Many providers of “low-cost” shared web hosting like Hostpapa advertise “unlimited bandwidth” — but it’s a scam, and you could end up with your website shut down and back-up functions blocked unless you pay higher fees. Don’t get burned. Learn from my experience.
In 2018-19, the web hosting provider Hostpapa suddenly without notice shut my website down completely until I paid higher fees. This seemed like a scam. I investigated and discovered that’s exactly what it was – and I was far from Hostpapa’s only victim. In this post, I summarize what I learned about this profitable scam aspect of Hostpapa’s regular business operations. I do it in a way that is understandable for non-technical people, and I then suggest key questions to ask before signing up with any “cheap” web hosting provider like Hostpapa.
Update April 2024: Since I first published this in 2019, hundreds of people have left comments and/or contacted me privately having the same problems with Hostpapa–they had small websites with low traffic but were being threatened and told they had to “upgrade” to much more expensive hosting plans. This has included a number of people and companies with significant expertise in web technologies, who said that they were able to technically audit activities on their own websites and determine that Hostpapa’s claims of excessive resource use were, simply, false. In addition, of those hundreds of people who left Hostpapa for another hosting provider, none have reported back to me that they ever had the same problems arise again. In light of this, I have updated the “technical discussion” section of my post.
Hostpapa gets generally good reviews. Learning #1: You cannot trust most reviews of web hosting providers. Search engines return “Reviews of…”, “Top ten…” and “Best…” lists very high in search results, so there are massive profits in posting such lists and reviews. Most reviews of the “best web hosting providers” are put together by a person or company that’s typically getting paid by the web hosting companies every time a visitor clicks through to the companies’ websites, and is paid more if the visitor signs up. So if a top-ten list gives a very bad review, it’s usually just because that particular company has no such “affiliate programs” with scam reviewers. (Reviews done by established, independent tech magazines are a better bet.)
I signed up for Hostpapa’s medium, “unlimited bandwidth,” shared web hosting plan that said they would “never charge higher usage fees” – so what could go wrong?
One day out of the blue I received an automated message from Hostpapa telling me that my website had been using up so much server resources that Hostpapa had shut my website down. I could not even access my website to manage it. The email said that I could regain access to my site if I started paying monthly fees that were ten times more than what I was currently paying.
Most people without technical knowledge probably just pay the higher fees. What choice do you have? But I had a little technical knowledge and a lot of suspicion. My WordPress blog on Hostpapa was small, and the traffic was very light. I contacted Hostpapa and explained this and reminded them I was on an “unlimited bandwidth” plan that said I’d “never be charged higher usage fees”.
Hostpapa staff said my “unlimited” plan wasn’t actually unlimited. They said the “bandwidth” was unlimited but not the “server usage”. Learning #2: The commonly advertised feature of “unlimited bandwidth” for shared web hosting plans is misleading.
For non-technical users, “bandwidth” can be understood as the width of a pipe, while “server usage”, is the amount of liquid your website sends back and forth through the pipe. Hostpapa sent me a link to their policy that described extremely tight, strict limits on “server usage” – the number of monthly drops my website was allowed to send through the pipe to web users. But this policy was never mentioned in Hostpapa’s ads or Terms of Service.
I persuaded Hostpapa to let me back into my website, and I tried to ensure that I had a backup of the content. However, Hostpapa was still throttling my website so heavily that, no matter what back-up tool I used, it would time out.
Hostpapa then sent me a list of technical tips to “correct the problems” that were causing my “excessive server usage.” I had to spend many hours researching to figure out how to implement them. I finally managed to implement them all — and it made absolutely no difference. Hostpapa shut my website down again.
Hostpapa then admitted to me that it was often the case that implementing their technical tips did not actually solve the problems. The “real” problem, their staff explained, was that WordPress has become so popular that it’s now a frequent target of hackers and malicious web-bots. These hackers and web-bots were overloading my website, they claimed. And even running WordPress firewalls and plugins like “Stop Bad Bots” might not help much, Hostpapa staff said, because they do not actually block the bad traffic from ever arriving.
