Discovery
Came across a paid post while browsing Google News which promoted a hosting service I have never used or heard of before.
It was enticing as it offered a lifetime deal/package.
$39 for a lifetime of unlimited hosting for a single website? Sign me up.
Setup
The first thing that was curious was the fact that the setup process involves you filling in a google form (after you’ve paid).
I received a code in the email and needed to paste that code in while filling in a google form, as well as copying my email and name from the original purchase, fill that in and your account gets activated “soon”.
Happened within a few hours for me, so no real complaints from me.
Control Panel
After gaining access to the hosting, I set up my domain which I pointed to the hosting using DNS A records, transferred the actual code in easily using shell. The ping to the USA from Latvia isn’t super pretty while working in shell, but otherwise it’s all smooth and simple.
I am not sure if the backend is CPanel, but might be that, with a skin, functionality wise it’s really similar, not really sure.
Some curiosities I found was that while the (apache) server defaults to php 8.2, CLI php is at 7.1.33 (discontinued for a couple years now).
WP experience
Overall, it’s fine it all just works and for the money, definitely is fast enough.
I keep getting errors like this from time to time while browsing the backend:
Never even once had this issue with the multitude of other hosting suppliers I’ve used.
To be fair, I have yet to experience this issue on the front end, but this blog is super simple, I’m quite eager to try and upload something more complex and see what actually trips it.
Support?
Only have had a couple minor questions and both were answered within an hour or two, so super reasonable.
Your experience may vary though as I feel it’s just a single person, fronting as a support team, it’ll depend on the workload and time of day.
What did I actually buy?
After doing a little digging (wasn’t hard) – backend exposes domains like stackcp.com which can be googled and lead you quickly to 20i.com…
I think the package I purchased (tier 2 lifetime) is someone reselling 20i.com
Obviously these obscenely generous offers don’t actually allow anything unlimited, start really using them and pushing limits, you’ll be slowed down or shut down real quick.
I think how long the “lifetime” service will actually be up for depends on whether this reseller keeps paying their bills.
My one-time purchase buys roughly a month of their reseller cost for what I’m using, so if people keep buying, hopefully we stay up.
Would I recommend it?
Depends on what you intend to use it for.
My blog is not business or mission critical, I’d be sad if I lost it, but nothing bad would really happen. Hostverge is perfect for me for this use case.
That said, the backend errors are rather annoying, I hope they resolve themselves somehow soon.
I wonder if it’s an issue with the host or the hosts connection to cloudflare? Should try investigating.
For large applications or client-facing stores, definitely not.
However I’ve been in the industry for a long time and no one I’ve worked with would ever consider a hosting provider like this for anything serious/business critical.
Good, high traffic hosting costs money.
TODO for myself
Knowing that the long term stability of this hosting probably relies on one person paying their bills, it would be a good idea to have an automated backup system.
Since we have shell access and we have cron jobs, why not write a script that backs up and minifies the database and maybe some sort of a version control like git which save the db and file changes and then pushes it off to github? The 100mb file size limit and 10gb repo limit sounds good enough to me.
Let’s make that my next blog post.
