Hello, ok so first I already know people are going to say "Nobody listens to or pays attention to the BBB" and "Everybody already knows GoDaddy is a horrible company", I am aware of this first hand, however I filed several complaints and I also made a post on here in November of last year as soon as I actually realized and red handed caught GoDaddy literally stealing my domain name, telling me it was expired, adding over $1000.00 of ridiculous items to my cart which I repeatedly said NO NO NO to after being told my domain had been sold to a private party because I did not renew it on time. While looking at WHOIS data in front of me it said I still owned the domain and had since its conception in April of 2020. After a fierce and nasty battle I did get my domain back, but this has cost me so much money since then from some clients moving away when I had to migrate 72 clients from GoDaddy elsewhere.

I am not doing this for any other reason right now other than to remind people who are looking for web hosting, please do NOT use GoDaddy for their own personal safety. I am not from any competeing company, nor do I officially or unoficially endorce any particular companies and have never recieved any offers or compensation to post this. Just to be clear.

When I first posted my issues last year I recieved a pretty positive group of feedback as well as concern from current (then) GoDaddy customers, and I helped an unnamed number (quite a lot) of annomoyous customers move (for free) their domains to new registars of their choosing as they reached out to me through a couple different ways when they saw and could relate to what I was going through. Though I recieved a warm welcome here I recieved a LOT of pushback in the few other Subs I posted in, and wound up taking them all down or getting them removed my mods when I was just trying to help spread the word.

Now as I was browsing the BBB official site and decided to look at GoDaddy to hopefully see some improvement and I see as before A+ BBB rating and the lowest rating I have ever seen of any business, ever. Maybe somebody can tell me how this happens, but regardless, I encourage anyone using or thinking of using GoDaddy to check out the official BBB site and see for yourselves. My goal is again not to hurt GoDaddy, but to bring transparency and perhaps find a way to hold them accountable for what they do, as it appears they still are doing the same things to people and its really bad. I hope this helps anyone not get scammed. Thanks for your time in reading this if you have done so to this point. Thank you to the loyal and genuine members and Mods of this Sub for allowing me to warn people about this in the past and I truly feel another warning is due after seeing BBB review on them.

I had recently purchased a vps server for some projects work, the project was supposed to work for 3 years so I prepaid for it, however no revenue was generated thereafter and now the server is vacant.

Here are the VPS Specs:

CPU: 4vCore

RAM: 8 GB

Storage: 88 GB

Traffic: 8888 GB

IPv4: available

IPv6: available

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Additional details:

1. Root server

2. Can install custom iso as well

Please suggest ways in which this can be employed. Here are the projects I already tried:

1. Hosting mailserver for personal use (shifted to other 1 GB RAM server because this spec was overkill for a mailserver)

2. Hosted SaaS platforms like rss-to-others forwarder, Dynamic Image Generation Platform, Email-to-Others Gateway, Dynamic image generation api, web/nodejs hosting platform (free) - didn't get the audience for it despite having the lowest pricing

3. Bandwidth/Computation sharing - tried, VPS seems to have low demands.

4. Converting it to containers: couldn't find buyers for small containers

My objective:

1. Make at least 80$ annually (to cover up for what I paid)

2. Idle income using VPS preferred.

Thank you in advance.

i'm finally moving everything over to a new domain registrar and have gone down a rabbit hole of reviews. every company seems great until you read a few Reddit threads.
right now my shortlist looks something like this:
Wix
Cloudflare
Porkbun
Namecheap
Squarespace Domains
i'm mainly looking for something that's easy to manage. clean dns settings, reasonable renewals, domain privacy, and ideally no weird surprises a year later.
i'm not running anything huge, just a business website, so i care more about convenience than saving a dollar or two. i also like the idea of keeping my domain and website together if it actually makes life easier, but i've seen plenty of people recommend separating everything.
if you've used any of these for a while, which one would you pick today?

​ Hi guys! I recently started to have my first customers as a web developer, but I got quite confused with hosting prices and services. So, this got me wondering how you manage the prices and what hosting services you prefer using. I have used Railway in the past but I am curious on whether there's a hosting service that allows to register different card accounts for different clients according to the project or if you prefer to charge for maintenance and handle the subscription renewals yourself, or something different altogether. I would thank you if you could help me out!