For me, this just raised more questions. Isn’t bad traffic like this usually blocked at the server level, by the web hosting provider? After all, about 90% of emails circulating on the internet are spam, too. Imagine if an internet service provider refused to run spam-blockers and instead let all spam emails through to its clients and then charged its clients higher fees for all the extra email server space they were using each day. Hostpapa staff replied that they simply couldn’t keep up with blocking all of that bad traffic. They told me that, as a result, Hostpapa had set up an entire division dedicated to moving people with small WordPress sites off low-cost hosting plans onto higher-priced plans. Basically, they admitted that this scam is a major part of Hostpapa’s profit model–of course, they didn’t call it a “scam.” (Update 2024: A number of technical experts who have run into the same problems with Hostpapa have informed me that Hostpapa’s claims about these various “causes” and “solutions” are all technically implausible based on how shared hosting servers work–that’s why no actions ever solve the alleged “problems.” In addition, a number of readers forwarded this article to Hostpapa staff, who didn’t respond to any of it except to dismiss the post as “old.” Hence, another reason I’ve updated!)
I repeatedly asked to be allowed to talk to a supervisor or manager at Hostpapa, but my requests were refused.
I persuaded the Advertising Standards Council to investigate and they eventually concluded that Hostpapa was indeed engaged in false and misleading advertising.
In response to the findings of the Advertising Standards Council and another complaint I made through the Better Business Bureau, Hostpapa finally changed their advertising and Terms of Service to clarify that they will under certain conditions throttle websites, shut them down and charge higher fees (see their new ad below). However, the wording in their ad and Terms of Service “Disruptive Uses” section still make it sound like this will only ever happen if “you” engage in “abusive” activities or if “you” use “unusual” amounts of server space. Hostpapa has refused to clarify that, in fact, your site could be throttled and shut down under very ordinary conditions with no reasonable technical explanations for it.
I will never do business with Hostpapa again — I’ve found other web hosting providers that are nearly as low-cost and I’ve had no such problems. So here are some key questions to ask a provider if you are considering signing up for a shared web hosting plan:
- What are their actual server usage limits?
- Do they ever throttle client websites?
- Do they shut down client websites without notice?
- How do they deal with situations where a customer’s website may be crossing the server usage limits? And if a customer disputes that they’re crossing those limits, what resolution processes does the company have in place?
I’ve posted this just to be helpful to other people, not to make money. If you’ve found this post helpful, please post a link to it somewhere so that others are more likely to find it when they do searches. (And/or please leave a comment — if you don’t see my “Comments” section below, click on the title of this post and it should appear.)
Addendum 2024: I have not continued to research other web hosting providers, and my “list” of recommended, alternative, better providers has slowly whittled down to about two providers. I’m happy to email a recommendation to you if you ask in a comment. However, it appears that Hostpapa may be relatively rare in the scope of this scam it is running, even compared to other questionable providers; therefore, my main recommendation is to contact providers with the questions I’ve listed. That way, you let them know that people are wising up and looking for alternatives, and you get providers’ policies in writing. When you find a good one, feel free to let me know via email (I don’t want to turn the comments thread into a long list of “ads” for providers) and perhaps we can crowd-source a longer list again. Also, I encourage everyone having problems with Hostpapa to post a complaint to TrustPilot and the Better Business Bureau or other review places, summarizing this scam. If there are a lot of public complaints about this, others will hear about it — and who knows, Hostpapa might even change… You can go through a formal complaint process with the BBB, or simply post a comment here: https://www.bbb.org/ca/on/oakville/profile/web-hosting/hostpapa-inc-0107-1241393/customer-reviews. and at TrustPilot here: https://ca.trustpilot.com/review/www.hostpapa.com
I am currently experiencing the classic ‘CPU and I/O are hitting their limits” with my website BS barrage of emails. It was their 3rd email that featured threats of suspending the website. I have such a small website. 6 pages, ~60 images no bigger than 800 pixels, compressed for web, and then some embeded youtube videos.
Traffic: only me so far.
How do they expect to keep customers with this type of tactic? Are they just preying on the super ignorant?
I luckily canceled all the unneeded services from that before they could renew and charge me. I found my own SSL for free.
Now I will be looking to transfer everything to a new host. Sad stuff.
Please send me your suggested web hosting provider.
I have a friend/client that is experiencing this same “excess resources” BS for the 3rd time in the last year and a half. She has a small website that I designed for her 3 years ago and very minimal visitors. I’ve fought them twice before, but I am losing my patience with them this time. First of all – in what world does an “Account Manager” contact you? I knew from the start it was a ploy to get people to upgrade. I asked him why support wasn’t helping her resolve it and he sent me the same canned email (with even MORE things to do) as Don Hart received.
