Can you share any details with the rest of us, without any specifics, so we might be able to better understand your side of the story?
Your comment was marked dead, by the way. Your account might be flagged as spam because your most recent few submissions were also dead. Might wanna email HN about that if you want to post here more.
Hey, we totally understand how stressful this must have been, and we're glad to see your hosting plan is back up and running. That said, we want to clear up a few things.
When phishing activity is detected, whether intentional or due to a security breach, we have to take action to protect other users. Suspensions aren’t random, we follow strict security protocols, and while we understand it’s frustrating, keeping the platform secure is a top priority.
Also, managed hosting doesn’t mean full security management, server security is a shared responsibility. If an account gets compromised (through weak credentials, outdated software, or vulnerabilities in third-party apps), action needs to be taken on both sides to prevent issues.
About data access, when phishing-related suspensions happen, we have to be extra cautious before restoring access. That said, we always work with our customers to resolve these cases properly, as happened in your situation.
Again, we’re glad this was sorted out, and if you ever need help tightening security on your server to avoid future issues, just reach out!"
I had been politely waiting for the OP to update rather than just repost the above response ... but I guess we could assume they are working hard to sort out their troubles with the 70 sites in regard to however many had been suspended. I dare say organising back up as well if that's also their role.
I wonder what actually caused the temporary suspension. Was some protocol not followed? Was the OP not sharing all the details? Was it a case of bad bureaucracy who only responded because of the public backlash? There wasn't quite enough info to tell.
Not that we should speculate since it is the sort of thing where one's proverbial neck is on the chopping block with all access revoked ... 10 minutes or a couple hours could well feel like a lifetime. Resolving problems often take time, possibly only when whomever has been tasked with it begins their next work day.
As for accusing replies they received -- probably just the cookie cutter responses when their account went dead from the outwards facing staff at Hostinger. Reviews take time generally. Again this is just speculation on my part.
I have observed in the nature of the web, some people expected to be treated like royalty or better ... often way better and not accepting of this day or days but this second, now I demand it. It would not be the first time a; not at this minute, in time, under investigation, not until type response is construed to be hostile, unhelpful, being an utter bast@rd, or worse.
Given the reply by Jellyfish8785, their account was compromised. With about 70 sites, it would not be surprising if one or more had an older version of forum or blog software which would allow a scrip kiddie to gain access to one site and from there others.
As for suspended domains. In the absence of a reply from abuse or admin @somesite.foo the next usual step is for netizens who've spotted a big issue is to report the site to the domain host as it is (well has been) easy enough to find and file a report.
What did you find overly complicated about Wix compared to Squarespace? (I don't have a dog in either race... started with Squarespace, but clients found Wix easier to use over time. Maybe that balance has shifted again recently?)
Compared to Wordpress, though, either is much simpler because they're fundamentally site builders as opposed to CMSes. With Wordpress you really have to think about concepts like "schema" and try to understand posts vs pages vs comments, and it gets way more complicated once you start adding in page-builder plugins or ACF or SEO optimizers or performance enhancements... Wordpress is way more powerful (and thus complex, buggy, and expensive in dollars and time) than any of the "build your own website" services, Wix or Squarespace.
Good point about the files. Wix is a walled garden.
But cost wise, $20 a month is nothing. The first time they run into a WordPress security, theme, or extension issue, they'll spend more than a year's worth of Wix hosting to hire a dev to fix it.
I frequently recommend Wix to freelance clients who just need a basic site. Once they set it up, it basically keeps going for years and years, which is not true of most other stacks, including Wordpress. It's an easy service from a single vendor, so no need to deal with different hosting/CDN/SSL/etc providers. I think it's a wonderful thing for clients with simpler needs.
The benefit for clients is that they can pay you once, for a few hours, to help them set it up (if they even need that)... and then they basically don't need you anymore. I've "lost" several happy clients this way, but I'd rather they just use that service than waste their money on a developer they don't really need. It's very easy to use, reliable, and cheap. And they have a single vendor to go for any sort of support they might need for their website.
In contrast to many of the over-engineered Next.js or Gatsby sites I've seen, Wix is far, FAR easier to maintain and I get pretty much zero complaints about it after initial setup. All the other stacks I've ever made for clients, whether they were in Next, React, Angular, vanilla HTML, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, other CMSes... all became a maintenance headache after 2-3 years, and usually obsolete, unusable, and completely rewritten within 4-5. Not so with the Wix sites; they just keep going year after year and the client never worries about it again, logging in to post an occasional update every week or so but otherwise letting it do its thing.
