tsoHost pulls plug on Gridhost service with just 45 days' notice UK hosting outfit tsoHost has shut down its Gridhost platform amid stinging criticism from customers about the 45-day notice period and general way it was handled. The complaints are that not enough time was given for many to complete a successful migration to another host, reports of technical issues during the notice period …
Ok, hands up how many here access the CPanel on their website host once a month (or more frequently)
I think that I use them once a year at most. Once the site is up and running, I rarely need to go to CPanel.
Either way, this whole move stinks to high heaven. I hope that many thousands of lawsuits are heading towards GoDaddy right now.
GoDaddy has been involved in many controversies since its foundation in 1997. [Wikipedia]
tsoHost? So is Hungarian notation still a thing?
(Ok, I get it: not strictly Hungarian notation as in the szBufferOverflow variety, but more a forced nairagnuHungarian notationed play with letters. Maybe I'll write me a program to play around with a few words and see if I can find a clever one).
((Can you believe the coding standards forced upon me at present requires me to prefix "p" to function parameters,etc! pArg!))
Hungarian notation as in the szBufferOverflow variety,
That was not the original intent of HO. That was a largely pointless perversion of it. Even back when it was popular a lot of IDEs could tell you the type of something just by hovering the mouse over it. The original intent of HO was to indicate the intent. So instead of 'szFilePath' people should have chosen 'fpDocument' meaning 'file path to a document'.
According to Wikipedia the two conventions are now referred to as 'Systems Hungarian' or 'Apps Hungarian'.
Anyone still using 'SHO' when cutting new code today with a modern IDE needs their bumps feeling (unless they are forced to by archaic coding standards or legacy code bases). 'AHO' might still have a place but given the autocomplete feature that all decent modern IDEs have I'd prefer people to call the variable 'filePathToADocument'. There's no excuse for brevity when choosing identifiers today.
Well actually there is one excuse. I sometimes use an abbreviation for a small but complex loop or LINQ expressions as that can help make the code more compact and easier to take in at a glance.
return fieldInfos
.Where(fi => fi.IsLiteral && !fi.IsInitOnly)
.Select(fi => fi.GetRawConstantValue().ToString());
Or they want to know a variables type by looking at it WITHOUT hovering the mouse over it? The idea is that the code is parsable by a human without a computer.
IKR, when would you ever need to do that?????
I wouldn't trust the human anyway. They might parse the text wrongly. Or someone might have changed the type but neglected to update the name.
int szWibble; // Will compile just fine.
I think it's far better to rely on the IDE (in conjunction with the compiler) to sort all this stuff out because it won't make a mistake (at least not with a type safe language and frankly God help those using one that isn't). A lot of modern languages let you declare a variable without knowing the type eg; C#
var myVariable=GoGetSomeValueOrOther(); // The compiler will figure out the type.
About the only time I care about the type is when defining DTOs and they tend to be a one off deal soon forgotten. The rest of the time the IDE deals with it - especially if supplemented by ReSharper. It takes two keypresses to create a field from a ctor parameter and I neither know nor care what type R# uses. I know it will be 'the right one'.
And with well written code it should be fairly obvious anyway. Why do you need to use the identifier name to tell you that a a function takes an ASCIIZ string? Even back when I was working with C++ (over twenty years ago) the IDE would highlight any attempt to pass an int as an argument to a 'char *' parameter. Either an argument is compatible with a parameter or it isn't and a modern IDE will tell you if it's iffy.
For decades now I've been able to work on the principal that if the IDE doesn't underline an assignment of some kind then it's safe and all my IDEs have been able to autocomplete based on the currently available choices (though VC wasn't as helpful there as Borland Builder since the latter did a full context analysis).
I don't give a damn if you call something szWibble because I don't trust you. Sorry ;)
I must get around to using one of these "IDE"s one day, they sound awfully clever.
> the IDE would highlight any attempt to pass an int as an argument to a 'char *' parameter
Gosh, just like my compiler, eh? Well I never.
Sorry, bit snarky, but having had arguments because someone's IDE would require fewer keystrokes for him, if only we'd rename every member variable in all of our sources (no-one else seemed to have this trouble). Someone else demanding we redo the build system because he didn't know how to make his IDE invoke our existing makefiles, And so on over the years, I get a bit twitchy when someone praises IDEs a bit *too* much. Not that I want to see Hungarian notation, no sirree.
Guess I just like using separate editors, debuggers, profilers, compilers, build tools and so forth, mixing and matching to fit the job, rather than one super-duper do-it-all IDE. Or, worse, more than one IDE 'cos they target different parts of the system!
But down with Hungarian notation, anway: long, pronounceable, names for the win.
