Greetings to all photography enthusiasts and followers of my creative journey! Today I’m sharing a candid account of my recent experience with HostPapa, a web hosting provider that has been a part of my online presence for years. In this post, I’ll delve into the recurring downtime issues I faced, the persistent upselling tactics of an accounts manager named Cesar, and the unexpected help I found on social media.
A Long-Term Relationship Turned Sour
My association with web hosting began way back in the early 2000s when I signed up with Lunarpages. A solid start, it all changed when HostPapa took over. While my loyalty remained steadfast, my experience evolved, and not always for the better. This evolution made me wonder if HostPapa’s commitment to customers had shifted over time.
The reality is that they sort of see legacy accounts such as mine, as a pain to handle and ever since they took over, there was a push to upgrade and send them more money for not a lot in return. Hostpapa treated me more like an unwanted house guest than a loyal subscriber.
Dealing with Recurring Downtime
As a content creator and photographer, maintaining a seamless online experience is vital. Unfortunately, my journey with HostPapa’s shared server was marred by frequent downtimes due to excessive resource usage from my site, according to them. These unexpected surges in resources and failures not only frustrated me but also lead to frequent snotty emails from their accounts manager.
I was shocked to see the lack of understanding and fake empathy coming from the HostPapa team. Nothing at all sounded sincere or like they were really trying to help solve this problem together with me. It just sounded to me like they were sick of dealing with my issue because it was from a legacy account left over from LunarPages and they they just want me to pay more so that they could be done with this old account.
Cesar: The Persistent Upseller
Amidst these challenges, I encountered Cesar, an accounts manager at HostPapa. While an accounts manager typically offers support, Cesar’s approach often felt like a continuous sales pitch with a side of uncaring frustration. The insistence on upgrading to higher-tier hosting plans, even when I questioned the necessity, left me feeling cornered and pressured. This misalignment between my needs and the proposed solutions was disheartening. Repeatedly, I had told them that I was not in the position to upgrade financially but, it fell on deaf ears.
Some of the emails left me annoyed especially when he replied in an email stating that he didn’t have any further optimization tips for me. A comment that really sounded snarky as I was desperately seeking solutions to an ongoing problem that kept resulting in my site being shut down for extended periods of time.
I wasn’t looking for “tips” on site optimization or how to get more followers on TikTok, I needed support. Sadly, all I was getting was a constant push to upgrade. Albeit at a discounted price, it was still coming off sleezy to me.
Twitter: Unconventional Problem-Solving
Interestingly, my pursuit of assistance took an unexpected turn when I turned to Twitter (or X as it is now known) for advice. Surprisingly, my plea grabbed the attention of HostPapa’s social media team. Suddenly, my issues were being addressed with a sense of urgency. This experience highlighted the power of public platforms in escalating concerns.
They jumped up and got a support ticket made. Suddenly what was seemingly out of the scope of tech according to Cesar, support was now swiftly being handled. I was surprised at how fast they got my site up again and friendly the other HostPapa team members were.
Persistent Upselling: A Familiar Tune
What struck me the most was how my HostPapa account, which dates back to the early 2000s, had evolved from a partnership to an ongoing upselling push. This shift in focus raised questions about the true intent behind these interactions.
It started with a push to upgrade simply because my email was getting full. Then, they took to shutting down my site. For a small photography website, it really made me question my loyalty to this hosting service. Their tech support came up with only temporary solutions but weeks later, Cesar was back with another 48-hour shut down notice. The solution: upgrade my hosting package.
It wasn’t until my twitter post that I really found some honest support. That to me is a huge red flag. When you have to make an issue public to get some solid help that shows where a company’s priorities are.
The Bottomline
Reflecting on my HostPapa journey, I’m reminded of the need for reliable and supportive hosting solutions. As a photographer, my energy should be directed towards capturing beautiful images and sharing stories behind them, rather than dealing with technical hiccups. While I cherish the relationship I’ve built over the years, it’s essential to assess whether the current path aligns with my goals.
In the pursuit of better hosting options, I’ll continue my quest for a platform that values customer support, reliability, and the growth of creative ventures. Thank you for joining me on this open exploration of my web hosting experiences. Your support fuels my determination to find the best path forward for both me and my audience.
Tammy
This is exactly what Hostpapa is doing to me and it’s very frustrating!
Jason Teale
Run! I gave in and got their Ultimate package and now they are trying to pressure me to spend another $100 a year in increase my backup plan. The funniest part is that for that extra money I only get 5gb more!!! Not terabytes… nope gigabytes. What a scam!
Lesley Hardy
OMG i cold have written the same thing word for word. Im breaking up with them as soon as my plan ends. They upsold me onto a WHM because of traffic issues or something. I spoke to another provider and they told me Hostpapa are notorious for downsizing resources so they can upsell. Customer service is good, but the company sucks. They also “upsold” me on security software and shortly after my website was attacked and I had to take it down. I was building a new one anyway but I just needed like a fortnight!
When I spoke to a local hoster, it just felt more REAL
Jason Teale
I had a long chat with their customer service team and sorted some things out. I think that they have realized they dropped the ball big time. I am giving them another year but it was a tough choice.
