Good day Chicago and the rest of the world. I am formally announcing the return of Chicago Gang History after a hiatus since November 30th. Some of you that follow this site regularly may be wondering what happened to the site the past few weeks. I got a good amount of emails asking me what happened to the site and now I want to inform you exactly what happened that caused my shut down and what improvements are made to keep me afloat going forward with my alternative to Pantheon.
On November the 18th I got a devastating email from my web host Pantheon. They informed me on November the 18th that because my traffic was now averaging roughly 77 thousand viewers a month they would now have to increase my payment to them. I was paying them $35 a month to keep this site running but now they informed me my payment was going to be $450. I couldn’t believe my eyes so I thought to myself, ok, maybe I am misunderstanding the pricing sheet they sent me and maybe my payment was going up to $45 a month. I then made a call to Pantheon and spoke with some great reps but unfortunately they confirmed the nightmare that my payment was indeed going up to $450 a month! I was blown away, that is over 10 times the amount I was paying with an alternative to Pantheon. To add insult to injury they said this would take effect December 1st. I told the rep there is no way I can afford to pay such a high price especially since this site only makes a small amount of money each month that doesn’t even come to half of this huge payment they now wanted. After I get done paying taxes and my IT friend Josh his well deserved cut I am left with nothing much left especially since the IRS wants at least 30% of my gains. Chicago Gang History is not a business, it is a free educational site that only makes enough to pay the bills to keep it afloat but Pantheon didn’t care, the payment was going up December 1st no matter what. They gave no 30 day notice as a courtesy, I only had 12 days to figure it out which was not enough time. I found out this was laid out to all their customers not just me and their clients were dropping them left and right.
Needless to say I was in a state of panic as $450 a month is a lot of money for a average guy trying to support his family. This would be half a rent payment or groceries for the family they were going to automatically deduct. Pantheon does not allow their clients to make their own payments, Pantheon only accepts automated payments from your bank, no exceptions. This meant $450 was suddenly about to come out without much notice. Now I want to clarify the letter I got did not say I even had until the 1st, it specified no date so I was panicking, sweating, breathing heavy about to have an anxiety attack thinking about an alternative to Pantheon. No one wants to hear money may come out of your account without warning. The first rep I talked to didn’t even know when they would draft my account but he said it could possibly be sooner than my usual draft date of the 3rd of each month, I was freaking out. Finally, the second rep told me I had until the 1st of the month. I felt more relief but not much more as I now had to face a shut down while looking for an alternative to Pantheon.
I talked to Josh my IT guy about it and he got to work immediately getting me over to a new host which was his direct hosting service. He worked tirelessly day and night, sometimes pulling 12 hour shifts. On this day of December 17th Josh at last completed the transfer and now I am back again. You see if Pantheon had given me the full 30 day notice they should have there would have been no shut down at any point. From November 18th to December 17th is the amount of time it took 29 days to transfer service to an alternative to Pantheon. All Pantheon could offer was to move me into their free “Sandbox” plan and I was 100% not allowed to have one of their lower payment plans at all! Free or $450 a month were my options. I then did that on November 30th and I soon found out that plan cannot support the magnitude of this site and that’s why you got the error message of death when you tried to find this site during that time period.
Pantheon Sandbox plan or $450 left CGH offline for weeks
This was a totally crooked disgusting act on the part of Pantheon, sly, greedy, thoughtless with no regard. I strongly advise anyone to stay far from this company. No Pantheon is not a cheap fly by night company but they are surely full of themselves and think they are god, hence, why they use a Greek god as their logo. The sad thing is the site had unfixable errors on it the whole time I was with Pantheon you may have noticed the affiliations part on the gang pages didn’t work and couldn’t be fixed, a problem easily solved by Josh.
The future is looking good now as habd.as has taken over the hosting created by Josh Habdas. Josh has been with me since day 1 and created the design of this site and deserves much credit. My role is to tell the stories and update pages and pics but Josh does the layout and maintains the site. Now I am very glad to be under his wing completely with habd.as as a host. Pantheon treated me like a big money making ecommerce outfit instead of an educational non-for-profit site and it cost them my business and hopefully more. Companies like this should not operate and rip people off. Inflating the payment more than 1000% higher and giving a lousy 12 day notice is beyond despicable. Their initial letter on November 18th was also a disgrace not giving details of exactly when this would take effect. I was led to believe I was already roped into a scheduled deduction, luckily I don’t have a heart condition or I would have been on the floor.
Please be advised, for a limited amount of time when you google a certain gang from my page it may not show up in the web search because now I have to start all over again building back up with web crawlers. Rest assured though you can access the pages you desire through the very searchable main page. In due time you will be able to google the page of choice and it will be back on top.
I appreciate your support by visiting this site and I appreciate the feedback I have received over the years. I am happy to provide this free service to the world and hopefully now I am free of rip offs and sleaze outfits. There are companies out there that want to dig their greedy claws into anything popular ignoring that they don’t make enough money to support their greedy demands. I personally cannot afford to keep Chicago Gang History afloat with my personal paychecks I work hard to get. Pantheon wanted me to do whatever not caring that I would have to dig into my own pockets. This site needs those annoying advertisements to pay bills, bills to Uncle Sam and web hosting services.
Stay tuned for several updates coming now that I’ve got a good alternative to Pantheon. Some pages I even have to set to private until I finish, but when they are done it will be excellent. Please keep checking back daily for updates and subscribe to the Newsletter from the page footer. Take care.