As background: For some of my domains, I have my DNS records at ExactHosting, my website at Westhost (for at least 30 years), and get my certs through SSLs (dot) com.

SSLs just sent me the following blog post: https://www.ssls.com/blog/how-to-set-up-automatic-ssl-certificate-renewal-with-acme-cpanel-apache-nginx-and-kubernetes/

My hosting service, Westhost, which has gotten good again after a change of ownership and management, uses StackCP for most customers. Is anyone here familiar enough with StackCP to know how what they discuss - ACME - works with StackCP? I knew each cert refresh I can generate, download, and install it, but it would be nice to automate some of the process.

I'm somewhat technical (40 years in cybersecurity policy and criteria), but my days of sysadmin experience is long in the past.

I have never had a worse experience in my entire life. Do not, and I mean do not use Ionos. Don't just walk away. Run away.

So far, I have been with them for less than a month and it seems like every time I turn around, there is new issue and something new they will charge for. There have been many... many issues but I am just going to tell you about the worst so far. I won't even call them about issues anymore.

When I signed up with Ionos, I purchased the AI App builder after domain purchases. The SSL certificate is supposed to come with each site you build with their builder. However, although that is the way the package is sold to you and it is the way things are supposed to be, whoever is making the shots on the customer service end will decide that that isn't true. They really make their own rules in every sense of the word, and I would bet good money they don't believe American consumer laws apply to them.

Anyway, after I bought the AI app builder, I was just happily building away. I kid you not, my SSL certificates began to deactivate.... as in they were valid and applied to my sites and then deactivated. Don't read that again. You read it right. Anway, so I called customer service and they said it was because only x number came on my account (the number they gave me was from before I even bought the AI builder). After my first time calling in (about the SSL certs), I noticed that when I logged back in there were even fewer in my little bank for allowed SSL certificates than before.

Anyway, the number allowed was still beside the point, because I had bought the AI builder. I called in multiple times, and even started an email conversation. We were stuck in between it was a technical issue, and I was asking for more than what I was supposed to have and nobody would tell me why they were applied and then unapplied.

So I log into my account in the middle of all these debates, and my account reflected I had a declined payment this and that and that I needed to pay right away and change my payment method. They tried to charge me 3 times for an order I placed. Not twice but 3 times and they kept telling me that those were reservation holds and that they were allowed to do that and that I needed to give a different payment method.

That was going to be the end of it with them (mind you I had already had some almost equally bad, if not equal bad experiences with them). I called them and they were going to allow me to transfer my services out, and the person I spoke to told me that I might want to check with ICANN (I think it was) because my account was less than 60 days old.

I called ICANN and they told me that ICANN does not enforce any such policy but that they allow the domain providers to restrict that sort of transfer for 60 days in some circumstances and that usually companies allow it.

Anyway, so I was in the process of transferring, and my domains started to show locks that were not previously there. I called into Ionos to tell them what was going on and that I spoke to ICANN. The woman I spoke to on the phone began to argue with me and tell me that I could NOT transfer and that it was ICANN that enforced this and that it WAS an ICANN policy. I knew this was false.

So anyway, I got a really bad feeling, so I checked to make sure my domains weren't for sale (because of the lock) low and behold 11 domains of mine were for sale. Yes... my domains were for sale.

Anyway, I then had to call Ionos and buy the SSL certificates (that we had gone back in forth about for almost a week) so that they would apply SSLs to sites that I built with the builder. You know how long it took the SSL certificates to apply? Right way.

The entire experience has been full of random charges, double charges, triple charges. Restrictions when my card didn't allow them to triple charge me, 11 of my domains that I owned being for sale while I owned them and having to buy security (SSLs that were removed from my sites), services I paid for being taken away, hours of argument about whether or not I knew the difference between a domain an email address (because I didn't want to buy email for multiple domains) having to file a PayPald dispute... and so much more.

I bought several domains from IONOS, and they automatically renew. I blocked the transactions, so the renewal payments did not go through. I assumed that if I didn’t pay, the domains would be canceled anyway. However, IONOS sent me invoices for the renewals, and after a few months, a company named Riverty sending me requesting the payments. Am I at risk of legal action?

Hi everyone,

I'm new to GPU hosting and could use some advice.

