When signing up for Bluehost, it’s crucial to read the fine print and stay alert about renewal charges. While they might initially quote you an enticing price—say $65 for the first year—the renewal could cost you over $300. This for just simple hosting of your site with Wordpress. Then you have to also pay around $2 every month for email. This steep increase often includes add-ons like CodeGuard billed annually for $65, which they claim you’ve had the entire previous year, even if you weren’t aware of it.

I've been a fanatical client of LiquidWeb for 10 years, primarily because of how incredibly skilled and helpful their support was. I'm fairly skilled at UNIX administration myself, but I counted on Liquid Web's support team for all the tricky stuff. If anything I asked for was out-of-scope, support would still give it their best effort. Superlative support.

But in the last few years, the typical skill level of the folks I reach on Liquid Web's phone support team has plummeted.

This evening after a totally botched server migration – which left 50+ of my client's websites offline for 3 hours – I called support for help to repair some of the damage. It took me 30 minutes and three phone transfers to finally reach one of the old school experts in the USA who could actually help.

As for the other two support staff I reached, the first (baby crying in the background) and her superior (?) were overseas consultants who spoke poor English and had very rudimentary administration skills. Neither one seemed to have a working knowledge of cron jobs.

I pay $700/month for a dedicated server at LiquidWeb, but when I call support it sometimes feels like I'm back on a $3.99 shared plan at Blue Host.

What's your experience? Are there certain days of the week or times of the day when you get good ol fashioned Liquid Web experts on the phone? I wonder if the days of doing 2am migrations on a Saturday morning are over.

I have a simple static website.The hosting and domain is with fozzy. The renewal is coming up and their rates have become exorbitant. I am planning to move to a cheaper alternative like Asura. Will they handle the entire transfer. I want to keep the domain with fozzy as I have paid the fees till 2029 and just transfer the hosting. Can anyone guide me about the steps to follow ? Or will Asura help me out ?

So finally had enough of HostGator and going with Nixihost for hosting.

I only transferred hosting once before and it was a while back.

I got my domain through porkbun. I intend to keep it with them. Besides backing up my database from myPHPAdmin and wordpress site is there anything else I need to do? Will Nixihost tell Hostgator to transfer hosting to them after I buy it or do I need to let HG know?

Hey everyone,

Last week, I noticed a huge lag across my websites. They're hosted on a pretty powerful dedicated server, so I knew it wasn’t a hosting issue. After digging through the logs, I found an insane spike in bot and crawler activity, like 400 to 1000 times the usual amount.

I’ve always used the free Cloudflare plan, but this time I had to crank up the anti-bot mode to strict and tweak the WAF settings. I followed this guide that I found in the Cloudflare sub and it made a huge difference.

Anyone else here had a similar experience recently? How do you deal with bots hammering your sites?

Right now CF is mitigating around 700k request per day, per domain.

I recently registered a domain with porkbun. Within seconds of the registration going through, I got an email from go daddy saying something like "Welcome to your new account!" to an email that did not have an existing go daddy account and had never been involved in any go daddy related communication prior to this.

Has anyone experienced this? Im well aware of how terrible their reputation is which is why I never even considered registering with them. I never gave any consent or interacted with GoDaddy and don't even know how this is possible when porkbun defaults to enabling privacy service.

How is this even possible? Does porkbun sell data to them?

My work has a WP Engine server that we are paying $750/month for.

Performance is fine and I don't care about the whole matt / wp engine drama but I feel like there has to be something cheaper.

We have around 200 sites on it but most of them get very little to no traffic. We have around 5 sites that get 20k to 50k visitors per month.

We like the WP Engine features and need something that has similar features, primarily auto back up, staging, and can easily copy sites. We will probably add another 100 low traffic sites this year so it should handle that. Email not needed.

Not looking for random hosts, they need to be well established.

Budget less than $750

The question is pretty much in the title. I would like to run a small website, and was wondering would it be cheaper and better if I rent some Linux machine with SSH access, on which I could install everything I need, i.e. web server, database, backend?

Hi, I'm starting a small business which will include an eCommerce component. I have spent a lot of time reading Reddit but websites are not my forte and I'm still very confused. I finally booked my domain name on Porkbun, but I have read not to host with the domain registrar, so looking for somewhere else to host it. I also want to run a Shopify eCommerce site within my website, but again I understand best not to host the whole website with Shopify to derisk. I've read about wordpress hosting but I thought that was just for blogs and sites like that.

I also want email addresses (only a few for now) associated with my domain name.

With that said, can anyone please help me understand what a new small business with these requirements should look for, and suggest some web hosting companies based in Canada or US? I have a Microsoft 365 account and use Google calendars for now but no idea if that can be integrated with all this web host. I also know very little about programming, so the more basic the editing functions, the better. I have no idea what I am willing to pay - I'd say $30 a month? But I don't know if that's a lot or not.

