Site5 lost my website. Alternative hosting recommendation?

[GK]

I have my glensstuff.com domain registered with Namecheap and my site content hosted in Dallas by Site5. I received an email the other day informing me that my account has been upgraded (I was especially selected for this exciting offer, allegedly  ). Well with this fantastic upgrade my website has magically disappeared from existence and I can no longer access anything. Waiting for a response to my email(s):

My "Site5 Backstage platform has been upgraded". My hosted website (domain: glensstuff.com) is no longer available on the internet and I cannot login or access any of my files via FileZilla as per usual.

Furthermore under Portal Home>Client Area>My Products & Services>Product Details my website glensstuff.com is now listed under "legacy Products" and "Disk usage" and "Bandwidth usage" have reset to zero. If I try to access my hosted files by clicking on the "File Manager" icon I get the error message "Action Failed Unable to auto-login. Please contact support."

With a little bit of googling I have found that Site5 have gone down the crapper big time and as of Aug/Sept this year subscribers have been loosing their websites and waiting days and days for inadequate technical support. I am certainly not going to wait forever for someone to at least inform me as at why my hosted files have apparently been lost and am almost ready to pull the plug.

So which hosting company should I sign up with next?

[daqq]

I'm happy with www.websupport.sk , they are local (Slovakian local) and have a good service. Though I understand that this might not be usable for you (international payments and such).

[ebclr]

Sometimes free stuff are better than paid one

check

http://wordpress.com/

[apelly]

If you can handle a virtual server, Digital Ocean are cheap as chips, and charge by the minute, so you can spin up another machine and test something for a few cents.

[GK]

Hmm, minimum fee/cheapest plan from Digital Ocean is $5 USD per month. Can't read much Slovak I'm afraid and I really wouldn't like to work with a WordPress theme/template. Currently looking at HostGator. They're not the best (but I'm really not that fussed if my pages load in 800mS instead of 400mS or have a 99.97% up-time rather than 99.99%) but are huge and are therefore perhaps consistent. Cheap and bandwidth is unmetered (with caveats that I can't see effecting me).

[daqq]

https://www.websupport.sk/en/

See https://www.websupport.sk/en/the-hosting

For a small webpage you can get down to 0.9 EUR/month for the hosting. Select the requisite disk space needed.

[tszaboo]

Anything I tried, the prices increased ten fold, after the first year. If you dont want ads, and top domain name, I would go with wordpress.

[rdl]

I had a couple of sites I recently took offline that never got much traffic. They're hosted by NearlyFreeSpeech. They have a very reasonable pay for what you use plan. It took almost 4 years to use up the initial $25 that I deposited. It's pretty easy to set up and use and they do a good job explaining everything you need to know.


https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

[amspire]

I doubt Site5 has lost your website. You just have to change the dns servers in your domain registrar to ns1 and ns2.webserversystems.com as described in the email everyone was meant to get.I don't think you can use ns1.site5.com after the migration. The trouble with the migration is the people doing it were in a bubble totally isolated from Site5 support and the real world. The email system they used for notification was crap. Many critical emails were never even sent.

[amspire]

By the way, once your Site5 is up again, you get a few things you didn't have before. For example, you can now add your own ssl cert yourself. So  you can get a $10 cert or a free letsencrypr.org cert and you have ssl website and emails. Before you had to pay Site5 to install a certificate.

[apelly]

Hmm, minimum fee/cheapest plan from Digital Ocean is $5 USD per month.

Maybe I'm out of touch, but I thought that was pretty cheap.

And as I say, you only pay for up time. Obviously that's 100% for a web site, but you can spin up other machines for basically nothing to test on.

[amspire]

Just had a look this morning, and it looks like your Site5 site is different from mine. It is on DNS.site5.com and dns2.site5.com at server 143.95.78.250 and not on ns1.webserversystems.com.

Looks like that whole server has a problem. What does Site5 support say?

If you go to http://143.95.78.250/~name  where "name" is you cpanel user name, do you see your site? I have been a happy customer of Site5 for many years, but I have to admit the migration after the sale of Site5 to Endurance International Group has been has not been the best experience.

I had the backstage upgrade recently, but my sites are still working. You now have me worried a little.