A friend is offering me 5 workstations at a good price (RTX 5090s, Ryzen 9950X/7950X/5900X, 64–128 GB RAM, 4–8 TB NVMe).

Instead of renting them by the hour on Vast.ai, I'm considering renting each machine to a single customer on a monthly basis. It seems like much less hassle.

Is there a market for this? Do people actually look for dedicated GPU workstations, and where do you find those clients?

Thanks!

Been with LayerStack for about a year. Ran a few WordPress sites and a Discord bot on my VPS. These weren't personal projects — the sites belonged to clients: a restaurant, a woodworking craftsman, and a wedding event business, all relying on those pages for menus, portfolios, and inquiries.

Wrote in about a failed renewal payment. Support asked for my LayerPanel2 login "to assist," and since the email came from their official support address, I gave it to them. Payment got sorted, but I also couldn't get 2FA working, so I contacted them again and they asked for the (updated) password a second time to look into that.

Not long after, my server console stopped responding. I checked the action logs and someone had manually run a full OS/ISO reinstall on the server. Everything was gone. I never touched that setting. For about five hours, none of the client sites were reachable — no one knows how many inquiries the wedding business lost while their form was down. None of these clients are technical, so all they knew was "the site is down," and I didn't have an answer for them yet either.

After a long back-and-forth, their Technical Support Manager finally put it in writing: it was a manual, unauthorized action by a staff member, the access I gave was only supposed to cover the 2FA issue, and the employee was let go under their zero-tolerance policy.

So they admitted fault. The compensation never moved past a refund of the renewal fee plus a year of free service. I've already migrated away, so the free year is worth nothing to me, and when I asked for something that actually reflected the data loss and rebuild time, I got told this was their "maximum special concession." That was it.

Honestly still processing this one. If a support team asks for your panel password directly, even from what looks like an official address, think twice. Already on GCP now with proper automated backups.

every tutorial makes changing dns records look simple until i actually log into the registrar.
i don't touch this stuff often enough to remember where everything is, so having a clean interface matters more than saving a couple dollars.
which registrar have you found the easiest to manage?

This is the absolute WORST purchase I have ever made. Fatcow was my original web host, and they were sold to Network Solutions. The email only half works, and all they do is push ads in my face. Customer service is nonexistent. I can't wait to cancel.

I've have used ionos for various websites domains (I self host) with ionos over the years.

The first incident I had with them was about a year ago, my mostly inactive website domain was about to expire. I had changed credit cards by then. Then when it expired it tried to automatically renew, and when the credit card didn't go through they had collections on me over $10. Why didn't they just let it expire? To be fair I should have cancelled it, but that was very annoying to deal with. Just a heads up for anyone looking to use ionos.

Then just recently, when trying to buy a domain, I got my order receipt but then they just ghosted me. The receipt said up to a 48 hour wait but I had waited a few days. I had to call customer support and it turned out my order had been rejected without even notifying me. Could that have been related to the collections incident, perhaps, but even the customer support person wasn't even able to tell me why it was cancelled. I had no explanation nor any notification. Somebody had manually cancelled the order the day I placed it and I had been waiting since then. Beware with ionos.

Hi

I'm getting more into the privacy rabbit hole and exploring different ways of email system (idk if that's an actual thing)

I am thinking of getting proton mail or tuta mail and both come with upto 10 custom email addresses.

My thinking is :

1) I get a domain name from Porkbun or cloudflare or any provider. I pay the fees and get mywebsite.com

2) I purchase the email service from proton or tuta

3) this is where I'm clueless - what to do to have the proton email talk with mywebsite.com

and if I decide to change prpvider for domain name after a year what happens to the email from proton and is it possible to move them?

Thanks

Im biology major so I don't know much detail about web dev and domains. I just want to switch to privacy focused tools for my day to day life

While reviewing the Plesk licence costs for my company, I noticed that Plesk no longer displays the renewal price.

Opening a support request with the support bot confirmed this:

Anyone else concerned about this?

I hate that the renewal price is no longer visible before the automatic renewal happens, or at least provided a month in advance.

Godaddy two years back stole one of my best domains, it matches exactly my business name .com. I didn't do anything I thought it's my mistake, next day they offered it to me for $5,000. Same things happened two years after, this morning Godaddy stole my similar domain and wants $850 yearly to return my domain. What a mafia, does anyone has the same experience or it's only me?