I consider myself pretty business astute yet this element is confounding me! Thank you in advance.

Looking for free or cheap hosting. I have a small website with a few pages where I showcase my work. Users can't upload, leave comments, make an account etc.
Under metrics it shows that there have been 25gb of monthly downloads, which exceeds the limit of the no-cost plan from Firebase. They are about to lower the limit soon so I wish to find a new hosting service. Used the non-free plan of Firebase in the past but monthly cost was between 20-50$

Hey, sometimes I want to quickly show someone the progress of a site or test something without fully deploying it to the server. Setting up a staging environment every time or deploying it on a hosting feels like overkill, especially for smaller changes or quick previews.

So, what’s your go-to solution for quickly sharing something running locally?

Hi,

I need suggestions for offshore web hosting that ignores DMCA reports and fits within a low budget. I'm planning to start a website that will include torrent links or links to free file-sharing websites, but I won't be hosting any video files directly.

If anyone has experience with reliable offshore hosting providers, please share your recommendations. Also, I need suggestions for a domain provider that won't block the domain.

Greetings,

I'll be updating the look of my organization's website which is being hosted by GoDaddy. I noticed that the root folder is named "httpdocs" and this folder contains the website's files. I have another folder which i called "testing" which contains the newer website template I've been working on. My question is this: can I just rename the "httpdocs" to "httpdocsOLD" then rename my "testing" folder to "httpdocs"? Will doing this cause any issues?

Please enlighten me Thank you

I'm getting a constant deluge of spam and it's gotten to the point that MXroute isn't worth it for me. I own a few domains and would like to move to an email host that does a better job with spam. Are there any recommendations?

Hi guys!

So a friend of mine is doing some business regarding insurances and he wanted to have some kind of online course website where his customers are able to watch his course videos.

There wont be any payment functions nor any data collection (username and password only)

He thought about using a service like memberspot but I offered him to do it myself since it would be a great way practice for my webdev skills I thought.

But now I have second thoughts mostly because of security reasons and also legal compliances like GDPR, etc.. (we live in germany)

Are those potential issues I could face? Also I have not yet deciced where we would host this site but should I be prepared for legal problems that could arise and would it be wise to get insurance on legal topics just in case?

The development side of things is not something I worry too much about but rather the whole hosting infrastructure and legal requirements this website could face..

Background: I play in a dynasty fantasy baseball league (keep rosters year to year) on Yahoo. Due to Yahoo constraints & our unique league rules, all of our offseason (drafts, trades, keepers, etc.) is managed through manual labor in Google Sheets, which is a grueling process. I am looking to host a site that allows my league (maximum 30 users simultaneously) to perform these offseason tasks. I have a solid coding background, but more on the side of modeling & analytics than development.

Requirements: For this project, the starting point data comes from accessing the Yahoo Fantasy Sports API, which I have access to via python scrips, currently on my local machine. These APIs return json files. I want to store this data (preferably in a relational database, as is my background) where all the users of the site can access this data (& use as the driver of the site).

I do not have a development team or anything. It's a passion project so all funds would come out of my own pocket & I would be doing all development.

I have explored a handful of options, but its all a bit over my head as I don't have much experience beyond hosting a squarespace site, so coming to here for some guidance. I have no plans to scale this to host many leagues or build a fantasy platform, just one instance of a league & baseball player data.

I have a large interest/importance in the visuals/UI of the site, so flexibility (& ease) of that part of development is preferred. AWS Amplify mentioned that it worked with Figma, something I have some experience with. Anything like that, or easy front-end manipulation is a bonus.

Basically I bought a domain with bluehost, it has been nothing but a nightmare. I let is expire thinking I could just get it from wix for free after the day it expired (12/8/24) only to find out about the grace period and the redemption period. I got an email on 1/20 saying my services were expiring and but when I tried to claim it on wix it still says its taken. Who is says network solutions now owns it so I called them and they were totally unhelpful (I'm now learning they belong to the same company newfold digital and both suck) but before that they talked me into a domain back order (which I'm now thinking wad a terrible decision).

Anyways if anyone has any insight or advice on how I can keep my domain without spending a ton of money that would be helpful.

If I don't get my domain back I have to make all new business cards, flyers, yard signs, magnets and I'd really rather not. Thanks!

Edit to add domain who is info

Edit: thanks for everyone who was helpful

2nd edit: i paid $100 and got it back. lesson learned

I'm confused by Nixihost - their lowest tier Virtual Server is listed as "out of stock" and the rest are all named "(Deprecated) Dallas [...] OVZ VPS" https://www.nixihost.com/hosting/vps

They're running out of "stock" on small servers? And are selling "Deprecated" servers? What's going on with them?

