Just had a 3 year renewal invoice for a shared host account from Network Solutions and the cost was $411. We have a number of hosting accounts with many companies and this is one of the most expensive I’ve heard of for shared Linux hosting. I found somewhere to host the site for $22 for two years. This saves $126 per year in hosting – $252 for two years and if extrapolated to 3 years it saves a whooping $378 over three years.

So I moved the site (took less than one hour) and went to cancel the account with Network Solutions. Can’t find anything on their site on how to cancel the account. Found the billing section and there’s no way to turn off auto renew without phoning them (they’re meant to be an internet company – can you imagine ringing Amazon?) I have had to raise a support ticket about how to cancel the account. Four hours later and still no reply. Obviously the extra cost is not related to customer service.

I have many accounts on $1 per month hosts and they give better support than this (wouldn’t wait four hours for a reply to a ticket). So far the new host looks as fast as Network Solutions. I handle my own backups (email them off server for safety) so don’t care if the server is unstable or crashes and I very rarely hear of instability, crashing, broken hardware, etc and we have a number of hosts. I had one account recently that had a RAID array issue, they said not to update the machines while the put in the new drives, they put in the new drives and the site never went down. Don’t remember the cost of this host but it wasn’t more than $3 per month.

The extra costs are not related to usability. NetSol have their own hosting management interface and its a pain to work your way around. I prefer cPanel and that’s the interface on most hosting accounts I use.

It looks like Network Solutions charges this much because they can. Buyer beware.