Recommendations for an "old school" web hosting provider?

[elagache]

Dear WeatherCat web spinners,

For over a decade I have used GoDaddy to host my various web resources.  However, I've never been particularly happy with them.  This year they switched from UNIX-based email hosting service to Microsoft's Exchange/Office365 cloud.  It is much more expensive, provides functionality I'll never use, and doesn't appear to support standard email protocols.  In particular, SMTP is going to be dropped - which is the protocol that WeatherCat depends on.

My hosting contract ends at the end of this month, so it seems like a good time to jump ship.  What web hosting providers are WeatherCatters using these days?  Obviously I'm particularly interesting in a service that includes emails at the same domain name.  I am worried that support for the SMTP protocol is waning, so anything folks would know about that would be very interesting.

As long as I'm asking, can anybody give me some advice about switching web hosting?  Are there some unexpected gotchas that I should be watching out for?

Thanks in advance!

Edouard

[Steve]

Edouard,

I'm no help. I've used HostDime.com for 11 years for my hosting and domain registration for my six domain names. Manages hosting (non-static IP) is $165/year, and domain registration is $28/year. However, I am grandfathered in on a "legacy" account that is no longer offered. Their services are now geared specifically to large businesses.

I've not looked into any other options since September 2011, so I can't offer any suggestions. Good luck!

[Dave13]

Edouard,

I use QTH for web and email hosting. I've been with them for a little over 3 years, support is excellent. I can only recall one time they were down and it was for less than an hour.

WeatherCat works fine with QTH, STMP is fully supported.

If you decide to sign up with QTH, please consider using my referral link.

[xairbusdriver]

I left Hostgator when they became part of EIG (here is a list of hosting company's to AVOID).

I went with CrocWeb as our Tech-Help forums had moved to them. I also was given a discount code by one of our Admin. CrocWeb seems to always have some kind of discount for transfers. Never had a problem with the forums nor my own sites. They always have answered emailed questions within hours if not minutes. They are a Canadian outfit, but I've had absolutely no language problems, ay?

BTW, I think most "hosters" will handle the transfer for free.

Namecheap handles my domain registrations/renewals but most places offer to do that also. I just feel better having my eggs in different baskets!

[Dave13]

That's a big list of hosting companies to avoid, I've heard of some of them, didn't realize they were all connected, good info.

Two more hosting companies to add to the "avoid and run away quickly" list: 1&1 and A2 Hosting, they both have terrible support.

1&1 stopped supporting FTP in favor of SFTP in 2017, at that time WeatherCat didn't support SFTP, which is the main reason I left them.

A2 has a very bad history of servers going down for several hours, and on more than one occasion, there was an outage that lasted up to two days.

[The Grand Poohbah]

I migrated to DreamHost (https://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?2591276) last year and can recommend it. They had a special price that reverts to the standard price after the first year. If it's not offered, ask them about it. The annual fee for domain name registration is extra but reasonable.

I used the Shared Hosting plan for my three web sites and DreamHost's included mail service. I use the Apple Mail client and also changed from POP to IMAP, something I've wanted to do for a long time. You can also access your mail using a web browser. DreamHost also took care of the domain name transition. They also have tools for migrating the web site files from the original host to DreamHost. DreamHost automatically handles the security certificates for the https hosting. They automatically renew my domain registrations when needed. The whole process is straightforward once you read and follow their instructions.

I'm happy with DreamHost.

[elagache]

Dear Steve, Dave, X-Air, Grand, and WeatherCat faithful,

Thanks for all the helpful advice!  I'll need to look into each company a little closer to see what to do.  At least I got WeatherCat working with Microsoft's Office365 so I have a little more time to work on this.  However, that experience wasn't encouraging to say the least.  Still, I've got a lot on my plate at the moment, so I'll have to chew on this problem cautiously as the month unfolds.

Thanks again!
Edouard

[elagache]

Dear WeatherCat web spinners,

I've run into an unexpected problem on this caper.  All 3 web hosting providers recommended thus far look competent and deserving - so which do I choose?  Any additional thoughts on this topic?  Anybody else have a web hosing provider that they want to toss into the ring?