I consulted with our tech support team and they confirmed that faults are being generated by the domain peggyfrezon.com
If you want to pursue optimization, our tech support team gathered the following recommendations for you:
* Replace WordPress cron with a real cronjob by:
https://hostpapasupport.com/replace-wordpress-cron-real-cronjob/
* Install the Heartbeat plugin :
https://www.hostpapa.com/knowledgebase/wordpress-heartbeat-configure/
* Leverage browser cache and enable gzip compression:
https://hostpapasupport.com/leverage-browser-caching/
https://hostpapasupport.com/enable-gzip-compression-sites/
* Add 7G firewall code to the website’s htaccess file:
https://perishablepress.com/7g-firewall/
* Add Blocking bad bots additional rules into the .htaccess file:
https://gist.github.com/eduardopintor/d57ad81ff39a52b60e34
I’m sure this is a canned response like every response I read on the Better Business Bureau. I’m unwilling to edit my friend/clients .htaccess file as I’m a web designer, not a developer. I’m absolutely going to send the link to this article.
While I was searching for reviews on papahost I came across this topic here. I can see that the review is pretty old, from 2019 however, what caught my attention was the comment section.
Is unbelievable how many bad experiences are posted here and I really wanted to dig deeper and see if papahost is really as bad as all these comments suggest… the low price is very attractive for me since I’m running an NGO and they seem to be the biggest around here, in my country .. at least, the ones that came strongly recommended
Lots of reviews here complain about shakedowns and scams done by papa host company in terms of their renewal charges .. but guys, if we look under their terms and conditions we can see that renewals are done automatically unless the customer is turning them off and the difference in price .. well, I guess it’s something normal since all the other companies are doing the same.. offer a introductory price for new customers and then charge the regular rates on renewals.. I was also able to find the renewal prices on the website…. lots of these host companies have them available but we have to look…
In these days, it’s tricky to blindly trust a company with our money so.. PLEASE, PLEASE do your due diligence, crawl their websites, terms of service, etc.. because all of these things are something we agree with at sign up so.. is it really their fault? renewal prices and processes, resource limits .. etc
Knowing what we sign up with is very important for our expectations .. if you find that the renewal prices are not within your budgets good, prepare in advance and switch providers, same goes for the resources available on their plans..
This was my 2 cents on the issue and topic here .. I’ll still go with papa hosting due to their lower prices and from what I hear, exceptionally good customer help… I hope not to regret this decision
Hi Donald, I think you didn’t read many of the comments! I haven’t taken down or edited the 2019 article because in 2023, from the stream of comments here and the even higher number of people who contact me privately, I know that all of what I discuss is still continuing at Hostpapa. There are actually very few comments in this thread that discuss bogus renewal charges — and even then, those are usually ON TOP OF the other issues people are raising. You may have misunderstood what most people are complaining about: Hostpapa has an entire division set up with staff who suddenly one day out of the blue claim that your tiny website is overusing server resources, and demand renewal charges that are about ten times higher, or face site throttling, shutdown, administrative lock-out etc. And by the way, Hostpapa, in all these years, has never once responded to any of my complaints or requests for comment — they have never denied any of it, and I don’t expect them to. I suggest you send a link to this article to their salesperson and ask, “Is anything in this article inaccurate? If so, exactly what?” And then please send me a copy of their reply, with the details of their name, position at Hostpapa, and contact information!
I would love to hear your recommendation. I’m about done with these HosPapa goons. My BS detector is blaring “SHAKEDOWN”.
Same here with Hostpapa…
Brought them 4 customers and myself. 10-15 websites and after the first 3 weeks, email after email about resource usage.
Websites are not even online. One website has 1 visitor a week and when google comes by crawling at 4am they send a threat about resource usage and an “account manager” from on you to upgrade your website.
One of my customers got their basic hosting for his company website. Has 4 visitors a day but got scared from their threat emails. They threatened him from his initial payment of $150 within 3 weeks to another $260.
That’s mafia practices.
Stay away from hostpapa if you’re looking for affordable webhosting for your beginner site. They trick you into a cheap plan but you’ll end up paying the same or more. The worst part are these practices and i’m preparing a case against them as well.
It’s just criminal what they’re doing.
This is an update. Here are the recommendations from HostPapa to get my website set up properly. I am an author, aged 70, and have limited tech savvy, so I would rather switch than jump thru their hoops.
