FastHosts Reviews
Fasthosts has been delivering reliable UK based web hosting since 1999. By focusing on quality service and customer service, Fasthosts have managed to become one of the leading UK web hosting companies.
| Hosting Provider | Uptime | Speed | Support | Features | Price | Host Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FastHosts | 4 | 3.82 | 1.53 | 3 | 3.35 | 3.1 Based on 66 review(s) |
Reviewed By: IAN SOFTLEY
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Fasthosts - awfull
I totally agree with reviewer JL.
I have been with Fasthosts for an unbelievable ten years!!! in that time they have become steadily worse.
I have promised myself for at least the last 3 years to change - this year I am.
They are not cheap - certainly NOT fast - rude - unhelpful - virtually impossible to telephone - most complicated online software and when they have a problem....and they do...I waited in a cue for 3 hours, yes 3 hours to speak to someone as my site had also gone down.
It's only fear and laziness that has caused me to stay so long and of course I don't trust them to handle my change over professionally - But I AM DOING IT THIS TIME - wish me luck.
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Reviewed By: Anthony Hopper
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What an absolute scam
I opened hosting with them... was fairly cheap... soon went up to (for 1 year hosting) about £200 with the extra stuff that you had to buy (that most companies include free). Within a two weeks or so .... the server had gone down ... Waited for it to come back up and it didnt at all ... Contacted their technical help and was told its not an issue they can or are going to fix ... they are still demanding payment are are threating taking it through court as I have refused to pay based on I havnt been given hosting.. it anything I think I should be gettign a refund of like the £40 I have already paid them to set the hosting up... Two weeks hosting on a 1 year subscription and they still expect the full fee even though its them who messed up...
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Reviewed By: sean coady
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Fasthosts
A few people I know, including myself, have used their sitebuilder package. However, it appears that suddenly your whole website disappears. The customer support led to a 45 minute phone call to someone who could barely speak English, to the final response which was that the website was lost. This has happened to two other people I know.
The upload speed for the FTP is good and reliable. Unfortunately, the access to your website can be pretty poor and have poor download speeds.
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Reviewed By: J L
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Fasthosts: slow, poor, useless
Fasthosts are a truly appauling company. Avoid at all cost. I've had numerous problems with them, the latest of which was my domains stopped working, and after a month of Emailing them on a daily basis, I finally got an Email, to thank me for my comments. Another month later, after a month of Emails, and I got another Email to say that they were "escalating" this. So, a couple of months with nothing working, which I've paid for, and all they can do is send me one single Email. I've wasted blood sweat and tears on these conmen. No longer - they've lost a customer.
Also, also... their "wonderful new dashboard and front end" is the worst piece of software I've used in my life. Goodness knows how anyone could design anything so awfully complicated where the features you want are hidden away down several levels of menus, and without anything pointing to what you want. And it's so slow! But then so are Fasthosts servers: they run at almost dial up speed compared to most other hosting companies. Avoid.
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Reviewed By: Beate Hohmann
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DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY
They appear cheap, but that is only make-up. If you have an issue with your dedicated server you have to pay dedicated support staff fees first, they tell you that you then can try and re-claim them. Forget it. You never get your money back. When it comes to billing, they are a true nightmare, this is even worse then their support. Billing dates creep forward and forward, and it is totally impossible to cancel their services. They blatantly ignore cancellation requests and their own terms and conditions. 99% chance that the person you speak to is totally rude, you will not be put through to a manager, and if you ask to speak to their cancellation department.... they do not take phone calls! While all this is going on, they let you hang on phone lines, running up your bill with their nice 0844 number. I have just issued a complaints to Trading Standards Gloucestershire.
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Reviewed By: richard c
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Robbers
I just discovered you can't cancel your hositng accounts through the online control panel. You must telephone them and someone is ment to call you back withint 48 hours.
However 8 days later i got an email from them suspending my account and imposing a £20 late payment fee. After calling them they now say you must give 7 days notice to cancel.
COME ON FASTHOSTS - IF YOU CAN CANCEL A DOMAIN NAME, MAIL ACCOUNT WHY CANT YOU CANCEL A HOSTING ACCOUNT.
Is this so you can rob people.
Also when things go wrong they take days to fix it. I had to wait 6 days to get an email account fixed
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Reviewed By: Phil Davies
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Fasthosts poor service
We are a web design company and have been with Fasthosts for 7 years as a reseller and dedicated hosting customer.
Today we are leaving and canceling our accounts due to terrible support – currently over 4 days without a reply on a dedicated server failure.
The billing is underhand and unethical. Telephone support is just used as a front to delay actual action by an engineer.
No hosting company is perfect but we would strongly recommend avoiding this one.
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Reviewed By: Andrew Aldridge
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Best avoided
I only have myself to blame for not doing more research before transferring my domains to FastHosts, but frankly that's not helping ease my pain! FastHost's services are not suitable for running any commercial web services.
I've lost count of the number of times the SQL database has been down across all my sites. Performance is poor even when the service is working, simple queries to the database taking 30 seconds or more on some days, providing a completely unacceptable user experience for my website visitors, I dread to think of the number of leads or sales I've lost since I moved to FastHosts earlier this year.
