Originally Posted by r00tb33r

Mike, I really wish I was actively developing the site, and taking advantage of your apparently great customer service, but all I’m looking for is the most basic shared hosting that just works, meaning competently administered, and every year I don’t have to look at it is a good year.

I’m in the market for $5 per month shared hosting, and the computational performance needs of the site are in line with what that price bracket typically offers. I wish I needed more so I could give you more money, but there is just no need. I honestly wish that business was doing so great that it would outgrow it’s host, but that’s not the reality.

Will the pricing be as good upon renewal if you use a signup discount? Is that the question?

I don’t think that at the time of inflation it’s possible to answer that question without knowing that you (i.e. the person answering it, not you as a poster) might be lying.

As far as I know, the signup discount is given just for the signup.

For shared hosting, the 3-year discount is a recurring one.

Being a customer and following MDDHosting news and announcements, I saw that during their platform upgrade and pricing change, they kept the option for old customers to stay on grandfathered plans with minimal price increase – which I thought was super fair and felt more confident regarding potential price hikes as a customer.

But of course, as a customer, I would not want to see my provider stick to pricing if/when it becomes unprofitable. I want good service. Unlike some other providers, MDDHosting doesn’t promise what they can’t deliver, so they don’t seem to be promising any “lifetime pricing lock,” “huge lifetime discounts” etc.

Regarding the “just works” – a story from the past few days:

We have a local motorcycling forum. 100% nonprofit, just enthusiasm. Built over a decade ago by a member, who later on left the dev. waters and became a fitness instructor in Dubai (likes it more and says it pays a lot better). The forum was running as a set-and-forget, don’t-touch-while-it-works for years.

Until the time came when the PHP the forum can run on would no longer work with database servers of practically every provider (the current MariaDB or MySQL server, tried both). Forum just wouldn’t work.

I moved the forum to my MDDHosting reseller account. Because I wanted to be as certain as possible that any problems are not hosting-related (MDDHosting is what I consider to be good, stable, and properly configured).

Still, that wasn’t enough. Our language uses šđžčć Latin and сдфјкје Cyrillic alphabet. While forum worked on MDDHosting, those chars just wouldn’t. That didn’t work too on other provider servers I tried it on. Apparently, database compatibility problems – the forum was running for too many years on old PHP and the set-and-forget mode.

MDDHosting guys spent literally hours trying to sort out the character encoding and the database. Managed to update the forum software to make it run on PHP 8.1, and set it so that it can be easily updated in the future without breaking anything (as much as that can reasonably be expected with anything that’s computer-related ). Our forum is back, up and running.

Yes, the mess up was 100% our fault (zero maintenance). Yes, MDDHosting could have, as other provider support has done, said: “all works on our end, it’s your software.” But they chose to do what’s way beyond any reseller/shared hosting technical support scope and I really felt like they cared about our small forum more than many members did. And that’s not the first time I saw their tech. support do things I would never reasonably expect to be done, especially included in the regular price.

To sum it up – I would not expect to keep paying X $ per month until the end of time. But at this moment, and in the foreseeable future, I expect my sites to run fine on MDDHosting. Saving me time, worry and hassle.