I want to help you solve this issue so I consulted with our Technical Department to see what can be done to reduce your usage. They analyzed your account and provided the following recommendations
Recommendations:
– Delete duplicate backup files or old website files that are no longer in use
to maintain a clean hosting environment.
– Enable leverage browser cache
https://hostpapasupport.com/leverage-browser-caching
– Enable compression
https://hostpapasupport.com/enable-gzip-compression-sites
Please work on the above and let me know once you have updates so we can monitor your usage again. Should you have any questions, let me know and I’ll be glad to assist.
(End of the email they sent)
I only moved to HostPapa last month and so far am very unhappy. I was at Bluehost, and may return to them unless I find a better option. I signed for 3 years with HostPapa for about $125 so am willing to eat that.
They told me my usage is too high. I get zero visitors, no emails, and my webpage is more a hobby than anything. Then they gave me tips on how to correct the issues. Delete backup files, remove old files, install a bunch of coding here and there… ridiculous.
Do you have any recommendatiom as to a good provider?
I only left Bluehost because HostPapa was Canadian and looked cheaper. Big mistake.
I just received an invoice from HostPapa today. They claim I owe them $691.15 for hosting from May 3, 2023 to May 3 2026. I paid for one year’s hosting with them – years ago, I can’t even remember when, it was about five or so years ago. When I called today I was told to cancel my account. I replied, why would I cancel my account now when I cancelled it years ago? If I cancel it now, you will act like it has been active all this time and bill me for it. NO. I reminded the guy that when I did cancel it way back when, they still hounded me with invoices. He replied he does not have that email. STAY AWAY!!!! I told him they are just wasting their time trying to get a dime out of me. Eventually I hung up on him after he started to tell me for the third time to cancel my account.
It sounds like they were just invoicing you directly? If anyone gets false billing on their credit card, I encourage/advise you to complain directly to your credit card provider rather than to Hostpapa — when a lot of complaints about false billing come in, sometimes (not always, unfortunately) the credit card company will put pressure on the company to stop the false billing.
I just cancelled my HostPapa account after they auto-charged my expired card on file. Their previous email said they would attempt to charge my card 15 days prior to my account renewal (dodgy to even do that). I should have moved my sites sooner but forgot.
My online chat with the hostpapa support agent was straightforward with instructions on how to cancel and they confirmed that the charge would be refunded in 5-7 biz days. I’ll be watching my credit card account for this to happen, like a hawk.
I feel like I dodged a bullet with the 3 year auto-renewal. I went with canspace and they seem professional and straightforward. Will see how that goes before diving into a 3 year commitment.
Thanks, Rob!
Please send me your suggested web hosting provider.
I had two different accounts with HostPapa for two websites.
Site 1:
I had to shut down the first website so I turned off autorenewal and deleted the Credit Card information in the case. My credit card got expired before website renewal and was renewed with the same number but a different CVV number and they don’t have the new CVV number.
Guess what! HostPapa charged my card $695 for 3 years and sent me an invoice. Luckily they reversed transactions when I disputed how can they charge my CC for which they don’t have the latest info?
Site 2:
I am doing some SEO work on my website. Every time I run Google’s recommended PageSpeed Insight tool to check my website performance I see Resource High Usage in my Cpanel with the Number of Processes exceeding the limit of 40 processes which goes above 150 and sometimes close to 200.
Limits are also exceeded whenever I update plugins and upload/deleted video assets from the media library and they send me emails asking me to buy their VPS server plan which is not my requirement depending on the size and activity on my website.
Please share any recommendations to get another good Host.
Thanks
Hostpapa have other ways of scamming you. If you have a payment method stored with them they will automatically charge against it for any invoices. If you delete the payment method (in my case a credit card) they only soft delete it. I found that out when I had to add the card again and it wouldn’t allow me as it was already saved.
I’m now down to only having my domain name with them and have just now started to have problems with it. I can’t change any of the DNS settings as they blocked access to the control panel. To make changes I have to contact customer support. This resulted in a bunch of emails from them where they wany to know answers to so called security questions before they will make changes! These are questions I have never used in setting up an account – such as “middle name of my oldest child”. I don’t have a child! I can only assume that the support person is trying to harvest security data in order to hack my other accounts.
I am now trying to transfer my domain to another host. This has it’s own problems as I again need to contact their support and will probably run into the same BS.
If yu do have an up to date list of hosts that provide a better serice I’d love to have it!
