What I detest vistaprint as a web provider

My web site first began with Yahoo’s Geocities in August 2003, until it ended in October 2009. Then I selected webs.com simply because it’s also free and I like their name. My web site became soverf2repair.webs.com.

In May 2021, webs informed me that the company would be terminated by its owner vistaprint, and to keep my web site and URL, I had to upgrade to their paid premium subscription so that my website could be migrated to the Vistaprint website builder. I paid, but the migration was problematic because webs was unable to transfer single image links to vistaprint, so they created an obscure host to store them. For example :

https://soverf2repair.webs.com/Images/Matching_bodies_finders.jpg

Became :

https://c-cluster-110.uploads.documents.cimpress.io/v1/uploads/539b5e36-06f1-4497-84dc-8c599ffd60e1~110/original?tenant=vbu-digital

Also several of my sub-pages were lost during the migration and webs.com could not recover them.

Furthermore, my main page was badly rearranged and I had to spend a long time manually restoring it. The problem was compounded by the complicated and illogical Vistaprint Website Builder. I had to contact their on-line experts many times to make simple changes on my website.

In May 2023, vistaprint became partners with wix.com and my web site was transferred to the wix editor. My main page was badly corrupted and all the links to my sub-pages were disconnected. I spent a very long time manually restoring them. The Wix website editor was very different to the vistaprint website builder, and I had to learn new procedures to make simple changes on my web site. It was a nightmare.

In September 2023, vistaprint ceased support for the webs.com domain without any prior contact, so my web site soverf2repair.webs.com suddenly could not be found even on search engines. The vistaprint decision also meant that my 14 years of hard earned google points and the number 1 position for ‘Nikon F2 repair’ were lost.

Since my web site was still stored in the wix.com editor, wix produced a new URL for my web site :

https://soverf2repair.wixsite.com/my-vxw-site-lyzs5e

But this URL was impossible to remember or find. Therefore, I purchased the domain name soverf2repair.com and pointed it to the wix URL instead.

In October 2023, vistaprint announced that my annual subscription fee will be increased from $50 to $324, for extra features that wix.com provided. The 648% price increase was insult on top of my injury, and the final straw for me. I immediately recreated my entire web site on another host and cancelled my subscription with vistaprint and wix.

Vistaprint is the worst web host ever. They should have stayed as a printing company, as they operated with little care or concern for their web customers. Their unannounced action of cancelling the webs.com domain name meant that all their ex-webs.com subscribers suddenly lost their positions in search engines and they had to earn their points again as though they are start-up companies. There is no excuse for this vandalisation on such a massive scale.