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Changing Webhosts Again
3:00pm, Thursday, January 17, 2025
Current mood: numb 
Having to change webhosts is not a fun experience. I have had to do it a bunch of times and it's stressful, time consuming and, in a perfect world, shouldn't be necessary. Sadly we don't live in a perfect world, the capitalist model needs fixing, and from time to time it IS necessary. This was one of those times... 
About 6 months ago I realised that my webhost: HostGator had crossed the line into garbage-land and were no longer suitable for my needs. In fact they had become actively hostile to their customers. This is sad, because 6 years ago, when I signed up with them, they were fine!
HostGator Are Now Garbage!
- They made it hard to access cPanel
In a normal web hosting dashboard there will be an option to take you straight to cPanel. cPanel is the standard, host-independent, top menu for all the goodies available to any web designer. You will be going there a lot so it makes sense to make it easy to get to... So you would think... But NOT with HostGator 2024!
So you click on Email accounts and you enter the cPanel Email page and from there you can FINALLY get to cPanel. 4 clicks and 3 screens instead of 1 click. Ridiculous! What a pain in the arse!
The HostGator dashboard: Looks like there is a direct cPanel option but no.... (click any image for full size)
When you click on "cPanel Email you just get Email...
What is the problem with letting users access cPanel? I don't get it... Is it plain stupidity from HostGator analysts or is it a deliberate ploy to stop people going there?
Whatever the reason it's idiocy and I'm not putting up with it! - They removed ALL support!!!
Web hosting is technical stuff. It's tricky and there's a lot that can go wrong. It also varies quite a bit between hosts. You are going to need support. Quality support here is NOT an optional extra. It's ESSENTIAL!
I like to set and forget when it comes to websites but in mid 2024 I found that my forums had stopped working so I went to ask HostGator support for help with getting them back up. I was AMAZED to find that there was NO SUPPORT other than a phone number that I knew was going to be useless. You couldn't email them, you couldn't open a ticket and there wasn't even an online chat box! Unbelievable!
"There MUST be something!" I thought and finally on the web I found an email address: support@gator.com so I emailed them. I got this reply:
HostGator dashboard 2024. Do you see any support option here?
For real bro? In case you're wondering: gator.com IS HostGator. They just don't want to give you any support. The contents of this email not withstanding, they do NOT offer a "dedicated email support option". You can imagine how useful the phone number is, they will ring you back some time in the next month or two...
"support" is NOT support at HostGator...
This was the deal breaker for me. Hosting without support is simply unacceptable and I had no choice but to move on.
To be fair: HostGator do again have a chat box now, which you can access if you can find it. Whether you will actually chat to someone who knows anything I didn't bother to investigate. By this time I had already moved my website. There is still no "support" option on your dashboard at the time of writing though.
"AI Driven Support Resources"... - They tried to debit my account even though I had disabled auto-renew
When googling reviews and stories about HostGator I found a number of cases where clients had been billed for continuing services even though they had cancelled their membership and those clients had found it difficult or impossible to get a refund for services they had not agreed to. I was concerned about this so I disabled the "auto-renew" option.
A few weeks later I was consequently disgusted but not surprised to receive this email from HostGator:
Auto-Renew set to off...
Yes, they tried to steal my money even though I had turned the option off. They are basically criminals...
They tried to debit my account anyway...
- They keep bombarding me with ads for services that I don't want
HostGator don't have email support but they DO have an email marketing department and I quickly became sick of receiving "special offers" to add unwanted bells and whistles to my basic plan. There were numerous examples but a classic one is: Why would you want to pay for an SSL when one comes free with the plan anyway?
Apart from the unwanted emails their customer portal is full of ads for their garbage add-ons as well as 3rd party products:
I don't mind an ad here and there if it's to advise of some USEFUL add-on, but useless stuff and 3rd party ads on MY portal are unacceptable! Another reason to migrate.
Every time you login you get a full page ad.
Newfold Digital are EVIL!