Wow, so many of the same stories… I am also one of them. Was with Lunarpages for years with no issues, but HP has given me the run around a few times. I have a small, personal blog and do know a little bit about the backend of things, but I’ve been super-frustrated with their “you need to figure out what’s going on with your blog”-attitude. Shouldn’t their tech support not at least be able to tell me when something is wrong, let alone fix it?
Thanks so much for bringing this to light. People need to know about this. And I’d love to hear your recommendation. I’ve looked at a few hosting companies but have been able to figure out which way to go. What’s a reasonable monthly/yearly fee for a small blog these days?
It pains me to read this. Same story here. Used LunarPages for years with no issues and then they sold to HostPapa. Now every two months there is some over usage of resources and we need to upgrade. But it’s simply an I/O fault once a month when a backup runs. Their resource usage limits are laughably low.
I would love to know what vendor you recommend using. Thanks!
Same experience in Feb. 2023!
Same scamming steps!
I wish I’ve had read this article before buying !
Please let me know the name if the other priovider
I am releived to see that I was not the only one in this situation. Your speach is convincing and would be happy to receive your recomandation for moving my business away from hostpapa.
Thank you for sharing your experience. Which hosting platform do you recommend?
Valerie, your email address you gave me seems to be incorrect.
I can not believe what I’m reading. I’m also receiving the “upgrade or else” threats after I just literally paid for another 2 years. I’m so frustrated and I refuse to pay one more dollar to them. Has anyone pursued legal action against them?
Hi Carrie, you can usually get your money back with a stern complaint and demand for it. I’d suggest copying your entire site and also getting a new host to formally move your site before you do that, though.
I wish there was a route of legal action against them — in Canada, where they are based, there’s really only a complaint process and you can get money back but there’s little in the way of compliance, accountability, or enforcement regarding fraudulent actions. I have tried to complain to some policing agencies in Canada, but received no meaningful reply. I do wonder if, because Hostpapa is also active in the US, if the FBI or another more robust agency there might be prompted to investigate. A class action lawsuit would also seem possible, where the company is sued on behalf of all the users who’ve been affected.
Thank you for doing this. I would also like to know who you currently recommend. From what I have read this is becoming very common in the shared hosting market.
I started with LP in 2004 and was generally happy with them over the years. When HP took over last year I got my first notice of excessive faults after about 6 months. He suggested an upgrading to a VPS. I explained that my web site volume is about half of what it was 10 years ago and declining. I talked knowingly about my setup and activity and they closed that case.
Then 6 months later a second rep contacted me with the same offer. I had to do a bit more research the second time. Like Carla, I keep explaining that with LVE these faults only affect my own site, but they disagree. Rep 2 eventually closed the case.
I just recently started with Rep3. This guy seems a bit more persistent and offered an upgrade to a discounted “PRO” level shared server (I am currently on mid level). He says that would be a ‘permanent’ solution. I’m pushing back for now, but it looks like this is going to be repeated every 6 months. Looking for an alternative if I need to bail.
Hi Rob, my website has only been live for a couple of weeks and already HP are sending me the scam emails threatening all that you mentioned in your original post. Thank you for sharing your experience, it is clear that I need a new hosting provider, and would be grateful if you could tell me which ones you personally trust? BTW I am in Australia, altough I doubt that makes a difference.
Same dissatisfaction with hostpapa here. Please send your recommendation.
Hello there
I too would be very interested in knowing who you would recommend as a hosting provider instead of HostPapa.
Yep, you’ve guessed it: it would appear I’m another victim of the scam. In my case, it was faults caused by IO spikes. Account Manager was clearly trying to upsell – I asked for information about what was causing the spikes, and got patchy information plus other information that didn’t make sense.
I opened a support ticket once I started to suspect he was not actually interested in solving the problem and, in fairness, the support team have been a lot better. It looked like they may have solved it, but now I’ve got an EP fault!
It all made me very suspicious – I can’t see how the sites I have, which are way below the limits aside from when these spikes happen and really not at all complex or large, could be causing these problems – so I did a bit of digging (which eventually led me here!). It seems CloudLinux actually allows them to set their own limits, so now I’m wondering if they set them artificially low at some point with the specific intent of it causing problems so they can start the process of trying to upsell.
