Hostek - Hurricane Server Down

[Hussman]

Good Morning Folks,

Before we start I need to make it clear I know very little about the technicalities of web hosting etc, so please make your responses idiot-proof if possible.

I have, for a number of years, created basic websites to promote a few local businesses, including my own, and a local charity.

The domain names and websites were run through a company called PickAWeb. When I did have the occasional problem they resolved it quickly and I was happy.

A few years back, PickAWeb were taken over by Hostek. Initially I thought this was good, a bigger multinational company would be more resilient to issues I thought.

On the 16th Oct the server that holds all the websites I operate crashed. Therefore all the websites went offline with error messages for anyone trying to access them.

Looking at the Hostek service status it indicated that one of the servers (Hurricane) was down.

These things happen, and I assumed within 24hrs all would be restored.

It is now the 22nd Oct and things still haven't been fixed. I've contacted Hostek but feel I am being given the run around. The misinformation is shocking. For example their service status page (https://status.hostek.com/) states Hurricane Server should be restored by yesterday late afternoon. It wasn't!

To access the "back end" of my webpages I type in www.mywebsite.co.uk/cpanel. This brings up a password and 2 form factor protected the admin page.

So now here's my dilemma. All the websites which I create I use a piece of software called "old website builder". This is found on the cPanel admin page.

I have got backups of the websites, and I wanted to find another hosting company that use. "old website builder" so I can simply (I hope!) restore the webpages directly from back ups.

1) If I find another company that uses "old website builder" would this work?
2) Does anyone know of any companies that use "old website builder"?
3) Can anyone recommend a cheap hosting company which is simple to use and has decent customer support when things do wrong?

I feel it's looking more and more likely that I will need to create 5 new websites from scratch...something I'm not looking forward to

Thanks for reading this far. Any suggestions welcome.

Hussman.

 

[Zaphan58]

I've never heard of "old website builder". But you should be able to compress to zip all your files using cPanel file manager and export your database if any using PHP MyAdmin. Then copy all that across to your new host. You may even be able to download a full account backup using cPanel backup wizard and provide that to your new host and have them import it.

For hosting I have used https://krystal.io/ for many years and found them good. Unfortunately it is common for a large company to take over a small one and turn them to poo, presumably they massively cut costs to maximise profit and run it into the ground in the process. I've experienced this many times with companies 123-Reg / GoDaddy have taken over.

 

[visibleman]

1 & 2 - Find out who/what company made the plugin and then go knocking on hosts doors and ask if they support it. But if it's an old plugin, in the same way as Parallels (was SWSoft) Sitebuilder which was popular with Plesk (Plesk is similar to cPanel for hosting) hosts back in the mid-2000s, then support might for "old website builder" may now be near enough non-existent.

3 - Look at Stablepoint, Krystal, Allhost (owner is/was on OCUK) - all offer cPanel hosting, so at least that side of things should be familiar.

With your backups, you can probably shift the sites to another host and get them back up without much issue. But going forward, you'll most likely need to look at recreating the sites with something else if hosts don't support your previous site builder plugin - either to another site builder/editor app or moving it all to a CMS or static website generator depending on needs etc.