TBH, I very much dislike raw makefiles as they're often an unmaintainable mess. Not sure why (and I don't think it has to be that way), but it just seems to happen to almost every non-trivial cross-platform project.
I'm starting to like cmake, and over the last couple of years almost all the major IDEs have gained native support for it. So there's that.
I have been with them since they were Vidahost and they were a great company before Host Europe took them over. I am one of the people affected with 5 legacy client websites down for 5 days and currently struggling to get the source code and database dumps. Plus they took a full year's cloud hosting payment only a couple of months ago! This definitely has the potential for a class action lawsuit!
I'm a zero-delete kind of emailer, but of course, the one (or two) emails you wanted to check back on, I did delete. Pretty sure I did get a migrate email from TSO and that the promised seamless migration did happen. The one remaining site I still have with them (I can't get the charity to agree to move to a proper - but paid - hoster, so stuck on their free charity package + not-free domain name), is now on their cPanel servers (though with a klutzy front end without direct access to the cPanel main menu) whereas before was an entire klutzy not-cPanel. I did keep the DNS migration emails, which effort was a pain - if they can migrate us themselves, why not fix the DNS records, too.
Have ensured I have whole-site back-ups away from their servers ready to migrate on the inevitable day it all goes tits-up* and I can finally tell the charity I told you so, and get free SSL into the bargain.
* Reg-ers expansions invited...
It seems to be one of the problems of UK capitalism that anyone with the money can buy a small good company and pretty well guarantee to make a profit by sucking it dry and chucking away the remains. As an individual looking after a few small web sites and email for family, I've lost count of the number of hosts I've used over the last 25 years. All started off highly recommended and were good for a few years, but in most cases I was pretty well forced to leave when they deteriorated rapidly after they were taken over.
I'm now with Tsohost (still) and glad to be free of their gridhost cloud platform which had frequent outages and severe email delays, as well as being blacklisted for long periods so our emails often went to spam. I did get plenty of notice of the changeover, although it was was badly managed in the extreme with multiple issues.
However Tsohost is still very economic for my small requirement. On-line support chat has been reasonably OK and has always been better than phone support, plus you get a record of the conversation. And since the changeover was completed the platform has been a lot more reliable so I haven't needed it much. I am now reluctant to put a lot of work into jumping to a different and wonderful company just to wait a bit longer until it gets bought out and goes down the drain the same way.
I feel your pain. I've been hosting with a long succession of companies for over 25 years. Each starts brilliant and then the owner sells out based on their success to a bean counter company that either reduces the service or ups the price - or both!
It's been a steady 4/5 year cycle. I graduated from buying web hosting to control panel hosting to VPS or bare metal servers - and would recommend that route if you have the technical nous. This gives you full control of your environment leading to ease of further migration at lower cost. OK, the screwups are almost entirely due to you but then you can fix them without need of a hoster's helpline wait/promise/disappoinment.
In fact on my personal threat list - my current provider being taken over by the HostEurope/GoDaddy type possibly rates right alongside being hacked.
I've also had a long history with hosting companies (broadband and web). At one stage I was acting as a reseller for a provider and signed-up a lot of companies. They decided to sell out to a competitor (no names) who then proceeded to inundate me with unsolicited invoices for services. I was contacting them many times daily telling them so, but they refused to listen. This went on for some time. Interestingly they never threatened court action, and they never cut off my, or my customers' services.
Then, one day, they got taken over (again, no names).
A short while later I received about 50 credit notes through the post.
So they were fattening themselves up to be sold. I wonder what the acquirer thought of their strategy.
After that debacle I vowed never again to be a reseller for a hosting company.
I had a payment problem (card not accepted -- their problem, not mine), opened a support ticket and I told them please don't suspend my service (gridhost). They didn't, but they did delete it. And then when I called (I am a managed/VIP customer so have phone support access) they said oh well that's because it's been discontinued... I was livid. Then they coughed to say they did send out emails, but I was missed off. In fact yeah, a few people were missed off. Oh actually we aren't decommissioning it yet, but we're not sure why yours has been deleted. Anyway we will restore it.
They did work to restore all my gridhost stuff but didn't do a perfect job of it, so I instructed my (50+ customers) to host elsewhere in the 45 days (which, yes, for large hosting resellers, was nowhere near enough notice).
I have a cpanel server with them which runs perfectly well and I don't really want to move, but I've shuttered the majority of my web hosting business because I can't take another problem like this. And, y'know, Wix and Squarespace are things now.
As someone who looks after the company websites without really knowing what they're doing*, and who had to do some maintenance on a site earlier this year and found out one site is hosted by tsoHost, that headline made me rather nervous. Since we're still up, it looks like we weren't part of Gridhost, or were successfully migrated. (Weirdly, whois claims we're hosted by Easyspace, but cPanel at tsoHost works just fine).
