Goodbye to Freedom 2 Operate

I’ve had my fair share of trouble with web hosts in the past. Having worked for a bad web hosting company, I know how shady and negligent they can be on the back end. The poor consumer is often left with little to do but file a support ticket and hope someone pays attention to it.

Unfortunately, that accurately describes my experience with Freedom 2 Operate (recently rebranded as Progressive Networks), the web hosting company that hosted Project Paradox until now. I started with them about two years ago. They were free, allowed PHP, gave you a MySQL database, and didn’t display ads on your site, which was exactly what I wanted. Because I wasn’t a paying customer at the time, I never really minded the periodic down times and glitches.

That all changed a few months back when, after posting an inquiry on the forums, I was informed of their “no ads on free sites” policy. Honestly, this didn’t seem unreasonable; after all, why should I make money from my site if they’re losing money to host it? Since the site was finally making money, I decided to shell out the dough for a paid account.

It’s been several months since then and I’ve been frustrated by the fact that, while Project Paradox has been making steadily increasing profits, the same old server problems have persisted. Over the past month, several of my site’s scripts mysteriously stopped working due to backend changes of which I was not informed. I files several tickets and sent emails to little avail. I would have posted to their support forums but for the fact that they have been down for some time. My site remained inaccessible for almost a week before I got any response.

Thus, I’ve elected to take a hit to the site’s short-term profitability to ensure that things like this stop happening. At the recommendation of friends, I’ve selected BlueHost as my new web hosting provider. They seem good so far and, ignoring the fact that I had to prepay for two years, they’re actually five cents a month cheaper than F2O was. That’s not to mention the free domain name or other little goodies that they give you. I’m reserving judgment until I get to know their services better, but they definitely give a great first impression.

All in all, I consider it a good investment for a site that I plan to maintain for years to come, even if I have to take a hit in the short term. It’s just a shame that I had to be driven to it by poor web hosting.