I apologize to you for the delay. Although Beta testing has not yet launched I can check to make sure you are registered on our list for this testing. Could you please email me directly with your full name, e-mail address, and domain. (creeves@westhost.com)

Thank you for your patience.

VPS.NET is a great alternative to meet your hosting needs. Ditlev our CEO has mentioned the possibility of a fixed price break for existing WestHost clients that would like to transfer over to VPS.NET.

I would recommend reading through the WestHost 4.0 forum as there has been a lot of discussion regarding this and other relevant items.

http://forums.westhost.com/forumdisplay.php?f=143

I hope this helps. We will continue to provide updates as often as we can here on our forums or this blog.

One of the reasons that made me switch over to Westhost was the VPS like environment. I do not really need a 100% VPS account, but I wanted my own database server. On my previous host I had recurring downtime because of overloaded database connections. Now my concern is that the same issues will happen again.

Of course I don’t know yet what Westhost’s offer for existing clients will entail, feature- and price-wise, but what I can read so far is not that exiting. VPS.net might be fantastic but I would prefer a plan with fixed monthly cost, so I know what I have to deal with.

You make some valid points. Everyone’s situation is entirely unique with the changes that are in the coming months. These are largely considered positive changes that have long been awaited (i.e. cPanel) by many existing clients. However, given that everyone’s situation is unique we are working to provide a better or comparable solution to all of our existing clients. Remember that our existing client base is our top priority and we want to do our best to help each client find the right hosting solution. As we move closer to this transition I am certain that we will have more information that may alleviate some of your current concerns. We have not lost sight of how we have gotten to where we are today and what changes we need to make to take WestHost and our clients into a brighter future. I would encourage you to stay up to speed on any additional information as it is released before making a decision to look elsewhere. We are committed to do our best to provide a solution that meets everyone’s needs.

I am very disappointed in your decision to phase out Sphera for a lower end shared environment. It would be a good alternative to keep Sphera in the middle in my opinion at a mid range price figure like Jumpline did. Sphera has been the core of Westhost and has proven very stable. Why would you throw that out the window and radically changes things?

I personally hate cpanel, it looks too amateurish for me and doe nothing more that Sphera, The sitemanager is quite slow but that’s not something you go tweak all day and it’s not a major drawback. And I don’t how moving to a lower quality environment (shared that is) can be considered an improvement…

For example, I currently don’t see how a VPS offering with the current Pricing (Version 2) will be able to match the offering of a current semi-dedicated plan with 60GBs of Space at the same price and with similar features, especially since each node seems to be locked at a 10GB space block. That’s basically more resources and speed for less disk space or the other way around with the shared alternative. And the apps auto-installer or at least many apps are going to change apparently, which is a nightmare.

I host both with Westhost and Jumpline on Sphera, for different purposes given the different restriction policies. But if you are going to break stuff and force us on a price increase for a complete different platform, I am afraid I will have to move all my sites elsewhere.

I can only assume right now that Hosting Services Inc. was only interested in your data center operations, and buying your customer base, not caring much about westhost’s previous commitments to its customers. Sadly I see that that as a 180 degree turn from Westhost which I always valued for its great customer support and flexibility.

I personally think you are heading for a disaster with your customer base and that a Jumpline approach would better serve you and your customers.

The only reason we stay in business is because of the support of clients like yourself. When it comes time to migrate off of our current VPS environment we intend to be as flexible as we can to ensure we keep you as clients.

The standard migration path for our shared hosting and resellers is to migrate accounts into cPanel. However, as you have pointed out, we’re already aware that cPanel won’t work for everyone. For those who can’t host their web site using our new cPanel shared hosting then we intend to migrate those accounts to VPS.net.

In all cases we hope to keep prices the same for existing clients. We’ll certainly have more specific information when we draw to migrating away from our current clients to our new hosting environment. If you would like to get a preview of what that new environment will be we are accepting beta testers at https://corp2.westhost.com/wh4betasignup/. We would love to hear any feedback you have!

-Jonny

The features set between Site Manager VPS and cPanel hosting is very different and you can bet that a lot of sites will break if you do that!

I’m actually quite happy with the current Site Manager “VPS” setup, except that I wish they’d make Site Manager load faster.

Going to cPanel shared hosting and vps.net seems like it will require major, major changes to the way we market the VPSes. Will the VPS.net accounts have a control panel included, for example, and will it have click-installable GCC and Tomcat?