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
We have been with Hostpapa for 3 years. We started with them with the basic package and the price is reasonable. In our first year our email and website were shut by Hostpapa several time, Hostpapa’s claims excessive resource use as the reason and this is very surprising considering we did not even allow google to crawl our website and our website is not searchable on search engine. This is because the company is new and we are still making changes to our products and websites to cater to the market requirement. Also, we have only 3 active email address and we don’t have that much emails as we are still in “development phase”. In order to resume using email quickly. We fallen prey to moving to their “expensive” plan.
On 27 May, Hostpapa decides to relocate our hosting with them to a new server. When the relocation is completed, we had issues accessing our emails and website. From the initial outright denial that there is no issue with the new server and it is our ISP and router that is having problem, we work hard to gather evidences to show Hostpapa team that there is really an issue and pleaded with them to change our server. This met with outright rejection. No business today can survive without email. We have not checked our total lost opportunities but this is seriously impacting us. Not forgetting the huge amount of time we spent to get Hostpapa to look into the issues.
On day 5 of the outage, we were finally told that there was a cut on the fibre from a major provider that has resulted in us not having access to emails and website (refer to here: https://ecogent.cogentco.com/network-status). Hostpapa then proposed to move our hosting to a new server. However, even after the move, we still do not have access to our email and website.
Through out the incident, we felt they don’t check the issues enough (they could have use a VPN and to check) and push blame to us and we have left high and dry. We need to gather evidence and troubleshoot on our own to get them to seriously look at our issues.
We had another business hosting with a Singapore based service provider and we were never treated like this. I suggest you look beyond what Hostpapa put on google page 1 and find a reviews from actual user that actually reflect their support.
I started my website with Lunarpages, which was a very good web hosting service provider. The hostpapa service is poor, I am searching for a new hosting service. Could you email me your hosting service recommendation? Thank you!
Relieved to have found this before migrating to Hostpapa! I would appreciate any recommendations for low cost hosting providers, especially Canadian ones. Thank you!
HostPapa recently bought the hosting company I had happily been with for ten years. HostPapa sent me an email saying they were going to migrate my websites and I could not make any changes to those websites until I got an email saying migration was complete. After a week of waiting for that email I send a message to the address they told me to use and asked why migration wasn’t complete. HostPapa ignored my email. I send another email 3 days after that and again it was ignored. I sent a third email and it was ignored. Two and a half weeks after migration started I’m still waiting. HostPapa is absolutely terrible. Why would a business treat their new customers this way? I’m thinking I’ll go with [edited].
Thanks for calling this out, Rob!
Server usage isn’t the only “violation-for-profit” scam. Hostpapa also frequently sends “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.” emails. The “backup” capacity is so low it’s hard not to exceed this.
I have some good alternatives (though one recently had a 24-hour outage with no warning and no available support), but would like to know yours.
I had similar experience and would like to ask for your recommendation please. Thanks in advance!
Please share information of alternative providers.
Wow. Nice to hear I’m not alone. Back in January I received the “we need to upgrade your plan email”. I upgrade to the ultimate. They said that will fix your problem.
I received an email two weeks ago saying “you need to upgrade your plan”. I asked them to provide the reasons for the spikes. They mentioned the usual BS about adding bot removers. So I did. They said the next day “looks like it worked. Fast forward ten days to when I receive an email saying “you need to upgrade to the $1,000 plan or face suspension. You have 48 hours to figure it out.
I bought a two year plan at $600. I’m going to move to Namecheap.com, but it looks like I’m out a year and a half of their hosting. How can they suspend you AND keep your money?
Incredible. The audacity! I can say that most people (including me) have been able to get outstanding money back by writing a firm, clear email to Hostpapa that outlines your complaint and states the amount of money you expect to get back. There are lots of places you can turn to appeal “financial” complaints of this kind, like Better Business Bureau where Hostpapa is a member, and Hostpapa seems to not want to go through that and risk getting a ton of these kinds of complaints on the record with neutral third parties and regulators etc.
Thank you very much for the info on Hostpapa. Could you please send me your recommended web host providers?
I, too, am looking for a host for a small website and thought HostPapa looked good until I decided to search for reviews. Glad I did! Please send me your recommendation(s).
Thanks!
I have a personal site (no money, just a site for few friends use for some gaming of the pen-and-paper type) that is password protected and that makes traffic very low. There’s nothing that should get seen other than the login page.
My provider was a small company and the proprietor died suddenly and now another company has taken it over. What used to be about $16 USD per quarter is now $36 per quarter. All I’ve been running was Simple Machines Forum with an average of one user (me) and periodically as many as 6 in a week. Never hit any limits of bandwith, compute cycles or anything. Due to rough time in real life, I either drop my site for good, or I shift to a cheaper solution, but I don’t want to jump into bed with a bandit.
