@blog2ready Sorry for your experience of hosting your own instance. I hope you tried to get some help from the irc channel. I don't know how experienced in hosting you are, but as for now it is probably best to hook up with someone who has some knowledge about !gnusocial when starting to host. Myself is not experienced in hosting own stuff, but with a lot of reading , trail and error and not at least help from @mmn and @hannes2peer in the beginning (sept.2014) I was able to manage. It also helps to run an instance locally to test stuff. As for the lost of followers, yes that is a bit downside when moving to another instance. As GNU social is not developed by a cooperation we need all the help from the community we can possible get. Also I think we must understand we should be as patient as possible when searching for answers. I hope you stay with !gnusocial and contribute the best you can to the progress of the !fediverse