Virgin bins Webspace, tells customers they can cry to GoDaddy Virgin Media is to put its legacy hosting biz Webspace out to pasture, after taking over the service via its acquisition of NTL back in 2006. "As more of our customers are choosing to use alternative apps and services, we've decided to stop offering Webspace from 28th April," Virgin informed customers in a letter seen by The …
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They did, but brought it back in house late last year, (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/21/google_ends_isp_email_support/) but frankly its still not working that well.
I only now use it as a disposable address to send signups to and moved to my domain providers package that works far better.
You still cannot use a standard POP3 mail client to delete mails on the web servers so they are just building up in my and my wifes mail accounts and VM can store them forever as far as I'm concerned...
And I bet despite another service going (Usenet seems to be either dying or closed) my bill won't come down at all.
"There really is no reaosn for an ISP to offer hosting, or even email come to think of it these days."
There's no reason for anyone to do so unless they're making a business out of it. But as ISPs are businesses there's no reason why they shouldn't choose to do so.
OTOH if you choose to go with an ISP as host for web or email services it ties your hands if they piss you off and you want to go elsewhere.
Oli1 Why would you try something more complicated.......?
Because it's a hobby site, which isn't there to earn money, and doesn't justify sixty quid a year to tinker with.
Ditto the underlying question, why would we use an ISP site at all. Because we're running a little site for the fun of it and can't justify paying retail.
BUT, also, the web space that VM were offering is part of the "added value" of the contract. So, quite simply is a reduction in value they give. Even if the user doesn't take it up, it's available. Or was....
I felt much the same when my ISP dropped usenet. Sure I didn't use it that much, and I was eventually able to find a free text-only provider which mostly covers the little bit I did use, but they were still taking something away, and they obviously didn't lower my monthly bill to compensate.
"I felt much the same when my ISP dropped usenet."
After a few takeovers my old ISP ended up in the hands of TalkTalk who didn't exactly drop Usenet, they just made it virtually unusable for a the times when I preferred to use it. Coupled with the inability to get a complaint through the chocolate fire-guard customer disservice department which had come in with a previous takeover I bit the bullet and moved, even though it involved changing email address. The solution there was to register my own domain which made it easier to jump ship when my next ISP was sold.
If an ISP offers these extras then they should maintain them or cut their rates if they drop them. However, it's something of a lock-in. It's amazing that ISPs haven't grasped that as dropping the service must promote customer churn.
"Virgin Media is to put its legacy hosting biz Webspace out to pasture, after taking over the service via its acquisition of NTL back in 2006."
I received that letter, but I'm confused by the NTL reference. Here, it was United Artists -> Telewest -> Blueyonder -> Virgin Media, and webspace (with no capital) was provided as part of the package all those years ago.
Was a capitalised webspace something special that NTL offered, with the webspace provision of the alternative route to Virgin Media eventually being mopped up into it?
(Not that it matters: Never used it. Just curious.)
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Or at least, find another alternative before you need to pay them. I still get yearly "Your account has been suspended because the credit card number we have on file has expired" notices from them, which I would take a lot more seriously if I had actually had an account with them after 2009 or so.
Maybe GoDaddy isn't very good (don't know, not used it) but in the context of users of VM's free webspace it may be an improvement. However surely people only used VM free for unimportant stuff, I had some family photos on there for a while (passworded) but commercial hosting got much better and cheaper. I'm using a decent alternative for £20 a year. So far that's proved fast, reliable and provides responsive competent tech support.
It's not hard to find small amounts of completely free webspace if £20 is too much. I'll not "advertise" here but I know of a fairly reliable host offering free 50MB disk (Same as NTL did), 100MB monthly traffic, email, MySQL - that's free as in future years too - or start paying but in exchange for more disk, bandwidth etc (and cheaper than GoDaddy).
Only the most naive will switch from free to £60 a year without checking alternatives
Doubtless VM will be getting a kick-back from GoDaddy
I use VM because I'm in a cabled area so their bundles are competitive: 200MB broadband (that's not "up to..." but actually delivered), better TV service than I got using an aerial (better quality, more channels, record programs while watching another etc), landline and mobile. Email and webspace were never very good and from their perspective just costs and support hassle with no benefit to VM.
Are there any recommendations for suitably priced alternative services for running a low traffic hobby web-site of 3 pages of straight HTML? I have spotted https://www.eukhost.com/ who offer a free web site of one page, although at first glance it looks as though you have to use their nice website builder. I already have my HTML. I just want to put it somewhere. Any suggestions ;-)
I use Clara Net. I was with them back in the days of dial up but moved ISP when I wanted ADSL. They had loads of decent plans for dial up but never really kept up with the move to ADSL.
I stuck with them for my email/domain though. The email tools are pretty flexible - great for setting up throw away email aliases for each company. I've not made much use of the webspace but it seems to work well. Works out at £35/year with domain and that's not increased in many years now.
http://www.claranetsoho.co.uk/clarahost
No connection to them other than being a customer.
I'm with vidahost and they're pretty good...support has been excellent so far (email, not live chat). They know what they are talking about, which is nice (and not universal amongst webhosts). (Disclosure - I'm a customer and I'm not making anything for saying nice things about them).
You can get a better price with some US hosts which is fine for the site; but may cause issues if you want to run email through there (Safe Harbour and all that)
Or there's this, for free: http://x10hosting.com ,,,there wasn't a catch last time I used it; but that was a couple of years ago now.
Definitely wouldn't go with GoDaddy...all the control stuff is custom, with ads everywhere and it takes longer to do anything because there's all this crap in the way trying to get you to sign up for things you don't need.
Thanks to those who have made suggestions. I have had a look at the free x10hosting.com offering and have tried setting it up. It took a couple of attempts to supply an e-mail address which they liked, but it then just worked. I was able to ftp over my html and css files into /public_html and my web site is now working. Obviously it is too early to comment on reliability, but it seems quite zippy. It runs as a sub-domain of x10host.com.
Thanks again.
I'd recommend that you get hold of a cheap domain (namecheap are having an 88c special on some of the new ones; but you're better off with a .com or .co.uk, if you can find one you like). That saves you having to change everyone's bookmarks if you have to move the site again.
You keep the domain at the registrar, and just point it at wherever it happens to be...this makes moving the site easy if you decide to change. Namecheap are good, with good support, but there are lots of other registrars around, of varying sketchiness.
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