So, if you have a decent low-priced hosting company that isn’t a bunch of crooks, let me know. All I really needed to run was a forum and be able to serve a few simple hand-made web pages for a very small group with very minimal traffic.
I’d have built my own server over our cable link except that I’d have to keep up the server patches and backups. I’m happy manually backing up (rate of change on the site is low). But the server patches seem more worth paying a bit for.
So, email me your best suggestion, thanks. And thanks for shouting out the fraudsters.
Please advise an alternative good webhost. I’m having the same issues with HP. Thanks
I would love to receive your hosting recommendation. I’ve been running into issues with HostPapa resource usage with a client’s site repeatedly over the last six months or so. Thanks so much!
My first problem with HostPapa was in 2022 when they tried to force me into a much higher plan b because of high resource usage. It was all caused by bots grabbing images from my site. HostPapa would not do anything about this but I did finally put enough IP traps to get most of them locked out. Now there is another round starting. Would you send me the host you recommend – if it is still a valid choice.
Would love your recommendation for web hosting please
Add me to the list of folks running small, unchanging, low resource websites for nearly two decades (originally with Lunarpages) who are now getting the shakedown and only being told to upgrade. I too would be interested to know which host you ended up at. Thanks.
They have not changed…I just had the same thing happen with Hostpapa half way thru a three year term. Several emails telling me that my site was incurring “High Resource Usage”. Then the emails started telling me that upgrading my account for ONLY $466 or adding the PapaCare+ service for $59.95 plus tax a month would fix the problem. They did suggest a couple of things to try and I worked for a few days and installed a couple of plugins(which seemed to increase my resource usage) but they said nothing changed. They shut my site down this morning telling me I either had to upgrade the plan or get the service contract. I asked about a refund for the remaining time left in my plan and was told that refunds were only available on the first 30 days. Strangely enough, it looks like my High Resource Usage corresponds with the notice I sent telling them that I would not be renewing my plan, for a substantial amount, when the current term ends… when I questioned the suspension of the account without a refund I was told by support that this is not a “tactic” by Hostpapa to get more money… ya right
Time to look for a reliable, reasonable priced, hosting service, if one exists.
I would also love to know your recommended web service provider!
I am having the same issues with Host Papa almost one year to the date of starting my services with them. Can you also please let me know who you use as well.
ALSO, for anyone who is interested I am looking into the potential of starting a “Class Action Lawsuit” against Host Papa here in Canada.
Could you let me know the name of the provider you are currently using
We are encountering a recurring issue with HostPapa, similar to previous experiences. Our team comprises professional programmers and IT experts, affirming that our resource usage for our straightforward, informative websites is well within acceptable limits. Since migrating to HostPapa three years ago from a different hosting provider, our website configurations have remained unchanged, and we have not implemented any significant alterations. Historically, we have not faced any issues until the recent period coinciding with our contract renewal, when unexpected difficulties began to arise.
Regrettably, our account has been suspended weekly without prior notice, and notably, these suspensions have occurred in the absence of any documented resource overages. Additionally, we have observed that the support team is located outside of Canada, which may be contributing to our challenges in resolving these issues effectively.
What hosting would you recommend? how about godaddy or ionos do you think they go by the same scenario?
Because of similar issues and threats, I migrated my website away from HostPapa yesterday. I checked my stats today and there were no visitors or bandwidth used but my website still had IO faults occur this morning. So it seems to me that my “excessive resource usage” has nothing to do with website traffic or bots.. Any insight into who’s this can happen, legitimately, would be much appreciated. Btw, I haven’t yet cancelled my hostpapa plan (which has almost 3 yrs left) because I unwisely moved my domain to them.
Yes, I’m not surprised to hear this. Some people who are more technically knowledgeable than I am recently explained to me how, in fact, even the “explanations” that Hostpapa gives for why these “problems” are happening (and my own extrapolations from those explanations) are non-credible. Basically, it seems that there’s no substantial problem of any kind occurring that truly makes technical sense, and therefore no matter what you do it can never be solved except by paying Hostpapa more money. I plan to soon update the post above with this and other information I’ve gathered in the intervening years that this has continued on.
Would greatly appreciate your recommendation! Thanks for sharing this info!
I too have naively been taken in by HostPapa and need a recommendation for a hosting site for a non-profit in Canada. Your suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I have been getting the threatening emails and a final deadline of Feb 7th before getting suspended. It has been very stressful dealing with HostPapa’s constant demands we fix our site (while their suggestions do not work) or upgrade or get suspended.