Support is a joke, with default FAQ answered emailed to you that have little or nothing to do with your question and then the call closed instantly.
Now I've learned I'm locked in for 12 months and I'm horrified that there's no escape from this dreadful service, but their terms and conditions allow them to provide whatever level of service they want with no guarantees or come back. My only hope seems to be a plea to Trading Standards that the product isn't fit for purpose.
OK for personal or casual use, not for anyone who's web presence is important to them.
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Reviewed By: Tomek S
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Fastosts is a nightmare
Really annoying! Very rude and impolite service, and the most important thing - payment. It's a kind of nightmare! They'll take your money off from your account unless you resign from that(but you can resign only after one yeat time period) - without e-mailing you, and you cannot stop ! You cannot delete your credit card info, so they use that without informing you! Fight shy.
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Reviewed By: craig pimbley
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AVOID like the plague
I have had nothing but problems since buying a hosting package with these. There support is called "Xtreme Supprt" There's nothing extreme about it. I have mailed them two times yesterday and still no reply. The day before that I spent all day talking to them trying to get them to sort out some problems. Which they said they had passed on to the 'second line team' and I will receive an email very soon about the problem (I'm still waiting). They cost a fortune! But I didn't mind this at first as I thought I would get a better service. I was wrong. My advice to you is stay well away from fasthosts.co.uk.
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Reviewed By: Jamie Ball
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A New System
After opening a fasthosts hosting account for a client, I came to discover fasthosts have two control panel versions, an 'old' and a 'new'. My clients' old web designer had an 'old' panel and myself a 'new' one, and domain transfers don't work properly between the two. I haven't seen any downtime, but some features are lacking, for example you have to pay to make a database. I would not recommend fasthosts unless you are starting from scratch with an unregistered domain. Support isn't great either.
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Rubbish problems with billing
Nightmare to speak to their billing team, very rude customer service
I have been with them for some time however it's always the case with support or billing to get rid of the customers, unhelpful
Waste of money
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Reviewed By: neil w
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Avoid
I mistakenly had autorenew ticked. Cancelled a domain name and did not realise that you had to do the same for hosting.
They email you an invoice AFTER they have taken your money. Tried to get a refund IMPOSSIBLE. These people are so arrogant and hide behind their T & Cs.
You cannot remove your CC details from their system either.
A horrible experience.
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Waste of money
Hosting doesn't cost a hosting company much- most of what they charge goes to pay support staff. So if you get terrible support, your money is going down the drain. That is why we are leaving Fasthosts. We have only used their support twice, and this second time has been a minor disaster. Five days into setting up one Exchange email address, and they still haven't given me the Exchange server name! Whole days have gone by with no emails, or attempts at solving my problem. The Outlook PRF file they have on their website doesn't work, and they know it doesn't work! They admitted in email. So why is it still there? Complete garbage. I used to work on an IT helpdesk, and we would have been sacked for work like this.
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Reviewed By: A Pearson
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Fasthosts are rubbish
Support staff are rude, unhelpful, slow, and often plainly wrong. You get endless SPAM. Sites are often down. Endless server errors trying to use their web builder software.
Avoid at all cost!
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Reviewed By: gareth harvey
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Shambles
Not very reliable, have now had my site down for 3 weeks, complained and received a useless reply. Today I found out my support ticket had been closed, even though my issue has not been resolved. 3 weeks on and still not able to resolve my issue.
Should have learned my lesson several years back with their security issue. The decided to change everyone's passwords, for everything including SQL databases and issue new ones by post. We hade a database drives site down for over a week.
Have a reseller account, looking around for a dedicated server as far away from fasthosts as possible.
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Reviewed By: Kevin Jones
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More downtime than a sloth on sleeping pills
Using Fasthosts for the past 12 months as a reseller has been an utter nightmare. The first few months were relatively event-free, but the past 6 months have been troublesome to say the least.
I'm looking at Fasthosts 'System Status' control panel right now - believe it or not they have had SEVEN outages since Christmas (eleven days ago!), and 15 outages in the past 20 days. This gives you some idea how unstable the Fasthosts web and email infrastructure really is.
Calling my clients to apologise for internet and email downtime has become a far too regular occurrence. Fasthosts are an embarrassment.
There has been several situations in the past few months where even Fasthosts own website was unavailable! I recall their 24/7 support telephone line was simply 'engaged' during this time too!
Other than the unreliable servers, the performance has been poor and Fasthosts charge for every extra (even extra MySQL databases, standard IMAP email accounts etc.) making them incredibly expensive compared to most other mainstream hosts.
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Reviewed By: Chad Walter
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FASTHOSTS - AVOID
Like other recent reviews, I share the same opinion in that this is a hosting company to avoid. There are too many others out there that excel where these guys fail. The network speed, especially trying to upload files via ftp, is extremely slow. Control panel is not user-friendly. Customer service, as been noted many times in other reviews, is quite terrible. They should be taken to court for their renewal system. My advice, avoid the headache and find another host.
