Goodbye 00hk, hello Cloudflare
After 17 years, I am saying goodbye to 00hk.com, a Hong Kong-based web hosting company that I have been using since 2005.
Why?
I own dozens of domains, for recent years I have been buying them from Namecheap and after 2020, I buy them from Cloudflare Registrar. However, for my first ever domain, pixoria.net, I kept it to be registered with 00hk. I must confess part of the reason is I am phasing out this domain and keeping it as my legacy, and I am just lazy sometimes, so transferring out is not always my priority.
Until recently, I got an email from them asking me for HK$168 for another year’s renewal, that’s around £16 or US$21.58! When you have a look at the post from openprovider.com, the median price from the famous registers is just US$10.11, even you factor the most expensive provider from the chat GoDaddy (which I always avoid), is still cheaper.
I always tried to find some excuses, to avoid a major migration, and I always looked to support small businesses. So, let’s investigate if I can have another year renewal with them.
- Maybe their customer service is good? Not really, their turnaround time is good (kudos to them!), but the support team is a bit rude and unfriendly.
- They don’t have WHOIS privacy; and
- Their domain control panel is outdated and unreliable. It is even dead on the day I am moving it out to Cloudflare.
So that’s it, I am going.
A throwback to 2005
While saving for a few pennies, it’s a bit sad the scene of small hosting providers is going downhill and struggling, let’s throwback to 2005 and remind us of what is the scene back then.
It was my secondary school days; the world has pretty much recovered from dot com burst and Hong Kong is also recovering from the SARS pandemic. For the tech world, small hosting providers are hot businesses, benefiting from:
- Forums / Discussion boards, are a thing and are a trivial community around.
- Blogs, flash message boards. (e.g.: hkflash.com/Xanga)
- Smartphones at the time are referring to that e-waste running Windows Mobile (sorry Microsoft, they are bad.) and Palm PDAs.
- Chatrooms! (Back then web chatrooms are a great way for finding friends (and romance!)
- Free web hosting with ad-support services sucks, the well-performed ones are struggling (Uhome/Yahoo! Geocities)
- People are playing with Microsoft Frontpage/Macromedia Dreamweaver
Setting up a discussion board is not hard, at the point of 2005 there are a handful of mature PHP boards like phpBB, Discuz!, you name it. You get hosting, fire up the database and you just worry about who to join.
Setting up a hosting provider is not hard either, back then VPS are expensive (DigitalOcean only comes into the scene after 2011), but co-location is not as expensive as today and the power usage limit is not as strict as today and cPanel being widely adopted, the barrier is low enough for school kids to run a business. There was a term called “Student Hosting” meaning the hosting running by teenagers, who wanted to earn the extra pocket money.
What happened then?
Tom Scott has an interesting video about his prediction in 2012. It pretty much mentioned what has changed, but let me summerise up:
- iPhone brings the smartphone era
- Mobile broadband boom, 4G, 5G with affordable data plans
- Mobile-first design
- Social media platforms, and tech-ad giants dominating the user landscape
- Bite-size contents became a big hit
All this makes hosting a website not as important as before, even the digital transformation accelerates since COVID hit the world. For the last nail of the coffin, it’s the cloud service become more affordable, for those who like home labs, you can build a simple website, using Raspberry Pi.
A Lightsail instance can be as low as US$3.5, with a free SSL from Let’s Encrypt and auto renew using EFF’s certbot. This is not even comparable with GoDaddy’s webhosting(although not recommended).
This reminds me, there’s no forever in digital world, who knows what’s going on in the next decade?