Also, why do they need to suspend the account? I was told one of the big issues with exceeding the resource limits was impact it has on other accounts (and hence websites) on the shared server. However, from what I can see (and I’m far from an expert in these things so I could be wrong), the CloudLinux LVE should stop any individual account using too many resources – meaning it doesn’t affect anyone else, and the only the only negative repercussion should be that the website exceeding the limits slows down or is unavailable… That would make sense as you couldn’t run a shared hosting server if one badly misbehaving account/website could bring everyone’s site down.
Anyway, rant over! Look forward to hearing who you recommend….
Hello, please email me the best hosting provider to use instead of HostPapa.
I’ve also been harassed and upsold and its time to move on
Hi Bob,
I am experiencing the same issue with Hostpapa and would greatly appreciate your suggestion.
Tricked into purchasing VPS last year. Now reports of high resources usage and out of memory errors again, asking to upgrade again.
Thanks for sharing your story and recommendation in Canada.
Hi Rob,
I’m having the same issues with Hostpapa and would like a recommendation. I will be researching alternatives, however, it’s always nice to get a word of mouth suggestion.
Thanks,
And here we are, 2022, and HostPapa is still the same. I am sad they are Canadian. I went away from them a long time ago, for different reasons. Never had WordPress issues because I design my own websites and do not use WordPress.
But now I have been drawn into trying to help the Poodle Club of Canada with their WordPress website, as they have been receiving the upgrade suggestions with “resource usage” threats. They are mostly dog fanciers with no tech experience. Their website has no blog, only one contact form and one form to notify of planned events. I wondered how there could be excessive usage of resources. But they are pushing for the Club to get a VPS, of course at a ridiculous price.
The talk of the “account manager” made no sense, typical upselling blather aimed at someone whom you hope to swindle. So I looked around to find out if others have encountered this behaviour… and found this.
Thank you Bob. Now I have a strategy.
Please email me the hosting suggestion, as the hosts I use are too expensive for a small non profit association.
Hello, after 2 years, I am suddenly getting rude support and somehow my wp_co fig debug file was turned on to ‘true’ which means that it is vulnerable to attacks. I will migrate my sites away from these crooks. Please tell me which company you recommend. Thanks
Why not put the list of recommended providers in the post instead of having each and every person searching for a viable HostPapa alternative to individually send a message and get it by email? Yes, everybody should spend all their spare time contacting one provider at a time, read endless web pages of stuff to figure out the downsides, but what do I do if I really don’t have time and energy for that? Give up on having a WordPress blog? Spend my next weekends copy/pasting the pages into text file and reformat them as static HTML pages? Yes, people want me to give up, stop doing what I like, restrict me, but what’s the point of life if we are at this point?
Look at the date on the original post, DeBugMan. Three years ago, I and many posters here would have recommended LunarPages–but since then, LunarPages has been purchased by Hostpapa and there’s been an endless stream of people with tiny websites hosted by LunarPages getting told they are massively overusing resources and must pay much, much more, and these victims are posting reports here and emailing me. So, the point is, I haven’t wanted to take on the responsibility of making public recommendations, and then having to constantly keep up to date researching to figure out if my recommendations are still valid–that’s a lot of work for me, and no one’s paying me for this. Basically, my own recommended ‘list’ has been reduced to two hosts I have been recently using myself, so I feel ‘relatively confident’ about recommending those in a private chat, that’s all. Even then, I urge everyone to ask the recommended questions before signing up.
I am considering directly contacting a few companies to ask them to answer my suggested questions and issue clear public statements about their site throttling and upselling policies, and then posting those statements here. As you are commenting on, though, even that is substantial work for a person to do, and I have other priorities, just like you do. For example, incidentally, not a single person, as far as I know, has complained about their experiences with Hostpapa to BBB and posted a link to this page on the BBB website–that could be very helpful to many people and might get Hostpapa’s attention, especially if done by everyone who has had problems.
Would like the recommendation, thank you.!
I *just* got notice from Hostpapa on this exact issue from the so called Acct Mgr. “I will monitor from today to make sure no other faults are produced and make sure that the account does not go into suspension.”
Also been happy with Lunarpages for years until Hostpapa took over. They jacked up the prices and are now pulling this nonsense.
Absolutely infuriating.
I’d like the recommendation.
After a few months of use my mailbox exceeded 1gb and I was threatened to be shutdown if I did not delete some emails to bring it down to under 1gb or upgrade to one of the expensive services.
My work around for this was to save my email only on my pc using pop3.
