My trials and tribulations with my old hosting provider

Hello, dear friends and followers of The Motorbike Channel. Many of you have contacted me over the last few days because our website was down and you were unable to get your daily news from the world of motorcycles as usual. Our app was also out of service for almost 14 days. As I simply cannot respond to hundreds of emails during the Christmas season, I would like to take this opportunity to briefly explain how this outage came about:

In November, I received an email from my old host, DomainFactory, informing me that I would no longer be able to use my own mail servers — which were part of my plan — but would instead be forced to use Microsoft Office 365 for my email correspondence. At an additional cost, of course. As many of you can imagine, I was not only surprised but also less than enthusiastic about this news. So, for the first time in a long time, I went into the administration menu for my server. I don’t usually go there very often – why should I? If everything is running smoothly, there’s no reason to. There I was informed that I could, of course, object to the migration to Microsoft, which would incur an additional charge – which I did immediately. DomainFactory’s support team informed me that they had received my objection. And a few days later, I suddenly couldn’t send or receive any more emails. My means of communication with you were gone. Just like that…

Of course, I contacted support to ask what was going on. The answer: we have migrated all your email accounts to Microsoft for a fee. When I asked why this had been done despite my objection, the only response I got was: we’re sorry, timing overlaps, blah blah blah, that’s just how it is now.

But I couldn’t quite come to terms with this “that’s just the way it is” attitude… The only logical consequence for me was to terminate my almost 20-year business relationship with DomainFactory and move all my domains (including this website, 33 in total) to a new host. I hope you don’t hold it against me that this took a few days. Please keep in mind that this site is completely free and always will be. And moving 33 domains to a new host “just like that” is unfortunately not something that can be done in a day. But I hope I’ve made a good choice with my new host, so that you can now enjoy this site again permanently and reliably.

Thank you for your understanding and I hope you continue to enjoy themotorbikechannel.com.

Best regards from Portugal
Yours, Achim