Over the past several days, you may have noticed the Alexandrian website periodically disappearing or appearing with broken menus.
Here’s what’s going on:
My hosting company, which has hosted the site for 20 years, has gone through a whole series of acquisitions over the past few years. A few months ago the company that bought the company that bought the company that bought them ended up getting bought by Endurance International Group (EIG), which has recently changed its name to Newfold Digital.
The enshittification has now begun: They’ve significantly reduced the specs of my hosting plan and are now trying to upsell me all the stuff they removed. (“Do you want to have the server’s PHP upgraded to a version that doesn’t have security flaws? That’ll cost ya!”)
The main problem is that they’ve reduced the number of MySQL queries the site is allowed to make each hour. When the limit is reached, the MySQL database stops responding to queries and WordPress stops working. But, good news! For just $500 per year they’ll increase the MySQL limit!
It took me a while to figure this out, because the customer service reps will just lie to me when I talk to them.
My “favorite” interaction so far was when they swapped from trying to upsell me an add-on package to trying to upsell me an enterprise-level private server (for even more money). I told them I still wasn’t interested in the upsell, and their honest-to-god response was, “Me? Upsell?! Perish the thought! We don’t even offer these servers! You’d have to contact a different company, like Bluehost or Network Solutions! I’m so sorry you thought I was trying to upsell you!”
Bluehost and Network Solutions are, of course, owned by Newfold.
If you’re looking to host your own website, avoid all of these Newfold Digital brands:
- Network Solutions
- Bluehost
- Markmonitor
- HostGator
- register.com
- domain.com
- CrazyDomains
- Reseller Club
- iPage
- Big Rock
- Sitebuilder.com
- Vodien
- Yoast
- Yith
- iPower
- BuyDomains.com
- Snapnames
- NameJet
- Typepad
- Web.com
- FastDomain
- Homestead
- LogicBoxes
Newfold has since reduced the cost of their bullshit add-on from $500 to $57 to $36 per year (it’s a “special discount”!), but I’ve decided to go for the alternative solution of bailing on these fraudsters and finding a new hosting company. If for no other reason than who knows what essential part of the server they’ll turn off next.
I’m hoping this will be a fairly quick process. I apologize for any difficulties you have in using the site in the meantime.
Yikes! May I recommend WP Engine? I host my own portfolio and our game site with them and have for years. Specialized to WP sites. They are a bit more expensive than the herd (smallest plan is $30/month), but the support team has been great. Bonus: they’re the only host that has an independent clone of the plugin/theme repository that’s independent from Matt Mullenweg’s iron grip on WP’s development. I even run my client accounts on one of their bigger servers.
Anyhow, hope you find a solution because The Alexandrian is a treasure trove that should be protected for posterity!
I use Siteground. Never had any problems. I would recommend them.
My site is on digital ocean but I do have to do a lot of apache stuff myself.
Wow, what a coincidence! You’re not wrong about those other brands.
I used Dotster to renew a couple domain names for a local non-profit for 2 years, almost 2 years ago. They had an Email Forwarding feature, where one could set up an address like mail@[domain], and emails to that address would actually go to the one-or-more other email addresses you told them.
Dotster became Web.com, and Web.com became Network Solutions.
The other day, I was asked to add a new address to the email-forwards. That feature was completely missing from the control panel. They don’t offer that feature anymore, and they can’t even show me what email-forwards exist.
The forwards are still working, but I cannot change them. I can only recreate them somewhere else, from scratch and guesswork, because I cannot even see which ones exist today.
I’ve checked my email history several times — at no point did they say there was action required, nor any sort of deadline to preserve records of my current configuration. Customer service was very apologetic about their astonishing removal of customer-input data with no warning, but they were also quite clear that there was nothing they could do to actually help.
That was just a few days ago, and I’m still grumpy about it. I’m absolutely going to transfer those domains elsewhere as soon as I choose a new registrar.
At least it’s been a good reminder to always maintain version-controlled backups of critical configuration like email forwards and DNS records. I might even try using Terraform for it, if I switch the email forwards over to Cloudflare.
I host all my sites on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, and I have nothing but praise for them.
I’ve been using Dreamhost without drama for over 20 years. I’m not sure who actually owns the company, and my hosting needs are pretty modest, but I’ve never had a bad experience with them. “No drama” is a weak recommendation, but all the same….
@Scrith: Shit, dude. “No drama” is pretty much the one and only thing you want from a website that supports your business.
I can also say I used Dreamhost for a decade with pretty rare issues and decent support. My traffic was almost certainly lower than the Alexandrian, but it *was* critical to the business that it didn’t ever stop working.
Hope you get it sorted soon.
I’d highly recommend Krystal.io
They’re independent, not part of one of the big enshitified groups like GoDaddy, and their tech support are actually technical and competent. And performance is fantastic as they use litespeed, which has fantastic caching.