HostGator were fine when I joined them 6 years prior so how did they go so wrong? 
Well it's quite a story, so let's go back to the beginning:
Back in 2006 I needed a new webhost so I switched to BlueHost and I was happy with them for many years before their service and support went downhill and I finally left them in 2018.
So why did BlueHost go bad? Well in 2010 they were acquired by the Endurance International Group (EIG) and their CEO and founder was replaced. Then, in 2012 EIG acquired HostGator and their CEO and founder was replaced. It takes some years for an amoral juggernaut like EIG to destroy a company, so HostGator still seemed ok in 2019 when I joined them, although I'm sure the rot was already deep, even though I couldn't see it at that point.
If I'd done my research a little more carefully and suspiciously I might have seen differently though, as in August 2018, EIG's CEO and CFO were fined US$8 million for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission for misrepresenting company subscriber numbers. 
In November 2020, Clearlake Capital, the world's 14th largest private equity firm, (as of 2023), announced that it would acquire Endurance International Group for around $3 billion.
Following the acquisition in 2021, Clearlake combined EIG's Web Presence division, including Domain.com, Bluehost, and HostGator with Web.com to form "Newfold Digital", a global web presence and domain name registration market leader. Newfold Digital is a joint venture between Clearlake Capital and Siris Capital Group, owner of Web.com since 2018. 
According to Wikipedia: "In recent years Clearlake has become the biggest user of "General partner-led Private-equity secondary markets". It is a technique where Clearlake will find another private equity firm to buy a large portion of one of its existing investments and then offer investors a chance to sell at a new valuation or roll their stake into a new fund that will hold the investment for a few more years."
This kind of thing may be technically legal but it is surely amoral and is just a sliver of the sort of rubbish that is destroying the world as we speak and tarnishing the previously good name of capitalism. 
We all know how these huge investment houses work: They buy a good company without permission and take control of it. Then they strip its assets, sack its workforce and boast of their achievement. The company shows a HUGE windfall in the short term and the owner can then either sell it for more profit or let it rot.
This is a case study in much of what is currently wrong with capitalism. This is NOT how capitalism is supposed to work and the rules need to be changed before the world is destroyed. One of the things that MUST be stopped is allowing investment houses to run companies. It is no different to allowing wolves to run the sheep pen. In the end you have no sheep and the wolves starve. In the long term it benefits nobody. Of course the filth that are the investment houses don't care about the long term. They are making money NOW!
In my opinion the CEOs and CFOs of these investment houses should be swinging from a scaffold by the neck, right in front of the Wall Street Exchange. And this goes right across the board for virtually every large company operating in the world today. They have ALL been ruined by investment houses who are run exclusively by amoral, loophole-exploiting criminals. They don't care about the companies they buy, only about the money they can rape from them.
This all needs to change. You can read my in-depth soap-box article on the subject here.
DreamIT Host
DreamIT logos.
So I cast around to find a host that was NOT owned by a large investment house and I eventually settled on DreamIT Host, based in Melbourne. They had very good reviews on Product Review so I thought I'd give them a try.
It's early days, so I don't want to be too definite but they DO offer support via online chat or email tickets which has been quite helpful so far. My website loads more rapidly than it did with HostGator and I can get straight into cPanel with one click. I'm limited to 5GB on the basic plan but this is enough, (just). Normal FTP won't work but SFTP will. Everything is ok at the moment although doing the migration was not without its problems. We'll see how things shape out over the next few months...
Google are EVIL and stupid
Years ago I moved my domain name registrations to Google Domains. Go Daddy are yet another example of what is wrong with capitalism today and they made the simple process of maintaining the registration of a domain name into a serious pain. They were always trying to rape me of more money using every sly-arsed trick in the book and I walked.
Initially Google Domains were everything I would want from a registrar: Plain, simple, easy and cheap. But then of course, they went and sold it off without my permission to SquareSpace who's main line of work was in creating websites, NOT in registering domains for the wider world.