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Reviewed By: ray anthony
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Save your money
I have been with fasthosts for over a year. Their service is not satisfactory. I have had problems accessing my emails on more than three occassions, as well as trying to access my control panel. Fasthosts Customer services (if thats what you want to call it) is a joke.
Once they have locked you in for twelve months, you are stuck.
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RENEWAL SYSTEM VERY DISSAPOINTING
Be warned! If you do go with fasthosts be wary of their renewal system.
I thought I would be reminded via email but they renewed my account automatically.
I rang to say I did not want the service for another year but they said because I did not ring them to cancel, they have every right according to the contract that they can automatically renew and take your money.
I was skint, they kept trying to take the money from my credit card which had hit its limit.
I had no other way of paying, numberous phone calls to them asking if they could help me out as it was a complete mistake that it got renewed.
No sympathy whatsoever!! I am sure they make most of their money from these innocent mistakes.
I hadn't even used the server at all for the last year! I work for myself, Im a one man band, not a big multi million company.
In the end I have had to get a bank loan out for the next 1 years to pay it off :(((
Not happy! Else they would have took me to court.
Very stiupid sistem, iternet company need call for stop contract. They is very fast only to still money.
Please make sure you contact the cancellation department well before your renew date, I shall be certainly be doing this next year! heres the number! 01452 561858
Avoid like the plague!
:(
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Reviewed By: Adam Gerber
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Useless
Customer service is completely and utterly non existent, however customer service is essential as Fasthosts seem to attract more than the average in terms of system problems. Any support mail that achieves a response is answered by patronising idiots who simply don't know what they are doing. Whatever happens, the issues are NEVER addressed. There is no complaints procedure, there is no way of contacting any Fasthosts management who reside in ivory towers, and obviously couldn't give a hoot what their customers think of them. Before choosing Fasthosts, you would be better off wandering down to your local primary school, where you should ask the children if any of them would provide you with a similar service, you'd honestly get a better response from them, and service too. Do yourself a favour, and KEEP WELL AWAY FROM FASTHOSTS!
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Reviewed By: Joe Medina
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Avoid Fasthosts
I am also a victim of there billing/renewal.
They told me my account was closed during the trial period and then 8 months later - started to bill me - with no warning.
On contacting them - I was told since my account was not closed - but only one of my domain was blocked (due to heavy traffic usage). And they will not issue any refunds - even though the account was never used.
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Reviewed By: Graham Jones
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grahamcjones
I had been using Fasthosts for some 6 months, using their reseller account and had been reasonably pleased, however upon my recommendation I transferred a major client to Fasthosts. Well what a disaster, they have changed their reseller control panel and basically rolled out a system that doesn't work. We had intended moving some live sites from my Fasthosts account to theirs, a simple job you would think, well no absolute disaster 4 days in and sites still not live. This is a totally unaccepable situation and this needs to to highlighted. I would not normally go on these review sites but as I'm in my clients office and unable to sort the problems as I'm waitng for Fasthosts support to do something I will spend the time telling everyone to be VERY VERY careful of using this Company for any serious websites. The Company I am a consultant to, deal with large PLC's and are the main CDM contractors on the Olympic Swimming Pool, they are not used to dealing with 'noddy' Companies like Fasthosts! I have now been told in no uncertain terms to find another, this time reliable hosting Company, sorry Fasthosts you have shot yourself in your foot yet again.
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Reviewed By: Jo Smith
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Renewal system very dissapointing
Be warned! If you do go with fasthosts be wary of their renewal system.
I thought I would be reminded via email but they renewed my account automatically.
I rang to say I did not want the service for another year (£1500) but they said because I did not ring them to cancel, they have every right according to the contract that they can automatically renew and take your money.
I was skint, they kept trying to take the money from my credit card which had hit its limit.
I had no other way of paying, numberous phone calls to them asking if they could help me out as it was a complete mistake that it got renewed.
No sympathy whatsoever!! I am sure they make most of their money from these innocent mistakes.
I hadn't even used the server at all for the last year! I work for myself, Im a one man band, not a big multi million company.
In the end I have had to get a bank loan out for the next 5 years to pay it off :(((
Not happy! Else they would have took me to court.
Please make sure you contact the cancellation department well before your renew date, I shall be certainly be doing this next year! heres the number! 01452 561858
Avoid like the plague!
:(
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Reviewed By: Drew de Soto
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Fasthosts
Very poor. mail server go down all the time, they are slow and ignore technical or customer service requests. They are just too big.
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Reviewed By: Jason
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Terrible
I am a long term (over 5 years) customer of Fasthosts. That ends today.
They have a 30 days payment term - not monthly but 30days - this means that your payment date creeps forward every month until you are paying at a totally inconvenient time. This means payments are missed and then you are charged a £20 admin fee. It is impossible to fix this without calling every 10 months to move your pay date - sometimes they refuse to do this unless you pay another month in advance.
