Almost finished updating my taxonomy when…

The performance of my current website and webhost became so poor I filed a support request and upgraded everything I could even adding the W3 Total Cache plugin. Every time I complain about the performance of my little hobby website Liquid Web tells me to upgrade. So finally having sunk so many weekends into upgrading this website myself, I decided I would pay twenty dollars per month for better webhosting. For the record Liquid Web bought the company, that bought the company that was the webhost I went with after the original webhost of Muschamp.ca went out of business.

Liquid Web

I did not choose Liquid Web but I’ve been paying them $14.95 USD every month for years as the switching cost is real. It will probably take me at least a day maybe multiple weekends to switch to a different webhost and I had other things I’d rather do. They know this, which is why they always tell me to upgrade when I ask for support. So I was going to upgrade. I was going to upgrade to a twenty US dollars a month plan shown above. I had my wallet out when the randomly assigned human to chat with suggest I pay them $48 dollars a month.

I say “no it is just a hobby website”. My website legitimately gets less popular every month because the performance is shit and the content is old. I even sent him my account information, I double checked my system usage, bandwidth, RAM, hard drive space, database size. The one outlier is I/O usage and I don’t know what is causing that to spike of late. I tell him I think I’ll just get the twenty dollar a month plan advertised on their website. I send him the link to the twenty dollar a month plan screenshotted above. He sends me a second pre-filled out shopping cart, this time recommending I pay them $79 dollars a month. It was then I hung up aka ended our chat. I filled out the post chat customer satisfaction survey where I literally called him an idiot. I told his colleague who had recommended I upgrade to at least the $20 dollar a month plan what happened then I blogged about it on my miniature painting blog because it was such an upsetting experience.

I have been a loyal customer of Liquid Web for a while. I was a loyal customer of Alpha for even longer, then I was a loyal customer of my webhost before that. Someone can review weblogs and chat logs and credit card statements. I put the actual webhosting statistics to the right, a screenshot I took today in preparation for upgrading my hosting plan. I did not fly off the handle and call anyone names, but perhaps I should have, because what kind of salesmanship training or negotiation class teaches you to refuse business and try to upsell them to a twice as big of monthly purchase then when they say no you decided to try and upsell them to a package that is four times as big? Only an idiot would do that. An idiot who has a name, probably even two names, I doubt either of them is “fucking” or “fuck”. But they were such a poor salesperson that I now want to rip down this entire website and move it to another host.

Hours have gone by. I’ve tried to calm down. This is why I just paid them the money month after month and blogged on WordPress dot com about painting miniatures. Because my time, especially my weekend time has value. I would rather spend it painting or blogging about painting. I don’t need Liquid Web. My website has been online for twenty plus years. I’ve put up with a lot. I don’t need to put up with shitty customer service or someone who is trying to upsell, upsell, upsell until I fire them. Because yes that is what I want to do, fire my webhost and move my website somewhere else, I just know it is going to be a lot of work. Witness how long it has taken me to update my blog’s taxonomy or all the expert advice I’ve followed and how poorly my website performs.

The future of my blog

I did better when I just did things my way. Server administration isn’t really my forte but I legitimately have done it and things are easier now. I could have just clicked a button and bought the damn plan, but instead I chatted with a human and he truly sucked. And it is because I’ve had multiple sucky interactions with Liquid Web that I put my wallet away and fired up WordPress because I’m definitely in the market for a new webhost.

I have a blog. It has less than 700 posts. I’m willing to delete posts. I have one domain. I have less than half a dozen subdomains some of which I’m willing to delete some. I have less than a dozen email addresses. I think only two are in use. I have the single database behind the WordPress blog. I have some custom PHP again I’m willing to delete some of that too. I just don’t want to waste so much of my time dealing with poor performance and crappy customer service.

Taxonomy ain’t everything

My blog did better before I optimized it and made it more professional. I have the Yoast plugin. I have the W3 Total Cache Plugin, I have Site Kit by Google, Akismet, Health Check, and my website keeps running worse. It definitely seems to run worse since Liquid Web bought Alpha. So updating the taxonomy, optimizing the images, increasing the caching this all doesn’t matter if no one wants to read your crap and you don’t want to maintain your crap anymore because your webhost makes the experience so unenjoyable you just want to rip your entire website down and cancel your webhosting plan.

I was going to write more about trends, how Google is trying to gamify search engine optimization, or how Google ain’t what it used to be, especially after they rolled out AI to answer user questions and they trained their LLM on reddit. But now I need some advice and I may have to use Google or Twitter to get it but I’ll release yet another post into the void of the blogosphere. This may be the last new post on Muskblog for a while, because the ROI of this blog and of updating the taxonomy just isn’t there.

But wait there is more

So after publishing this blog post, tweeting it out in the hopes that someone @liquidweb or in the greater webhosting or WordPress community would care, I see on my phone the following message:

Yes Liquid Web I did abandoned the shopping cart. I was thinking about upgrading my webhosting but your sales person’s relentless attempts to upsell me, just pissed me off, so I abandoned the shopping cart they created for me and after thinking about it still decided to write about my dissatisfactory experience with your service and staff. Luckily I can still upload images and text to the Internet, even if it is a bit slow and I can’t seem to get any workable advice to fix the problem other than “pay us more money”.

Updating old blogs is hard

Liquid Web sent me another email telling me about the shopping cart they created for me, which I didn’t want, which I’ve abandoned. There is still time to change my mind. I am twenty-three posts away from having my taxonomy be changed. This is actually not true I need to go through the old posts in the Technology and Uncategorized categories, but I am keeping those categories so that is less of priority. I had big plans on writing a post-taxonomy update blog post and my web host and some selfish greedy salesperson ruined it.

I have to go to work, you know my actual job, but I need to put yet more time and effort into this website. I’m not sure I have it in me to move webhosts while all angry. I wanted to look more at analytics. I wanted to fix all the busted links I could find. I was reading about optimizing my image loading. All of that is a lot of work and I can still do it then move to another webhost.

If you have any thoughts or advice you can leave it below. However these days, I mostly get spam comments. So although I do write a call to action, I have little expectation that anyone will leave a comment or care about my obscure but old WordPress blog. Twitter ain’t what it used to be either.

This entry was originaly posted on May 26th, 2024, it was last edited on June 1st, 2024 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Liquid Web, Web Hosting, WordPress.