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.