Hello! I have 3 websites for 1 brand, all Wordpress. We run events every couple months and 1 yearly festival. We sell ticket through our website (WooCommerce). At the festival period the website slows down due to high traffic. A friend told me about aws EC2 and the scalability option, that it will suit my needs and be fairly cheap. So after a few days of searching, Litespeed seemed like the best option since we exclusively use Wordpress. Since we want something user friendly and easy to use we went with Cyberpanel, installed on a EC2 instance, tested it, secured it, transfered my 1st website (the least visited one) and all looks good so far. While searching online, people either looove it, or haaate it, there is not between. Am i missing something? Is it good for my use case? Will i be surprised later?

Edit: What would you advise for my case (personal use, only Wordpress)?

hey everyone

i've been using cpanel/whm on a vps from godaddy for the past 6 years, and as of the last 5 or 6 months, we've been having a lot of problems with email deliverability, mainly due to poor ip reputations from godaddy, but the thing is, they mainly use relay servers to send the emails, so even though our own ip is not on some rbl, one of their relay servers ip is, which is causing us a lot of trouble, mainly with gmail and hotmail/outlook/live domains (but also several other personal/local domains), they are outright rejecting basically everything we send, and we have no control whatsoever over this relay server/ip

so i've been looking into alternatives, google cloud actually has a more affordable option than what we currently pay for godaddy, as we don't need a resources heavy vps, only a somewhat bigger storage, around 500gb, and we have around 10 cpanel accounts/domains, so i'd appreciate any other options

besides google, i've looked into azure (way more expensive), aws lightsail, digital ocean (also more expensive) and host**ger (didn't like some things i've read about it)

our domains are registered directly with our country's registrar, and more recently we handed our website to a third party to manage, we only point to their server's ip in our dns zone, so we mainly need it for email usage

also, does anyone have experience migrating emails from one host to another from different companies? we actually migrated to a different server whiting godaddy some years ago, but their support actually handled almost everything (in fact, they did without even contacting us, pretty damn weird, but thankfully everything went well)

I used to use HestiaCP but its abit broken sometimes. FastPanel just dies if a reverse proxy origin is offline, Cyberpanel buggy and paywall, cloudpanel lacking emails.

ispconfig sounds good

I mainly will be hosting 1-3 sites, and needs emails and running wordpress mainly.

Hi All,
I purchased a domain last year, just to have it on hold. Its a really good domain and I still want to hold it for a project i want to undertake in the future. So currently I dont need to host it or anything I just want to keep the website address.

I've just received a renewal from my provider at a total of £40.88 around $45-50 (A breakdown is below)

What are your thoughts?
I have till the end of the month to make a decision so your guidance on this appreciated

So this is kind of a special case. I would like to re-upload one site and parts of another that were taken offline several years ago. I have permission from the original owner to do this and all of the original files.

This site will never be monetized at the wishes of the owner, so I'm looking for a budget option.

I have a domain locked in for 10 years so that is not an issue.

I tried two of the free providers... what a clown show. First one banned me for too many inodes, second one marked me as fraud immediately before even uploading anything. Also tired of seeing so many bait and switch pricing options... seemed a lot better 15 years ago when I was messing around with my own sites.

I am leaning toward Nixihost at $5/mo/3 years.

Need 2GB storage, PHP, SQL. Don't need cPanel.

What is your monthly budget? - Low, $6/mo or less if possible.

Where are you/your users located? - I'm in the US, users could be anywhere

What kind of site are you hosting (Wordpress, phpBB, custom software, etc) or what is your use case? - Mostly plain HTML, a little PHP and SQL

Do you have a monthly traffic volume? Estimates are ok. - No idea, probably low

If you’re looking at VPSes? - No

Did you read the sidebar/check out the hosts listed there? I've personally vetted these companies and their services are a good fit for 99% of people. - Leaning towards Nixihost, open to cheaper suggestions.

Thank you for your input!

Hi everyone. I am starting a law firm business and have someone building the website for me. There is no confidential information or payment service on the website. It’s all pretty basic. This is a WordPress website and I don’t expect a lot of traffic especially early on.

The developer is telling me we need a host with a capacity of 32GB and 6 vCPU. That sounds pretty high. In any case, when I look online hosting is very expensive at $1000 per year or more.

Am I looking in the wrong places? What is my most affordable option? Many thanks in advance.

I need help with hosting and wordpress.Since moving to HOstgator I have not been able to use my website and the customer service has absolutely no clue. Is there such a service that you pay and get help about hosting? I need someone that is very knowledgeable about hosting that I can pay and get serious advice. Would someone know where to get such help?

