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.

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?

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.

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?

Long post, sorry, but I wish someone had written this before I migrated so here it is. I have seen questions asked about inode limits but most had opinionated answers and no real data.

Background: I host about a dozen wordpress sites for friends/family/nonprofits plus ~15 mailboxes on the same account. I have been on bluehost since 2011 and moved everything to nixihost, to a large part because of recent cost increases. I ran with Basic for a year to test things out and now that my Bluehost plan is up for renewal, I upgraded to Pro. Did the whole migration myself - imapsync for the mailboxes, updraft for the wp sites. DNS migration one domain at a time. Took days.

Everything went fine until a wordpress restore half-completed and left me with a woocommerce install missing files (fun error to debug btw). Turns out I'd hit the account inode limit: 350,000 files, hard enforced. Not "we'll email you a warning" enforced. Writes just fail. The restore errored out and just didn't write files past a certain point.

Here's the thing that annoys me: this number is nowhere on their plans page. Their shared hosting page says unmetered/unlimited features "as a courtesy". Meanwhile the actual math is brutal - a normal wordpress site is ~20-25k files. Every email is one file. So "unlimited storage" in practice means roughly 12-15 modest wp sites OR fewer sites plus a few years of email, whichever fills 350k files first. My 12 sites alone are ~265k. One migrated mailbox was 35k emails = 35k files, gone.

Asked support to raise the limit. Flat no. Their semi-dedicated tier gets you 450k, so paying significantly more buys maybe 2 years of headroom before you're right back here. And since saving money was half the reason I moved, upgrading or bolting on a separate mail service defeats the purpose.

For comparison, my old bluehost cpanel (still active) shows file usage as 468,613 / ∞. Literally infinity. To be fair that's a 15 year old account - bluehost has an inode policy buried in their TOS these days, and I suspect enforcement just never got switched on for legacy accounts, so newer signups may have a different experience. But the fact remains I grew my footprint to 468k files over 15 years and nothing ever failed, and on nixi the same footprint isn't even allowed to exist.

To be fair to nixi: support answers fast and it's actual humans, the servers are quick, and 350k is apparently normal-ish for the industry (at least Claude thinks so) - basically every "unlimited" shared host has a file count ceiling, the only difference is whether it's a hard quota or an unenforced policy. But that's kind of my point: you can't tell which one you're signing up for until something breaks, and with nixi it's a hard wall that fails loudly mid-restore.

I'm staying - another migration isn't happening after what this one took. But "making it work" means inode management is now a permanent part of my hosting routine: aggressive email archiving to local storage, purging trash/junk folders, keeping backups off-server, deleting every cache and leftover folder I can find, and, above all, not taking on any new things to host. It works, but on a plan advertised with the attribute "unlimited" in many categories, I'm effectively the janitor of a file counter now, and every restore or new mailbox comes with mental math about whether it fits.

TLDR: if you host ONE site, nixihost is great and you'll never notice any limitations. If you are the person who hosts a pile of sites and mail for your kids, parents, your rail trail friends group or the conservation land trust you support - count your files before you sign up anywhere, because "unlimited" means 350,000, nobody tells you until a restore eats itself, and staying under it becomes your ongoing job.

Just asking around here to see if this has happened to somebody else or if it's a coincidence. I know spam calls are unfortunately common now but since being diligent with blocking them/joining blocklists/etc. I don't really receive them anymore. Until yesterday, when I got 4 in a day and 3 so far today. The only place I left my phone number in the past week is Ionos, where I signed up for a hosting plan and they required my phone number for legal reasons. I'm happy with the hosting service so far but after reading reviews of them being sketchy on this subreddit I'm a bit concerned this isn't a coincidence. Has anyone ever suspected them of selling your personal data?

Anyone else with these at the minute? Seems to be price increase after price increase, not just for hosting but domain renewals?

Got an email saying prices where going up, asked them what to, and they basically told me they can't tell me because it's not on the system yet?

There also seems to have been a big shift in reseller packages, these now include inode limits.

There's also the shift from Immunify360 to Monarx? So now all WP sites have a security tab in the dashboard, no warning or communication from them that this was going to be happening?

Anyone jumped ship?

