back to article Fasthosts officially not the best in UK for virtual servers

Brit web biz Fasthosts has been slapped down by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) for boasting that its virtual servers were the "best" in the UK. The hosting company was unable to prove that its virtual machines were better than all the other virtual servers in the country, or that they used "industry-leading technology …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Devil

    Fasthosts not the best?

    In other news, bears defecate in the woods,

  2. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Nick Gisburne

      Re: worst hosting company I ever had the misfortune to deal with

      I'll second that. Mine was a short, sharp shock and I struggled to get my company's domain name and hosting out of their clutches when I realised how bad they were. Later, when I put up a page about my troubled dealings with Fasthosts, they threatened to sue me for defamation, until I pointed out that I was simply listing every bad experience they had subjected me to.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: worst hosting company I ever had the misfortune to deal with

        Could be worse, you could still be in the process of leaving. Personly not used them though having nightmare with rimuhosting atm and some amazing inept so-called tech's. But hey everybody has a bad experience with whatever company you pick and others have a good one.

        Bottom line whoever you pick, check out there backup policey and how they do there backups. Amazed how many say there secure and how virtulised you are only to backup unencrypted to the same backup device. This then enables another company to get a hosting with them and with little effort and inept admins, restore your backup onto there virtual host! Then deny it!

        Rule of thumb do a search and if you don't find any bad reviews then something is wrong and only until you find a balanced mix of reviews can you actualy trust those reviews.

        Anon as lawyers making me.

    2. DJV Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: worst hosting company I ever had the misfortune to deal with

      Seconded (or thirded as Nick Gisburne beat me to it). Their support is shit, their reliability is shit, they "upgrade" servers without advanced warning and then apply inappropriate settings to them and refuse to fix them when you tell them they've done it wrong (if you manage to get through to them that is). I always warn people away from the idiots. Avoid StreamLine as well as they just seem to be resellers of FastHost server space.

    3. not_equal_to_null
      Thumb Up

      Re: worst hosting company I ever had the misfortune to deal with

      We host about 20 domains and a few virtual servers with Fasthosts - I've not got a bad word to say about them (except for their slightly odd management console).

      Their support people are great, and things get sorted fast when there are issues.

      Just lucky, I guess.

    4. alcopops
      FAIL

      Re: worst hosting company I ever had the misfortune to deal with

      Yes, they are dreadful. Slow website, email errors and appalling overseas support. If you wanted to make a bad web hosting company - they tick all the boxes.

  3. chuBb.
    Meh

    They were pretty good 10 years ago when then had the lucas arts theme tunes as the hold music, then they were bought by 1and1 and it all turned a bit kenny g.

  4. Matthew Forbes

    They had a DDOS attack a few months ago and locked down all servers so needed a static IP address, wouldn't accept a DDNS address, so have been having to remote into a site with static IP address to work on a website.

    Not sure who is worse, this lot or the company that used them in the first place.

  5. Derichleau
    Thumb Down

    Fasthosts have been going downhill

    I've been a Fasthosts customer on and off for over 12 years... I remember the days when there was no support at the weekend so my site would go down on a Saturday morning and I'd have to wait until Monday for them to fix the problem.

    They're okay I guess. My main issue with them is that they are one of the more expensive hosting companies but I don't mind paying if the support is there. Recently though, I've noticed that they tend to inform me that they "monitoring the situation" which basically means that if they leave it for a bit the problem will probably resolve itself. As a typical example, they had an issue with the SQL server recently and it was causing my site to be unavailable for long periods. They said that they were monitoring the situation but when I tried to get logged in during my lunch hour at work, my site was down. It was still down 45 minutes later so clearly, they were not monitoring the situation otherwise they would have done something to get it back up.

    When you think about how much their costs will have reduced over the years... to continue to charge what they do they either need to be offering a lot more ore providing a first class support. They do neither very well in my opinion but it could be worse.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      Re: Fasthosts have been going downhill

      ..They're okay I guess... ....it was causing my site to be unavailable for long periods....

      do you run or help run a business...

      just wanted to know so i can avoid it!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Take a leaf out of the ISPs book

    Our servers have UNLIMITED power, UNLIMITED memory and UNLIMITED reliability*.

    <small print>* Fair use clause applies.</small print>

  7. Gerrit Hoekstra
    Coat

    These guys got drenched in the 2007 Gloucestershire floods

    ...because they built their data centre below the waterline. Mwaaahhahahahahaha! Now they are sticking their heads above the parapet with outrageous claims just begging to be disproved. Common sense still does not prevail there, then. Mine's the waterproof and bulletproof coat.

  8. Spindreams
    Pint

    ServWise are the best, I can prove it....

