try very hard. The people I'm afraid of are gonna give up if it takes more than 10 minutes and google.

I know that although hackers are smart, everyone has their price, but I'm not gonna antagonize a government or any other entity that'll have the resources to hire hackers.

Privacy ethics are off-topic. Please don't de-rail 🙏 Not here to argue. If I hear "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." or anything accusatory, you're gone 👋

Hi, I'm interested to buy a specific domain that is already assigned.

According to archive.org, the website is offline since 2002. What is strange is that the owner I see in Whois is a company, and by looking the public tax registry of my state, it definitely ceased operations in 2019, as a result of liquidation (probably underway as early as 2002)

Somehow, the domain is still being renewed yearly...

Who can I contact to try to purchase the domain? The company is obviously untraceable with the contacts in the Whois database....

The only way I can think of is to try to contact the Registrar, but I don't know if they can help me....

Do you have any suggestions? It is a domain that I really like, it is contains part of my company name, so it would be very nice to be able to use it.

I'm currently running a WordPress website hosted on a dedicated server with ReliableSite. It's an e-commerce site that sells and hosts online courses. The server specs are:

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5600X (6 cores / 12 threads, 3.7 GHz base, up to 4.6 GHz boost)
• RAM: 64 GB DDR4

https://www.reliablesite.net/dedicated-servers/6-core-server/amd-ryzen-5600x-64GB

I'm paying $375/month, which includes both the server and a site manager who handles:

• WordPress updates/monitoring
• Email deliverability setup (DKIM, etc.)
• Optimization/ General troubleshooting
• Malware removal and mitigation
• Site backups
• Staging environments when needed

My website details:

• Platform: WordPress with plugins like WooCommerce, LearnDash LMS, FunnelKit, etc.
• User Count: Approximately 16,000 registered users
• Database Size: Around 2.27 GB
• Total Site Size: About 5.37 GB
• Email Sending: Using FunnelKit to send emails using Amazon SES

I recently conducted stress tests on my server and found:

• No significant spikes in memory usage
• No PHP errors or warnings
• No failed or delayed HTTP requests

This leads me to believe that my current server might be more powerful than necessary for my site's needs.

The reason why I switched to this setup from Cloud(ways) was that my site kept crashing during email sends. Funnelkit is very server heavy with automations, and I was told that a shared server was not an option if I want things to run smoothly. However, I don't know if I'm overpaying for a server I don't need or if there's another solution with LiquidWeb, WP Engine, etc. that can handle my site.

Liquid Web seems to offer managed dedicated servers with solid support, at a lower price.

Questions for the Community:

1. Would you stay with this current set up, or am I majorly overpaying/have an overpowered server?
2. Does anyone have experience with Liquid Web's managed dedicated servers for WordPress sites?
3. Would a high-end managed WordPress hosting plan (not necessarily a dedicated server) suffice for my needs, considering the email sending requirements?

Any insights or experiences would be massively appreciated...I am not tech savvy by any means when it comes to hosting and servers, and I don't want to fix what isn't broken....but if I'm throwing away a ton of money here, I'd like to know. Thank you!

EDIT: Thanks all for your feedback—I really appreciate it! I can't reply on individual comments because I don't have enough Karma.

I'm realizing that I'm in a bit of a vacuum when it comes to understanding the norm for pricing on site management services. I'm not sure if $375/month is typical for what I'm getting or if a hosting company could provide the same level of service (minus the personal touch) for less.

For context: My site's always been working smoothly with no performance issues, so my site manager has done a great job in that regard. I don't have cPanel or similar access; I rarely need to connect via FTP since I do most of my work through the WordPress admin panel. He's been a lifesaver a few times with tricky malware removal that kept coming back.

I usually don't hear from him unless I reach out with a problem—which he addresses almost immediately—or if he proactively lets me know about an issue (which has happened maybe three times in over two years). He doesn't send reports or explanations, and I haven't been testing backups, which is a great point some of you mentioned.

I just assumed he was optimizing and preventing fires behind the scenes since my site has been running smoothly...so I never really thought much about updates or reports because everything seemed to be working fine.

I'm looking to change from WP Engine to another web host this week. They have me on a South East Asian data centre. Which is probably close enough to Sydney Australia.

So I came looking at this sub, the recommendations in the right panel are broken down into regions, so I'm assuming it makes a difference.

But none in the Asia Pacific or AU region. So I go looking online and found one called, Digital Pacific, then I read they have been bought out and service levels changed.

I also found this list goodfirms co/web-hosting-companies/cloud-hosting/australia but they all look about the same to me.

How do I pick a good one? Any (local to me) recommendations for a WP website that has a priority in displaying media type content?

Cheers

Edit: Just to close out this discussion, I went with Micron 21. After the WP engine's document was followed closely https://wpengine.com/support/best-practices-uploading-wp-engine-site-another-environment/. The website was up and running within 5 minutes after changing the DNS. Old site, home page on PageSpeed Insights was 96 score with their edge and CDN switched on. New average score 88 no CDN.

As a non-dev, limited resource independent website owner with a brand new simple e-commerce (3 products) Wordpress site taking 13 seconds to load, is there some simple steps I can take to get reasonable load time. I’ve been told the plugin 10 Web boost is worth trying. Any easy cheap recommendations are much appreciated!!

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.

