FastHosts Reviews

About FastHosts

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.

Shared Hosting

VPS Hosting

Dedicated Servers

CUSTOMER SERVICE

FASTHOST I always try to be as honest as possible when writing reviews and this is the first bad one I have written. (not a serial bad reviewer) Tried to downgrade a package I had signed up to 2 days after taking it out. When you ring up to contact customer care you are not allowed to be put through to them, you are told they will ring you back. Which they didn’t instead it is done by e-mail. They tell you you cannot change the contract under the 7 day cooling off period it does not apply. When you argue this which takes 9 days or so e-mails going back and forth their reply is that It is now too late to change the package as I am out of the cooling off period. This is not the kind of service I want from a company it was their fault I could not communicate with them on my first attempt and their fault the cooling off period the expired. You also are dealing with people in America when you phone up and that is infuriating. Would not recommend !!!!!

Unethical Customer Service Behaviour

They have an interesting take on what they call Customer Services. If you have feedback for Fasthosts then be prepared for an opinionated argument. Instead of taking on board the customer’s experience and issues and using this as valuable feedback to improve the customer experience, they have been instructed to argue their individual opinion. I never asked for the representative’s opinion, instead I got an earful about how I was wrong and he was right. Pretty offensive and personal really. This tactic clearly doesn’t improve Customer Services which they claim they find important and in fact benefits no one whatsoever. Think wisely before entering into a contract with this company.

Fasthosts – Best I’ve been with yet!

I have to say I have been surprised by reading some of the reviews on this site regarding Fasthosts, I have been a Fasthosts customer for over 12 years now and I admit that in the early days their customer service was questionable and their hardware was still in a state of evolving but they have gone from strength to strength. I have had minimal downtime over my tenure with them and I have always had advance notice. There customer service has improved no end, I have rarely had to phone them mind you as the interface and flexibility is versatile enough to allow me the freedom to solve most issues. Their knowledge base is very comprehensive. I now have 2 Dedicated Servers with them, 2 Virtual Servers and numerous shared hosting accounts on behalf of my customers and have had nothing but good service. I must admit I was a little concerned when I found out that 1&1 had purchased them, having had negative dealing with 1&1 previously although this doesnt seem to have had an impact as much as I would have thought. And for the record every person I have dealt with on customer support has been courteous, helpful and professional. I have never been rerouted to a foreign call centre as many of these reviews seem to have. All in all, outstanding service coupled with quality hosting. Couldn’t ask for more 🙂

Worst VPS ever

Starting from November 2011 until May 2012 we had 4 outages with Fasthosts that lasted between 2 to 3 days each. They have cost us thousands of pounds and Fasthost refuse to compensate apart from giving the odd free month that no way makes up for the damage they have done. Before the outages we had over 3,000 products on the first page of Google, thanks to Fasthosts today we have none. They nearly destroyed which was a very good business. We had a total of 5 days of outages in the lead up to Xmas that got half our products removed from Google shopping. Dont touch Fasthosts they will cripple your rankings and kill of sales.

Fasthosts Poor Support Service

I now being more careful about my next service provider after the terrible time and the terrible support that I have had from Fasthosts – I now have a website that I cannot upload a single extra image to or it all crashes and Fasthosts have to reset it all… so how rubbish is that – for over nine months not solved my images problem – so now really have a useless website with them. Support takes quiet some time to answer you – and the support time have a language barrier which prevents UK customers questions being understood or answered – now planning to move – as the stress levels in dealing in any capacity are too high for me. And I want to have a site that I can add images too… obviously a good plan… but not with Fasthosts!

Fasthost the constant dissapointment

First thing, I started an expensive launch for my new site by putting a large amount of money on Google PAY Per click. The campaign was going great and I was monitoring it closely. As I was advertising globally I left the campaigns to run every night. After I went to sleep on a Saturday night I awoke to find very few enquiries on the Sunday. When I checked the Google analytics account I had spent almost a £700 in one night which was fine but what I didn’t know was Fasthosts had been down and my site wasn’t live. I was told by Fasthosts that there was nothing that they could do……………..(I did understand this to a certain point but £700 is a lot to waste) A few weeks later the campaigns had been running all week and all was fine then Saturday night came around again and an almost identical spend on Google Analytics was achieved but to my horror I was not receiving E-mails from the site, after a lot of checking by me and the web developer (at further cost to me) Fasthost admitted there had been a problem but that it couldn’t be them that was causing these particular issues with my site. ( Believe me there is no doubt in my mind that it was) Not willing to lose any more money I moved Hosting providers to Good 4 Hosting.co.uk and I haven’t had any of these problems since. But guess what I forgot to cancel my hosting with Fasthosts after my 12 months contract was up and they are demanding an additional fee.