*Yes, I know. I haven't been given the time to figure things out to my satisfaction, and I am in no way a sysadmin or dev. Await a "Who, Me?" in a few years.
A couple of years ago, lots of my web features suddenly stopped working. I was unable to access FTP nor edit my website. Over Christmas, when I needed to edit our availability and certain other pages.
2 weeks like that. Apparently, it was because we were on a 'legacy' plan that I'd recently renewed 3 years upfront, no longer supported. I should've been told, but clearly wasn't.
I moved my whole site asap.
It used to be pretty good back in the day but has steadily deteriorated over the course of several years.
Yes, we had issues and outages but they were never that serious (Apart from them upgrading PHP and not letting us know, and the great 'Domains beginning with B' débâcle which hit us). Also we were on a shared hosting machine (Probably their cheapest, knowing our bean-counters), and I had to keep saying to the MD 'You get what you pay for'.
Like a lot of people, we got caught out by this Gridhost turnoff, and spent about two days with no web presence at all, then another 2 or 3 days with a holding 'Sorry, we've got problems' page before the brand new shiny website we had waiting in the wings came into service....much to the relief of our worldwide customers, some of whom thought we'd ceased trading or something.
We were lucky with the new site. All we had to do with this was advance our plans by a couple of weeks. I know of various colleagues and contacts that have anywhere from 40-odd to 162 sites affected. All of them swear they did not get a single warning email in their working and monitored mailboxes that were registered with tsoHost.
The MD and I have spent the last couple of days updating content and sorting out all the redirected domains and email etc. It's been a bit of a panic, but no too bad as these things go.
People are right about the poor support at tsoHost. The chat que lengths were horrid. We always started out as #160-odd in the que, and it took hours to get to the top. Then you get a canned stock answer, and back you go to the bottom of the que. Actual support tickets were a bit better, but not much. Once we had persuaded them to re-instate FTP access for backing up (Which they managed to get working on the 3rd attempt), we said 'F This' and committed to moving away from them as fast as possible...it was sheer luck we had a replacement site nearly ready to go, with another provider. Professional companies who see support as an obligation rather than a cost centre generally put extra resources in place just in case - especially on and after the 'due date' - something this bunch of tossers didn't.
Had they actually warned us, or any of our colleages/contacts, we would have known in advance and could have dealt with the turnoff more efficiently instead of this un-planned 'sprint'.,.
tsoHost were on our our naughty step anyway (Hence the new site being on another provider), but we've added GoDaddy (And any subsidiaries) to the non-preferred/avoid vendor list now because we don't want the risk any more. Considering GoDaddy are US based where customer service is king, they've really dropped a bollock, service-wise. Not impressed.
tsoHost ain't the only one. We buy hosted exchange from giacom via a reseller, and for the last week or have had out outlook clients frequently asking for the password to {random mailbox}. We bitch at the reseller, they say it's a giacomp issue and are continually chasing them. I'm too far away from this to be sure, but it looks like giacom's authentication synch/replication across their server suite has issues.... Still ongoing with no sign of a 'cure' yet.
Overall, it's been a pretty shitty few days. Still, Vino Rosso helps..
So I had a tsoHost Gridhost service for several years.
Back in May 2021 they told me that they would soon be migrating it over to their cloud hosting platform with full CPanel support. That never happened, despite updates early this year saying that it would be happening really, really soon. When renewal came up I switched to a monthly contract and gradually moved all my sites elsewhere (Krystal, since you ask).
On 26th September I got the first notification about Gridhost being retired. (So yes, I did get advance warning.) No mention of the previously-promised free migration, though.
At the start of this month I cancelled my hosting contract and asked them to close my account. All done... I thought.
Then on the 9th they renewed an SSL certificate I'd had as an add-on to the service and charged me for it.
When I complained they claimed that I'd only cancelled my hosting service, not the optional add-ons. Apparently I had to go through a separate cancellation process for the add-on, even though the hosting service it was an option for no longer existed.
What can I say? Good riddance. I doubt they'll be in business much longer.
Thanks to El Reg for mentioning the email problems tsoHost had back in July 2019. For more than two years I'd thought that was somehow my fault...
Thanks for posting this background, I thought I was losing my marbles after reading the article.
We too got told in May '21 that Gridhost was going bye-bye and everything would be migrated to their CPanel platform. It was the predictable culmination of the preceding few years' litany of unheralded crap-outs (more niche and specific to what we were up to, none made headlines) and support tickets that invariably petered-out with words to the effect of: "We're not interested in solving this because this is a legacy platform anyway."