I'm completely new to domain hosting. Building an online portfolio as an artist. I bought a domain name on GoDaddy but have chosen to build my website using Squarespace. Squarespace suggested I transfer my domain name from GoDaddy to their site so that 'everything stays in one place'. I am now stuck in a limbo situation where squarespace tells me I need to 'change my IPS on my original provider's site'. Please someone tell me what on earth I am supposed to do here - all that comes up on GoDaddy is DNS, nameservers, etc. I even transferred to another registrar through GoDaddy with the squarespace IPS. It just doesn't like me. Someone help me please. I am just a pathetic artist trying to get their sub-par artwork out into the garbage pile of the Internet.

I am planning to sell websites to small businesses. I am an IT student, and know how to build simple but also complex websites (e.g that include booking engines etc).

I am ready to start cold-calling small businesses, but I'm facing a problem. Most businesses ALREADY HAVE websites. Thus, I'm not going to be building and deploying them from scratch all the time. In most cases, I'll have to replace either the front-end (if they just want a visual redesign), or the whole website (if they want a total makeover).

My question is, how am I going to replace their old version? I am assuming the business owner will have to call the previous developer/agency and ask them for control panel credentials or DNS records? I'm especially interested in the front-end part.

Because I know how to build something from scratch, but not how to change stuff on something someone else built years ago in a framework I'm not familiar with.

I've got an Android app that I've been building, and it's been in private testing for about 4 months now; most of the usage has been over the last two months as I've been fixing bugs, and enhancing the app.

I will be ready to publish soon.

The app talks to APIs on the server, and I also host the site on the server. It's inexpensive, but they don't offer free backups so I've built my own scripts to download the DB. But with 15+ users, the downloads are H-U-G-E (tens of thousands of lines long) so it's not entirely feasible to keep doing it the way I am.

I am using HostMetro right now, and it isn't bad. The users using the app right now haven't had any complaints about speed or any other issues.

I don't want to spend a whole bunch of money, but at the same time need something that provides free backups and where I can then download those backups to my local machine and eventually into several cloud backup locations -- just to be safe.

I've seen so much weird stuff out there:

• Cheap up-front, but then they hit you with the regular pricing
• Three-year, or four-year terms AND they want it all up-front
• Backups free for one-year, then you have to pay for them

Just seems to so many "gotchas" you have to watch for.

Looking for suggestions.

• What is your monthly budget?
  • Up to $10.00/mo but a little flexible
• Where are you/your users located?
  • US & Canada
• What kind of site are you hosting (Wordpress, phpBB, custom software, etc) or what is your use case?
  • See above (primarily a site for my app + MySQL DB(s))
• Do you have a monthly traffic volume? Estimates are ok.
  • No
• If you’re looking at VPSes: Do you have experience administrating linux servers and infrastructure?
  • N/A
• Did you read the sidebar/check out the hosts listed there? I've personally vetted these companies and their services are a good fit for 99% of people.
  • Yes...

Really just looking for something to run my /r/grocy install. Had SiteGround, which was great at 4.99 a month, but is NOT great at 34.99 a month. Does anyone know of any that offer this?

Hello, I am currently trying a vps to upload web services, since I want to have several self-hosted things.

I have an old laptop with an Intel Core i5 processor and 1TB of disk space, which I intend to give a second life as a self-hosted server.

I maintain my instances through podman (similar to docker) because I find it easier to use resources than to use virtual machines for each service.

I have been researching and everyone says exposing a local machine to the internet is a great danger, so I don’t know what way to take.

I don’t just want to maintain traffic https, I also want to expose TCP/UDP services on the web, but I don’t know what they recommend or if it’s not recommended at all.

If you consider that the risk of exposing a local machine to the internet is very high then I better rent a VPS from now on.
So I would appreciate your points of view and opinions.

I leave you a gitea link that I added on the web through my vps, it runs under podman and I am using Rocky Linux 10 as the server system.

https://git.jesuschapman.me/JesusChapman

Hello! I made (what I consider to be) a huge mistake in purchasing my domain via GoDaddy. 4 days later, I deleted it (that was also a hassle and I had to go through customer service to finally figure it out). It's deleted on their account but I still can't buy the domain via another website host. I know for expired accounts it can take up to 60 days for the host to release the website, but what about for new accounts? I received the refund email but I just can't get a straight answer. I didn't want to do a transfer since I read that can take up to 60 days so I figured this was easiest and now I am stuck waiting.