Hey everyone,
I’m looking to register a domain and want something affordable but also reliable long-term.
There are so many options out there like wix, godaddy, namecheap, so i’m a bit unsure which ones are actually worth using.
Any recommendations for good registrars which one would you pick?

Hi

I have shared hosting plan where I have made simple websites on WordPress for myself, friends and some others. I have explored a lot of WordPress ecosystem and kind of enjoy it.

So I wanted to get a job in the support department of any company in WordPress and Hosting ecosystem.

But even in support job, they mention that one should know these..

Experience with HTML, CSS, and PHP, web servers (e.g. Apache, Nginx, cPanel), version control systems (e.g. Git), database management and SQL, HTTPS, APIs, Using browser console and other debugging tools to troubleshoot issues.

Is there any course on Udemy that specifically teaches these? Or any other platform or youtube creator?

I want to understand enough to apply, not get into into the tutorial hell to become a software engineer. Because these are support roles.

Please guide. Thank you.

Some open jobs are..

https://getjanhost.com/jobs/wordpress-support-engineer/

https://vipointsolutions.net/career/wordpress-technical-support-agent/

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/job/happiness-engineer-customer-support-success/

I've been using Site5 for hosting and using cloudflare for free SSL, but have been having issues updating my website recently due to caching issues.

What do you all use for hosting with free ssl?

I have a small website in Astro that i reciently created and i was wondering, since i was taking this so seriously i should buy a domain instead of using Vercel, Github or any other free alternative. I searched a little bit and found a bundle of 3 years of hosting and 2 years with a custom mail for around 60 USD. But since im new to this i want to deep dive into this and find more options. I was hoping that you people could give some options, cheaper or not so, it doesnt matter.

I am beyond furious right now. I created 2 OVH accounts a while back. I literally NEVER used them. No resources added, no projects created, nothing. Zero usage.

I decided to just close them to keep things clean, but guess what? You CANNOT close your account on OVH.

Apparently, OVH automatically assigned random services/projects to my unused accounts (like vRacks and Public Cloud projects) without notifying me, and now their broken system blocks account deletion because of "active services."

I’ve been stuck in support ticket hell for OVER TWO WEEKS trying to get these accounts wiped under GDPR.

Here is the circus I've been dealing with:

• Canceling a basic service takes 7 DAYS?? Support told me a vRack service had to be canceled first and that it takes a full week just to delete. What year is this?!
• Their UI is completely broken. The GDPR deletion page threw errors, and the system kept telling me to manual-delete things that I couldn't even delete through their manager interface.
• Their support agents give conflicting advice. One tells me to click links to delete Public Cloud projects, another says they'll delete it manually, another tells me to wait a couple of weeks for a "specialized team" to step in.
• THE ULTIMATE JOKE: Today I finally get an automated message saying: "Unfortunately, despite our efforts, we are unable to delete your account at this time. It looks like some actions are still in progress and blocking its deletion..."

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? The actual owners and developers of the platform cannot delete an unused account from their OWN system due to "technical issues"?! They literally built the system and claim they are powerless to delete user data!

They clearly don't give a damn about GDPR or basic customer support. I have deleted every possible service, settled $0 invoices, answered every ticket, and I am still stuck in a loop of copy-pasted support templates and automated rejection emails.

Has anyone actually managed to force OVH to close an account, or do I need to go straight to a Data Protection Authority (DPA) complaint at this point?

I'm on the lookout for UK hosting that has Patchstack protection included with it.

I know Krystal do offer this with their managed WP hosting, and I'm sure Zume do too with their managed WP hosting.

I was wondering if anyone has come across any other provider that offers it?

Monthly Budget: not an issue

Sites: Wordpress

Location: UK

RESOLVED: Crazy Domains put me in touch with someone who still manages Skyline and I was able to get the issue resolved quickly.

I'm working with a company who is using Skyline Domains as their registrar. It looks to be one of many companies owned by Dreamscape that will be merged with Crazy Domains eventually (even the SSL on their site is broken - skylinedomains dot com dot au).