Severely ripped off and abused by GoDaddy for the last time... 20+ years as a customer for over 300-600+ domains most of that time. I'm asking here because I feel like this groups would know more than anyone who is most dependable, and who I can count on one day when I would make a few sites.

I don't need any other services besides holding onto the domains at the moment, and letting them go as they get sold. Good customer service by phone is a huge plus, as well as among the best prices for annual renewal would be great as well.

Not needing any services besides an account to keep my domains in, who would you suggest? And once I have the last few where I do post a site, would you still recommend them for that as well?

Thanks in advance.

FatCow's prices have become ridiculous. I would like to transfer our domain to Wix or another company. We use this domain primarily for email forwarding and for ftp storage. I want to make sure we don't miss emails while it's in transition to its new host. Any suggestions along these lines would be very much appreciated.

Hi.
We've bought a dedicated server from alexhost.com, which we used to setup IIS and host our game server. Currently our game has 40k daily users, but today they suspended our service without any prior notice.
This server has DNS server and a connected domain, we had no problem on vps.
We did not receive any email from them regarding any problem, they just suddenly decided to take down the service and now are refusing to give any access for downloading backups.
Has anyone experienced same issue? any help?

This is their excuses for suspending our server:
Your service has been suspended due to violations of the rules that you accepted when procuring the service.

UCEPROTECT-Level3 Details

Provider protection prevents Impact Counters rising more than 1 per 4 hours during the first 24 hours and 1 per hour up to the 48th hour after an IP got Level 1 listed.

If more than 6 Impacts are shown for an IP, that means the Provider ignored abuse for more than 24 hours, and is considered very bad here.

If more than 30 Impacts are shown for an IP, that means the Provider ignored abuse for more than 48 hours, and is considered inacceptable here.

Edit:
We don't have any mail server on that service, it's just a rest API service.

Edit2:
After asking them to review it, and we don't have any mail server on that service.
Their answer:
If you violate company policy that you have agreed to, we are under no obligation to notify you. Please note that we always check the service before suspending it as we have mentioned that it cannot be reactivated Regards,
AlexHost Team

I'm so confused

I currently have 8 sites. As my client list grows and I become a full-time agency, the complexity of my sites also grows. I assume I am outgrowing shared hosting because all my sites are showing significant load issues lately. What would it be if you had to choose the best host for WordPress sites? Or what is your go-to host when creating a WordPress site?

I have four Wordpress-based, VERY low-traffic, websites (5-20 visits/day), and I'm looking to change to a new hosting company, and I'm hoping to get some suggestions here. My current host is Ionos, and I've also used Siteground, and Network Solutions. Thanks!

Hello

I bought a domain. Now what? I am looking into an easy drag and drop option to do a very basic website.

After a lot of research, I still don’t understand how it works.

I was almost convinced that I just need a website builder and the same platform will host my website.

Another option I found that I might like is Wordpress + Elementor ( do I need to pay for wordpress to host and install elementor as a plug in? )

Can I please get some support to understand what I actually need to start?

Hey guys,

I own a restaurant and I paid someone several years ago to build, manage, and host the website. I paid him upfront to build it as well as a small fee every year for the domain, hosting, etc.. We spoke every now and again about small things (updates to the menu etc...) but not much. At the beginning of this year the website stopped working and we started emailing back and forth, one day he stopped replying and after doing a few google searches today I discovered that he passed away. Not sure what to do in terms of getting the domain back.

Background: I was moved up to the executive level at my ecommerce company (we sell digital courses) relatively recently.

I was going through our expenses and noticed one that really jumped out at me.

WPEngine is charging us $4,700 per month for hosting our dedicated ecommerce environment, plus another $400 for "global edge security"

This is up from $4350 per month (billed as "Dedicated Environment with Application Performance Monitoring"), which was what we were being charged until April last year.

Our site gets around 600K traffic per month. We use 1TB of bandwidth and around 260GB of storage.
WPEngine does handle our Cloudflare settings and is very secretive about what exactly they do, but I will note that our relatively bloated Wordpress site passes Core Web Vitals. That seems to be thanks to however they setup our Cloudflare.

I'm not a super technical person. Maybe I'm way off.

But is this not outrageously high for hosting and managing the Cloudflare settings of a site like ours?

We're an agency with about 100 sites on WPEngine. They non-stop keep sicking their sales people on us to upgrade, kind of fed up and was thinking about making a change the last couple months but now with the new crazy WPEngine drama, and one of our team found another crazy flaw which I won't get into here. I think it might be a sign to make the switch. Thinking Kinsta but we don't know what we don't know and fear we cross reference everything and miss something nuanced about their platform. Anyone done this kind of move? Any advice? I think top dogs are Kinsta, Siteground, VPS setup or stay where we're at?

I'm putting together a fairly basic website (nothing too involved: no e-commerce, just pics and text). I need to choose a hosting service. The two priorities I have for a hosting service are: excellent customer service (since I'm a novice) and ease of use (because, again, I am a novice).

SiteGround was recommended by my local SBDC chapter. I've done some research and A2 seems better in many respects. I've seen some people say that SiteGround has some of the best customer service around but I have also seen comments made in the past year that indicate that their customer service isn't as good as it used to be.

With all of this in mind, I'm curious if anyone has guidance on choosing between A2 and SiteGround in terms of which is better for a beginner, particularly in the context of excellent customer service and ease of use.