Should be renamed TheftHosts

ITS EASIER TO WALK TO THE MOON. In the infamous words of Jeremy Clarkson – How hard can it be ?? Well if you want to cancel your account with fasthosts customer service then the answer is VERY. I have been trying to cancel my account since December 2009 but still after numerous emails and telephone calls they still keep taking the payments. I even have an email to acknowledge the closure request but thats not good enough for customer services and certainly not to get a refund on unauthorised payments. Don’t even bother to try by stopping the direct debit as this just gives them the excuse of saying we can’t do anything as there’s arrears on the account and delay further. DON’T EVER GET CAUGHT BY FASTHOSTS – STAY AWAY and use a professional company.

Dreadful customer service and billing

Shockingly bad customer service, lack of basic communication and record keeping between their technical dept. and billing dept. They’ve repeatedly tried to take payment for services I don’t even have (luckily the credit card attached to the account expired first) and have sent me ridiculous emails demanding large sums of money to renew my service (not that I have any services with them at this time). Avoid like the plague.

Never ever go near these guys

Fasthosts – Well they are certainly not fast, their packages are limited and expensive and customer service should be a minus number. I had several sites with these guys and then they decided to change how emails were handled, all my emails stopped working. They kindly told me, after the event, that they had ‘upgraded’ their email system and all I needed to do was download the piece of software so my Outlook would integrate. I explained I didn’t use outlook but thunderbird. Sorry no solution for that, incredible. Terrible time trying to cancel them. Also moved my wifes website however she has now received a snotty email about her renewal.Er what renewal. It seems they have no record o the cancellation, have taken the money for a service not required and reuse to give the money back. One word – criminals. I know have a reseller account with Ariotek, so far 5 stars.

Fasthosts – price and quality problems?

I can’t relate to the reviews on here – first of all, I’m an independent developer who has no affiliation to Fasthosts apart from use of their dedicated servers. * Firstly, their connection speeds are beyone amazing – download a file to your server and it will attain at least 40mb – only limited by the connection at the other end. * You can install whatver you like – don’t bother buying the MSSQl etc databases – you can just bang on as many virtual machines as you like onto one machine and put any software you like on them. * Support – on the odd time I’ve needed support asking for reverse DNS and diagnostics on their machines the support staff have been completely knowledgeable and quick to answer – I’ve never had any issues with attitude…perhaps its the stupid questions that get asked that elicit the responses people receive…ask a stupid question etc… I have had a good half dozen dedicated server over the years with Fasthosts – uptime has been remarkable – I run serversalive! as a monitoring tool – downtime is practically negligible – there was a few hours about five years ago when we had rthe terrible flooding in the UK and support staff were on a skeltal basis – but apart from that it has been in the hours per year I imagine – 0.1% p.a seems pretty acceptable to me – no opne can offer 100% uptime, there are too many responsible parties to guarantee that [LINX, BT etc etc]. The pricing is very fair – but what the hell do people expect? if you are going to run a ‘mission critical’ website don’t do it on a £3.99 hosting package – invest in a couple of dedicated server with different ISPs and have somne fault tolerance, Jeez… I have had a few hardware faults due to SATA discs breaking down – but anyone who’s involved with web design/IT should appreciate that no server is 100% reliable, always have up to date backups…don’t expect Fasthosts to carry the can for that, they offer a backup service and if you don’t know what you are doing then maybe you shouldn’t be ‘resellin’ services without ensuring you have proper disaster recoervy in place. Get real people, too many mis-informed posters on here who don’t understand the intricacies or requirements of what they need but are happy to shout about ‘bad support’ and attitude – I have exactly the same attitude when I get numties phoning up asking for ‘can you make the site full screen on my monitor’ and ‘can we have a flash landing page’? Nuff said.

Avoid Fasthosts

Technical support goes to Phillipines on the telephone and they can’t help. Their knowledge is poor and very difficult to understand. Support tickets always go unanswered (I have one waiting over one week now). Avoid at all costs.