    How can they be the best when ServWise are the best...... huh!

    Disclaimer: I have no affiliation or link or anything to do with ServWise, honest guv' ;-)

  9. Emj

    I will stick up for Fasthosts a bit - I have been with them since the days of UKReg and VPS was just but a distant twinkle in the eye of a engineer somewhere in the world. To be clear, my domains have always been with them but hosting has been around a bit - GoDaddy, Heart, 1&1, Webfusion (before they got bought) , Rackspace and even co-location. I wouldn't say that they (FH) are really any worse than any other large host. All have their unique T&Cs, 1&1 even made you fax them to leave back in the day.

    When it comes to down time (at least on the VPS platform), I haven't had any issues for the year (or near enough) that I have had some VPS servers with them. Rackspace though, I had several times of downtime and they are really supposed to be one of the best.

    I guess in the end it is all down to personal experience - most are fine with their host but there is always a number who aren't - no difference to anything else really - cars, new houses, phones, etc.

    No-one can really be the best - those that have the best spec will have the higher prices so in other peoples eyes, won't be the best.

  10. Tim Hall
    Alert

    Danger Will Robinson!

    After about 12 years with Fasthosts, I recently moved my last domain away. For many years I found them reasonably reliable, but over the last year they have become pretty much unusable for me. I was getting so many failures it was untrue. Technical support was pretty much non-existent. Added to that, the rest of the world has added features and dropped costs of their hosting packages, making Fasthosts incredibly expensive in comparison. My advice? Handle with care!

    Would just like to point out that 1and1 didn't buy Fasthosts as a previous poster said. The company that owns 1and1 bought Fasthosts. Same parent company, but two separate hosting companies. :)

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I think they offer value for money. At least on the dedicated server front.

    Saying that, one of their monkeys rebooted a live, working server the other day after I reported that the rKVM wasn't working.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Terrible

    We used fasthosts probably 10 years ago. We were there only a couple of months, during which time they had a total outage for around 2 days, and some sites only averaged about 75% up time. It sucked my will to live.

    Since then I've experienced many different hosts thanks to working with a variety of clients, and I have never found one as bad as Fasthosts.

    I still recall the support guys, who were all no more than call centre staff with a big red 'restart' button, which was the solution to everything. "You site has gone down for the 10th time today? No problem, I'll restart it for you".

    Curiously though, we've used UKreg for domains since the same time and never had any problems at all with them (hope I am not tempting fate).

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Clues in the name..

    Fasthosts...

    Not as in fast, but as in "pull a fast one."

    http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/pull-a-fast-one

  14. Richard Jukes

    Contiuum Hosting for me.

    I have only ever used http://www.contiuum-hosting.co.uk and I've got to say its very rare I've ever had a problem, and on the occasions I have had issues I've just spoken to Laze on IRC and its been sorted or it is already in the process of being sorted.

    I should probably admit that I've known the chap for a long time so I am biased, but the uptime talks for its self :-)

  15. Displacement Activity
    Paris Hilton

    Ok, so far...

    Been with them for a year, for a few non-critical sites. Bare metal + tty only, so I have minimal reliance on their support staff. Nasty problem to start with, when it took me a day to find out that their OS image had yum set to auto-update everything. Duh. Nothing since then. It was very cheap for bare metal then, probably still is. I think they've been trying very hard to get over their reputation problems - they ring every few months to ask how things are. +1 from me; I'll probably stick with them longer-term.

    @someone-up-above: it doesn't matter how and where they do their backups - if *you* can't restore your server then you'll always have problems, whoever you're with.

  16. Danny 14
    Thumb Down

    sack of crap

    We hosted 2 servers with them, one shared. The shared box got accused of using "too many resources due to badly configured scripts". We found this odd as we didnt use many scripts on that box. They bumped not only this box but our other two (lord knows why the other 2) onto some other infrastructure that suffered more downtime and far worse response. All complaints went onto deaf ears, all complaints about the 2 unconnected servers being moved were ignored until all of a sudden they admitted it was another host on the shared box. Great. They took close to 6 weeks to move it back.

    Come renewal we went elsewhere. Wouldnt touch em with a barge pole.

  17. Jay 2
    Thumb Down

    S'OK I suppose, unless you need support

    I've had two domains hosted with Fasthosts for quite a few years now. In that time the support has definately gone down the toilet. More often than not it's not even worth opening a case as they just won't do anything, assuming they can actually understand what you're asking for. The first line support have no access to anything, so frequently ask you for your passwords to see what's going on.

    1. Pan_Handle

      Re: S'OK I suppose, unless you need support

      linode.

      That is all.

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