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Who are people currently using as hosting providers?

Article lobste.rs

Who are people currently using as hosting providers?

(I think of the options "web" is the best tag here? I guess you could argue "devops" but I think that would be overselling the complexity of "what hosting service do you use?" :D )

[edit: an update from a real person at DH: their payment processor only supports IE Chrome]

While I am loathe to post this kind of question on lobsters - not because I don't think there'll be useful advice, but because I think it's low quality vs most of the other things being posted (both stories/articles and questions), but who do people currently use as hosting providers? I don't do anything particularly interesting or server dependent, just email, a static site, a couple of bash script generated sites ( :D ) and email. Google and DDG are both swamped with sites that haven't really been trustworthy in years.

So who are people using these days?

For context:

I've been using dreamhost for almost 2 decades, but their site and support have just become absolutely atrocious, they've got a force enabled "spam filter" that consistently classes email with all appropriate "not spam" headers, from trustworthy domains, to the extent that at one point they started silently bouncing email so it never even appeared in the junk folder. That BS literally cost me a few hundred dollars, and yet they still continued to force it on me, and didn't even offer any compensation. In fact when they "white listed" the company that they had been silently bouncing (there's literally no way to tell if they're doing it) they acted like they were doing me a favor. The final straw was a support request I just made, in which I first had to deal with text predictor nonsense, and when I finally got a reply from support I just got a form response that clearly demonstrated that they had not even bother reading the report so it might as well have been a bot. Just the standard "update your browser" "clear your caches" "disable ad blockers" "don't use a VPN", where my response is (paraphrased here because even if the support responses are garbage the support people aren't to blame for the garbage site or service):

Of course I already tried that, your website has become increasingly garbage for years so I just presumptively assume it's only been written for/tested on IE Chrome, and things like VPNs, ad blockers, tracker blockers should not be impacting any of that (wtf do you have tracking scripts on your payment page? or anywhere else for that matter?)

[addendum: the support response was such a template that I looked again at what the support person said about my support request, and then went back to my prior support request (same template). So the only "human" part of this template is a description of my request, and having compared them they are clear slop, and there's not a single person involved at any part of the process. So my attempt to avoid the garbage slop support on the webpage (slop support bots are literally just bad FAQ+doc search tools, why even bother?), by using a support system that is designed to appear to involve actual human support, is also just slop. Not even marked as such. Just passed off as human to try and pretend that there's any interest in supporting customers.]

Discussion 96 comments · 49 points · olliej · 2026-01-11
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