Joe
Same here. My site was on LunarPages for years, without any problems. Now HostPapa keeps telling my my website is hogging resources and they will limit access to my site if the over-usage continues. My website is for showing my art – it unfortunately does not get that much traffic and when I look at my stats in ControlPanel, I do not see any high resource usage. HostPapa says they have “multiple options available to fix this right away” and I just know that means upgrading to something that I don’t really need. I’m starting to shop for other host providers.
Jason Teale
that is exactly the same story that they told me. I know that my site get barely any traffic and now I see that it is a common tactic. I would switch right away. I upgraded to give myself some time and right after that, they tried to upsell me again saying that the backup limit was full.
MattP
I had been a Lunarpages customer since the early 00s. Linux cpanel hosting, basic web/php stuff and basic email (aliases, forwarders, catch-alls). It was something like “unlimited storage” but I never abused that for media hosting or anything else. Just basic web stuff and email.
By 2020 I mostly just used them for legacy email as everything else had been moved to proper VPS servers.
Lunarpages was bought by hostpapa and it was okay for a little while.
Then about a year after the acquisition (fall 2021) they wrote me to tell me that having an email account over 1GB is against their policy (my email account was at 13GB) and that if I didn’t get my account under 1GB (ie delete ~20 years of mail history) within 7 days, they would suspend my account (no new email, loss of access, etc). Supposedly they had tried to contact me before but all of the HostPapa support team’s email goes to spam…on my HostPapa managed email service. Yeah, they are that good. Anyway, even if I had seen those messages, or they had tried to call me, it would have only given me another week.
At the same time they tried to upsell me into google workspace or MSFT365 plans.
It was the final nail in the coffin for HostPapa after a short experience with them. My cpanel didn’t show any warnings or storage limits and showed I was on a LunarPages legacy plan.
It is completely unprofessional to give people 1 or 2 weeks to make a massive change after 20 years. Certainly not something any business or enterprise should or will tolerate.
I scrambled and setup my own postfix/dovecot server and migrated all my email within a few days and cancelled the account. It was on my todo list, but was low priority. HostPapa’s unprofessionalism on timing and notice meant I had to re-shuffle all my projects and treat this as an emergency (like one of my own servers went down)…but this should not have been an emergency except for the poor systems, policy and service at hostpapa.
I’m lucky that I’m in a position to run/monitor my own services…most people aren’t and will need to rely on HostPapas or Google or Microsoft. However HostPapa really has destroyed what was once a great hosting company (Lunarpages).
Today running my own mailservers, a huge portion of the spam I receive is coming from the hostpapa network. I dutifully report it to spamcop and the hostpapa network is regularly completely blocked at SMTP because I get more spam than legit email from their IPs. This explains why even their support team had trouble delivering email to my hostpapa inbox and reinforces that staying away from hostpapa is a good idea.
I had a bunch of friends, colleagues and clients that I had brought to lunarpages years ago. I’ve migrated them all away to other services since end of 2021. Don’t let people you like use HostPapa.
MattP
By the way, for non-techies looking for solutions…
I expect you are generally just using some kind of CMS app for your sites/galleries (ghost, drupal, wordpress, etc).
Probably a mix of FTP (hopefully SFTP) and web interface.
So all you really need is a decent IT guy that can configure/monitor a linux virtual server for you and install your app and backups. Off-server backup space is cheap with B2 storage and can easily be automated to run daily/weekly…and there are approaches that help keep your backups safe from ransomware.
A basic linux VPS can be $5/month. A “beefier” one for a popular site can be had for under $20/month. You can put a CDN in front of it if you are using a CMS that requires a bunch of database queries on every page request. BunnyCDN is very cheap and pay as you go ($0.01/GB bandwidth).
Your IT guy should ideally be able to auto-provision this server for you and monitor it for you (detecting availability of security updates, doing app upgrades, etc). Detecting outages or DNS misconfigurations, etc.
Your domain registrar ideally provides a free DNS service (e.g. Gandi does but NameCheap doesn’t), if not then you may need to pay for some basic DNS (connecting your domain with web server, email server, etc).
For email, best to leave that to the professionals and just pay for Google Workspace starter or MSFT365 Business Basic. This gets you hosted email, calendar and contacts server as well as the ability to create email groups (e.g. marketing@) and to send email from those groups using “send as”. You will pay ~$6/month per mailbox for these services.
The biggest problem is that you need to find an IT person to install your CMS app, upgrade it, setup automated backups and monitor your server…and of course for support if you have problems. Most IT people that are good are looking for larger business customers where they can charge more per month. So if you have trouble on the web hosting end, look around for managed hosting for your particular CMS app of choice rather than going the raw linux virtual server route.
Jason Teale
Thank you for such a detailed response and it is crazy how similar it is to the other people that have messaged me. They tried the email tactic on me as well. I used the site site email for years and then started using gmail later on. So, I wasn’t using the email excessively by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, they came at me with the in the beginning. Then when I wouldn’t bite with email, they stepped it up a notch.
Even now, they are still trying to upsell me stating that I can’t update my site because I’ve run out of backup space. At least once a week I get a message saying “Uh-oh! You’ve reached 100% of the storage space allocated for your HostPapa Automated Website Backup account. Unfortunately the continuous backup of all your files in your account will no longer run, until you upgrade your plan, or reduce your storage to below 100% capacity.”
So I must thank you for the information here and I will be starting to look for a suitable place for my site asap. Thank you.