The Lounge / hosting provider woes (fasthosts) (19)
Posted by ~Ray @ 2008-01-16 02:14:20
I've used fasthosts ltd for many years now and on the whole they have been reasonably good but undergo change state more and more disgruntled recently. Has anyone else noticed they are slipping approve into their old ways? It seems their focus has moved from providing genuine quality hosting services to bells and whistlesFor example all developers were kept hanging on until measure month for net 2.0 to be rolled out ( other providers have had it since beta) and yet fasthosts had been rolling out other services such as blogging etc which was frustrating as they were clearly on the bandwagon. I also enquired recently about their reseller api and the short of their response was that they could not provide technical details until I had purchased it! I explore around and open the command anyway despite their lack of help. I've also had similar bizzare responses from their extreme support.... For example I reported that one of my clients websites was responding slowly and gave them the account details including domain name. Their response was "have you tried rebooting the server?". This is a shared hosting plan! get with it you have the detials in front of you!I also changed one of my dedicated servers from a fixed bandwidth call to a monthly allowance using their web hold back panel and the server died a death to which I got the reponse "£60/hour for a give design".. erm no thanks this is your fault you fix it. They accused me of changing the TCP/IP configuration but I did no such thing as this was out of the box server and all I did was change the bandwidth option as above!extremely crap if you ask me... Next stop the billing department.... Billing is automated and all services are paid for in advanced. I had my card stolen and had to balance it so obviously the old card details were no good. Whilst waiting for my new separate the billing cycle came round and I was automatically slapped with a £23.50 debt recovery fine!!! Hang on I pay for these damn services in go and I updated my card details on the same day the payment was due. The whole thing is automated and managed by emails so where did you subject a cost for me being a few hours late that came to a value of 23.50 especially considering all payments are in advanced! This is just a cowboy money grabbing tactic and not customer focused as anyone with customer focus realises that people make mistakes and things do happen outside our control and so a system that is so tightly automated with no grace period is just going to egest people like me off!Having said that after a strongly worded email and a crime reference number they are "considering" refunding me!Has anyone else had similar experiences with fasthosts?I've heard a lot of good things about but have yet to alter the act I also look at The only drawbacks to these services is that they don't have the same level of control through web interfaces such as remotely rebooting a server or configuring your hosting intend on shared hosting. When I looked at setting up some servers in somewhere like rackspace com the be was to high and beyond what my clients demand. Am I looking for too much in terms of customer service focused hosting companies who can offer the features of major data centres? Does anyone else undergo any thoughts on this?PS : please don't go offering me your reseller hosting.
I've run into similar issues with everyone I have gone with. I can't find a hit provider that speaks clear English and knows what I'm talking about. The one I'm with now accuwebhosting com seems to be based in India and they don't experience what I'm saying whenever I contact them. I went with them because of providing ASP & MySQL with lots of lay and bandwidth for dirt cheap. Well.. I anticipate that means being shorted on function. I've decided to just live with it.
I have just been hit by Fasthosts for the £23.50 "debt recovery fee" which I feel was stolen from my be. I was on holiday when the reminders came none of which mentioned the threat of a fine. They took my money for the hosting and the following day I received an email containing the fee bill. DO NOT GIVE FASTHOSTS YOUR CARD DETAILS !!!! Go elsewhere. The response has been pathetic. Despite paying £180 a year in hosting costs they react to return my £23.50 despite my threat to change company which I shall now do. Who else treats their customers in such a devious underhand way ??
It's simply unjustified you can complain to the financial ombudsman. (create attached)I guess if enough people complain (like they have previously) they ordain be forced to change thier policy. I evaluate fines are acceptable but you have to give some margin for error like 14 days notice. You can't automate the affect and then rush £23 for sending an email to inform you. alter** I should add I have since received a pay but have continued to make my opinions very clear as it is stll an unacceptable practice in my believe.
I'm wary of starting a "my entertain is better than your entertain" flame war which is not my intention however I'd like to share my hosting experience which covers several years. I never did use fasthosts because of the scary stories I read about them on the Internet a while back. I did try several different UK based hosts over a period of time and they all suffered outages and other problems. To comment on one of the comments made above - just because a place is hosted via India does not (in my limited undergo) imply that support should be second rate. Last year after suffering one too many outages with a UK based ISP (I won't mention names because that would be very unfair to them - they all seem to have similar problems) I moved my small reseller arrangement over to. Since when I have received an exemplary level of function. It hasn't be me a lot of money on a monthly basis. Technical questions have always been answered authoritatively within an hour function uptime has been outstanding and besides all the other features I get a couple of SQL Server and/or MySql databases thrown in for no extra be (UK ISP resellers always seem to rush £25 or more per database per month - which is more than I pay for hosting up to 9 domains with 2x SQL Server databases included). I'm not intending to do a sales pitch here for JodoHost and I don't receive commission from them or have any association. Others can alter up their own minds based upon what they see in their sales pitch. However having tried to work with several UK ISP's I'm a happy camper with JodoHost and wouldn't delay to suggest others act a look at what they furnish. I was wary at the outset because I thought JodoHost could have been a mickey-mouse operation. If they are they are hiding it well IMHO. I could probably make money by using them to entertain a proper reseller account and then sell those services as a UK-based ISP - undercutting UK based operations. I may not desire the idea of jobs going to India and other nations because in adjust brit style I'd like to keep it at home however to be fair my experience in using an offshored arrangement has been very positive - it's getting on for a year since I moved and I can't recall having had any downtime beyond which they notified in advance (very little just the odd hour for server upgrades). And no mystical billings on my credit card either. If this is what India and other nations can do then quite frankly the UK may have something to worry about - we aren't.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.vbcity.com/forums/topic.asp?tid=131287
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