Rob, as have many others, I’d like to get your provider’s company name. Thank you.
We are having the same problems with Host Papa. No problem with Lunar pages, but now our website gets “suspended” unless I call the “account manager”. Ready to leave, but such a pain. Please send me your suggested web hosting provider.
Hi Rob, please share your recommendations. Having same issues with ongoing resource limit / upgrade harassment. Thx.
We have a website for a small non-profit hosted by Hostpapa. Very simple website and are now getting repeated automated emails informing us that our storage space is used up and need to upgrade to ensure backup occurs. After reading your article and all the comments after I am now looking for a new website host provider. Please send me your recommendations.
Hi Rob,
Thanks for your analysis.
I’ll skip the details of my experience, It is identical to many of the above comments. The headline would read “Hostpapa Police issue three speeding tickets on Parked Car”.
Please share the recommended provider with me.
Rob,
Please send me the name of the web hosting service you recommend.
Thank you.
Their new scam is to make email inbox size smaller and smaller (there is no published limit in their terms of service). Currently I am being harrased every month to ‘upgrade’ my service plan. They are now saying 1GB per inbox is too big. This is 2023 – I get individual emails of 50MB. If you could send me your recommended host I’d be grateful – time for a change I think.
Please provide a recommendation for a web hosting provider.
Thanks
Thanks so much for taking the time to write this article. I know it’s been a few years but consider this a my buying you a virtual BEER or coffee.
I am a 20+ year lunar pages customer with one WordPress website and getting the same harassment from HOSED PAPA!! Their technical people are useless and the “reports” and “logs” that they now provide you, actually have the useful information filtered out. You literally can not determine what the issues are that are causing these “? IO throughput (IO): ” issues. It’s a scam and so sad that businesses even prey on their current customer base. I am technical (40 years in software engineering). It’s time for a mass walkout of customers…. Vote with your money and hit them where it hurts. I used to steer people who wanted to have their own website or email domain to lunar pages. Now the only thing I do tell anyone I talk to is don’t use HostPapa. These silly greedy owners will never understand that voices carry!
I would love that recommendation for your hosting service.
Hi Rob, thank you for your post! Do you still have any recommendations for website hosting?
It’s been four years since you posted this, and people like me are still getting our websites shutdown over this same scam. I started with Lunarpages in 2003 with no problems until Hostpapa bought them out. The prices went up on everything. Last year after threats of suspension. I upgraded. I was told it would solve everything! It’s been suspended twice this year. It’s currently suspended. because I won’t pay more, and honestly, I’m not tech savvy enough to jump through all the hoops every time. It also means my email through them is also suspended. I was going to transfer it to a business Gmail, but I can’t even access it to do that. Anyway, thanks for your post!
I’m going to have to add “Lunarpages” to the title and SEO for this article, because ever since Hostpapa bought them, there’ve been a deluge of complaints like yours. I’m going to do a formal update to the original article soon — but you’re absolutely right, the problems with Hostpapa have continued for years in a very systemic way. I receive as many or more private messages about it as comments here.
If you formally transfer your site to another hosting provider, the hosting provider will have the ability to access your site, copy and move it. I doubt Hostpapa would so brazenly flout that basic law, because if other companies start complaining about them to regulators, that would draw a level of regulatory attention that I’m sure they’d be much more concerned about. Most people also get their money back by simply demanding it — there are organizations like the Better Business Bureau that will actively help with issues related to money, and Hostpapa doesn’t seem to want that.
I will email you about specific hosting providers, but generally, I now tell everyone: VIRTUALLY ANY ORDINARY HOSTING PROVIDER IS LIKELY SAFER THAN HOSTPAPA, for reasons that I will elaborate on when I update my original post. I have yet to hear of any other hosting provider doing what Hostpapa appears to be doing in such a systemic way.
Rob,
Please send me your recommendation for a different provider.
I had been with Lunar Pages since 2004 and as others, never had any issues that weren’t handled in a timely and honest manner. When Host Papa took over my account was due for renewal. I had always paid with a check and mailed one to their CA address. Upon the renewal date my website was ‘shut down’ due to non payment. After a few hours of communication I was forced to pay with a credit card which was then in their data base for future charges. Three months later I received my check that had been mailed in an envelope with no explanation what so ever. I called and no one could/would answer my questions. Six months later I began to get the upgrade BS story that everyone has been mentioning. I continued to argue and request help on their end to ‘resolve’ the problems. They have shut down my site several times without explanation and continue to try to push me into the most expensive offering they have. This is not a company that anyone should do business with.
jim
I’ve dealt with similar issues at other hosting services. I use Cloudways in the States now and like them but complicated set up. And more than many people need. Now building a simple WordPress site for Canadian company and want a host located there. Who do you use?