I wouldn't choose to use it for a personal project anything more advanced than a personal blog or a very simple marketing site. But it's fine for what it is, and the web is better off for having services like this for regular people to choose from. Not everything needs a super-heavy JS frontend.
If you want something that just works for years and years, static sites are fantastic for that. Hugo is what I use for my astrophotography blog and it's blazing fast and...well...static
It's not about what I (as a web dev) need, but what works for "halp, I need a website" clients who don't know anything about tech. Hugo still implies the need for a build setup and hosting, which in turn means DNS, SSL, CLI, etc. Which often means more dev time. Your average yoga teacher or restaurant or nonprofit would have no idea how to deal with all that (and they shouldn't have to). That's why the page builders are better for them, IMO.
I recently moved two sites from GoDaddy's predatory WordPress offering (they were charging $1k a year just for some security add-on) to use Hugo + DecapCMS + AWS Amplify. Decap is a fantastic "good enough" CMS to do anything clients of this size need, the only downside is it takes about 1 minute to deploy any changes. Amplify let's you lock a version of Hugo to use, or bring your own, and it will build and deploy your site on any new commit if your repo is in Github or Gitlab. Both clients are currently billed $0.51 per month, and the only reason it is that high is because Route53 costs $0.50 per month per hosted zone. So both these clients went from paying nearly $3k each year for a WordPress site to paying just over $6 a year for a site with nearly the same functionality and none of the maintenance or security concerns. And once everything is all set up, which honestly is not that hard, the only "tech" they need to know is how to sign into Gitlab, which are the credentials they use to log into their Decap admin.
I mean, yes, that sort of setup is less fragile than someone's clobbered-together homebrewed site, but it still requires a dev to maintain. What happens to your client's site if you or they can't maintain the dev-client relationship anymore, for any reason? They'd have to find another dev willing to take over that setup from you.
That sort of thing sounds great for an agency managing multiple sites running off the same template and framework, but for freelancers, it's still too bespoke to be easily portable between clients, hosts, and other freelancers. If someone came to me with a stack like that (and they have), I'd offer to help them migrate it to a more standard setup like Wordpress or Wix for a one-time cost, after which they would pay the vendor directly. But otherwise I wouldn't want to be responsible for maintaining it, especially for just one or two clients.
It's just way too much setup and maintenance. The AWS setup time would itself cost (in dev hours) a month or two's worth of hosting, and Hugo updates or DecapCMS changes would take even more time. Even if the costs to me were $6 a year, the dev hours required to keep a site like that going would far surpass what it would cost them to just pay $20 a month for a vendor-hosted + managed system.
It also introduces multiple points of failure, and if I were hit by a bus or something went wrong while I was on vacation, they'd have no idea if they need to talk to their web host, their CDN, AWS, DecapCMS, Github, or me... they probably don't need to talk to me at all (nothing I can do about any of those services if they have an outage), but they will have no support outside of me.
I don't have anything against self-hosted setups like that for the right audience — I have many such ones myself — but I think they're way more trouble than they're worth for clients who aren't already web-savvy.
I work for another headless CMS (not Decap) and I frequently have to try to help customers who inherited an old site from another agency who didn't properly explain what a headless system is, and they get really frustrated because they end up having to pay a few hundred dollars to a third-party dev just to add a new article category or whatever. It's the kind of thing that would take them ten minutes on Wix/Squarespace/Wordpress, but requires a dev for a stack like you're recommending, and it'd take anywhere from a few minutes (if it's a common stack, like Next/Astro + Vercel) to several hours/days (anything more than 2-3 years old, especially). That will far, far exceed the time and money it takes to host for several years on any of the standard consumer platforms.
For some of these sites, even the original developer who first made them for the first owner didn't want to take them on again — they knew how much work it would be to update them to a usable state again (but that's usually more Gatsby than Hugo).
I'd be very, very wary of recommending such a stack to anyone who is not working with an agency or is already themselves a developer.
At some point you'll want to upgrade the hugo generator, and then you'll need to wade through their release logs. I neglected my personal site for years and I had to hunt down various errors and deprecations. It's out of reach for non-developers to do. A 1.x compatibility promise would go a long way.
My wife's site runs on Squarespace, and she's been self-sufficient since it was set up.
