I’ve been hosting my server with a Danish company, Asergo, since 2006. Back then they were called Easyspeedy. It hasn’t all been plain sailing, but things got much better over time, and in particular since they rebranded from Easyspeedy to Asergo in 2017, it’s been a fairly flawless experience.
There were some customer service issues early on, and multiple hardware failures, with me needing to reinstall the server in July 2010, March 2012, January 2014, October 2014 and most recently March/April 2020.
These days I do very little on the server, and the Asergo machine was complete overkill for my needs. In 2018 I started looking for some sort of simple hosting, but by the time the hardware failed in 2020, I still hadn’t moved, and had been paying not only Asergo for far more than I needed, but also GreenGeeks on top of that. There was nothing wrong with GreenGeeks, but I found not having full root access to the machine overly limiting.
Fast-forward to 13 October 2022, and I got an email from Asergo:
It saddens us to inform you that due to the high cost of electricity in Europe, we are forced to terminate your server on the day of the next billing circle due to the server’s age and high power consumption.
[…]
If you do not react to the email, we will see this as a confirmation of the termination of the contract, and your server will be taken down on 19/10/2022
They also offered me an alternate server at more than double the price I was previously paying.
The day of the next billing cycle was six days from when I received the email, and I was slightly annoyed to receive six days notice after having been with them for 16 years! Luckily I wasn’t away and out of email reach on day 1 of the Whale Trail, only to get back, relaxed, to find I had until the next day to move the server.
Still, I thought six days was unreasonable and asked them to give me time until the end of the month.
No reply.
Not wanting to risk it, and appreciating the push to finally downscale, I cancelled some weekend plans I had, and moved the server. I went with Gandi.net, who I’ve been using for my domains since 2012. I could downscale to something much more fitting for my needs, using Gandi VPS, and still have root access to set up everything the way I like it. Not being in a rush, I also took the opportunity to upgrade the versions of Ubuntu, MariaDB and PHP, and generally clear out a lot of the gumph that had accumulated over the years.
Having made the six-day deadline, I contacted Asergo to say that they could terminate the machine.
No reply.
I was starting to wonder what was going on with the company, but having successfully moved, didn’t worry too much.
Until the next month’s billing went off. I contacted them again, asking them to reverse the charge.
Again no reply.
I imagined all sorts of scenarios at this point, and, after giving them a few days, was resigned to having to follow up with my credit card provider to reverse the charge.
Finally they got back to me, apologising, saying they had just found my previous emails, stating that they would shut down the server and reverse the charge.
Eventually the refund came through, and my mostly positive 16-year association with them came to end.