Fast host taking me to court…

Wow, I’m quite shocked at how Fast host has treated me. I didn’t renew my two year contract with them, because apparently it was automatic and my card details had changed. When I found out, they wanted an extra fee of £80 to unlock my web site which had been taken down – and I didn’t really feel like keeping it anyway. So I told them to keep my site off air and when phoning them back a couple of days later to fully confirm not to keep the web site, I was so long in the que that I had to hang up. I kind of thought though that everything would automatic cancel at this point – how shall I know that I am obliged to keep paying for a web site after the 2 years have run out? This was September and my site hasn’t been up since. Nobody from fasthost has phoned me or sent me any letter with regards to this. Until I heard from a law firm the other day that I am being taken to court on £140 for a site that I don’t have, and if I loose I have to pay the fees for lawyers, etc as well. Stay away from these people. No one knows anything when you phone them, their features are confusing and I think that what they’ve done is really cheeky and totally without customer service…

Appalling availability

I’ve had nothing but trouble since moving all of my domains to Fasthosts’ VPS infrastructure a few months ago. I continually experience outages of several hours and, on one occasion, for the best part of three days! I am fed up of spending a ridiculous amount of time handling complaints from (quite rightly) annoyed clients who’s websites and email functionality are continually offline. I will be migrating to an alternative hosting provider as soon as possible.

do not touch with a bargepole

In the 5 years in which I’ve been a fasthosts customer I have witnessed a shocking decline in their level of service, competence and support. Last week they managed to wipe a website which I was about to get paid for by and at first denied it was them & then tried telling me it was never there in the first place, which was a bit foolish as I was on the phone to them at the time it went down. After wasting 15hrs on the phone to a call centre in the Philippines trying to get them restore from a backup we decided it was safer to rebuild the site. We’ve received no apology from them so far. . We also signed up to their Resellers Package and bought some domains through it before finding out that it’s actually not free (as they advertise) but that we had to pay them every time we wanted to setup a database. We’re now in the process of moving our business away from them but are stuck for another month before we can transfer our domains elsewhere You Have Been Warned !!!

Fasthosts – You often Get What You Pay For But Not Always

I have very mixed feelings about Fasthosts… They occupy an uneasy niche between amateur hosting and semi-professional levels of service. I just can’t bring myself to say that their offering suits professionals, because after 2.5 years of being with them and a lot of hair lost to stress, I am moving my business away from their servers. Fasthosts aren’t the cheapest by any means, but they offer a good array of services. In theory they are reasonably priced among their peers. I give respect where it is due to their technical support team who are mostly friendly and as helpful as they can be given the limitations of their training and their remit decided by the top brass. 9 times out of 10 though I solved my own problems while trying to get them to solve them for me. First line support is often available within a couple of minutes, sometimes in more like 10 minutes on hold. They don’t offer a geographical or freephone support line so you are talking about time on hold to an 0845 number… If you have to wait for second line (actual server engineers) to talk to you, it can be 3 days before anything gets actioned and support seems unclear as to the role of 2nd line support. I have actually been told that second line support / personal engineer services are provided ‘out of hours only’ and ‘out of kindness’ by the server engineers. As I told the staff who said that “out of kindness at £120 per hour?” The main problem with Fasthosts is that they can’t/don’t really fulfill some of the offerings they have properly. They sell products like plesk for their higher end customers (on dedicated or virtual servers) and yet they fail/refuse to support it beyond mailing you documents you can find on Google. They offer personal engineer services for those with high end packages who are having problems, but only for certain tasks or problems. Other requests leave you with a blunt ‘no’ which is surreal: “Can I pay you £120 per hour to check my backup configuration and tell me it is performing properly.” ‘No’ “Why?” ‘We don’t offer that service.’ Hmm… So what is good about Fasthosts? Well, if you just want a decent dedicated server and you are confident you don’t need support and can set up your own backup system properly, then Fasthosts dedicated servers are well priced and worked very well for us. If you want shared hosting and it isn’t mission critical, it’s ok. For anyone else though I have to urge great caution. Unless you are a server supremo, you may find yourself up the creek without a paddle and out of pocket.

Unbelievable

Fasthosts VPS are an absolute joke. Last night at 11pm their entire VPS center went down – no ‘auto fail over’ present at all. What’s more, its now 2.20pm the following day, and the servers are still being worked on. My mission critical websites are still down. Their support staff always sound bored and uninterested, in fact to call them support staff is really over egging it. Fasthosts – terrible for general hosting, terrible for reseller hosting, and what a surprise – also terrible at VPS hosting.

