HostDoc will be closing its doors today and will no longer accept orders for any service moving forward.
All payment gateways are now inactive. All clients will be refunded pro-rata and a few refunds have already began being issued. If your refund has not yet been recieved, please open a ticket and be patient, all valid requests will be refunded.
If you have a paypal subscription set up, please cancel it now.
As much as I enjoy providing a hosting service basically for free (there has never been a profit margin which was not reinvested into new hardware), and as much as I can fend away many if not most of the trolls or those that try and bring the brand or reputation down, it is a much harder feat when it is someone that was once trusted.
As such, this is a notice that backs ups should immediately be taken and alternative hosting solutions be sought as a replacement for the services you currently have with us.
Services will not go down immediately, however, acting immediately would see you prepared for when our services do eventually go down which can be up to 30 days from today.
Our cpanel shared hosting may stay available for the next 6 months. If this is the case, no further fee will be charged to current users however, you are urged to use this time to prepare backups and migrate away from HostDoc.
I am sorry to those I will be letting down with this decision.
I am sorry I could not be the host I envisioned being.
Thank you for choosing HostDoc and allowing us to serve you as best as we could.
As an onlooker and light conversation participant, I had no desire to see this happen. Hope he didn’t feel pressured by community, I know how that can be.
Sure. Caching (whether whmcs plugin or engintron) caused customers to see other customer’s whmcs client pages (front page and ticket list specifically noted). Much disagreement over how it was handled, lots of “oh my god gdpr” talk, yada yada yada, and then this.
HostDoc was one of the first benchmarks I did. And man, was he generous! He offered me a full month free access and then added yet more nodes for me to benchmark.
I still remember the results: They were good, really good. Plus he was respectful and friendly and fully accepted whatever the results were.
I don’t know any details behind his decision to close down his operations but I’m not in the least surprised that he ends them properly providing enough time to his customers to find a new home and/or to save their data.
I wish him well and I hope that he recovers quickly and fully.
It’s a shame seeing that drama can close down a business’ doors.
Although the leak of personal data is a serious matter, it can happen (and it has happened) to much bigger players, it won’t shouldn’t be the end of the world. You should disclose the incident to the affected customers, as per GDPR rules, take steps towards fixing the issue so it never happens again, and move on.
and for the drama… I honestly think, if you can’t take it, don’t go there. don’t pick that industry for your business ventures and don’t enter dens like the drama boards.
of course if you advertise somewhere and respond to requests you have to expect to get shit thrown your way equally.
getting frustrated is understandable. cutting everything down in a blink of an eye… not so much.
I think the situation with @ReliableSite last year already raised some red flags over being a bit… short fused.
however good luck to future endeavours to @HostDoc and even more so, best of luck to all clients to get out of it without major harm.
[HostDoc] fully accepted whatever the results were.
I don’t see any reason to paint HostDoc as someone who is overly sensitive and can’t take the heat of competition. That’s simply not true.
Note when he made his statement about (some) competitors plain and simple disliking him. It was only at the end, in his looking back. He did not complain while he ran the business.
I’m under the impression that his remark was about unfair behaviour, hypocrisy, and dirty games - not about competition as such. I know for a fact that he was open to being looked at critically and to getting frank and direct feedback. I know it because that’s what he asked me for.
I see only one thing to criticize and that’s his lax reaction to security problems, problems well noted, that have been alleged based on, I quote, “someone at LES mentioned …” and on one (1) person saying that HostDoc didn’t take that seriously. So before judging that we should at the very least know about his view too (which AFAIK hasn’t been communicated so far).
that’s why I mentioned his reaction and kind of drama with @reliablesite last year already. maybe you did not notice that back then…
he did not only complain about his vendor back then but also pulled the plug in a moment of bad temper. so for me this is not only about the handling of the security concerns blabla, but a pattern in behaviour.
just to be clear: I don’t want to “paint” him as whatever, I simply want to express my opinion that he seems to have underestimated the challenges compared of what he is able to take in as an individual. it’s not only about taking heat from competitors but about the industry he decided to go into.
I just read the email from @HostDoc and immediately came here to search for more info, as I learned hostdoc existed through hostballs. I have been a customer for about 6 months and I’m really sad to see all this great service go away. Through these months I only needed their support like 2-3 times, boom, got it instantly and solved my problems all the times. About the services I have, I’m pretty sure that I haven’t got any downtime like at all. I have tried many hosts and HostDoc is by far the best of all of them. I literally wouldn’t mind at all paying 2X what I pay now, just so I know the owner gets something out of it…
@HostDoc if you plan to move on with a similar project like hostdoc, I’m interested in trying it out…
I wish you the best