I’ve dealt with similar issues at other hosting services. I use Cloudways in the States now and like them but complicated set up. And more than many people need. Now building a simple WordPress site for Canadian company and want a host located there. Who do you use?
Oh my gosh! I’m dealing with the same problems right now! I manage a cats rescue website and they have been extorting money from the owners even though they survive off donations. Please let Please share the other provider with us. Greatly appreciated!
HostPapa can absolutely go F itself so hard! Just completed my transfer away after encountering this scam from them. My website is literally a couple paragraphs of text using their default wordpress installation but apparently it’s just eating up so many server resources that it’s impacting other customers. They send a bunch of vague suggestions and supposed “report” that is just a table of nonsense numbers that gives you nothing to go on. Their tactic is to have you waste increasing amounts of time and effort trying in vain to minimize your resource usage until you finally give in and upgrade. I am fully transferred away. I’ve transferred clients away from other hosts before, but this is the first time I transferred a site away from a host that makes me feel this desire to scorch the earth behind me. Everybody needs to stay away from HostPapa. They need to go out of business!
I am increasingly unhappy with hostpapa. I try to run a small WordPress site with about 10 plugins, and since the site
is in draft stage, there is little or no traffic to it. There are about 10 pages, no videos, and about 10 uploaded pdf files.
But I still get resource exceeded etc from hostpapa. I am generally diligent about keeping the plugins up to date.
Then, they suspend my account, and I cannot get in even with
cPanel. However, it is advertised as unlimited. I call up, and they remove the suspension.
After this happening a number of times, I am leaving hostpapa. As a long term customer, I was initially
with lunarpages, but it became hostpapa. These suspensions never happened under lunarpages.
As a php programmer for a number of years, all of this makes me think. WordPress is after all based on php.
There are a number of php.ini settings. And so, if the php script
engine is running too long, for example, the script engine will shut it down. Likewise for memory (memory_limit). If a php page does not fully
execute because of ini settings, it should be no problem, except a poor running website.. The php page just won’t send back to the browser. I don’t see this as a reason
to suspend someone’s website. From shared hosting, I expect an occasional php file to not fully execute. I have seen this for one client,
whereby the sql was taking so long that the php script was timing out. The fix was to reduce the number of rows requested.
Again, these are not ‘earth shaking events’. If a php page does not render, its an inconvenience to your website. Users will see a blip.
But I personally do not buy the argument that is impacting the whole server, and impacting everyone else. I suspect hostpapa of trying to upsell.
Also, as a unix/linux programmer, multiple processes share memory virtually via the os and kernel. There are priority settings for
processes to make sure all is fair. In a multi-user/multi-process os, safeguards are put into place to prevent one user/one process from
taking all of the system resources.
To be fair, it is possible that one of the plugins is poor. I am getting better and better at writing my own. But it could take a lot of
work to debug everyone’s plugin I am using. Still hostpapa never gave any indication that it was a certain php script at a certain line number.
Hello, Please let me know the provider. I am looking to change provider for a small charity website.
They got me with the excessive I/O usage nonsense as well as cutting our email storage significantly. We have a very and I mean very basic WordPress site that just has a few pages about our business. It probably gets 5 legitimate hits a week. There is no interaction with visitors, nothing computational, just a few bits about what we do and a few photos. It’s just there for us to have it. We also use the email which we really need.
We had Lunarpages for almost 20 years and no issues but as soon as Hostpapa bought them, we started getting harassed. They restricted our resource limits so low that anything that WordPress or a third party beyond our control did would trigger over usage. First they were a little nicer and offered some solutions in addition to upgrading – adding a robots.txt, turning off Cron Jobs, etc. I did it but told them that blocking bots should really be their job, not ours. I can’t control what some server in China does.
Then a year later while I was dealing with a major family medical crisis (which sadly ended badly), a “tech support” specialist named Jean-Pierre A. contacted me making a big fuss about how we had triggered several I/O overages and how in a shared host, we are essentially being selfish for doing this and the only way to go forward is to upgrade or we can risk getting shut down. I again asked what could I do when third parties are doing it. All WordPress did was update a theme! i can’t use WordPress without a theme! Long story short, I got sold a 3 year contract for their 2nd highest priced plan and that was after Jean-Pierre tried his hardest to sell me the highest. I also got tacked on a free trial of their backup which I only found out about because I was getting annoying emails from that saying that I had gone over my storage limit and had I not caught it, they would have charged my credit card 6 months later. After googling Jean-Pierre A (i’m not putting his last name), it seems like this is what he’s really good at…I hope he enjoys his commission.