I used to run my personal website on Hugo but after a few years I wanted to upgrade the Hugo version and was suddenly out in the cold - there was no real path to upgrade, everything only works together once and as soon as I started upgrading, there was mismatch between the generator, the theme, and whatever widgets I used.
Moved to wordpress.com since that. No more worry about keeping things working, I can focus on the content. Admittedly, the horrible load times of wordpress.com sites are causing me to look at alternatives - waiting 5 seconds for the homepage to show up is not really acceptable.
I wish someone made a hosted version of a static site generator - they maintain the compatibility between individual components, provide some online editor for content, but the output is just a bunch of static files generated from this. Have not found one so far but if you know one, please drop a line!
> Admittedly, the horrible load times of wordpress.com sites are causing me to look at alternatives - waiting 5 seconds for the homepage to show up is not really acceptable.
It shouldn't be that slow. Did you enable Jetpack caching and such?
WordPress sites can be lightning fast if cached well. I forget what the WordPress.com options are, but if you host on Pantheon, Wpengine or similar, it can be very very fast.
You can also self-host on Cloudways (managed WordPress containers), now owned by DigitalOcean, or use Gridpane to deploy it to any VPS with a dashboard.
> I wish someone made a hosted version of a static site generator - they maintain the compatibility between individual components, provide some online editor for content, but the output is just a bunch of static files
(Disclaimer: I work for one) Headless CMSes can often do this, but usually you have to bring your own frontend. Astro makes this setup pretty easy to maintain (it all works together and is maintained by a single vendor). Of course Next would work too but it's much more complicated. You'd still have to manage the frontend though :(
There might be a static generation plug in for WordPress too. I can't remember exactly.
If JS, maybe consider Astro (for simple blogs)? It has built-in MDX support and deploys in a few seconds.
There's also Ghost, but it's a bit more complex. It has both a paid cloud version now and also the FOSS self-hosted version: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost
I'm a low-level kind of person, both at work and at home. My requirements are static site only, hosted locally and no fuss (if I need to look up how to install the associated ecosystem or deal with a package manager it's out).
If I had to migrate right now I'd probably go with Hugo.
Privacy issues aside, it's kinda cool reading about how Indians use their phones, and also how they use English. I'd never heard "beyond the pale" before, and I'm still not sure what the idea of "multiple Indias" means when some of them are Mexico and some are Africa...?
I've also never heard of the majority of the apps being analyzed or tracked. Must be such a different world out there.
Beyond the pale is commonly used in English. A pale is a stake, and it means beyond the boundary (set out by a fence with stakes, hence the phrase) of what is acceptable. It gaines popularity in the mid 19th century. It may be related to the term "the Pale" which referred to the better controlled more Anglicised part of Ireland around Dublin, but there isn't enough evidence to be sure of this. Certainly not an Indianism anyway.
>I'm still not sure what the idea of "multiple Indias" means when some of them are Mexico and some are Africa...?
Is it not pretty obvious? It is like the phrase "middle America". It doesn't literally mean a different country. It means different wealth categories: the Indians that when considered as a whole are economically equivalent roughly to Mexico, those roughly equivalent to Indonesia (poorer) and those roughly equivalent to Sub-Saharan Africa (poorest). There are ~1b Indians that are still so poor they aren't realistically in the market for your startup app if it wants its customers to ever spend anything, there are ~300m Indians that could be in the market for some apps, but probably mostly free ad-funded ones, and there are ~150m Indians that are quite a good market because they will happily spend money on something that provides value.
From the context, what I gather was meant by the idea of "multiple Indias" was the socioeconomic status of different demographics in India and their app usage. The presence of specific apps gives a tell to which demographic they belong to.
In other words, the richest demographic used certain apps and was equated to folks in Mexico, followed by the less rich equated to folks in Indonesia and the poor to Sub-Saharan Africa.
It's the average cooldude marketing of self-proclaimed "India 1", denigrating their own people and can't think outside of labeling others as something else.
These people are extremely snobbish in person when you go past their sweet talks, who don't understand much about people. I hated the "real" interactions and went back to being an IC in big tech.
Part of it is because they don't understand them, part of it is because they "understand" via someone else who told them stuff (like a redditor assuming everything on r/india is true), part of it is their own contempt of culture due to previous reasons ("ah these people are beyond any repair!"). Basically, ignorance in elites.
