FastHosts Reviews

A very poor company indeed. Well known for reasonable prices but customer service bordering on the appalling.

I have tried to transfer an account froma Fasthosts reseller to my account but have not been successful. After calling their support line I was told this was due to my being on the "Old Version 4 Control Panel" and the reseller being on the new "Version 5". Quite amazing since I just opened my account with them and expected to be on the latest software.

To add injury to insult I was the told they had no timescale to state when the new version would be upgraded on my account. They REFUSED to give me a time instead just telling me "it will be soon...".

That was a month ago and still no upgrade - so I cannot transfer domains!

They are a joke and I strongly recommend going elsewhere if you are serious about your domains.

Also to open an account you need to supply your Credit Card details and they are not deletable once entered. You also need to go through a convoluted process too close the account - they make that as difficult as possible - basically at every step of the way they are a complete pain to deal with.

On the plus side they do answer their support telephone within a frw minutes.

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.

We hate fasthost because:

we are having problems due to the fact that our new bank card has not arrived.

This means we have missed a payment and our supply has suspended.
We under stand that.

However we want to maintain our service and have offer to make payment by any other means.

Fasthosts cant accept any other form of payment and now want to charge us an extra cost.

So we want to pay, we have a problem cause by our bank but can make alternative arrangement
but fasthosts don't want the money, the hassle and are not interested in their customers problems.

We have called them on every number we can find and asked to speak to any one who can help but there is no one.
There phone system will not allow any transfer of calls and there MD has no telephone? neither does customers services, accounts or their finacial director or company seretary.

I and my Company have been using FastHosts for about 4 years. We run a large website for an electric car company with a number of sub-domains and all our e-mail from FastHosts.
Good points: Reliable service (cannot recall a single downtime), easy to use control panel (for e-mail in particular) and easy to transfer domains in and out (we changed company and accounts at one stage and had to transfer the lot).
Bad points: Value is pretty poor compared to other good deals I see on the web but once you're with a reliable provider it does not seem worth to switch. We also had a compatibility issue with our first website design about four years ago causing our marketing guys to host somewhere else for a while. And support is a bit hit-and-miss. Late at night (UK) and in the weekends I get a quick response. During the day it can be quite a few hours.
Bottom line: reliable, never failed to deliver what they promise. But that does not mean you cannot find better value of features elsewhere. I am looking for a host for my personal blog and weighing up 1&1 (cheap domains) against GoDaddy (cheap hosting). Both offer a host of extras that you do not get with FastHosts.

Fasthosts host a number of my domains and websites. I now have a dedicated server.

The uptime would appear to be very good. There has been limited downtime to my knowledge.

They appear to offer most of the common options that are available with most other hosts. In terms of cost they are fairly competitive, I don't think they are either the most expesive nor the cheapest.

However my main problem is with the support. You have very long waits on the automated phone system to get through to support however when you get through they are fairly helpful. Their new payment process cannot seam to handle Mastercard's fraud prevention process.

They are very quick to suspend your account if this does happen which is not great when it is their fault the payment wasn't taken in the first place. I think they have a good selection of packages which would appear to cater for most needs.

I just think that their support and customer service lets them down. I would have no problem recommending them to others with that caveat.

5 User Ratings

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FastHosts Overall rating 2.7 5

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We've 5 reviews by this host's customers. Unlike many hosting reviews sites, we go for quality - not quantity. Learn why we're different from other web hosting reviews sites.

Ed Barnuk

Graham C Jones totalcdminfo.net

kevin donoghue indiedistribution.co.uk

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Chris Longton internet-phone24.com

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Our Profile

Fasthosts was established in 1999 by Andrew Michael, and has grown rapidly in size and strength to become a dominate player in the budget UK web hosting market. In 2006 Michael sold his 75% stake in the company to the German technology giant United Internet (which also owns 1and1 Internet) for £61.5 million.

Company and Services
Based in Gloucester, UK, Fasthosts employs around 100 staff members at its headquarters. It has a sure footing in the UK web hosting industry with just under 10% of the market share - making it the third largest just behind its sister company, 1and1 Internet.

As one stop shop for websites, you can get a domain name, email, broadband connection and web-hosting all from Fasthosts. Its web hosting service comes in two flavours: firstly, there is the general web hosting option offering unlimited traffic, email and site building software. It comes with a suite of more advanced features from which you can pick and choose depending upon your needs.

Secondly, for those with a more demanding palate, Fasthosts has its dedicated server hosting. With this you get unlimited data transfer and root administration access (so you can install the applications you want).

Both Microsoft and Linux platforms are supported. Customer support is available 24/7.

Fasthosts has experienced several high profile failures causing major disruption to its customers over the years. Best known of these was in October 2007 when the Company’s servers where hacked into. After the attack, Fasthosts was forced to ask its customers to change their passwords. A few weeks later it unilaterally changed the passwords of customers who hadn’t heeded their warning. This meant that many were locked the out of their website control panels for quite some time while the issue was being resolved.

On the plus side, Fasthosts has several accolades, including being listed as the ‘Number 1 choice’ for e-commerce by Web Host Directory three times. Netcraft (the internet research company) ranked Fasthosts as the world’s top provider of Windows web hosting and the Sunday Times has twice listed Fasthosts as one of the top 100 fastest growing companies. UKReg, Fasthosts’ domain name division, is the UK’s largest domain name company.

Server Location
All of Fasthosts dedicated servers are based in the UK.


Related Links
Official FastHosts Blog

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