The Story Behind the Move

For over 10 years I have used hosting with Surpass Hosting which is a sister company of Host Dime and they used to always be helpful and would do just about anything I requested until recently.

At some point last year I bought a Dedicated IP address for my 3 major sites (kustomchoice.com, g3k.xyz, snapgeek.com) and also a Multi-Domain SSL cert to go along with them. Yes, I know there is almost no real reason to have SSL on at least two of those domains but I wanted it anyways so my customers/visitors felt more confident in visiting/using my websites plus it makes me look more professional.

Well Fast forward to 2017 now & today I come to find out that Surpass Hosting will no longer allow me to renew my Multi-Domain SSL Cert (yes the one i purchased LAST YEAR) because they no longer offer them. Instead Surpass Hosting expects me to buy 3 single domain SSL certs at $30 a pop which would equal $90.

Now due to the nature of SSL Certs and dedicated IP addresses I’m assuming that would mean I likely would have to buy 2 more dedicated IP addresses as well. Surpass charges $36 per dedicated IP address per year so for 3 it would cost me $108 for 3 dedicated IP Addresses.

So that means my total hosting costs would total up to be:

• $150/yr Reseller Hosting (Legacy Plan, their new plans are even more!)
• $90/yr – 3 SSL Certs
• $108 – 3 Dedicated IP
• $348 Total a year for hosting through Surpass Hosting.

No thanks Captain Ripoff.. My hosting business has been in decline now for several years so it’s easier for me to just close it than to keep taking a loss.

This leaves me with two domains out of 10+ ones that I actually care about that will move to my new host.

My new host will cost me a total of:

• $38.88/yr – Hosting
• $29.88/ur – Multi-Domain SSL
• $0 – Dedicated IP
• $68.76 Total for a year of hosting for 3 domains (if I move a 3rd one there).

I should of done this years ago when my hosting business started costing me money to run instead of making me money but I was too stubborn to give up the dream of owning a successful hosting business.

These days though my real focus is on my photography at Snap Geek Photography so it makes sense now to make this move.

The hosting plan at NameCheap that I picked was a plan named “Value” & only costs only $9.88 a year for the first year and $38.88/year afterwards for the following features:

• 20GB SSD
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Up to 3 websites
• Unlimited Parked domains
• 50 subdomains
• Daily backups
• Cloudflare ready
• Cpanel
• 100% Uptime (or so they claim)
• and bunch of other features.

However, after being over at NameCheap for just over a month my website was down over 4 times within a month period and the uptime was looming more around 97% vs the 100% they claim. Each time they were down I complained and the support reps were pretty good to help me out though they delayed longer than I liked asking me stupid questions vs digging right into the problem. They delayed so much in fact that by the time they started digging into the problem it simply started working again and they never did have a good explanation on why it wasn’t working to begin with.

Now don’t get me wrong on this, NameCheap is a great company with some great people. I actually still use NameCheap for my domain registrar & have used them for SSL Certs (which I plan to do again soon) but I doubt I’d recommend them for hosting services just yet.

As of 3/16/16 I have moved my hosting for G3K.XYZ back to my server where I know I have uptime currently at 99.7% vs the 97% that I was getting with NameCheap. I guess the lesson here is that I should just keep forking out the extra money (for now) to keep my server going vs moving to a cheaper shared hosting plan with NameCheap.