Currently certain people cannot get an email through to me (this after I paid) and 4 weeks ago they delted 30% of my data from my webspace without even letting me know in advance. This happened about 3 months after they emailed me to say I had \'unlimited webspace\'. They then took over 2 weeks to give me back photos of my children! 2 years ago they reset all of our passwords (all of them) and refused to issue new ones any way other than by post which resulted in a lockout of over 3 weeks from my account and services. Today\'s admin charge caused by the continual creep of the payment date) is the last strw - I am out of here. I would call them but they have just moved the call centre to India and it really does not work.
You really should avoid Fasthosts - they used to be great but they are now terrible on technical quality, customer service, support, and billing.
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Reviewed By: Gregory Hine
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Gregory Hine
The SiteBuilder Support desk is uncontactable. The 'contact us' facility opens up a 'new message' in Outlook but there is no address in the address bar and their address cannot be found anywhere else - so no contact can be made with the support desk. All very unsatisfactory and falling very far short of the promises that it is easy to get a site up and running in very short time. I have wasted a day getting nowhere.
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Reviewed By: Dave Allen
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Dave
I am very upset with fasthosts. I have been using them since 2001 and they used to be very good. Quick support and very occasionally did anything go wrong.
I now host 7 websites with them and since early 2009, it's all gone down hill. Severe down time on all websites and on emails. You can only send an email to 10 people at once! The downtime is now unacceptable and I will be looking else where. It is embarrassing as I had recommended them to other colleagues.
Avoid unless you're 'messing about.' The customer support is rude and won't answer the question. I phoned up and said my website was down (and typically during the phone call the website started to work) so they said 'case closed'. I argued I wanted to know why it went down. Their attitude was 'it's not broken at the moment, don't complain'. They also no longer appear to use UK call centers, so communication is normally difficult due to accents and quieter phone lines.
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Reviewed By: Harkiss
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Crashing bore
Fasthosts now seem unable to deliver an email hosting service and issues of taking from cards 30 days ahead without notice remain.
Their email hosting is down as I write and has been for over 24 hours, virtually without a break.
Time they closed and let others do a better job
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Reviewed By: Alan Myers
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Avoid Fasthosts
The worst hosting company I have ever used (with the possible exception of Servage). The Technical support is worse than useless. it is so frustrating contacting them as they basically ignore everything you say and tell you all is fine. Even when you convince them that there is something wrong and you get through to second line support they simply say the same. it appears that they do the briefest of tests if that before dismissing the case. Constant error 500 server misconfigured errors appear more often than not even trying to serve the one line phpinfo command. I have no confidence in their servers or their technical ability to maintain them to an acceptable standard.
Don't try and get your money back either as the people at customer service (refunds) are simply rude to the point of obnoxious. In a nutshell, unless you are serving a basic HTML website you are going to have problems. AVOID them at all costs. If you've just bought, you've wasted your money, if you're nearing the end of your contract for goodness sake MOVE somewhere else. This Webhosting company has lost the plot.
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Reviewed By: Mike Gatward
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FastHosts
I have been using Fasthosts for just over a year now and have found them to be a very reliable UK hosting company. I have not had any major problems and i have found their support system to be very useful. i would highly recommend using Fasthosts
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Reviewed By: Sam
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Sam
These lot are a complete and utter joke... DO NOT USE THEM...
Reason?
They do not support RSS feeds, and only after registering a hosting package did I realise this... As a result, I wanted to cancel, they refused saying I would have to pay for 12 months worth of hosting for a package that I had no use for!!!
Explained the situation to their amateur support staff who spoke over me and interrupted me consistently...
My advice and experience is to DEFINITELY NOT USE THIS FIRM.
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Reviewed By: Shaks
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NEVER EVER USE THESE LOT
Used Fasthosts to purchase domains.....was the biggest mistake I ever made. Overcharged me, no refunds. Customer service department useless, couldn't get through to Billing as there "was a problem with their internal telephone system" and altogether very, very bad. After speaking to customer service, was told by the "ever so nice" (not) customer services assistant, was told that I had to pay up monthly (can't leave just by paying up for the entire year because I was so sick of them), that she wasn't and couldn't get involved with the overpayment, wasn't her remit!
All in all, one word of advice - NEVER EVER USE FASTHOSTS. You'll regret it in the end.
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Reviewed By: Cath
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STAY WELL CLEAR
Fasthosts are possibly the worst company I have ever had to deal with. Fair enough, we haven't had any issues with our site going down at any stage, but they have just transferred from IIS6 to IIS7 without informing us, and as a consequence there are many flash elements of our site. Had we been informed we could have made alternative arrangement.
We have spent literally hours and hours over the last few days waiting on hold with their technical support who were rude, abrupt, and useless. We will be launching a complaint to the appropriate governing body.
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Reviewed By: Duncan James
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They fine you using small print in the contract
I gave up on Fasthosts after they fined me £20 for late payment of a montly charge. I had been a long-term customer and the problem was that they consolidated two of my accounts into one account. This administration simplification should have helped me... but they did not tell me they were doing it and I spent weeks unable to login. When I finally managed to log back in I discovered that my account had gone into the red. They blamed me. They are nutcases... I am a businessman and would never treat my customers like that. It was clearly their fault... and using some of the small print in the contract they fined me £20! What is that about? They change my login details without telling me and then fine me for not logging in? Eh? Otherwise they were good, but I just could not trust them any more so moved provider. They still have two of my old website urls by the way and a year later I still cannot get them off them.