Terrible service

I used Fasthosts, it is over expensive, the phone service is shocking, and when I decided after a year I wanted to close the account, I tried to cancel the account but couldn’t get through to the billing department for days, and it went 2 days over the expiry date and now they’re saying that I have to pay for a years worth of hosting and if I don’t pay they’ll send it out to the debt collection. Fasthosts have a terrible customer service.

Poor Support from Fasthosts

Generally this has been reliable – but recently when offered a free “scaling up” of my premier package – things have all gone terribly wrong. I have now been in daily if not twice daily contact with “support” services. Support just means to fasthosts that they will blame subcontractors about why an item on its server is not working, not give you any solutions, tell you a problem is fixed andthen close down all correspondence with you – three weeks now i have been trying to republish my site after they upgraded my package – three weeks of backlog and three weeks of missed orders – can you afford to lose all that business and get no support – I cant – and am looking at getting a new providers pronto… very very unhappy with a very shoddy service – and I am a premier business customer too! oh! dear

Fast host cloud server

Vanilla Circus has jalf a dozen cloud servers with Fasthosts. The support we receive is vey good, bar the odd US support guys they have. We can fix most things are self but sometimes we get stuck. What we have found is that if you get the unhelpful support guy, then ring back and the chances are you will find a pretty helpful tehnician. In terms of making charges from about everything, we found that we were charged for a server we could not cancel as it was not in our account. We telephoned support and they cancelled it for us. Fasthosts still charged for it. Even the threat of legal action made no differene. Eventually they refunded it as we started to move our business elswhere. We are a business so our spend is considerable more than individuals. I don’t think I would choose to host with fasthosts if I was A) not technical B)Choosing a cheaper package. If you want a recommendation for a hosting company that has real people in the UK for support try Bytehouse. There servers seem to be a little old but the support really is amazing!

THE WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE EVER

I used Fasthosts’ customer service and I was very disappointed. I told them I couldn’t access to them to cancel the account and they told me that ‘sometimes things in life aren’t fair’. They denied giving me a refund and when I said I wanted to complain they said they would forward me to somebody… instead they phoned me to try and sell me more of their stuff.

Didn’t cancel in time so I now have to pay for another year

After speaking to a very aggressive credit controller (matt) who was extremely intimidating I am now having to pay for another year of hosting. I can’t put a note to cancel at end of subscription rather than renew, I have to remember to call them in April to cancel – not easy to remember when you don’t even use their services anymore! But they will keep my credit card and threaten me with court action unless it is paid. They offered my boyfriends parents an opportunity to upgrade their email package and if they did not like it they could revert back to the same old one. They did not tell them this would cost, each month, per email address. So they asked to revert back. But, funnily enough they can’t revert you back after you’ve upgraded! So now they are left with a complicated, expensive system that has lost all their contacts. yay for fasthosts!

FASTHOST…MORE LIKE SLOWHOST

I paid to use this bunch of cowboys to build a website,pay monthly for 12 months, however once id sighned up i couldnt add any pictures to the templates available and i couldnt publish to the website, after loads of phone calls and promises of a fix that never worked i decided that as i hadnt used their service it would be fine to cancel…silly me…a very unhelpful customer services person pointed me in the direction of the terms and conditions…tuff luck matey…your stuck with us and theres nothing you can do…not her exact words but it was clear i was stuffed….so if you dont wanna get stuffed like me….stear clear of Fasthost….

Dreadful service and woeful support.

FastHosts are probably okay if you don’t have complex requirements. I’d just about trust them to run a few POP3 emails (although even then they can balls up authentication and leave you without mail for most of a week). Anything more complex though – like a Hosted Exchange 2010 deployment is asking for trouble. They’re cheap, which is only acceptable if your time isn’t. Trying to talk to their support people is a nightmare as they respond with scripted replies based on only half an understanding of the problem you’re explaining. I can’t recommend strongly enough to AVOID FastHosts if you intend to rely on email for your business.

I Would Recomend But..

I don’t have any faults with this host apart from the fact that we cancelled our account because we were moving the site over to a new host, then we were charged and told they never received the request, I can understand that if they don’t have a record then they cant cancel but when i thought it had been cancelled i thought we were ok. Its very annoying the fact that i now have to pay fasthost for a service that i wont be needing. They have offered me another free domain to link to the hosting package as i have already transfered the domain to the new hosts but why would i want to do this as i only need one website. Very dissapointed as we have never had any problems with them but i would not reccomend anyone to use them.

