I am sorry to hear that Ron.  We had a similar problem, though not nearly as bad, a couple of years ago.  When I started Source of Title I used a local hosting company because I wanted to be able to go their office and scream at someone, face to face, if I had a problem.  Fortunately, we never really had any trouble with them, they were very good.  But, they did eventually go out of business.

Web hosting is cheap, these days.  I can understand why a company would go out of business - there just isn't any money in it unless you have a tremendous volume.  When our host went out of business, they took care of getting all of their customers transferred to another local hosting company.  However, that company was completely inept.  We had a lot of problems with our hosting over a six month period - much of it had to do with email.

We eventually made the decision to host Source of Title in-house.  We made a large investment in servers, software and bandwidth.  Not to mention, we had to learn all about things like Windows Server, DNS, email hosting, Network Address Translation (NAT) routing, automated back-ups, etc.  What we used to pay $25/month for, now costs us over $600/mo just for the bandwidth!  But, it is nice to have the level of control we do over our environment; it makes it possible for us to do so much more.

I am proud to say that what our local hosting company could never get to work, we have managed to do quite well, with over 99.9% uptime.  The little down time we do have is usually in the middle of the night for server maintenance.

Anyway, you are right - the cheapest solution isn't always the best. I hope you are able to get your domain name back and get it moved to a more reliable host.
Best,
Robert A. Franco
SOURCE OF TITLE