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Comment by WallyFunk | Hacker News Reader

I like Hostinger's[0] (proprietary) hPanel[1] which is like cPanel but essentially free and bundled with the cost of one of their plans.

[0] https://www.hostinger.com/

[1] https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/video/hpanel-overview

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I had a bad Hostinger experience. Within a couple hours of registering a pair of domain names through them in 2017, I started receiving spam emails and phone calls on that specific email address and phone line. Within a few weeks, I was getting upwards of 50 emails and a dozen or more calls every day. It took months to calm down, and even now 5 years later, I still get 10-15 emails and maybe 5 phone calls a month regarding one or the other of those two domains.

I have domains registered back to 2008 (and older ones I've let expire) and newer ones that are in their first year, and as far as I can tell *NONE* of them generate any kind of spam (or it's so infrequent that I literally miss it completely).

This only ever happened with Hostinger. And for the first couple of years, every email and phone call would explicitly reference one of the two domains I registered.

So I can recommend their hosting I guess, never had any problems with it, but I would never, ever register a domain with them again.

Thanks for the feedback. 'Had this same problem [not with Hostinger]. It stopped when I started registering domains with privacy. Looks like spammers pull the email address from WHOIS.

That's what Hostinger said when I contacted their support, but I literally did not have this problem with 100+ domains registered with other registrars (GoDaddy, Gandi, TUCOWS, Namecheap, Amazon, etc.) - it was just Hostinger. My suspicion is that they sell your information when you register a domain; I have no other explanation for the phenomenon.

Thanks. It looks like I have to buy into a Hostinger plan to use the panel? If so, then that's what I'm trying to avoid.

Also, the problem with this is that it's going to be a massive hassle when you want to move to another hosting provider.

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