tsoHost shuts down the Gridhost service platform • The Register

Exclusive UK hosting company tsoHost has shut down its gridhost platform amid harsh customer criticism of the 45-day notice period and general handling.

The complaints are that many were not given enough time to complete a successful migration to another host, reports of technical problems during the notice period, and frustration that tsoHost’s technical support system was completely overwhelmed by users desperate for help was.

tsoHost, now part of the GoDaddy group, posted a notice in its online knowledge base that it would be closing down the Gridhost platform on November 10, 2022. It warned that customers’ cloud control panels would become inaccessible after that date and advised them to “complete all your actions at least 10 days before the final date”.

Customer pages and e-mails were also no longer accessible after November 10th.

The company claims customers received emails about these changes over a number of days, starting on September 26, then on October 11, October 27, November 3 and November 9.

It informed us that the email contained advice to help users manage this transition and that the guidance was also made available on the tsoHost status and control panel pages as of September 26th.

tsoHost states in its online FAQ that it is retiring Gridhost to focus resources on providing the best products and services to customers. To do so, it says it had to “restrict products which, though once groundbreaking, will become obsolete by the time alternatives become available”.

“We understand the decision to retire the Gridhost platform will be disappointing and tsoHost is working closely with customers to support migrations,” a GoDaddy spokesperson told us.

However, The registry was contacted by several readers who said they did not receive any such emails from the company and only spotted others’ grid host shutdown plans on social media.

One user said: “It seems very obvious that customers have not received any emails advising them of this shutdown. I know I didn’t receive any. There was no documentation, no support capacity for the increased demand.”

There were similar complaints on social media with one angry customer, Ben Cooper, Post on Twitter to ask tsoHost, “Did you really just shut down an entire hosting platform without notification? Several of my pages disappeared so I googled it.”

“Yes, I know you claim to have sent emails – none arrived.

Another user on Reddit posted that he had been active on the Gridhost platform with a reseller account since 2012 and had 298 websites running. They complained that 45 days was not a reasonable amount of time to complete a migration.

Other customers spoke of a chaotic customer care situation with hours of waiting to even speak to a live chat agent. At least one user complained on Twitter that after hours of waiting they were simply dropped from the queue. Another said they submitted a support ticket and a week later they still hadn’t been in touch.

The situation was possibly made worse by the fact that tsoHost stopped offering phone support in July, which we discovered when attempting to contact them by phone and were greeted by a terse recorded message to that effect.

tsoHost’s online FAQ advises customers that if they want to keep their website content and emails with the company, they must select an appropriate plan and order through the website, and then follow a series of steps to get it from Migrate grid host to the new platform.

Alternatively, customers are advised to contact the tsoHost support team for advice on how to migrate their website and emails to another hosting company.

According to the company, customers who requested a migration before November 10 have successfully completed it. “tsohost can confirm that the customers who requested migration prior to November 10 migrated successfully,” the GoDaddy spokesperson told us.

“We advise customers who have not yet backed up or migrated their information to create a support ticket and our teams will provide details on how to download content from the platform.”

The spokesperson also warned, “We are currently experiencing longer than usual wait times while our support teams work on individual cases.”

Maybe tsoHost decided there were too many problems with Gridhost. Earlier this year, it was reported that websites whose names start with the letter B were having trouble loading.

Last year, an incident sparked user complaints that the host’s client area was down and that its websites were down. The year before there were problems with emails, and in 2019 customers suffered a week of disruptions after somehow shady code was injected into tsoHost’s servers. ®