Webhosting Review: Disappointing Fasthosts Web hosting, you break my heart

I don’t work for fasthosts and I don’t normally write bad reviews but I have to take an exception and I guess this is the first bad review.

My first website www.steakovercooked.com has been hosted on fasthosts webhosting company since September, 2006. So it has been almost 8 years. I don’t remember how I signed up fasthosts account at the beginning. Clearly, I didn’t google for reviews at that time. I believe if you now google for fasthosts reviews, many of them complain as badly as I do. Well, there are reasons for that.

Price

Fasthosts webhosting is usually expensive than others. For the very basic webhosting package, you need to pay around 5 pounds per month while most other companies offer 1 to 2 pounds, with even better features.

I only pay 6 pounds for a VPS, why should I be so stupid to pay roughly the same for the share-hosting? With the same price, you will usually get better offers from somewhere else. Fact is fact, if you don’t believe it, just google.

Technical support

Well, I have to admit that the support from fasthosts is responding fast. You send an query and it takes less than half day or sometimes even faster for them to respond. But how good is their support? The technical support will ask you to provide the FTP password so that they claim they can look into the issues… I don’t get this? I don’t want to reveal my passwords… That is why I usually change my password to a meaningless one before sending to them.

Unfair Policy

The fasthosts has a fair use policy, which means that the unlimited web space, unlimited bandwith is not actually unlimited. You can’t store your files as backups on your FTP because it violates the fair use policy. You home directory has a private folder but you can’t put backups in it. The unlmited bandwidth for sharehosting should be reasonable because you can’t use too much CPU that affects other websites on the same server.

The fair use policy is ok. But what I don’t like is they will remove your files, disable your website (by renaming your htdocs folder) prior to contacting you. This is very rude. I feel no safety at all.

Once, I asked them who renamed my folder and why, and they didn’t find out who did it and they didn’t admit it! Ridiculous.

Very very unstable, uptime is not 99.99% at all

The fasthosts claims that their server is 99.99% uptime. But believe it or not, it is far from that. The website sometimes is down for no reason. My company has purchased a dedicated server and quite often I have to check its status because it has happened to me many times that I have to reboot the dedicated server from the control panel. The server is not responding at all.

The following has happened to me at least twice. My FTP files are all missing. I login using my FTP and there is no file! The website shows a 404 error.

If i login using SSH, I can see the root directory, which is very very uncommon.

and I asked them through the email support and here is what I get.

You see, they have to refer to engineers. They can’t do a damn shit but at least their altitude is acceptable.

I have 5 websites in total. Before they were all on fasthosts, but it was a very bad time, and I decided to move them to other providers gradually. I am still using 2 on fasthosts because I have made the payment for two years every time (kinda of contract, which has 1 month discount) and it is non-refundable.

My suggestion is, do not use fasthosts.. if you google, you will find better options, and I am sure you will. because there are plenty of other very good choices, such as quickhostuk.

quickhostuk is simply the best. It offers a very cheap VPS (Virtual Private Server) that is trouble-free.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —