Puh-lease

Do your research before signing up with a web host. Don't just accept cheapest price (although fasthosts is not the cheapest)

See e.g. http://www.reviewcentre.com/products100.html

This time.....

Every time these cowboys have their systems go down on me I swear that this time I'll move on. This time they won't get away with it......

But pressures of work etc and a few days later you forget. Other more important things to worry about like earning a living. Until the next time something breaks.

This evening I've been looking at alternative hosting. Trouble is you look through all the websites, they all say the same thing. Often you are suspicious that some of these companies are just resellers. How do you tell?

So who do Reg readers recommend annoyed Fasthosts customers go with? I just want someone reliable with a decent set of features that are UK based and not a reseller.

Fasthosts are CRAP!!!!

I was warned before I moved our systems over - what an utter idiot.

Intermittent my arse - our mail was down completely from 8am this morning.

To illustrated their complete and utter talentless ability to run an ISP.

Their webmail home page didn't say "System unavailable because of some useful reason", it just sat there for 3 mins and timed out - all day well after they knew.

Their support website was so overloaded it didn't say something useful, it just sat there for 3 mins and timedout - again well after they knew.

These people are idiots - I can't believe they are so utterly incapable of running an email system. My clients would sack us if we ran theirs like they run ours - I intend to sack them after this weeks - and last weeks, and the week before etc etc debacle.

AC is right - the fastest thing about these retards is the speed they deduct your credit card for yet another shitty useless service.

Rant Rant Rant - Useless Useless Useless.

tee hee..

The email service we offer as a part of our business is loss making, and not because of the the work generated during an outage like this, customers who won't use their control panels, time spent setting up new mail boxes and telling them to empty their full mail boxes over the phone and so on.

The more customers who move away from us, the less loss making our email business is, it takes events like this to trigger people to get annoyed. Thanks for supporting our business strategy fasthosts! We've no plans to move away!

That said, half of our company is on the premium mail boxes that were unaffected, half were not, we are moving our own company mail away already ASAP!

So I think a natural order to things is being found. People who are serious about email don't use fasthosts, but you forget there are loads of people out there who are not serious. (the bulk of my customers)

My Experience

In my experience, Fasthosts are truly, truly awful.

If we were lucky enough to ever get through on the phone, to chase whatever support reason big or small, every time we were told our unresolved issue had been escalated and we would receive a call back. We always had to chase. We could tell from our machine logs that issues were sitting untouched for days. Even when we got really angry and demanded some level of service, we were left short changed - but the invoices turned up on time.

There was the major connectivity issue that meant customers weren't able to access our dedicated Fasthosts server. We demonstrated it was an issue internal to Fasthosts but it took weeks to get anywhere, no-one cared - but the invoices turned up on time.

There was the hardware issue that screwed up our RAID 0 mirroring which turned our web server into a machine that could respond quicker using quill and ink. It was sidestepped, ignored, brushed over, deflected and never fully fixed - but the invoices turned up on time.

Before it went really wrong - or more precisely, before we actually tested them - at the start we kidded ourselves they were useless at the small stuff but would be there if we needed them. They weren't.

Thinking about how much hassle it would be to move, we kidded ourselves that they failed us once but it was a fluke. It wasn't.

We moved hosting company and have never looked back.

I would never trust Fasthosts with my business or my data again. Ever. And not in a vengeful way, I mean in the same way I wouldn't put my baby in a car seat on sale for £5 because of quality control issues at the factory...

The alternative is...

Rackspace. We moved over to them six months ago and cannot fault them. Yes, they look expensive in comparison to the "£3.99 per month" bunch, but then you're paying for a service where someone who knows what they're talking about answers the phone the moment you call them up, pro-actively monitor your servers, and help you when you've fscked things up.

All those people worried about loss of revenue from FH downtime should ask themselves if the amount lost is more than the cost of a Rackspace server. Then switch.

Bring back andrew michael

things really went down hill when andrew michael sold the company a few years ago to the german company united internet. I had two reseller accounts and 11 dedicated servers. I moved the servers to Rackspace who are excellent but never found a good reseller offering.

Several times in the past few months...

...I've been unable to access my e-mail. No apologies, no information, no renewal coming from me. Used to be excellent, now pants. What is going on?

Thansk Mr. C Hill...

"Every time these cowboys have their systems go down on me..." :0)

Paris...need I go further?...

Not worth the money

Utterly useless company. I sold a business with some attached domain names, and because Fasthosts had 'switched systems' found I could not get the domains moved to the new owner even though they had opened up a Fasthosts account to make this easy. Okay I said, can you do this manually rather than me using the control panel? No, they could not even do it manually, and they estimated that it would be about a year before they could.

Their stunning technical ineptitude was compounded by the lousy support throughout.

Have you ever looked at their site-building software SiteBuilder? ShiteBuilder more like! It looks like it was designed in the 90's by someone who loved MS PowerPoint v1.00.

Ha Ha

I used to have my domains and email with Fasthosts. Thank deity these problems are a thing of the past since I quit them and moved to a decent provider like UK2.net - who have never given me any problems and whose customer service and tech team are a delight to speak with. *Smug*

Boing

Hmm, can't say I noticed any mail problems yesterday. However for the past two weeks or so I've been getting bounced messages when I send a mail to a certain address. Though I could have sworn the other day that one got through. Fasthosts deny there's a problem, but no other mail (work, Gmail, etc) is having the same problem.

I've never had a problem with Continuum Hosting

I use Continuum Hosting, http://www.c--h.co.uk and I have NEVER had a problem. Used them for the last 5 + years, they are only just now going fully commercial and I know the two directors have invested £120k in hardware. The one director used to do some pretty cutting edge research involving network storage gear at one of the reputable and big IT companies, said company used to make damn good laptops too.

Yes it is a bit of a plug, but like I've said I've never had a problem - I believe they also have a fully redundent system, so if your Virtual Server fails it is immediatly started on another hardware server. They are going to expand this in time, so that they cover several datacentres - thus even if by some freak accident the entire datacentre is cut off the net, they will still be up and running.

Give them a chance, FTW!

SMTP still worked. Woo bloody hoo...

We had no POP or webmail until late afternoon, which caused us major grief. SMTP worked fine throughout. One of our providers outsources our email to Fasthosts and is jeopardising their own relationship with us in doing that.

Memset.co.uk best in the UK for Hosting

I would recommend Memset.co.uk as a UK alternative to Cowboy Hosting companies.

They walk the walk and talk the talk - Nuff said

Registered email

"Even if you have a Hotmail you need their support PIN, which if you need a reminder needs to be sent to your registered email. So you are back where you started!"

Well then that's your own fault. Don't have your registered FH account email provided by FH.

Used to be good....

I've used them a couple of times and was initially pleased. My last experience with their customer service was just awful. Won't be using them again. Always a shame to see a company fall apart but at the end of my contract I'll be off.... recommend other people stay well clear.

You get what you pay for

I work for a shared hoster (ok not as big as FastHosts) and freely admit that we've had issues where for some reason one of the mail servers in the cluster plays up and we've had a bit of a slow down for a couple of hours. We're usually on the ball, customers are made aware of the issue usually before they notice and we provide constant updates on their admin area status pages. Shit happens.

But it never fails to amaze me when we see emails from customers (on tenner a month hosting + 10 pop3's) claiming to be losing £1000's per day or hour because of a glitch that happens maybe once in two years. If email is a mission critical part of your business then you need to plan for failure. If loss of email service is going to kill your business dead in the water then you need to have a failover service with another provider. That's life. Whilst the current issues with FastHosts may be a pain in the arse, I have no sympathy for organisations or individuals who haven't put in place a backup plan if reliable email is a must.

Fasthosts = crap

Unfortunately Im one of the poor buggers that because of the organization I work for we are resellers for fasthosts, so effectively everytime they screw up and loose email/hosting services, i get about 30 businesses who use their services call me up saying why can they not get emails....

Here's hoping the company I work for gets their collective 3 brain cells together and moves providers!!

Oh, they are making me redundant 1 week before Christmas also....strokers!!

Heading down hillfor a while now

I have been with fasthosts for 4 years on a low end Linux home package and have noticed that performance and reliability have been steadily getting worse. My email was down recently for the best part of a day and when it came back up service was intermitent. Im surprised to hear people on dedicated servers are having problems too as I wouldve thought fasthosts would at least take care of their premium customers.

It seems like they are hell bent on overloading their servers and network to breaking point to squeeze as much profit as possible.

Looking for quality web hosting reviews is a mine field, i spent a whole weekend trying to find an unbiased (un affiliated) review site or one that didnt have just as many positive posts as negative for each host.

In the end I choose to go with a linux xen virtual server from MemSet. It costs about twice what I was paying fasthosts but I can do so much more with it and so far its been very reliable (time will tell) and support has been outstanding, questions by email (I dont pay for phone support) are usually answered within the hour and responses often go beyone the "basic technical support" service I pay for.

The main selling point for me when choosing Memset for my hosting was the 1month rolling contract, I figured if they dont lock me into a year long contract they have more incentive to pride a consistent service. As far as I could find they were one of the only hosts to offer this (especially on virtual/dedicated servers)

Possible work round?

I have my domains and mail hosted at Fasthost, but all my mail is auto-forwarded to my ISP's mailbox where I pick it up. I haven't noticed any lack of e-mails coming through.

... just in case this is of use to anyone.