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Reviewed By: Russell Dodd
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Not that great
I work freelance for some clients creating web applications; some use fastHosts, some use Titan: the difference in customer service in World's apart.
Titan will allow you to change directory permissions, Fasthosts will not. Titan help me out with any query I have, even at the benefit of FastHosts (when FH didn't answer my question!)
Fast hosts, refused to redirect a .com address to a directory on their server, but Titan did.
Connecting to a Fasthosts SQL Server directory is an awful pain in the neck. Titan sent me details to log into their VPN, connected to the database in 30 seconds.
My advice is stay away from awful Fasthosts. I'm sick of receiving their generic replies to my queries!
The positive is the servers are always up
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Reviewed By: Jeanette
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READ THE SMALL PRINT
Read all the reviews online you can - I wish I had before I signed up for a package I couldn't use. You have to pre-pay and they auto renew without warning you even though they can see on their records your account is empty, very poor customer service, no refunds, issues with using for commercial sites, no backup. Avoid.
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Reviewed By: Richard Lockton
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Problems with Joomla site since Load Balancing added
I thought adding Load Balancing to a domain which is currently a joomla site would improve the serving speed but despite adding load balancing over ten days ago there is no improvement in performance and I'm still getting messages in my browser saying:
www.mywebsite.eu is pending on this server. Please allow up to two minutes for www.mywebsite.eu to become fully active.
This goes on for hours...
My client must think I'm a complete wally - and I am - for using Fasthosts in the first place!
The whole thing is a joke. I would not recommend them.
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Reviewed By: Agnes Sam
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Poor Customer Support
My web designer recommended Fasthosts to me when Lycos was bought by Strato. Fasthosts has never answered the telephone no matter what time of the day or night I have phoned. They have an 0870 tel. no. All they do is send an Auto Response. They gave me the incorrect Nameserver so I could not direct my website to them. Lycos has ceased operating and I cannot get a human being to speak to about my package with Fasthosts. Their Sales people answer immediately when you are purchasing a package, but once you're hooked you're on your own. Fasthosts do not provide 24/7 support. My website is down and I am paying Strato and Fasthosts.
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Reviewed By: silo can
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collection team will be dealing with you
i made a horrible mistake by buying space from fasthost. Here are the reasons goes:
1. it's a lot expensive than their rivals.
2. there are hidden charges.like if you want to have database in your website it will cost you another 26 quids. Without the database only website you could have is plain html site.
3. it says 30 day trial on the agreement.when i want to cancel it during this 30 days they simply ignore my mails. Then when i finally got in touch with them, they said 30 days expired and they could cancel the account only if there was a technical problem from their side.
4. they sent me email they i had to pay rest of the amount around £120 (12x10) otherwise COLLECTION TEAM will be dealing with me.
5. i called them TO complain and i wanted to talk to a supervisor or manager, assistant, Mark, answer was "i don't have a supervisor or manager"
6. they sent me a wrong email. it means your information can end up someone's account.
over all DO NOT GO NEAR THEM.i still pay for my mistake. 10 pounds coming out of my account every month for the service i don't get is painful. i haven't even logged my account over 9 months.
i repeat DO NOT GO NEAR THEM.
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Reviewed By: dan
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Awful
Do not use these unles you are a sado, they have no support do not fix any problems and will drive you insane with Kafkaesque idea of treating customers. Avoid at all costs!!
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Reviewed By: Matthew Fagg
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FASTHOSTS - AVOID
I have been a fasthost customer for around 4 years. I have 3 websites with them.
I soon wanted to move one of my web hosting packages to another site (recommended by web site designers due to what they called ‘indexing’).
After I called them to cancel my order I was charged for another year a few months later when my hosting was supposed to expire.
They have refused to refund me laying the blame solely on me and are refusing to take responsibility for incompetent staff.
I am now moving all my accounts away from them as customer service is at the very, very bottom of their priorities.
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Reviewed By: Ian Moore
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no support for out of date credit card holders
I have to say that I was resonably satisfaied with Fasthosts until one day I had a problem with email.
I had received a notice saying that my credit card details had expired though, as I still had 6 months before my service expired, I did not bother to update them.
Calling support I was told that without valid credit card details support would not be offered. As I did not have all of my details with me in order to renew the credit card, I was left for three days with email problems.
I am moving over to eukhost.
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Reviewed By: Graham
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Graham
Just moved away from FastHosts.
Worst service I have had from anyone in my 42 years on this planet.
They locked my control panel because they kept requesting I pay them £00.00 and my bank rightly rejected it. No money was owed I was paid up fully. They removed my website and it took 7 days to get it sorted.
Their tech department is a total waste of time could not tell me anything and did not have a clue as to what the fault was, everytime I rang up (which was everyday) I had to explain again what was wrong, so no updates on their database then.
Their managers are spinless I requested about 6 times to talk to someone in authority and all I kept getting told was all the managers are in a meeting or are not available, no one would take the call.
Avoid them they are the pits
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Reviewed By: simon appleton
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STAY WELL AWAY
Have now used these guys for around 8 years and have watched them get gradually worse and worse. Absolute jokers... 3 good reasons why:
1. Cost me about 1 solid week of messing around last year when they messed up their security and had to change the passwords on every single account they have.
2. I have never waited for less than 15 minutes to get through to tech support - often abrupt and rude when you do get through
3. They have just suspended my site because they say it is using too much CPU Resource - having tested it thoroughly (2 whole days of work), the scripts are fine
Stay away at all costs...
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Reviewed By: Mike Johnson
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Billing Practices
We had accounts with Fasthosts. We cancelled them in late 2007 and we have emails to confirm this. They've continually tried to bill our card for renewals and threaten additional charges when they fail. Their approach to billing and refunds is awful. The whole system is designed to get your card details, bill you for renewals with no notice and make as many additional charges as possible. Complaints are given low priority. We will never use them again.
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Reviewed By: andrew
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andrew
this company is down right crap!
i have not one but two packages too big for me.. i want to downgrade. answer, sorry you are 24hrs late on renewal and need to pay outstanding balance. so that;s what i did last year. i also did ask for the account to be closed and downgraded. that never happened and this year is back to square one. with automatic renewal and no warning of a new year starting on the contract this company are real cowboys. hight NOT recommended
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Reviewed By: Todd
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Avoid like the PLAGUE
I have been with fasthosts for over 12 months now and only took it up because it seemed an easy option for getting a small personal site up and running.
I was involved in the big security breach in which they changed all your passwords on you.
Then when you try to close your account, for obvious reasons, they give you different answers about how to do that. Finally they had the audacity to ask me for a password that I didn\\\'t have (which THEY changed)!
They WILL NEVER refund, even if they are at fault - EVER. Even as you begin to mouth the words ref..they come out with the standard terms and conditions response.
I am a very reasonable person, but the way fasthosts conduct their business is unreasonable and my hope is time will show that.
I ended up contacting my bank and insisting on a chargeback on my account as in my opinion I have not authorised these charges and have been trying to cancel my account since april.
AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!
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Reviewed By: Peter
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FastHosts.co.uk Review
I found myself writing a bad review on another supplier and realised that people only ever tend to moan about things never to praise.
I have been with Fasthosts for 18months and the service I have received has been excellent. UK based helplines, talking to people who will sort out any problems.
After reading the bad reports on Fasthosts I am very surprised by the comments and can say I have not experienced any of the issues raised. The passwords saga is well documented and could happen anywhere, when these things do happen you have to resolve the problem immediately and professionally, Fasthosts did this and maintained the security of my domains.
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Reviewed By: jonespost
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Like trying to reason with my vacuum cleaner
I was attracted to fasthosts by the prices (who isn't) and the apparently good user interface. I had a number of glitches. For instance, I ended up with two accounts due to login problems at one point, and after I did the merge procedure, the two accounts sometimes appeared merged and sometimes did not. Then followed security problems and the inconvenience of having to change account settings for my own protection. Then came non-functional control panels for various sites, in particular one that they were hosting which I wanted to cancel.
The bottom line is, their answer to everything was "please refer to our terms and conditions. " Basically they use that as their catch-all disclaimer if their service is down or you have a billing dispute. It's like trying to reason with my vacuum cleaner.
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Reviewed By: Layde
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Not impressed
Not having dealt with the hosting of sites before, I was quite pleased when I signed up with fast hosts a year ago. It has been downhill since then, starting with the changing of all passwords a couple of months ago, which meant that all of my sites (which need to be updated daily) were displaying incorrect info causing major headaches. Now, Ive made the mistake of entering an incorrect account number and they slap me with a £20 + vat bill after the arrears were cleared. Not impressed.
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Reviewed By: Chris Pozzi
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Worst service yet
I often read these sorts of reviews and question their credibility. It could be that a disgruntled customer has just come off the phone with someone, didn\'t get their own way and has decided to vent about it to anyone that cares to listen. This review, however, is different. I cancelled my Fasthosts dedicated server 3 days ago and my feelings are still the same. Here\'s why.
About 2 weeks ago someone hacked one of my websites on my dedicated server with Fasthosts. I immediately restored my website to full working order and ensured (at command line) that all permissions were set for each file/directory. A few days later it happened again. Now I am no expert, so perhaps running such a large site on a Linux server with little/no knowledge of it was a bad choice. With this in mind, I phoned Fasthosts for some help. I\'d been a customer with no problems for 9 months so I thought I would give it a go.
My experience with their customer support was the worst I have ever had anywhere. I spoke to a young lad called ***** for over 20 minutes about how to resolve the problem and he insisted I pay £120 per hour for an engineer to fix the problem. Estimated fix time? At least 2 hours. \"But I made sure each directory had the right permissions set, I just need someone to run a security check. It shouldn\'t take more than an hour?\". *****\'s answer (after referring again to 2nd line tech support) was that I would still need to pay £120 per hour to get it looked at.
I came off the phone, thought for a day about what to do and realised I needed a host that would help me manage the server from a software perspective. I am now with UK2 and am extremely happy, but that is another review all together!
In summary, why not to go with Fasthosts:
- Very slow support. A lot of \"We\'ll get someone to call you\" but they never do
- Very poorly trained \"support\" staff. Every call you make is referred to 2nd line support. Every. Single. Call. Expect at least 15-20mins a time on the phone to them.
- No help if something goes wrong. Not important to some people, but very important to me. I wanted help with some of the applications they had installed on my server by default and I got nothing.
If you are looking for a host that supports your server from top to bottom and actively wants to help you grow your site/business, Fasthosts is not for you. I\'ve been stung and I would hate for you to be too.
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Reviewed By: Sebastian
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Seb
Now this is my last provider - and after reading about their service on their own, nicely designed website and the promises of the super-duper technical support I\'ve decided to purchase a dedicated server from them.
They state that:
\"Owning a Fasthosts dedicated server is worry free, thanks to our comprehensive technical support. Our technical support website features knowledge base articles dealing with all common dedicated server issues. What\'s more, our UK based support team is available by phone and email 24x7.\"
This information is on their site at the following address: http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/dedicatedservers/managed-options/
Now - just to clarify - this is far from truth - and I\'ve just found out on the first day of the service.
They are using their own control panel together with the Matrix panel to manage the hosting.
I\'ve never used this panel and I\'m not hosting literate - I told them this when I was making a purchase over the phone.
I was assured that their technical support will be able to help me - no problem.
Well - it didn\'t. I called them the same day I\'ve paid for the server to ask how to set-up a domain and create an FTP account for it. They\'ve send me a links to the knowledge base pages. After reading the content of the pages I still wasn\'t able to set it up. I\'ve decided to call them again and this time the guy told me that they don\'t provide this kind of support and hang up on me.
I\'ve decided to send an email to their customer support team with the complain and request to cancel my account with them and to refund me the money.
Because it was Friday evening I had to wait till Monday, and call the customer support myself, because I haven\'t heard from them.
I\'ve explained situation and the answer I\'ve got was that they can\'t cancel my account because it\'s a contract and it is till March 2009. They said that I can send an email with the request to the other email address and that I should get the answer withing 14 days. - impressive isn\'t.
Well - I\'ve done it and I\'m still waiting for the answer.
The problem was that I needed desperately to have hosting up and running on Monday which I clearly said when I was ordering the server - but I guess before you pay for the service - everything is wonderfull.
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Reviewed By: Darren Sutherland
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Just moved to another host!
Just moved to another host. Disgraceful billing tactic, no reminders, just an email saying "we've taken your money". Telephoned and said I didn't get a reminder, they replied they don't send them anymore. You need a valid Credit Card on your account at all times or they say they will close the account. They also don't give refunds.
Avoid, avoid and avoid.
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Reviewed By: Jamie
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Good at billing
Uptime, speed and performance good, average price. However you can waste hours on their dreadful website. It's particularly difficult to stop services though you can be sure Fasthosts are very reliable for billing you for them and applying any charges!
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Reviewed By: Ian
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Fasthosts Review
I fell foul of their domain renewal system as I was unable to access my account to cancel a domain - as they had changed the password without telling me the new one! The reset password page didn't work for ages and the phone system was dire.
They refused to refund my £10.
I have now sent 25 emails and had about 20 back(surprise surprise!) over the past 3 months so I think I have now cost them more than the £10 in their time. You have to have a live credit card on their system and any changes in T&C could allow them to steal your money - and the credit card companies won't get it back for you.
Fasthosts are terrible and use them at your peril - their support requires a PIN for them to answer it and their escalation procedure is not existent - the worst I have ever come across.
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Reviewed By: Mark
URL: Hidden
Fasthosts Refund - Forget it
A domain I had with Fasthosts was recently renewed without any prior warning.
I contacted them straight away to cancel the the account which they did immediately but refused point blank to refund any money for the service I would not not be receiving. (Even though I was inside the 7 day cooling off period for internet purchases).
My advice - avoid them!
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Reviewed By: Mike
URL: Hidden
Dissapointed
Currently migrating away from them to eUK... Very poor support as with other comments telephone, email and general customer care is shocking
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Reviewed By: John Carpenter
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John Carpenter
I would like to add my feelings of frustration and disgust to the thousands of messages currently doing the rounds on web forums re: Fasthosts customer care service.
I understand that the company is currently going through a difficult time and as a result, demand for customer care is running high, but no company in 2007 can expect customers to wait for literally hours on phone lines, being charged premium rate 0870 fees simply to speek to an operator. The automated email service that they offer as an alternative is simularly unsatisfactory. To advertise a '24/7' Customer Care service as they do is false advertising. In my own case, I waited for over an hour at 3am on hold for service, only to move from 41 to 20 in the queue. I had to call from abroad on a mobile. I waited for so long that my phone eventually ran out of batteries. Luckily I found a standard rate phone number to call them on, otherwise it would have cost hundreds of pounds for nothing.
If Fasthosts really were caring for customers, they would allocate the extra revenue currently generated via the 0870 helpline to human resources and staff the phones properly.
