More Nonsense from Krystal Hosting

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I got an email today from a support ticket that the hosting company created (not me) demanding that I reduce the footprint of xbomber.co.uk or upgrade to a business plan, which is going to be quite expensive.

This follows on from the drama from a couple of years ago when Krystal migrated all their customers from physical web servers to virtual servers running on their katapult hardware, which seem to have a lot less storage.

With this, the Ruby plan went from unlimited storage to 25GB of storage, which is not actually a lot.

They let customers on Ruby renew on "Ruby Legacy" which maintained the increased functionality of the original Ruby plan for the price of the new one.
I renewed this in Feb 2024 for 2 years.

Now, they're deciding to squeeze us already even though the contract that we signed for Ruby Legacy extends to this coming Feb.

So I contacted them by phone and I couldn't even gain basic agreement with the agent that a 2 year contract means that they have to uphold the promised levels of service for 2 years.
They wouldn't even meet me on that much.

So, I've forwarded the ticket email to their complaints dept to make this go away until Feb to give me time to think about what I want to do.
I can either start cutting away at the site to keep it under this 25GB limit, or I pay a lot more for the Emerald plan.

To be honest, the way this whole migration has been dealt with and communicated to customers leaves me really irritated and I don't really want to pay any money to a company that doesn't think that it has to uphold its end of an agreement for the full term of that agreement, let alone pay them *even more* for the privilege.

The goalposts move all the time with this and it's always the customer that loses out.


This is after I engaged their support to see what network security options they had to assist us with the DDOS attacks ...
Their was response was to tell us to sign up for cloudflare, which is a total non-starter, and after I explained that I wasn't interested in using a proxy service like that, they just stopped responding in any meaningful way.
They even complained that the IP blocks that I'd put in place to solve the problem myself would put a demand on the server (!!!).
- Compared to what? just sitting back and letting the DDOS agents just do whatever they want with the server?


So, I'm not sure what to do with it.

It just seems like I haven't got the time to deal with all increasing demands from the hosts and the decreasing resources that we have to use there, along with all the spambots and DDOS attacks etc to do what I actually want to do with the site.

At the moment, I'm taking a full backup of the site...
I'm not quite sure what they plan on doing before February, but it's clear that they take the view that we are using space that we aren't entitled to, when we renewed for 2 years on the basis that the Ruby Legacy plan that we bought would allow us to use the space that we had before, for that 2 years, rather than 'until Krystal decides otherwise'.

[Crash]

I think we have this all resolved now ...
The site is getting moved onto another: even faster, server on Wed 9th, so we may get a bit of disruption on that day.

If the site is unavailable at that time, we haven't gone.

I will put a notice on the front page of the site nearer the time.


I was messing about yesterday putting XAMPP on the desktop downstairs to see how feasible it would be to host the site without any actual hosting.
I was getting quite a way with it, but it would still have been a massive pain trying to route the traffic to the server among other things, just to arrive at a wildly inferior solution.

I may put out a little begging bowl on the site to help cover the server costs.
I might get a shiny gold stat bar in return, or then again, the juice might not be worth the squeeze. We'll see.

Screenshot 2025-07-02 201909.png (1.09 MiB) Viewed 2567 times

[Crash]

The migration is done and we are now running on the new server.
It seems pretty brisk.

At least now, we don't feel guilty about using the space, and we have a little avenue for future expansion.