Geodog

If your web hosting company is acquired by Web Host Plus, run for the hills

Three years ago, I wanted to put together a new website (SARS Watch Org), and wanted to use a different web host than the one my family site and blog were hosted on. Someone recommended dr2.net, and the price was right, $45 for year's hosting. While there were occasional problems, the site stayed up even when SARS Watch Org briefly became very popular. Sometime in the second year, I found out that the owner of dr2.net was a teenager named Matthew Eli, but he gave great service, so while I knew that it wouldn't make sense to host a mission critical application on dr2.net, over the years I transferred more and more of the sites I built for family members and friends to dr2.net, and moved all my personal email over to dr2.net. About a year ago Matt merged his operation with a company called Mesopia, which quickly was renamed Netbunch. From my point of view, things stayed the same, so I didn't pay a lot of attention when they announced that the new company had been sold to another company, Web Host Plus (so Matt could go to college). What a mistake.

Web Host Plus, also known as Webhostplus.com, is the gang that couldn't shoot straight of web hosting. Unannounced in advance, they decided to migrate all the sites over to new servers, with different Apache and PHP configurations (and some of them are already listed with RBL as spammers). The first thing I knew about it was when my sites started breaking. And tech support on Webhostplus.com is a joke -- I sent in email and the answer to almost every question about site configuration is "wait for the [un-announced] nameserver change to resolve" or "it's a permissions problem, chmod all your files to 777" -- in other words invite myself to being hacked. Then I stopped getting incoming email to all my email accounts. I spent many hours emailing technical support and posting on the forums without any result until I eventually called the poor sap who is in charge of the old dr2.net customers, Carl Rudel, who got incoming mail turned back on .. for a little while. So far it has gone down 3 times this week, for 2 days at a time in one case. And each time Web Host Plus lost all my mail! It takes a lot of work to be as incompetent as Web Host Plus -- internet email was expressly designed to avoid this. But if you check the forums at Netbunch you can see I am just one among hundreds with similar problems. I don't understand what kind of business model Web Host Plus has that makes it worth it for them to acquire smaller webhosting companies if they drive all the customers away? I fear credit card fraud -- there are certainly allegations of such among all the horror stories I read about Webhostplus when I searched for information about WebHostPlus on Web Hosting Talk.

I have now spent a large part of the weekend doing what I should have done when I first found out that Netbunch had been acquired by Web Host Plus -- backing everything up. I have my mail moved over, but still need to move my sites over. Anybody have any recommendations for a web host that lets you host multiple low-traffic domains on one account? I liked working with a small company where I "knew" who the owner was, and emailed with him, but I've just seen the problem with that. Would I be better off getting an account with someone like Yahoo or Verio? Do you get more competence in return for giving up personalized service? When I put together the web portal for MyTurn during the dot com boom, I found that size of the data center or company was no guarantee of competence either. Hopefully things have changed. Suggestions?