Hosting can be a pain and as a freelancer, I don’t really care for managing the hosting for clients – it’s more or less a necessary evil. With that said, I also don’t want a shared hosting provider like any of the numerous EIG companies and I need root-level access. Because of this, I like to use DigitalOcean boxes with a management platform on top.

Originally I liked to use Nestify.io, which allowed basic management of the instance from a control panel and made spinning up instances a breeze. No worrying about setting up automatic backups or firewalls, as Nestify did all of the heavy work there. For a solid two years, I was very happy with Nestify.

Recently however, the panel started to have breaking issues, managing billing was a pain (you cannot cancel a server or subscription without reaching out to support), and small other issues. In an attempt to try out Cloudways, I moved one client over and then asked Nestify support to cancel the server and confirm billing was canceled. In my support ticket, all I received was radio silence.

The radio silence made me reconsider using Nestify, so I opened a new ticket to cancel all my server instances (which I moved to Cloudways).

While they did cancel all my instances, they did not confirm the subscriptions have been canceled. If I go into the billing portal, it’s still set to renew….

All of my clients had their own billing setup (one of the reasons I liked Nestify), so I’ve now updated the credit card on those to my own, which I now have to do a chargeback when it all re-bills….

While the product was pretty good, the radio silence over a multitude of days is not acceptable.

EDIT: Still haven’t heard back on my active subscription….