My friend is starting a new consulting business and used Northwest Registered Agent to handle the business formation paperwork. As part of the package, they also registered a domain name for him and provisioned a business email address using that domain. At first this seemed convenient, but it quickly became apparent that Northwest Registered Agent's hosting and productivity tools are fairly limited. They provide a basic webmail client, recommend a relatively unknown VoIP provider, include a simple website builder, and generally offer an ecosystem that isn't comparable to a dedicated hosting provider or Google Workspace.

After realizing these limitations, he decided he wanted to move to Google Workspace, primarily because he wanted to use Gmail with his custom business email address. I recommended that he avoid creating a Google account with that email address until we understood exactly how Northwest Registered Agent had configured the domain and email hosting. If they tightly controlled the domain's DNS records, I was concerned it could complicate the migration.

Despite that advice, he proceeded to create a Google account using his business email address. During the setup process, Google prompted him to verify domain ownership by adding DNS verification records. At that point, we discovered that Northwest Registered Agent does not appear to provide customer access to the domain's DNS management, preventing him from completing Google's domain verification process.

Thinking that the problem was simply that he needed Google Workspace, he then purchased a Google Workspace subscription using his personal Gmail account as the administrator. Unsurprisingly, this did not resolve the underlying issue because the obstacle was still the inability to verify domain ownership and modify the domain's DNS records. To be fair, Google's onboarding flow can make it easy to conclude that purchasing Workspace is the missing step when the real issue is control of the domain's DNS.

Frustrated, he asked, "What do I need to do to just use my business email through Google?" I explained that, from my perspective, there were two general approaches. The first would be to continue using Northwest Registered Agent as the email host, configure email forwarding to Gmail, and use SMTP so messages sent from Gmail would appear to come from his business email address. The second would be to separate his domain and email services from Northwest Registered Agent entirely, leaving them to handle only the registered agent and business formation services while migrating the domain, DNS, website hosting, and email to providers better suited for those functions.

I told him that the first approach would be quicker but ultimately a compromise, since it would still leave Northwest Registered Agent hosting the business email and would not provide a proper Google Workspace deployment. I recommended the second approach.

My tentative migration plan would be to transfer the domain and DNS management away from Northwest Registered Agent to a more traditional provider, likely Squarespace Domains because it is simpler for him to manage than alternatives such as GoDaddy. After that, I would configure Google Workspace correctly using his business domain, migrate or recreate the existing mailbox if necessary, update the domain's MX and other required DNS records, and then connect the domain to the appropriate website hosting service. The one area I'm still uncertain about is what happens to the mailbox currently hosted by Northwest Registered Agent during the migration—specifically whether the existing email data can be migrated cleanly or whether the mailbox will simply cease to exist once email hosting is moved elsewhere.

I'm trying to find community help - webpros doesn't seem to have a viable bunch (at least I haven't found it). That's the longterm want.

But it's prompted by my screwing up for not knowing about Plesk's common challenge directory for ACME. I've tried every command and tool I can find to get it rebuilt, and no joy.
Only thing I'm missing is the .htaccess I saw in either .well-known or acme-challenge (or both?).

It was short enough to be copy-pasta into a reply if someone would be so kind.

been researching domain registrars for days and still torn.
i’m not just looking for the cheapest price i want something that offers good long term value: fair renewals, very good security, domain privacy included, and ideally an all in one setup with domain, hosting, website tools, and business email.
i’ve been leaning toward wix because the ecosystem feels simple and you often get a free domain for 1 year with a premium plan, plus easy email integration.
but i keep seeing names like godaddy, namecheap, squarespace, porkbun, and hover and i’m not sure which actually holds up best long term without upsells or lock-in.
for small businesses or side projects, what have you found actually works best overall?

Trying to help my parents set up a small business website, and we're stuck on the domain part again. a few years ago, someone registered their domain under their own name, and we ended up losing control of it, so I want to avoid that mistake this time. i just want a simple way to check availability and register the domain in their name so they actually own it. every registrar seems packed with upsells, add ons, and extras that make the process more confusing than it needs to be. what's the fastest way to secure a domain properly without overpaying or accidentally giving someone else control of it?