Speaking of renewals, their renewal rate is going to be 3 times higher than what I pay now so look out for that too. I’m going to leave them when the contract is up but sadly, it’s hard to find an honest host which doesn’t artificially limit resources so they can upsell you later. Lunarpages was great. I never once got a sales call.
Please, someone have a list of honest hosts. I don’t mind paying a little more if I don’t have to worry about dishonest sales people or higher renewals.
Yet another case. We are a small sailing club with 30 events a year and very low traffic. But, according to HostPapa, there are ‘faults’ caused by excessive I/O and we should upgrade our account. Thanks for the work on your article and please send me your hosting recommendation.
I’m having the exact same problem! The websites I have hosted are not large at all and despite doing very little work on them, suddenly there is an issue. The thing is, I have three other websites (one of which is a huge real estate website & the other two that are still a lot larger than the ones on Hostpapa) hosted over on Siteground with no downtime ever! Admittedly these are not on a shared hosting platform. But still!
Hello, thank you for this enlightening post. It makes me wonder how financially viable HostPapa is given the apparent way they are trying to squeeze more revenue from existing customers.
I had the same exact issue. Lunarpages were purchased by HostPapa and then they started sending the same kind of messages of CPU overages, etc. They sent me down so many rabbit holes over the past 3 or 4 years. Finally, about 2-years ago, I upgraded to a new shared plan, hoping that would fix the problem. It didn’t as about every 9-months or so, they would let me know there were issues.
I finally switched servers after reading this very insightful post. Problem solved. Chemicloud is my new host.
Thanks.
Hi, please share the provider with me.
One more thing-
Once I balked at upgrading (via the latest set of emails to and fro, between myself and HostPapa), my .htaccess file magically disappeared, preventing my site from using pretty URLs, becoming temporarily unusable. I restored a backup .htaccess and all was well. We’ll see how long that lasts.
I’m having the same experience with them, and have had the same since they bought out Lunarpages, where I had my hosting. The nagging never stops, even after I do what is asked of me to prevent excessive use (stopping WP-CRON, using Cloudflare, etc.). Now, web bots are crawling excessively and HostPapa claims they can’t do anything. I’ve had enough of them and will be switching as soon as I am able.
I totally agree with this. They are just a pack of scammers and people from whom I purchased a 3 years plan. 6 months into the plan, I suddenly begin to get a strange series of emails stating that has stuff EXACTLY as mentioned above. All of a sudden, my website begins to start creating “issues” for other users on a shared server – and I am on a unlimited bandwidth plan as well. Then a “service representative” comes up and says that my server is causing overload – thats on a static site that has probably 10 visitors in a week – and that too at random!
They offer me “affordable” rates to upgrade!!
Its a scam and a big one at that. When I did not react to their push – they blocked my website.
Lesson : stay clear of these scammers!
I used to be with Lunarpages until the buyout. Once or twice a year, Hostpapa comes at me with this bogus nonsense. At first I believed it, and simply did my best to work with their troubleshooting. I’d slowly remove features, turn stuff into static webpages, etc. They’d acquiesce and I’d not hear from them for 6-10 months until suddenly, oh hey, the problem is back! But… nothing was different.
At this point, I’m certain it’s a scam. But I don’t make money from my hosting. I just want to keep the content online for archival purposes. Combined, all my hosting generally only pulls 20gb of transfer in a month, and I don’t care how fast the service actually is. But I’m very uneducated regarding web stuff, and I don’t know where to turn.
Our group started with Lunarpages back in the late 1990’s — it was later acquired by these “Hostpapa” people. In the last 25 years we have either brought in, directly manage the accounts of, or referred thousands of users to Hostpapa. Currently, we have nearly a thousand accounts of customers we manage websites for that are on Hostpapa. In recent years we have heard an increasing number of complaints about “unlimited” email, bandwidth, etc. but finally experienced a problem that would not have taken the old Lunarpages more than three minutes to fix. Our client is still down with no access to their email or website, The sheer indifference of what passes for “management” of Hostpapa is shocking. The Better Business Bureau Complaints I found today (online); pages like this one with associated horror stories make it clear this company is at best, poorly run by inept managers, or at worst, a scam of some sort. In any event we’re moving our people out and that “moving” process began at 3PM today. Whatever Host[papa once was, it’s now a huge disappointment.
I’m in the process of dealing with this scam right now.
I even took Dow the domain as a test and sure enough I still received the scam emails from hostpapa. This is why I left Bluehost as they did the same thing.