I have over 20 clients on the hostmysite shared hosting accounts. They were all setup on the .net builder plans that ran about $13/ month. Then recently I had a client setup a new hosting account. I told them to get the one that costs about $13/ month. Then I came to find HMS raised their prices. The .Net Builder plan is now $20 / month.

Its bad enough I have to sell my clients on paying more each month for hosting from HMS. But when godaddy only charges $5 / month for .NET hosting. I can not validate paying $20 / month with HMS. Sure the support and people at HMS are more knowledgable. But there is no logical reason why .NET shared hosting should jump in price from $13 / month to $20 / month.

What idiot from upper management thinks that $20 / month for shared hosting is a good idea? I sent an email in to support voicing my opinions and no one responded. Obviously the HMS business model is now based on greed, and not providing competitive products and services for their customers. This is yet another example of what happends when your company gets bought out by third parties that have no experience in the products or services. They try to raise prices in an attempt to get a quick return on their investment. All they are doing is alienating the bread and butter of HMS customers ( developers, and web designers ).

I am now considering buying a server colocating it locally, then moving all my shared, and VPS clients.

Hey Whitesites,

We're not trying to compete with GoDadddy, we are aiming for two entirely different demographics. Basically it comes down to what your website is worth to your business. If the website is considered non-critical then why not pay $5 bucks to GoDaddy? Your customer service experience is certainly not going to be any thing close to that which you're used to at HostMySite, and who knows what their shared servers look like.

With the price increase I believe we are now charging closer to the actual cost of supporting shared customers, which in these times, shouldn't be all that unexpected. Are you signed up for our reseller program? It comes with a %30 discount on all shared plans meaning the .Net plan would come out to $14:

http://www.hostmysite.com/reseller/

When you say colocate locally, do you mean in house? There are serious implications of doing so, such as reliable power, network bandwidth, and physical security, all of which we guarantee. Have you considered colocating at HostMySite? If so you would be able to negotiate price with your clients base on their needs, or even come up with your own set of plan types.

I think you may be surprised to find out that Dedicated and Colocations are actually HostMySite's bread and butter, rather than shared, and you may find that this environment would be better suited for you and your customers.

Here is the problem I have.
Paying HMS $20 for shared hosting does not give me mission critical hosting. If anything the servers on HMS are slower than godaddy. I am able to FTP faster, and pages load faster on godaddy. Also I haven't had to call in for a reboot, or app pool recycle.

I have full faith in the HMS techs. But some tickets are taking way too long to get resolved. Mean while my client's site is down for over 6 hours. ( This was supposed to be load balanced too )

Sure Godaddy's support staff might suck. But if I never have to call in and deal with them, because the hardware is solid, then its not a big deal.

I had no problem with my clients paying $13 for shared hosting. But $20 is way too much. Its not even close to being competitive with other hosting companies.

This leads me to believe that HMS would rather just be a dedicate hosting company, and not bother with shared hosting accounts.

The Reseller program is a waste of time. I have always setup my clients direct with HMS, I would never want to play middle man with the hosting. All I was asking is that my new clients get the same $13 / month shared hosting account that my previous clients have. I emailed in support and still no one has responded. I guess they would rather I just go away.

There is a Level 3 datacenter here in Houston. ( with redundant power, and Com lines ) Even during Hurricane IKE last year it never went down. I am at the point where I am considering colocation, and my feelings are if you want it done right you have to do it yourself.

Once again I have always liked the techs at HMS. But management has gone to **** since the buy out.