A curious mind would like to know!

Cheers, Edouard

[Blicj11]

[Snip]  In particular, SMTP is going to be dropped - which is the protocol that WeatherCat depends on. [Snip]

Edouard, do you know when this is going to happen? Can you point to anything they've published on this?

All I can find is that they went to Office 365 SMTP in 2019 but Mac apps have continued to work fine since then.

Thanks.

[xairbusdriver]

Problems with Goddy email? Perhaps you need to spend a few hours/days viewing/reviewing their "Setting up Email" video's? There are only 21 "lessons"! Granted, most of these vids are less than 2 minutes long.
While I applaud your decision to leave Godaddy, there are some sites offering instructions on using SMTP and Godaddy:

• GoDaddy Workspace SMTP Settings (unknown publication date, clean.email)
• 4 Email Hosting Alternatives to GoDaddy (February 14, 2022, mybloghosting.com)

There are dozens of "Best/Great/Alternative..." email provider lists, unfortunately many of them list sites owned by EIG (check link in my post #3 above).

A search for "SMTP email providers" results in the same general results as for general hosting services. Including "SMTP" usually prevents finding MS/Office servers.

[elagache]

Dear Blick, X-Air and WeatherCat sys-admins,

[Snip]  In particular, SMTP is going to be dropped - which is the protocol that WeatherCat depends on. [Snip]

Edouard, do you know when this is going to happen? Can you point to anything they've published on this?

All I can find is that they went to Office 365 SMTP in 2019 but Mac apps have continued to work fine since then.

Here are the webpages that got me disturbed.  This GoDaddy page describes how you need to change your email settings to use Microsoft Office 365:

https://www.godaddy.com/help/update-my-microsoft-365-account-to-exchange-in-other-clients-40518

What got me concerned is this paragraph at the bottom:

If you’d like to continue using your current client, you can use the Microsoft 365 POP and IMAP settings. Keep in mind that Microsoft is discontinuing basic authentication in 2022, so when that time comes, Microsoft 365 POP and IMAP settings will only work in clients that support modern authentication (clients that can use multi-factor authentication (MFA)).

There is some additional information on multi-factor authentication on this GoDaddy page:

https://www.godaddy.com/help/enable-or-disable-multi-factor-authentication-32039

So for the moment you can continue to use WeatherCat by disabling multi-factor authentication.  There is also a mention of application specific passwords on the second webpage, but no explanation as to whether or not that is temporary or permanent.  Taking the quoted paragraph above at its word, Microsoft will discontinue support for that at the end of this year.  So I guess you have until 2023 to change.

I will write up my harrowing tale of bailing out of GoDaddy soon.  If you decide to switch, give yourself plenty of time to make the transition!

Edouard

[Blicj11]

Thanks for the info. I'll have to keep my eye on this and see what happens. Looking forward to your chronicling your move from GoDaddy.

[elagache]

Dear Blick and WeatherCat fans of bedtime stories . . . . . . 

. . . . Looking forward to your chronicling your move from GoDaddy.

  . . . . . Remember, you're askin' for it! . . . . 

Our story begins in a deep dark forest (or is that in a galaxy far, far, away?) . . . . . 

Actually, my unhappiness with GoDaddy had been a long time in coming but the straw that broke the camel's back was their unilateral switch from UNIX based email (which were included for free in with the UNIX web hosting) to Microsoft office 365 emails.  I had taken advantage of the free emails to create addresses for specific purposes.  Now every address was costing almost $30.  The switch happened at the start of this year when I was facing the first surgeries on my nose.  I had little choice but to pare down my addresses and pay.

Fast forward to July and the creation of this thread.  After researching all the recommendations here, I finally settled on DreamHost.  I didn't find anything against the other recommendations whatsoever.  Alas, I couldn't find any independent reviews either.  DreamHost was recommended by PC magazine.  In that review was another plus: DreamHost is a UNIX-based service.  I hoped that would prevent me from suffering another service change like GoDaddy had pulled on me.

As the phase goes: I "pulled da' trigger" and purchased a DreamHost web hosting service on July 19th.  Aware that another nose surgery was looming, I paid the extra money to ask DreamHost to handle the website migration duties (having prudently made my own backup first - just in case!)  This process got underway and appeared to be going smoothly.