Established that their CPanel offering didn't do everything we needed anyway, so jumped ship as rapidly as possible. Quite amusing to hear that this too fell apart in their typical fashion. They may regret asking why we wanted to leave, I had quite a backlog of material built up by then.
NB. We were grandfathered-in from Hostroute, if anyone remembers them. Just imagine: knowledgeable support responses from those who'd actually built the platform! The past is truly another country.
Maybe it was a renewals thing, or timing, or the direction the wind was blowing, but TSO were pestering me as far back as May to migrate away from Gridhost ("Cloud Web Hosting") and onto one of their cPanel offerings (I eventually settled on cPanel Deluxe)
My renewal for Gridhost was in August so maybe that's why they were pestering me so much. Who knows? But they were pressuring me to migrate way before the August renewal date (if it had been up to me I would have happily waited until August and then migrated)
So I'm kind of confused that some people appear to have heard nothing about this as TSO positively spammed me with emails about Gridhost being retired.
edit: Looks like I am very much in the minority though!
Luckily I'd already moved most stuff off TSO, further encouraged by the unannounced withdrawal of LetsEncrypt certificates last december. That only became evident when sites started to show up as insecure. A client who manages his own hosting at another godaddy subsidiary was the first victim I heard about. He "solved" that problem by taking the advice of the help desk and paid £50 for their commercial certificate (not much less than he was paying for hosting). (BTW it is possible to install LetsEncrypt manually on CPanel but needs renewing every 3 months and probably sounds too difficult to a non-tech person).
My "mistake" has been to use smaller providers who have to be price competitive and deliver great support. That's a business model that means they'll happily sell to the likes of godaddy when they show up offering big bucks - owners can take the cash and retire. Sadly non-tech users are inclined to buy services from heavily advertised and familiar names. They believe the marketing hype and get drawn in by year one discounts, disregarding the much higher charges for subsequent years. godaddy cheapest offering is £4 pcm as long as you sign up for 3 years but the included add-ons are first year only. In year 4 you'll be paying not £4pcm but £24.
I've been hosting websites since the early 1990s with a variety of providers. I've reached the stage of using a primary provider while trying out a couple of other contenders so I'm ready to move when the primary gets gobbled up and previously good availability, function, billing and support goes down the toilet.
I guess godaddy keep their acquisitions seemingly independent rather than migrate into the godaddy brand so they don't get tarred with the "bad press" of instances such as we've seen with TSO but also because someone unhappy with TSO might choose to move to another host not knowing that they too are a godaddy subsidiary.
I still have one small site at TSO simply because they still support PHP 5 and the site has a big application that needs it. A rebuild would cost £thousands so, fingers crossed, the need for that app will cease before TSO mandate the PHP upgrade.
I had been migrated from gridhost but I think that may have happened when they absorbed vidahost.
On a more general point: using email for important notifications is a complete no-no. Three problems,
1) SPAM filtering is often too aggressive and ditches some "good" email.
2) people change email address and don't update all places that use the "old" address. Even if they do notify everyone, the notification may not be acted on.
3) People don't act on an email immediately, especially if they don't really understand but file it for later attention and it then gets forgotten.
That's why I send my invoices by email but follow up by post if no payment by the deadline, the postal version usually gets a prompt response.
I was one of the "lucky" ones that got notification with 45 days to go... but that was about as far as it went! The message as so garbled, it was impossible to tell exactly what was happening, ending up with my looking to tranfer my hosting to an alternate plan. And things went downhill from there - they were all too happy to take my money for the new hosting, but pointblank refused to assists in the migration of my websites and email accounts, citing that they were "too busy"...
Fortunately, one public shaming on Twitter later saw a number of alternative hosting providers getting in touch with me; a bit of research ended up in my selecting one of these who turned around the transfer of everything over the course of a few days - including some SSL and redirection setup that TSO had never managed to get working for me. And, happily, all done and dusted before I ran out of time to cancel the new hosting I had with TSO and get my money back.
I took great pleasure in sending the "too little, too late, close my account" email to them. Shame really, because about 10 years ago they did well for me...
I have been a customer of TSOHOST now since 2009.
They claimed to have e-mailed me multiple times.
I did not receive a single e-mail in my inbox or my spam account.
And I know I was checking my e-mail because during the period they claimed to have warned me, I was ordering domains and checking for the e-mails.
This is some sort of pish take going on , they didn't warn customers adequately.
I also notice they didn't migrate my account either? It's sitting there with the Grid Host service that doesn't work - why if they were shutting down the service did they not migrate me?
Made the news over at BBC: 'It had just vanished' - the shock when tech fails
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