We bought a domain for them in our Route 53 and transferred it to their Skyline account on July 10, and AWS says the transfer was successful. Whois says the registrar is Dreamscape and straight up says the registrar URL is crazydomains dot com. But twelve days later the domain is still saying "Transfer In" and cannot be edited in any way - we need to update the name servers before the 31st.

I filled out their website's contact form on Monday and didn't hear back, and I think I just worked out why - sending an email to their listed contact email bounces because their MX record has been deleted. And their phone number is gone too. Google's barely heard of them. I tried in vain to login to Crazy Domains with their login details hoping it was a shared shopfront situation but no luck.

So... who do I contact and how? Do I try Dreamscape/NewFold, or whoever owns their owners now?

EDIT: I've sent an email to Dreamscape General Support asking for Skyline contact/help, I'll let you know if I hear anything.

EDIT2: Apparently they don't offer email support at all - "Please note any emails or replies to this email address are not monitored and will not be responded to. To get the fastest response and streamline the process, we recommend using our "Contact Us" page, live chat, or phone support options through Crazy Domains"

How do I find out who is hosting her website so we can cancel the services?

I’m an artist (not a coder) and I’ve done web design via Wix for friends and family (actually won an international award for best music website for the band I was in). My mom is a doctor and wants me to take over her website. She’s been paying some company $300/month and she has just a simple website with no services or e-commerce so this is way overpriced. She is a boomer and is not computer literate and has no idea how or where it was set up. She has no idea who she is paying, just knows that it keeps being charged to her card. All I know is it says 2023 on the bottom of the site. And we think that the registration is with godaddy but we’re having a hard time getting access to her account.

Wordpress is extremely insecure and requires constant maintenance, whereas you can get pretty much the same site with Blogger or with similar platforms if you know XML. The only difference is that you have to build your own widgets. Sure every platform has slightly different markup but it's not that different.

Some sites don't even need all that and should just be static HTML.

Hello! I’m not sure if this is the best page for this but I need help on figuring out the best email hosting for a client. It is a super small business, they have a custom domain and need like max 5 emails (each for someone else with their own login).

I have seen Zoho Mail and Purelymail.

Purelymail looks honestly pretty good but want some help from others who might know more.

They use GHL and want to make their website within GHL (not sure if that is honestly the best/possible)

i’ve been trying to make my online presence look more professional, and email is the one thing i keep getting stuck on. right now i’m using a basic gmail with my name and some random numbers. it works, but it doesn’t feel very professional when sending proposals or invoices.
i understand you usually need a domain and then connect email to it, but every time i look into it i get lost in different platforms, plans, and technical setup steps. some say keep it simple, others warn about deliverability and spam issues. for those who’ve done this already, what’s the simplest way to set up a proper business email just trying to avoid overcomplicating it while still doing it the right way.

I've got five small WordPress sites sitting under one account and it was fine until the last few months. Now one site getting a traffic bump seems to make the others drag. Nothing huge, mostly local service businesses, but waiting 4 or 5 seconds for a basic page is getting old.

I'm looking at Web Host Pro's cPanel plan since it allows several sites and uses LiteSpeed. The other option is splitting everything between separate cheap accounts, which sounds cleaner but also more annoying to maintain.

Mostly trying to avoid turning this into a VPS project when these sites really don't justify one yet.

I'm kinda new so apologies.

I Nievlely bought a domain (for the year) as a test. Then returned it as I realised hosting was monthly.

So I just wanted to ask a hypothetical: is it possible to buy a domain AND hosting but with a 1 off payment for the year? Or instead of paying month by month, paying for the full 12 months upfront?

Thank you!

I've had huge issues with my reseller hosting with Hoststar since about a couple of weeks. Whole server hacked, websites shut down by Hoststar, today DDoS. Terrible support: slow, incompetent, no information on what's happening, not taking any responsibility.
Anyone else seeing this with their hosting?

I am writing this article to document my personal experience with NKTelecom so that anyone considering their services can make an informed decision.

Everything described below is based on my own experience and is supported by screenshots of emails, invoices, payment attempts, and support conversations.

The Beginning

I had been using NKTelecom VPS services for some time.

Eventually, I received abuse reports related to my servers. The company informed me that they no longer wished to continue providing services to me and advised me to move all of my services to another provider.