Hi Rob. Thanks for sharing this very useful info. Like others, I’d be interested to learn about your current recommendation(s) for good Cdn hosting companies,
Please let me know which provider you recommend. I keep getting emails informing me of “excessive server usage” routine. Like this email: “Your hosting account is exceeding one or more server resources than your current hosting plan allows. Now, our system has detected that this high resource consumption continues, which as a result is affecting the performance of your website(s).”
I have four websites and the busiest one averages about 6-7 visitors PER WEEK. My next step it to change providers. I’m not that technically savvy, so it will be a chore, but this is getting ridiculous.
Thank you for this web page. It confirmed my suspicions.
You’re welcome, John! Did you enter your correct email address here? I can’t seem to send to it, getting blocked. Drop me a direct email if you can.
Scammer company. They tried to force my client to upgrade to $70 per month for a low traffic wordpress site that was “being targeted”. I think by them to be honest. When I asked exactly what was being targeted they sent nonsensical resource logs with no filenames. They threatened my client, wasting my time and energy. I moved her to [edited] in minutes and all problems were solved instantly. Chris from [edited] will actually fix the problem if you are being targeted, not try to upsell you to enterprise level service. However, to their credit, hostpapa DID refund my client 280 bucks for prepaid service.
Thanks for the recommendation, Shaun, I’ll check it out and share it with others. But I don’t want to risk this web thread, which gets a fair bit of traffic, becoming a place that draws scammers to post names of hosting providers, so I edited out the name.
Great information. They’re doing it to me, too. Would like to hear your recpmmendation.
Had an account with Lunarpages over a decade with NO ISSUES, then each week a “manager” for having “2 faults a day 3 days straight”, then the issue was the inodes (scam when they give unlimited storage with limited number of files and folders), the ONLY solution was getting more expensive plan lol
I moved my largest sites to digitalocean and the rest in a dreamhost shared account, now Im happy
Same problem here as well.
Thanks so much. This is exactly the kind of real information I needed. I am not happy with my current provider. I don’t have a great deal of knowledge regarding websites. I have muddled through with the same provider for a few years and it has been adequate enough. However, I feel like I am paying very high fees for what I am really getting. My preference is to have most of what I need in one place. I don’t enjoy having to outsource my security as I essentially have to do with my current provider (who also just was bought out in the last year). Not terrible providers, but not exceptional either. Happy to pay money for what is advertised. Not happy to find out a month in, that I need another add on and then another month later that I need another one. If it’s going to cost me $50 a month let me know at the start, don’t nickel and dime me to the end of the year. I liked the idea of HostPapa. I would prefer to go Canadian. However, what I was reading in the negative reviews was raising alarm bells. I also know that sometimes customers just blame companies for issues that are actually their own. I really appreciate you being so honest in your assessment and explaining it in very simple terms for those of us that don’t have a lot of extra knowledge. Please email me your current pick of provider if you would not mind. I am hoping to get this issue resolved as best as possible this year, at least for the foreseeable future. Thanks for taking the time to help us out.
I had the same experience. I also had several web design clients who had recommended lunarpages to in the past who are suddenly emailing me saying they are getting the same threatening messaging from hostPapa. I contacted hostpapa to get my site back up and they’re being very obnoxious about doing so. In the moments that it’s actually up, I’m going and downloading all of my site information. Unfortunately they keep suspending it in the middle of my work. This feels like a racketeering/protection scam. “Nice website you have there, be a shame if something happened to it. “ This is mob like behavior. Even their logo looks like some guy named Guido Lightfingers. The thing of it is, although web design clients that I recommend going with lunarpages are going to get a recommendation to go elsewhere now that hostPapa has decided to behave unethically. So it’s not just me they’re losing. A couple years ago malware got onto my site. I did not have security holes. Their crappy service is why the malware got in. That time I actually fell for their upsell to add extra layers of security. It’s not happening again. I am done with them.
I’m in the same boat, was with LunarPages since the early 2000s, never an issue, hosts a few small sites, very low traffic. Then HostPapa bought them out.
A month ago their ‘Account Manager’ tells me my ‘server resource usage’ is exceeding limits…yet they can’t specify what is going on. Tech Support has given me a number of options, I’ve implemented nearly all, but the threats continue. Account Manager keeps trying to upsell me.
Basically they’re telling you there’s something wrong, they can’t specify what, and a few token suggestions to make changes, which likely won’t help, since the goal is only to make you upgrade. (And then presumably, upgrade again, and again.) You can’t fix whatever is ‘broken’.