Hi all, I am trying to update a web.com site that hasn't been touched in over a decade. I have all of the login information, but trying to login through web.com doesn't work (user, email, and domain are all "unrecognized" even though the information is correct). I have to very specifically go to account.web.com and login with the same information that was "unrecognized," but then I am only able to access tools and templates that are from the time when the website was created. Does anyone know how I can access web.com's more modern features, templates, etc. so I can update my current site?

Hi there, for 10Years I was HostGator costumer, I payed my domain to my local Slovenian Hitrost.com domain provider

I had their Shared hosting Hatchling Plan and was paying $175.53 per every year (I started with $100, but price slowly increased, like everywhere else due to inflation)

I didn't mind their slow server,

I didn't mind their occasional complaining about my storage and disabling my website in the meantime until I sorted it out

I didn't mind if their their servers crashed and my website going down for a few hours

I didn't mind if I couldn't create some subdomains like radio.domain.si, storage.domain.com, etc

But this year, they automaticly upgraded my plan to Pro Plan, meaning I am supposed to pay $466.86 for it evey year, which is not acceptable

They did notify me one month in advance though, so at least that

So now I am looking for a new hosting company. I don't need much (Shared hosting and single domain would be just fine), I only need

cPanel

Free SSL Certificate (probably through Let's Encrypt)

Unlimited Subdomains (not restrictive on what name I use for subdomains (or if not unlimited, at least some high number like 100 (in hostgator I have about 88 subdomains right now, although, I should realy clean that up, cuz most of them were for testing anyway)

Unlimited Email accounts (I have about 20 right now

Unlimited Databases (I have about 23 right now)

Ability to choose what PHP Version I use (in Hostgator I had to use PHP 5.5 for some of my old apps)

Unmetered Storage (in 10years it adds up, and at HostGator it added to about 56.63 GB of Storage)

Unmetered Bandwith (although I probably didn't even use much of it anyway (hostgator stats show 29.72 GB, but not sure if thats per month or how they messure it), since my website was only for me and some of my friends, I was never a high bandwith consumer)

Ability to run CGI-Scripts (at least perl ones, but this probably comes with cPanel, idk)

Ability to swich cPanel theme (not realy needed, but would be real nice, what bothered me with hostgator is they would force the new cPanel theme (I realy hate Juniper, I want paper_lantern back)

Ability to renew with paypal every year

Some costumer support with tehnical people (like if I needed lower php version or some outbound ports open, etc)

Ability to migrate if needed

Of course I don't want any horror stories to happen like they would delete all my files without notice, have my domain hostage, etc

Does anything like this exist? (for resonable price something like $140 per year (or even less, certenatly don't want to pay more then I did at hostgator)

Why do Flywheel visitor numbers often exceed Analytics numbers? Could it be due to different tracking methods? Also, is it fair that they charge an extra dollar for every 1,000 additional visitors?

I currently feel like they made these numbers up in order to charge more. Is there anything I can do aboutthis?

Hi there,
I need a VPS mainly in Europe for hosting my website (alongside other microservices) that have low traffic.

My budget is $10/month and I'm looking for the best stability/support provider alongside good performance.

I have tried:

- Ho$tinger: didn't like them — their downtime is high and performance isn't stable. They also once had about 8 hour downtime and they refused to acknowledge it. Liked the support though.

- Contaboo: very unstable performance.

I looked for Netcup and Hetzner, but for some reason they are not accepting my Egyptian National ID document.

I looked up others like A2Hosting (Reddit seems to have bad opinion about them) and Interserver. Interserver seem to have good reputation but I wonder if there is a better performance VPSes out there as I think there might be something better than 2 vCPUs + 3 GB RAM for $9/mo.

• What is your monthly budget? $10/mo
• Where are you/your users located? Italy
• What kind of site are you hosting (Wordpress, phpBB, custom software, etc) or what is your use case? Wordpress/Laravel
• Do you have a monthly traffic volume? Estimates are ok. Low traffic. I expect it to increase soon but I can upgrade VPS later.
• If you’re looking at VPSes: Do you have experience administrating linux servers and infrastructure? Yes, I need an unmanaged VPS. I have experience administrating linux servers.
• Did you read the sidebar/check out the hosts listed there? I've personally vetted these companies and their services are a good fit for 99% of people. Yes, but they are expensive for my needs.

I just wanted to point out that I am back to Trentahost and things are going great. 
I have had my issues before and switched from them, but now I am back and it is smooth.
Great service and great support. Sometimes it takes switching to realize that what you had
is as good as it's going to get.

Here's to a smooth and fast 2025 for VPS!