I was concerned about regaining control of my canebas.org domain from GoDaddy (and by implication Microsoft.)  So on July 23rd, I initiated transferring my domain to DreamHost.  Immediately, I got an error: "Canceled - Invalid EPP/authorization key".  I repeated the attempted transfer - with the same failure.  At this point I contacted DreamHost technical support for the second time (the first being to handle the website migration.)  After batting the problem back and forth a bit, the DreamHost folks concluded that GoDaddy wasn't providing the correct transfer key and I needed to contact them about it.  After some GoDaddy tech support chat, I finally had a valid transfer request started from the DreamHost end.  Key to this exercise was specifying that I wanted to use the DreamHost domain name servers - that should have overridden any Microsoft control of my domain.  Stay tuned on this one!

In the meantime, everything was going just - swell - at DreamHost.    The server which was supposed to host my files crashed in the middle of the migration!  This involved more involved communication between DreamHost technical support and I.   I also made some additional backups - caution is always the better part of valor!   Finally on July 28th, my websites appeared to be behaving correctly.  There was some additional issues as DreamHost had a real fight getting this server to behave, but everything on canebas.org seemed to be in order - almost . . . . .

it was time to pull the plug on Microsoft Office 365 and switch my emails to DreamHost.  However, every attempt I made had no effect.  I could create addresses on DreamHost, but only the old Microsoft addresses were working.  At this point I had to shift priorities and prepare for the August 9th surgery on my nose.  So I left things as they were.

This past Monday (August 22nd,) I finally felt I had enough time to settle with GoDaddy once and for all.  So I logged into my GoDaddy account and canceled on all services.  Immediately, canebas.org became unreachable - what!?!?!?!    Time for another desperate trouble ticket at DreamHost.  Once more those folks came to the rescue.  Remember, that I requested that GoDaddy switch the domain name servers to DreamHost when I requested the domain transfer - they did not honor that request!  As a result when I canceled my old web hosting, GoDaddy deleted canebas.org from their domain name servers.  Since my domain wasn't listed in any domain name servers, there was no way to look up the location of canebas.org on DreamHost.  Thankfully, DreamHost was able to manually switch the domain name servers to their own (as intended all along,) and canebas.org was soon back online once more.

Finally, I could create the email addresses on DreamHost that I had canceled from Microsoft.  The next to last hurtle was to coax WeatherCat to work with DreamHost which I resolved with a little help from Grand.

The final obstacle was seeking a refund for the unused portions of the services I had with GoDaddy.  It took two attempts, but at least they did come clean and refunded fairly what I had not used.

After this protracted experience, I can second Grand's recommendation of DreamHost.  That does not detract in any way from the merits of QTH or CronWeb.  Other WeatherCatters are indeed happy with them.  What I can say is that I really gave the DreamHost technical support folks a workout and they delivered.

The other recommendation I can give be cautious and allow yourself plenty of time.  You might not run into Murphy's law at nearly every turn - but plan as if you will!!

Cheers, Edouard 

[Blicj11]

Thanks, once again, for taking the time to share the details of the domain transfer. Glad you finally got everything running again.

[dfw_pilot]

Late to the replies, but I agree with XAir that separating your services is good policy. Don't use a web host to also run your DNS and your domain registration as well - that's all three of your most important eggs in one basket/provider. I use one company as a web host and run my DNS and domain registrar through Cloudflare.

A couple bonuses to using a separate DNS provider from your web host is that you don't run into issues where your site disappears on a transfer like the story related above. Secondly, you can move your site to multiple hosts multiple times and your site will never go down. This is because you control where your DNS records point.

Example: oldhost.com and newhost.com. You transfer your site from old to new but your DNS records still direct traffic to your oldhost.com site. You can view your new site via the new host's IP address. Get your site transferred, working, and looking good. When you are ready, point your DNS to the newhost.com site. The change may take 24-48 hours to propagate. That's fine, some people will see the old site and some will see the new site, but they are the same site so no one will know the difference. After propagation is complete in 48 hours, delete your old site.