Hostway vs. Site5 2021

highly recommend for anyone!

environment. Hostway is running PHP version 7.0.33+ (debug version) which is very outdated. It’s been lagging behind for some time, but everything’s stayed relatively stable. An outdated PHP means a less secure environment, which is a major concern.
WP and WC are on the verge of new updates that will push everyone into PHP v8 and above. As long as nothing is updated on the back end, his site will stay up and running; however, plugin developers will soon stop supporting older PHP and require updates for their software to remain functional. If updates are based on PHP v7.4 or higher requirements, which will no doubt be the case, it’ll effectively bring his whole site down.
According to Hostway, they’re running the latest PHP version they support. I ask every week or so when the warning pops up. It’s extremely frustrating to get the same “we’re working on it” response every single time.
Also, Hostway's server is very slow, with a TTFB of over 3 seconds and a fully loaded time of over 8 seconds. Considering the tiny size of my client’s website (~12 pages), this is an abysmal byte rate. Potential customers will click off long before 8 seconds have elapsed. I’ve tried to optimize the site as much as I can (e.g., reducing image sizes, removing older posts, etc.), but I can't speed up the TTFB since it’s reliant on the server specs. I’ve talked to Hostway about this, too, with no resolution.
Just for laughs I pinged a friend and had him plug the site into his servers just like it comes from Hostway without any optimization or caching configured. The normal TTFB on his servers is around 300-400 MS, as a comparison. Just abysmal all the way around, but I can’t get my client to switch and I refuse to use Hostway’s web developer, which will only add to my client’s ~$400 annual hosting fees.

mail was sent announcing a price hike, just a bill that I was planning on paying one month early and luckily noticed in-time that it was 20% higher. NO WARNING and NO EXPLANATION. It looks to me like they were hoping everyone would have auto-pay on and notice too late when nothing could be done about it. I got in touch with Billing and they and claimed an e-mail got sent out. I triple-checked and there was no e-mail, only the invoice oddly two months early. They claim they need the money and I was like, I have a one-page website using less than 100 MB of space and have nearly zero visitors. It's a hobby handcoding HTML, so for what I have been paying for and barely use, they are making tons of money off of me for 14 years since all I have is a Virtual Server dynamically sized for what I use, which is barely nothing. The person in the chat talked to their manager to give me my old price for one time only. I waited 15 minutes. Then again LYING via omission: "Here's the updated invoice. We gave you two monhts free. Invoice still says $144 but with $12 discount, so is still $132." So, they offer to give me my old price of 120 and instead of being forthright and honest, they try to make like they are doing me a big deal by saying they gave me 2 months free usage. I caught him. At first I said thank you (for the two months free) but after looking closely, I was in the midst of responding and suddenly the chat ended (they hung up on me) after they asked anything else?