I had a virtual server with a UK, aim listed, hosting company (I'll blog about them separately). One day I receive a sales call. The sales person advises me that the company is discontinuing its virtual server range and I would have to upgrade to a dedicated server. 

I was paying £39 per month for a virtual box. The upgrade was only going to cost me an extra Â£20 per month so I went ahead. There wasn't an alternative.

As I had a lot of domains on the virtual box (free hosting to startups) I had concerns about the time it would take to migrate. But "ah" they said the Plesk Control Panel is included in the Gold package. That will ease the migration.

Little did I know that there was a limit of 10 domains on the box. If I wanted to add more I would have to buy additional licences from Plesk. So the solution was completely unsuitable for me. Why would I pay more to host some sites which have no database backend and use up about 50K of disk space?

Aside from that, Plesk proved to be a completely useless interface for configuring and administering the server. It was't able to adequately configure other applications running on the box like MySQL, PHP and the Apache web server.

Unless all you want to do is administer some emails and domains and you are prepared to pay the licence costs invest in Plesk. If you actually want to control your box don't, just install Webmin. Webmin is free and gives you control over the whole box.

I eventually installed Webmin on the dedicated server but Plesk wasn't going to give up. It had damaged the configuration too much. The only solution would have been to start with a new box, no plesk installation. A dedicated server, without the Plesk control panel, was £49.99, so I thought that was good I save £10 per month. High five, and buy a bottle of wine.

But support tell me a different story to sales. If I pay £49.99 I won't have a MySQL database. So tell me what good is an 80Gb box without a database? At the moment I am migrating my business away to another company, and the cost of the dedicated server package I had has been increased by over 16%.

So that was a good technique, ring your clients and tell them you're discontinuing a product they're using. Switch them over to a more expensive product (50% more expensive). Wait awhile, then up the price of the more expensive product even further. Result: you almost double sales.

The board or the VC's must be getting ready for an exit!