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What an irresponsible business model.

It's not the "no support" part that concerns me, is that they've pocketed the customers money until there was a major problem, then just shut down, customers be damned.

Sounds like someone placed a server in their basement, added cPanel and a PayPal link and totally ignored whatever happened to that server.

I guess you get what you pay for.

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It's not a business model. "No Support Linux Hosting" is a white labeled version of Shanje Inc. which is a small business from Iowa run by 1-2 people which was founded back in 1997, so they truly are a blast from the past. Shanje controls a Class C IPv4 block and they use it to host about 30,000 websites which nets them an estimated yearly revenue of ~$70k. Most of the sites that were impacted are ones you've never heard of like francisdiamonds.com and almuftahrentacar.com, but someone loved them enough to put them online, and now they've all been destroyed. Between hacking and COVID we've certainly seen a systematic decimation of the petit bourgeois. It's a tough time to be a small business owner.

That's what is especially frustrating to see. So much of the pre 2010 web is just gone, and I'm sure much of it gone because of something like this. hacks by ransomware garbage or script kids doing it "for the Lulz."

internet vandalism saddens me.

Don't mock lulz since that was the best part of the old web. When I think of lulz I remember stories like jobs and woz poking at&t in the eye blue boxing the pope. Today's guard rose to power on a billion laughs, but there's nothing funny about the criminality and extortion that flourishes under their watch as they focus their attention on banning people for vulgarity. OPM doomed us all.

It’s certainly easy to see why small businesses are increasingly giving up on websites and just using Facebook.

No cost, good discoverability, easy updates...just sucks for those of us who won’t use the platform.

I'm not so sure on discoverability. Engaging with customers, sure. However, not the place I do searches for (mostly local) businesses.

> controls a Class C IPv4 block

That explains how they could so easily offer ipv4 addresses with their vps offerings on the sister site.

This is only 254 useable addresses. Nice, but not that big.

And as a high school student back in the day, I really would have appreciated the ability to pay for something like this!

Really, not everything on the web needs to be mission-critical.

Yeah, the idea is sound (assuming it was properly marketed), but simply shutting everything down because of an issue like that does sound excessive. At the very minimum, they should have a basic backup that is enough to get the servers running again even if the customers' data got wiped.

It sounds like they were just waiting for a reason to get out of the business. Sometimes you just keep something running because it handles itself, but isn't really bringing in any considerable amount of money. But once you hit a hiccup like this, it's not worth the time to fix it, because it wasn't really a revenue stream in the first place.

> but isn't really bringing in any considerable amount of money

Another poster pointed out they pocket around ~70k/year so I don't think it's that.

70k is a lot for a person, but not really a lot for a company. Someone mentioned they were one or two people, so that's not too bad, but if you get much beyond that, cutting that 70k may make it more trouble than it's worth.

Sounds like the customers' data itself is still available?

> All customers should immediately download backups of their websites and databases through cPanel.

I noted that too and it's really weird. So, they do no have backup of their part of the data (or they don't want/are not able to restore it) but they still have the customers data?

Perhaps things were running in maintenance mode already, and there is no longer the desire to run this part of the business, so they took this unfortunate opportunity to wind things down.

Maybe they’re compromised but data seems intact, as in it’ll be irresponsible to keep serving on the Internet but most of it are probably not maliciously altered?

Yeah, it's pretty common for hackers to upload backdoors to random web sites when they can and exploit them at a later date. If we're talking about a full server compromise then I wouldn't use those downloaded data for anything except for analysis/archival purposes, unless it's been thoroughly cleaned first.

The refund would be a fraction of a dollar that people would have paid for the incomplete part of their final month, no? So perhaps it's hardly worth refunding, or perhaps they did.

A cheap low reliability non-spammy service is a pretty good niche for hobbyists. Who cares that it shut down. It did a job while it lasted.

You can’t charge one dollar monthly, the fees would eat almost all of your income

Yeah, they charged in increments of 12 dollars iirc. It wasn't set up as a yearly sub though - it just worked as account credits, so if you had multiple sites it would deduct money from the same account pool.

> Sounds like someone placed a server in their basement, added cPanel and a PayPal link and totally ignored whatever happened to that server.

Welcome to 99% of shared web hosting businesses.

WHM + cPanel is the combo you need to know if you ever want to run a webhosting company.

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