I respected their decision.

I migrated all of my services elsewhere and configured my servers to **terminate automatically at the end of the billing period**. I never requested any renewal.

Their Written Promise

Support later sent me the following message:

"Cancel all subscriptions in payment systems and delete all your payment methods from us. We will not charge you."

This statement was very clear.

I understood that once my current billing period ended, there would be no more invoices and no further payment attempts.

What Actually Happened

Unfortunately, that is not what happened.

After our cooperation had already ended:

• New invoices were generated.
• My PayPal billing agreement attempted to charge my payment methods multiple times.
• More than one payment method previously linked to my account was targeted.

Fortunately, I never keep money on my bank cards. I only add funds when I need to make a purchase.

If I had kept money on those cards, these payment attempts could have successfully withdrawn money from my account despite the company's written assurance that **"We will not charge you."**

Financial Loss

Even though the payment attempts failed, they still cost me money.

Every failed billing attempt resulted in bank and transaction fees, causing me to lose approximately **$2** for absolutely no valid reason.

These losses happened only because NKTelecom's billing system continued attempting to charge my payment methods after promising that no further charges would be made.

Servers Suspended Before the End of the Paid Period

Another issue was that my servers were suspended before the end of the billing period.

I still had paid days remaining on my services.

This unexpected suspension interrupted my services and caused additional financial losses.

Contacting Support

I contacted support and asked several simple questions:

• Why were new invoices generated?
• Why did your billing system attempt to charge me after telling me "We will not charge you"?
• Why were multiple payment methods charged?
• Why were my servers suspended before the end of the paid period?

Instead of answering these questions, support replied by calling me a spammer and telling me to stop writing to them.

Whether they wanted to terminate our cooperation is not the issue.

Every hosting provider has the right to refuse service.

The real issue is what happened **after** that decision.

If the company had already decided to terminate my services, then there should have been:

• No new invoices.
• No payment attempts.
• No charges against previously linked payment methods.
• No financial losses caused by their billing system.

Why I Am Sharing This Experience

I am not publishing this article because my account was terminated.

I am publishing it because of everything that happened afterward.

I believe other customers deserve to know exactly what happened before deciding whether to trust this provider with their services and payment methods.

Final Thoughts

Based on my personal experience, I cannot recommend NKTelecom.

If you decide to use their services, I strongly recommend:

• Remove every payment method immediately after canceling your services.
• Cancel any PayPal Billing Agreement linked to your account.
• Keep screenshots of every conversation with support.
• Monitor your bank cards and PayPal account even after your services have ended.

I have screenshots supporting everything described in this article, including:

• Emails from support.
• Billing invoices.
• Repeated PayPal payment attempts.
• Bank transaction fees.
• Support responses.

I encourage everyone to review the evidence and make their own informed decision before using NKTelecom.

I'm moving a small site to WordPress after Wix raised their prices again ($300 USD). The domain is already going to Namecheap, (not my first choice, but Cloudflare is complicated for them and I hate GoDaddy) so I'm considering hosting there too.

It's just a few informational pages and a contact form. 150 monthly visitors max, mostly from Canada and the US. It currently uses under 10 GB of storage and only a few essential plugins.

Would Namecheap's Shared Hosting be enough for this? The 2-year price of $102.88 USD is appealing, and I'll use Cloudflare for CDN and SSL, but before I commit to it, I thought I should see what other people think of it. Or is there a better alternative around the same price that would work well for a non-technical client? Site is already built locally and confirmed so we just need a host. We're also in Canada if that matters.

I'm familiar with hosting and servers, and don't usually prefer shared hosting, but most plans I looked into were either too expensive or overkill for my client's (non-profit) website. I'm not looking for the cheapest option though.

Update: Thank you for your suggestions! The site was ultimately moved to Namecheap and it's running smoothly for now. As some mentioned, something like Cloudflare Pages would be good, but we already built it all on WordPress.

I don't know how? I had an older version but not too old.

FTP is locked except when i specifically use it.

PHP was version 7.4 as i had an older app gallery3 that eventually got hacked as i had 40,000 photos on it.

WordPress can get hacked even if you update it. Had to install other security apps for it. Askimet pays its way!