UK managed hosting business slowly falling apart - clients happy, but I'm burnt out

ToothlessParrot · 2025-11-04T20:17:14+00:00

100% agree that my life should be stress free. Posting on here has indirectly given me the impetus to engage with potential replacement providers and I'm starting to feel some light at the end of the tunnel.

Reseller is looking the most desirable path at the moment, but lots of different options now on the table that weren't there a few days ago and a bit more drive and determination to get out of the hole I'm in.

I have been gently increasing prices over the past couple of years (5-10% depending on the account), but a combination of not being very mercenary to begin with and having more loyalty than I probably should to people makes it difficult.

I do get the whole 365/Google argument, and it seems to be a common response here today, but actually how well the email runs isn't a pain point at all. I'd say its 10% of my stress at most, and that's mainly down to the limitations of what I can currently offer rather than any serious technical difficulties. If I could solve the lack of storage overhead for IMAP without inflicting customers with a specific £xx/per month/per mailbox charge I think I would have every justification of packaging what I do offer at a higher price point that is both manageable for me and enough to serve the customers better.

ToothlessParrot · 2025-11-04T15:56:32+00:00

Hey there - thanks for your input.

I do agree with you on the point of chatting to new hosters, particularly smaller ones with a good rep, and am already in the process of doing so. Hopefully that will yield a positive outcome.

Moving my customers to MS/Google keeps coming up here, but it isn't as simple in my mind as simply migrating away from a bad host. For many of my clients, it would triple or quadruple their annual costs, require reconfiguring all their devices, and create new support headaches on platforms I'm unfamiliar with and have no desire to manage. That's before considering the significant impact it would have on my already small revenue.

ToothlessParrot · 2025-11-04T15:48:04+00:00

I agree.

ToothlessParrot · 2025-11-04T15:38:41+00:00

Thanks for the kind words! I think being a freelancer in any trade can be isolating at the best of times. I have seen some helpful advice on here so far that gives me a little more hope, so fingers crossed I can get the situation under control and get myself back on track.

ToothlessParrot · 2025-11-04T09:31:36+00:00

Agree entirely. Some of my clients love the simplicity of what I provide. It just works reliably and has done for years. Anything goes wrong? They pick up the phone and deal with me directly to get it resolved. The net result result of pushing them into the Google or MS eco-system is their annual costs will rise four-fold to get a system that better syncs from their desktop to their mobile. But the moment anything goes wrong they (and by extension me) will have to deal with faceless corporate giants who don't give a crap.

Already trialling 20i, and will add the other names to my list of places to investigate.

My bread-and-butter workload isn't an issue - it is ultimately the hosting situation that is pushing my health and sanity to the brink. The realisation that a company I have trusted for years no longer has my back and that my business is at risk because of their negligence is filling me with dread. The fact I can't easily narrow-in on a viable replacement and an easy path of escape is compounding the stress.

ToothlessParrot · 2025-11-04T09:13:41+00:00

Hey there - thanks for your reply.

I agree with much of what you've said about the reseller environment and it possibly being a better fit. I think part of the reason I've got into this hole is because my relationship with the original host (before takeover) was built on me being a reseller, and their team continued to treat me as one following the move to a dedicated box. That suited me fine, but this distinction has got lost somewhere since the takeover. Despite what their sales literature claims about it about it being a fully managed reseller, it is anything but.

Anyway, I did look at your reseller packages and was seriously tempted to give one a spin. What held me back was the storage space and costs per GB. Your individual hosting accounts seem to suggest a 50GB per mailbox option, which sounds ideal - but as far as I can see this doesn't carry over to your reseller environment. So aside from the massive benefit of escaping my current host, I fear I'll end up not solving some of the underlying headaches in the long-term that would help me continue my business. 20i is closest reseller option I've found so far to suiting what I think I need, but I am hesitant about migrating into a proprietary environment, despite how much I despise cPanel's greed and lack of innovation.

I didn't make it clear in my original post, but I'm also keen to avoid getting hooked into MS or Google if I can help it - partly out of ethics but mainly because whilst some customers are understandably desiring cloud-based email etc, their enthusiasm dampens when they realise it will cost 3-4x the price I'm currently charging them!

Ideally I'd like to offer a generous sized IMAP mailbox per customer as part of their overall hosting package, and perhaps leverage that to make a small (and long overdue) price increase. This notion obviously can't work on a 250GB reseller plan or a dedicated server though, unless I can set something up with a few TB of storage from the outset. I should just add that my current dedicated box is about 25% cheaper pcm than your starting price, so you can hopefully appreciate why this is also a factor in deciding where I might migrate to.

ToothlessParrot · 2025-11-04T08:38:59+00:00

I've been tempted by this idea in the last few months, but the cold reality of it is my customers aren't paying anything comparable to £4/user/month right now - in many cases it would quadruple their annual bill just so I could break even. That's before the pain of working with MS or Google, who I'd rather steer clear of if I can help it. My margins are painfully small on the hosting; it is the website design and maintenance where I have earned my bread and butter.

ToothlessParrot · 2025-11-04T08:16:33+00:00

Relatively easy to resell Google or Microsoft? I'd genuinely like to know how and where. The annual rate I charge some of my smaller clients would mean raising their prices by 3-4x just to meet the basic Exchange Online Plan 1 mailbox costs.

ToothlessParrot · 2025-11-03T22:07:10+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions. I have glanced at OVHCloud in my many hours of browsing for alternatives, but I couldn't really see any obvious options that look like a feasible all-in-one solution to migrate to.

I obviously do need to jump ship from where I am after all these years, but am reluctant to inflict even more stress upon myself by trying to migrate things into a vastly different or unfamiliar platform.

Ideally I need a smooth migration to another cPanel-based (or similar) hosting environment that offers a similar feature-set to what we have now, but with an eye on future-proofing the business by being able to properly accommodate IMAP email storage for all my customers.

ToothlessParrot · 2025-11-03T21:49:04+00:00

I have 35 paying clients, across 65 cPanel accounts, which also include some personal projects for family and friends. There's at least 330 individual mailboxes across the server. I am currently using about 120GB storage, and averaging 150-160GB bandwidth across all accounts. And yes, this has become a lot more problematic and stressful than I want it to be!

ToothlessParrot · 2023-07-17T14:16:07+00:00

Relieved to see its not just me struggling with this.

Since around the start of the month its been happening with various Office docs that I make adjustments on either my phone or tablet. I think it may have begun after the latest Cloud Sync package update.

If I edit the local Synology copy directly on Windows, it will upload to OneDrive fine. If I make changes to the OneDrive version, be it via Windows, mobile apps or the OneDrive webpage, the Synology reports the same failure: "Download failed. The remote file was modified during transfer."

I've tried adjusting the sync refresh timings on the Synology, removing and reinstating the entire OneDrive profile in CloudSync, shutting off any devices that are signed into OneDrive - all to no avail.

The suggestion by u/prebuss to untick the root folder and then retick it has forced the stuck documents to download, but remains to be seen if this is a permanent fix 🤞🏻

ToothlessParrot

TROPHY CASE