Do you remember 12 years ago when Google were the best company on Earth? Remember when they had a motto "Do no evil" up high on their wall? Remember when they were owned and run by Sergey Brin and Larry Page? Remember when they had wonderful products like Google Reader, Picasa, Google Play Music etc? Remember when Google Maps used to be easy to use? Remember when the top results of Google Search were NOT limited to paying companies? Those were the days...
Google is no longer run by Page & Brin and the "Do no evil" motto is long gone. I'm not accusing the current leaders of Google of anything illegal at the moment but it is clear that Google is NOT the morally upright company it once was. 
Yes, it's another sad story of how modern amoral capitalism destroys all the good in the world. Let's have a look at who actually IS running Google now. Sundatr Pichai (CEO) may have been an engineer that came up through the ranks at Google but Ruth Porat (President and CIO) was a banker at Morgan-Stanley, Anat Ashkenazi (CFO) was a finance head from BIG Pharma (Eli Lily) and Thomas Kurian (CEO of Google Cloud) was President of Product Development at Oracle, none of these are exactly nice companies, in fact they are down there with the WORST! The EVIL BLIGHT has infected the company and the quality of product and service has gone far downhill from its halcyon days a decade and more ago.
The EVIL BLIGHT doesn't just make a company mean and nasty though, it also makes it STUPID! And so it was that in 2023 the perfectly viable "Google Domains" was sold off. STUPID! and also ANNOYING! I was happy storing my domains with Google. Why should I be inconvenienced because a bunch of evil rapists think they can make a buck by selling the company I use? Pffft! Give me a shotgun and put the arseholes in a row and I'll show them what I think of them! 
Square Space should NOT be a general domain registrar
So now we come to the point, which is that SquareSpace made it VERY CONFUSING to update the name servers correctly so that my migrated website would work. Normal registrars simply give you 2 or more fields to fill with the nameserver URLs or IPAs which you get from your new web host and you are GOLDEN! SquareSpace are a bit different... 
When you go to your SquareSpace DomainNameservers page you are warned NOT to change them!
Don't go changing your nameservers so they point to your webhost... Nooooooo!
This is FUCKING GARBAGE SquareSpace! Go to hell you bunch of disingenuous arseholes! The fact is that changing these nameservers IS the thing that you SHOULD be doing! The only exception is if you are using SquareSpace to design your website.
This brings us to the reason why Square Space should NOT be a general domain registrar: They have a conflict of interest! They are primarily concerned with their web design customers and their nameserver instructions are for them, NOT for people just using SS as a domain name registrar.
I am not an internet specialist. I know a bit about it but I'm by no means a guru and I was confused by this warning and I wasn't sure what to do. Ideally I should have simply seen that SS were talking out of their arse and ignored them BUT I thought I would ask for help to clarify the matter. So I opened the chat box with SS help.
Call that help?
In this chat you can see that Maria is advising me to do the nameserver migration from my webhost's end. This is NOT the way to do it. She also says that nothing entered into SS will propagate. This is wrong! Once I changed the SS nameserver URLs to those specified by my webhost everything DID propagate! Garbage, confusing and incorrect advice from Maria at SquareSpace help.
What she SHOULD have said is: "Are you using SquareSpace for your web design? If not then go ahead and update our nameservers according to your webhost's specifications. Just ignore all our stupid warnings. They don't apply to you."
If she'd done that or if SquareSpace hadn't had all its scary warnings I would have made the changes the same way I had with other registrars and all would have been sweet. Instead I was subject to 2 hours of doubt and my website went down. I also made a change on my webhost which I possibly shouldn't have...
Damn SquareSpace! I never wanted you in the first place!
Anyway, it's all resolved now and you can all see my site and my emails work so "All's well that ends well!" as they say...
Whew! I finally finished this epic 3,000 word blog post. It took a good 8 hours! I could have used that time to finish my latest piano arrangement... Now you can see why I don't do many blog posts. 
Currently watching:
machining & welding vids by Cutting Edge Engineering Australia. Go Kurtis!