[amspire]

Hmm, minimum fee/cheapest plan from Digital Ocean is $5 USD per month.

Maybe I'm out of touch, but I thought that was pretty cheap.

And as I say, you only pay for up time. Obviously that's 100% for a web site, but you can spin up other machines for basically nothing to test on.

I am a regular Digital Ocean user and I agree that $5 a month is very cheap for a fixed dedicated IP address. Unlike Amazon, etc, the cost is fixed - no extra upload/download fees. Love the fact I can make a site in about a minute, use it for a few days with a full 20G of storage and delete it when I am finished for under 50c total cost. Great for testing.

[AntiProtonBoy]

VentraIP. Been using them for years and they have pretty good tech support. You can manage your domains and hosting together. Also, they are Aussie based 

https://ventraip.com.au/

[GK]

Just had a look this morning, and it looks like your Site5 site is different from mine. It is on DNS.site5.com and dns2.site5.com at server 143.95.78.250 and not on ns1.webserversystems.com.

Looks like that whole server has a problem. What does Site5 support say?

If you go to http://143.95.78.250/~name  where "name" is you cpanel user name, do you see your site? I have been a happy customer of Site5 for many years, but I have to admit the migration after the sale of Site5 to Endurance International Group has been has not been the best experience.

I had the backstage upgrade recently, but my sites are still working. You now have me worried a little.

Support is not available and doesn't say anything. Zip, nada, nil. I was out of town Mon-Thurs, but noticed Thursday night that my site was down. My account was upgraded on Monday, so I presume that its been down since then. Since this morning this appears when I try to access my site:



So at least now I know that it is a server issue.

[GK]

I doubt Site5 has lost your website. You just have to change the dns servers in your domain registrar to ns1 and ns2.webserversystems.com as described in the email everyone was meant to get.I don't think you can use ns1.site5.com after the migration. The trouble with the migration is the people doing it were in a bubble totally isolated from Site5 support and the real world. The email system they used for notification was crap. Many critical emails were never even sent.

I received two emails and neither mentioned anything about changing dns servers, but rather stated that I didn't need to do anything at all:

[GK]

You can manage your domains and hosting together. Also, they are Aussie based 

OK, I'll check them out, but I'm not sure that is a good idea. Pretty happy that I don't have my domain managed by site5 right now.

[GK]

I have been a happy customer of Site5 for many years, but I have to admit the migration after the sale of Site5 to Endurance International Group has been has not been the best experience.

That seems to be the general consensus. Scroll down and read the comments:

https://www.besthostnews.com/site5-review/

[GK]

If you go to http://143.95.78.250/~name  where "name" is you cpanel user name, do you see your site?

404 Not found.

[amspire]

After hearing about GK's woes, I have been reading the Site5 comments on the web. The great thing about Site5 was that we would post a ticket and get a real intelligent answer back within the hour. I haven't had to raise a ticket since the migration to Endurance, but it does sound like I have just been lucky. People seem to be waiting 7 days for an answer to tickets, and when they get it, it is a "We are working on it" type answer or "The server appears to be working fine" type answer. They are just not acceptable answers and when there is a problem. There has to be same day service.

Looks like I may have to look for a new host as well. Whatever I choose, I will only look at hosts that support the automatic renewal of LetsEncrypt free SSL certs (since they expire every 3 months).

[ebclr]

If you have a small traffic I can host free for you send me a personal email with domain and contact info

[GK]

They are just not acceptable answers and when there is a problem. There has to be same day service.

Looks like I may have to look for a new host as well. Whatever I choose, I will only look at hosts that support the automatic renewal of LetsEncrypt free SSL certs (since they expire every 3 months).

My site is now back on-line, but none of my tickets ever got a response. That's just bollocks, so I've cancelled my subscription at the end of my (non-refundable) billing period, which still has six months left. I wouldn't feel comfortable having a business website hosted by Site5.

[Brumby]

VentraIP. Been using them for years and they have pretty good tech support. You can manage your domains and hosting together. Also, they are Aussie based 

https://ventraip.com.au/

Another vote for VentraIP.

A range of plans.  Very professional.  Highly automated and very functional setup. Tickets responded to promptly.

I can recommend without hesitation.