I was with Jumpline for the hosting of this website since September 2000. That is more than 25 years for you people keeping score at home. Jumpline went through some ups and downs along the way, as a lot of companies do, but they generally provided reasonable service at a reasonable price. A year or two ago, Jumpline got acquired by HostPapa. The silly mascot aside, HostPapa started off fine. They kept my price the same, and if my site was up and down a little, well I was only paying for best effort service.
Last week I got a charge on my credit card from HostPapa, having never received a renewal invoice. The charge was for 77% MORE than last year’s hosting. I got an invoice later that day and it showed that the invoice was not due for another two weeks.
So, let me recap so far:
- HostPapa raised my price 77%.
- HostPapa processed that charge prior to even sending an invoice.
- HostPapa charged my card two weeks before the invoice was even due.
Back to my story. I contacted HostPapa to say “WTF?” and got this, “Please note that our system automatically processes renewals 15 days before the due date to prevent any disruption to your services. This ensures your website remains active without interruption.” Ah, I should have known that the “system” does that automatically. We wouldn’t want to leave humans in charge of anything.
One agent admitted there was a plan that was even cheaper than what I had been paying, but that the Level 2 tech team would have to approve because my current resources may need to be “optimized” before that would work. (Most days, by the way, my website never breaks a sweat, so I discredit that they were really going to let me download my plan and figure they were just trying to freeze me from moving hosters.) I asked if there is refund if I found the new plan did not work for me and was told that, “If you decide to cancel during the middle of your current term, a refund would unfortunately not be possible, as our 30-day money-back guarantee applies only to new purchases.”
After signing up for another hoster and telling HostPapa that I was cancelling, they really kicked into gear. Another agent offered a “one-time courtesy” of 10% off, making my new cost only 47% higher than last year. But, then the price would go back up, and probably then some. The other agent wanted to make sure that I didn’t want to try the cheaper plan anyway. I moved forward with a new hoster.
Then I was just waiting for my credit card reversal. This came about three business days later.
Continuing the recap:
- HostPapa has a cheaper plan, but they were not really seroius about offering it up.
- They were not willing to let me try the new plan with a refund of any unused months.
- HostPapa, once faced with cancellation, tried to jump in and fix things, but I had moved on.
- They did reverse the charge on my credit card.
The migration actually has gone pretty well, based on the fact that you are reading this. The non-blog part of the website came over in just a couple hours since it is just html files. The blog part of the site needed some tweaking to the WordPress database. The cron jobs had some issues with sending emails. THIS is why I have documentation of my site, by the way.
The new hoster is Hostinger, and they do some other of my sites. They are about 50% cheaper than the original cost with HostPapa, thus about 70% cheaper than the new, proposed price. Their tech support has been fantastic, both the AI version and the people who step in for the really hard questions.
Final recap:
- 25 years of history wrapped up over highly-preventable customer service errors.
- The attempt at the diving catch to save me failed as too little, too late.
- On to the next chapter.
Coming up next: More apps I can and can’t live without. Thanks for reading.