Welcome to WebSchwerver
All,
It has been an interesting few years running Webschwerver but unfortunately I have decided that Webschwerver will be closing for business January 1st, 2011. There are a few reasons going into this decision:
1) The provider of the control panel H-Sphere that is used to power Webschwerver was bought out by a different control panel provider who has completely neglected H-Sphere for more than a year. This means there have been no bug fixes, security fixes, etc. for the software for more than a year. One result of using old buggy software is that occasionally hackers will exploit known flaws in the software that have been around for a while and cause problems. Cleaning up the problems have been an educational but nerve racking experience.
2) Another result of using old software is that the control panel software will no longer be compliant with the technical standards used by credit card processing companies. New standards go into affect the beginning of 2011. Unless the control panel software is updated to comply with the new standards, I will not be able to charge credit cards for the usage of Webschwerver or purchase or renewal of domain names.
3) The company (Parallels) that ended up buying the company that created H-Sphere has just recently decided that they want to support H-Sphere again. They are promising bug fixes and updates to the control panel but first you must sign up for their annual maintenance plan. The cost of the annual maintenance plan is more than I paid for the software in the first place which is cost prohibitive.
4) Migrating to a new control panel is cost prohibitive.
5) The data center (Layered Technologies) hosting Webschwerver has become more and more "flaky" lately. Power outages, network outages, forced migration to new hardware to save them money, etc. Every time a glitch occurs in the data center, it is more work for me. The only thing that they seem to get right is billing me on time for the servers and that cost has gone up over the past couple of years.
6) Webschwerver has never been a money making business. At the best it has been break even. Unfortunately, to keep Webschwerver running with H-Sphere and at the data center would require me to raise prices significantly.
Along with the business folding on January 1, 2011, the Webschwerver servers will no longer be available as of January 1, 2011. This means that all web pages, databases, mail, etc. will need to be copied off the servers by that date or they will be lost.
To assist in migration off the servers, there will be no billing for usage of the servers during the month of December 2010. Also, I will be available to assist in any way I can to migrate your data off the server.
If you have paid in advance for a year, 6 months, 3 months, etc. a check will be sent to refund part of your advanced payment based on how many months remained in your advanced payment. To receive the check, please email me when you want to delete your account.
Domain names that were purchased through Webschwerver are still good for as long as you have them registered. However you will need to change the name service for those domain names to a different DNS provider. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about how to do this.
A question that everybody probably has is whether I have any recommendations for a web hosting company. I have always run my own servers so I've never been in the market for one so I can't recommend any. I recommend beginning your search as soon as possible.
If you have any questions, feel free to email me at chrisp@webschwerver.com.
Thanks,
Chris