As well as photography, up until a short while ago I also used to produce websites for local businesses and have done for 20 years. Nothing groundbreaking just small websites for people wanting a presence on the web.
Using shared cloud hosting, the solution worked for many years with a mix of WordPress websites and ASP coded sites. All was good until 5th April 2022, when I receive an email from the hosting provider as the time TSOHost part of the Paragon Internet Group.
We’re getting in touch to let you know that we have made the difficult decision to retire Gridhost Hybrid hosting at tsoHost on 5th May 2022. was the communication. This gave me 30 days to sort out alternative hosting, or upgrade the package with TSOhost to packages costing over double the price. It was time to call it a day, as the situation was not viable.
I moved a couple of sites including my own to IONOS which was a painless process. The other more complex site I had to let the clients know I would be discontinuing with them. With all but one site sorted, (this was under development to be replaced by another web company.
Five months pass, and the one remaining site is still live, and another email is recieved from TSOhost on the 26th of September, now saying…
We’re getting in touch to let you know that we have made the difficult decision to retire the former Gridhost platform at tsoHost and that this retirement will take place in 45 days, on 10th November 2022.
So now, I look at the situation and notice I have been paying for the old hosting (supposed to have stopped on 5th May) as well as new hosting. On complaining TSOhost state they had to extend the closure of hosting as they do not have enough staff to handle the migrations, not really my problem, they announced the closure not me.
Full text of answer to complaint….
From: Zak @ Tsohost Support
At: 25/Oct/2022 09:25
Hi Andy,
Apologies for any inconvenience caused by the migration.
Please know the gridhost reseller is a very large platform. We had over a millions websites hosted on this platform. When it comes to the decommission of the platform, we have had to migrate customers in batches. We had to provide 30 days notice to ensure customers stick to this date for each batch. The reason for this is that when customers would be happy to migrate we would need to carry this out, the resources we have available would allow for that batch to be migrated in that time. If we left this open and provided 6 months notice, we would simply get 80% of all customers wanting to migrate in the final 30 days.
We simply would not have the resources available to complete those migrations at once.
We have not tried to force customers, we have given ample time for customers to migrate to another service. The pricing for the new service is our general pricing for cPanel which has not been changed in 3 years. Customers at this point would also have the ability to migrate to a third party if they wished to do so.
If you have taken out a second package then your new sites would have been active from the new package, so resources used. We would not be able to refund this package. In regards to the gridhost platform, we will offer pro rata refunds from the date you were told the platform would be decommissioned in your first email.
Kind Regards
Zakah Hussain
Office of CEO – OCEO
Paragon Internet Group
I am promised a pro-rata refund on the hosting, but on viewing many reviews and comments on the company, I can see many have been promised this with nothing received from TSOhost.
So here we have a company that posts on social media on topics such as trust relationships and customer service, when in fact all they appear to be doing is scamming people into paying more and providing an abysmal service.
I would advise anyone to stay clear of TSOhost.