In the past I used GoDaddy for the bulk of my web hosting. In the last year I thought I’d try a different web hosting company and settled on 1&1 because I could host multiple domains for a reasonable sum of money. Now all the sites that I own and operate run on PHP/mySQL and I enjoy open source technology and have used it for about the last 10 years or so. Recently, I received an email from 1&1 stating “Free support for your PHP version is ending soon“. My first thought is “why should I have to pay extra for using open source technology on my websites?” and this left me feeling upset as I didn’t know that 1&1 had been supporting this for a limited time, free of charge. What it turned out to be is that support for using PHP 5.5 (which my sites run on is ending, 1&1 has been eating this cost since the PHP community has ceased making security updates on version 5.5. I spent time moving my sites over gradually to 1&1 and here I am being asked to pay more if I do nothing. This left me thinking “Why don’t they offer to upgrade their customers free of charge?”. Not cool 1&1, not cool at all. This now leaves me with a couple of options…
- Move everything back to GoDaddy
- Hunt for a new web hosting provider
- Upgrade from PHP 5.5 to PHP 7.0
I am leaning towards updating this version of PHP but this has left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth as the customer. The choice to go open source shouldn’t mean a poorer customer experience but I feel that happened here.
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