I had a merry song 'n dance routine with Fasthosts myself.

I cancelled my service, only to find it wasn't actually cancelled and got a £20 "fine" nabbed out my bank account.

Absolutely rubbish after sales service - once they've got you hooked, it's a heck of a job cancelling.

The words "Barge pole" and "like the plague" come to mind...

Fasthosts are shit, the sky is blue, grass is green. These are all well known facts. Fasthosts screwing customers just isn't news any more....

Get monkeys.

What do people expect?

Paris, because you'd get better support from her.

Boy im glad I host me website at home off a dedicated fiber line. Though I can never get enough of these cheap hosting companies and their constant issues with things.

@Matt

Nice one on the Shaft Toss. Hats off to you.

@Matt

Nice one on the Shaft Toss. Hats off to you.

Well don't forget to add to my rep when it finally comes back up eh ??? :-)

Hope you don't get infraction points on The Register - [ maybe after edugeek comes back up my 5 I collected just before the outage are wiped clean..... ]

Anyone got the Paris angle on it yet ?

Worst UK hosting company ever to hit the net.

They are the PC world of hosting cheap and no support

Curious internal structure, attended an interview there some time ago for a role in front line support. Failed miserably.. I was under the misconception that front line support was there to resolve run-of -the-mill tech support issues. It's not, it acts merely as means of checking the human beings username and password against account details before passing the fault report up to second line. About twenty of them man the phones on the cramped upper floor built into the roof space during the day, on nights just a couple of very bored lost souls handle the calls. BTW the aircon is frankly not up to it.

On the plus side if you can accept the job involves the mindless chanting of the service level agreement to distraught customers then the take home pay is quite good and they do look after the deskbots [sorry employees] The coffee rooms are the stuff of legend each fitted with soft drinks on squirty nozzle and an expresso machine cum bean grinder that the local Starbucks would dearly like to get hold of.

Shame the rest breaks are not actually long enough to enjoy a good mug full.

The latter is at least potentially useful.

I think most people agree that Fasthosts have some quality of service issues, but who should we be using as our primary website host? (MS SQL + ASP/.Net)

Perhaps it's worth paying a bit more for better service, but with so many different hosting companies out there, how do we know which one to choose? Google tends to find negative user feedback for.. well.. everything.. since typically more people will write up their bad experiences over their good ones.

Only 52 hours down time. Fasthosts support isn't called 'Extreme' for nothing.

Paris because even she'd struggle to stay down for that length of time.

I've used ThePlanet before, and found them pretty decent:

http://www.theplanet.com

Though they're not perfect (they recently had a fire in a data centre, covered on here), their support was always first rate. i.e. generally clueful about *nix and responsive within a few minutes. (a *real* 24 x 7 operation)

However, last used them in depth over 18 months ago, so it wouldn't hurt to double check. :)

I'd have thought that it's purely one of volume. You get far more shit with Fasthosts than you could possibly get in a bucket.

I use them for buying domains which I then point to proper hosting.

Been with CWCS 11 years and never had a single problem!

"The hosting service has launched its infamously glacial technical support into action,"

Ha ha excellent - that made me burst out laughing having been a previous fasthost victim!

It really is a case of getting what you pay for and FH's contract pretty much says they will try to provide the service, but bad luck if they can not and you just have to wait out any issues they may have.

Even when I have requested 'paid for' support it takes days, even weeks before someone is available.

Very very dissatisfied soon to be ex-customer (migration takes time!)...

J

I switched from Fasthosts (after they overbilled me and refused to refund it) to these guys and couldn't be happier. Reasonably priced, and excellent support.

Dealt with them for 3 years as a reseller and are complete amateurs from management to the help desk. They are the worst company (IT and non-IT) I have ever had to deal with. I suspect like most companies the problem is in management and it filters down to all levels within the company. I thought they would have gone under after the last few disasters but looks like they're still there causing their usual havoc on people - amazing.

My suggestion is if you are running anything that you deem critical/important and cannot afford down time of a week or more (this is the sort of down time you can expect from FH when they have their wobblies) then move to a proper hosting service. I bit the bullet and moved to Rackspace. Expensive definately but their customer service and ability is an example to all companies (IT or Non-IT), I think you get what you pay for. I have not had one problem and customer service is fantastic. I value my business and would not risk with amateurs like FH. If it is a non-business website I'm not sure who I would recommend but anyone other than FH would be better.

We had some significant outages over a ten month period and now we're suing them for every occurance because their "Xtreme Support" was extremely silent and never ever got back to us unless we spammed them. Needless to say, they failed in their uptime guarantee for dedicated servers on each and every occassion (we had a 5 day outage on one occassion and it was just a disk failure). You should be able to get them for the monthly rental, time, inconvenience, loss of business (present and future).

If everyone sues them rather than putting up with it, they might just get the message. The only defence that their Director of Customer Experience, Jolyon Ryall, could submit was "we...feel that we have made reasonable efforts to ensure prompt resolution of the problems reported".

By the way, we now use dedicated servers supplied by HostingUK - and their systems are very reliable and their customer service is just excellent - albeit a tad more expensive. But then, you get what you pay for I guess - we learned the hard way!

I'm posting anonymously because we are still in legal proceedings at this time!