If you do need to call Fasthosts, call their standard rate phone lines on 01452 541499 or 01452 541250 and save yourself a packet.
Better still, do like so many others and leave for a better service.
1 STAR!
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Reviewed By: Andrew Smith
URL: Hidden
Logins down
Fasthosts login system has not been working since Friday. Not a happy customer.
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Reviewed By: Judy Hallam
URL: Hidden
Fasthosts
After the hacker fiasco in October 2007, we had nothing but trouble. Firstly, we had to change ALL our passwords. Then MySQL worked on only 2 of the 3 load balancing servers. Got them to remove load balancing. The new server was not storing session cookies and took them the best part of week to sort that out.
Now (30/11/07) we have had another email stating that some customers hadn't changed their passwords and so Fasthosts have taken it upon themselves to reset everyone's passwords... SO... now MySQL isn't working (again) because they've changed the password and I don't know what it is. Can't get through on the 'phone (permanently engaged). They say the passwords are being sent by Royal Mail. GREAT! It's Christmas (in case they haven't noticed)... how long is it going to take before we get the new password? In the meantime, customer websites that need to be live before Christmas cannot be reviewed and checked by our customers, because MySQL doesn't work.
This is the final straw. Why the hell did they need to change passwords that we'd already changed ourselves back in October? I have a sneaking suspicion that they've been attacked again... but they won't admit to that will they?
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Reviewed By: Colin
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Colin
Fasthosts dedicated servers offer very poor support for any physical hands on work to the server. We were locked out of our dedicated server and requested a password reset. Fasthosts charged us £70 for for an engineer to do this and told us this will probably be done in the next 2 days but could take up to a week. However it was only after 5 weeks that the engineer had looked at our requested! Due to the ticketing support system the communication line had resulted in us being sent to the back of the support queue again! The support staff on the phone still could make no guarantees about dates. Another 2 weeks passed until the engineer had managed to look at the server and without warning us, rebuilt the server without the original website files, thus all of our websites were down. Again I phoned support to ask when they will restore the websites & data and yet again they could give me no guarantees about when the website data will be restored.
Other points to stress for their poor support is:
1) Their responses to customer support emails are short, vague without answering all the questions asked. It seems like the email responses are rushed, probably due to the amount of support they have to deal with.
2) The response to customer emails does not contain the original sent message, only the ticket number and this can be very difficult to keep track of the support emails between yourself and fasthosts.
3) It seems that fasthosts has grown too big and cannot offer the support needed for serious website hosting.
I would advise anyone not use fasthosts dedicated servers. If you want to host vitally important websites then look elsewhere.
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Reviewed By: mulverine
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Do not go near them
I have been with fasthosts for many years but recently, their billing practices and customer services have taken a definite turn for the worse.
After having my wallet stolen, my card details on the fasthosts website were not up to date. Not realising my hosting account was due, fasthosts tried to bill my card, then when it failed, charged me £23 'debt recovery fee'. After many emails trying to cancel my account or get a refund for this fee, fasthosts were simply not interested and refused to give me a refund. This was for a product that I was paying 12 months in advance for, hadn't yet received and no longer wanted. They didn't care - I had to pay with no refund. They gave me 3 months free to keep me happy. They also claim they sent emails reminding me about my card - none of which I received, but they didn't believe me.
Then again, a few months later I saw that 2 of my domains had been automatically renewed - payment taken straight from my card. I didn't want these renewed without prior notification and again they said emails had been sent - they hadn't. They also won't refund the payments even though it was taken 30 days before the domain expires.
Be careful with your domains and account renewals. Fasthosts automatically take payment UNLESS you opt out. AND they charge you a fee if your cards are out of date. AND they don't send reminder emails! AND they don't give refunds once paid!
Needless to say I won't EVER, EVER go near fasthosts again and will advise everyone not to go near them with a barge pole.
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Reviewed By: Simon
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Fasthosts Dont make me laugh
I have had the terrible task of having over five hundred domain names with Fasthosts after we purchased a business.
I can honestly say that they are the worst hosting company out there. Sites are constantly down, main phone numbers engaged etc. If you have a website or emails that you care about, DO NOT use these cowboys.
Placing your site on your bedroom computer would be better.
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Reviewed By: Mr Bump
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Things can only get worse!
Fasthost and UK Reg used to be really good... but over the last couple of years their services and reliability has gone down the pan.
Problems include: Sending reminders after invoicing you so you don't get chance to cancel. Broadband going down for 2-4 day periods with no answer as to what's happened. Problems with their sites that stop you getting access to control panels. Everything is charged as an extra. Tech supports 'not our problem' attitude.
I would have recommended them 2 years ago, but I wouldn't recommend them today.
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Reviewed By: Colin May
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Ok, but not great!
I've been a Fasthosts customer for just over a year now. The initial set-up was easy via their control panel.
Fasthosts do offer a reliable service, with good uptime and I've never noticed any major downtime.
The only thing that lets Fasthosts down is their support. If you're a techie person, I don't think you'll have any problems however if you're like me it can get frustrating waiting for support questions to get replied to.
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