Curious how involved it is to move to a different server, I have a couple sites that are fairly basic PHP, plus a couple WordPress sites..? Any automation on this?
Please email me the recommendation as well, thank you for posting this Rob!
And everyone reading this thread should know that I get equally as many or more people only contacting me about this privately! Yeesh…
Hi Dave, it’s actually usually very easy to move to a different web hosting company. And I highly recommend actually initiating the process BEFORE you flag to Hostpapa that you’re considering doing it. If they lock you out, you’ve got a bigger problem to navigate.
Essentially, you only have to copy the underlying databases/info that drives your site. You can do this from CPanel if you have that — there’s both a File Manager as well as some hosts allow you access to a formal backup tool via CPanel. For WordPress or other website tools there are often free plugins you can use as well from within them. CAUTION: My experience was that Hostpapa was throttling my site so heavily, that some backup tools did not work, but instead timed out.
So the most reliable method, especially if you’re not sufficiently tech-savvy on your own to feel comfortable to backup and then restore again on a new web host, is to simply ask your new chosen web host to “transfer” the site for you. This is standard, common practice in the web hosting field, they usually offer it for free when you sign up with them. So you sign up with them and give them the access to your old site, and they formally contact your host and they usually have a backdoor route that allows them to much more rapidly copy everything necessary and restore it for you in the new location. It’s usually stupid simple for them — I can only imagine it potentially being a problem with more complex sites.
Just got the major sales pitch, no threats yet, would like to know what provider people recommend, we are New Zealand based if that matters
Hi there, also running into the same problems and would love your recommendation (also in Australia). Thanks!
I have not had any problems with hostpapa yet but would like to avoid them in the future and don’t really want to support a company like this. Recommendations would be appreciated.
So glad I came across this. I run a tiny WP site for a local hobby club and it has been running fine for years. Then, out of the blue, we are using “too many resources” with offers for upgrades and pricey tech support. Would love to hear your recommendation for a trusted prover.
So happy to find a review that is real and not influenced by high affiliate commissions AKA greed.
Unfortunately, you know only one side of the story, but what happens behind the curtains is even more shady.
These so called “Account managers” that contact clients regarding exceeded limits and excessive usage of resources are nothing more than sales representatives who get paid commissions for every successful upsell they make. 99% of these people have 0 technical background and the things they write in emails are from a script + some random statistics from raw logs. These logs in some cases are irrelevant or wrong.
The scope of those sales reps is to intimidate, shut down cPanel and website access and try hard to upsell. They are told to do so. In fact if they don’t do enough upsells they may get fired and just be replaced.
The shady practiced behind this company are so beyond your imagination..
Many Canadian citizens choose Hostpapa solely because they are happy to help Canadian business. However, they have no clue how this company is managed. Hostpapa has done everything possible to pay as less taxes as possible while still be legally ok. How? Well the larger amount of their staff works from all around the world, at pay rates way below the minimum wage in Canada and USA. These employees are not actual employees but independent contractors. That takes away from them the employee right, while HostPapa benefits from these people by not having to pay taxes and insurance for them. It’s pure profit directly going into the pockets of the few people on top. Who by the way, don’t care about customer satisfaction and providing best service – their scope is to have a quite ok image so they can have clients to keep profiting from.
You will never hear from a supervisor or a manager when you request to because they simply don’t care. Just like they don’t care about their employees.
I have much more to say but it’s wise to stop here.
If you happen to read this article, please share it so that more and more people can be aware what’s going on with this company.
I would love your recommendation. They are currently attempting to shake me down too.
A sudden upsurge in more complaints here and coming to me directly lately — I wonder if it’s the purchase of lunar pages that some are mentioning? It’s pathetic how little investigation of white collar business crime there is in Canada — this really is starting to look potentially criminal.
I’m going thru the same time thing. 10 page web site. Maybe 7 plugins. Teething to upsell me to reseller server because I have other sites with them. Never had an issue until host papa bought lunar pages
Wow– this is enlightening– I’m going through this too with Host Papa. Please send me your recommendation, and I’m also going to contact the BBB
We are having the EXACT same issue with HostPapa. I was with LunarPages for many years and never had an issue until they were bought out by HostPapa. Please send me your recommendation. I suspect it is WP Engine, but I would love to know. Thanks!