Beware Fasthosts

Beware Fasthosts! It’s difficult to cancel renewals with them and you have to search very deep on their support website to find out how to do this. I called their 24 Hour UK Support Number 08445 830777 and ended up talking – with some difficulty – to someone in the Philipines. Not exactly the UK! One month after cancelling the domain, they then took £72 from my Debit Card for a Web Hosting Renewal for the domain I had cancelled. They told me it could not be refunded. Bandits! I’ll be going to the Small Claims Court next…..

Terrible customer relations

It’s ‘fast’ and easy to sign up with fasthosts but it’s really difficult and very slow to cancel your account. I have incurred extra costs because of how difficult it is to cancel my account- I’m not sure that there’s automatic renewal process is even legal. I realise this is standard for a hosting package as I have others but I’ve never had one which is so hard to cancel. I will never use this company again.

Fasthosts Support

Have been using Fasthosts for hosting and email services for many years now. However, there have been major problems with sites and emails going offline, usually for a while. That’s not normally a problem as most companies will sort this as quick as possible. Not Fasthosts. They don’t respond to emails (try them if you don’t believe me), their support team haven’t got a clue about anything, they keep referring cases to 2nd line support who also don’t have a clue. Not recommended.

AVOID AT ALL COSTS.

I have never had such a bad experience with a hosting company like this before. To cut a long story short, they are money grabbing theifs whose customer service doesn’t even deserve a rating. they will not reason. they auto renew packages without your concent and suck you into another 12 month contract. (and the auto renew button is none existant unless you contact them EXACTLY when your contract ends for any hope to get out of the hell hole) They lie and mislead service descriptions Summary: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE p.s. google “fasthosts hell”

Caveat Emptor

Beware before they get your card details. You will be continuously charged for the most useless, unreliable service you would wish to avoid. The shared servers have far too many sites hosted on them with little or no actual monitoring, so that any site on your shared server abusing their share (such as having customers coming to their site, how dare they?) will make other sites unavailable for considerable times. But apparently that’s acceptable to FastHosts. Is it to you? If not, steer well clear.

Avoid Fasthosts

I’m a developer, many of my clients have unwittingly used fasthosts who are ‘fast’ becoming the bane of my existence. Undoubtedly they are market leaders in downtime and diabolical support. Some of my clients run e-commerce sites and take a massive hit when their site goes down. I have moved several of these to reliable hosts, two that spring to mind are Go Daddy and for a slightly more expensive but excellent service use Microserveltd.

Get your own back

I have used Fasthost and have been very unhappy with the support and the renewals policy. The only way I have been able to stop these guys taking money from my card was to cancel it!!! So now how about a bit of consumer payback? Search for Shared webhosting or similar and click on the fasthost advert! Now we can cost the company money…

Fasthosts stole my domain name

When we decided to quit fasthosts due to being messed around and treated like dirt they refused to give up our domain name www.taguk.net. Pretty useless to anyone else. It is still registered two years later (not to us) and mysteriously so are all the other main extensions .com .info .biz .eu .co.uk .org.uk. Somebody (no idea who) thinks they can make a killing. If you let them register your domain say goodbye to it. Don’t go near with barge pole

Reoccuring charges up 11% without warning

How Fasthosts are seriously one of your top ISPs by ‘focussing on service’ is beyond me. They do respond reasonably fast, but spoil this by not reading emails properly and getting it totally wrong. Billing incorrectly is a speciality – they were billing me twice for the same domain hosting package every year for two years until I spotted it (this situation arose because I complained they were overbilling my standard package in the first place) – then took 6-7 emails to get it right plus another couple to refund the money. Now they have charged me the reoccuring domain package and sneaked in an 11%+ increase with no forewarning. I have had this package for years now and that is totally unacceptable. I so ticked off I’ve asked them to refund and tear down the website. Enough is enough! (is 1 good or 10 good? This site is confusing)

FASTHOSTS :(

Fasthosts have been difficult to deal with from day one and I have experienced continual technical problems including difficulties uploading the website, editing the site, loss of emails and bad customer service. I certainly would not recommend it!

Stiff, Rigid and only good at taking your money

Once good, Fasthost have just sat back taken their customers money and done very little to solve the ongoing problems. Yesterday email servers down for 3 hours, just waiting for my hosting package to expire before I move all my accounts. Very good at charging, very poor at solving your problems, been unable to move a domain from one fasthost account to another in a different name for over 6-months now, they just keep saying they know about the problem and are working on it. Very clever to DEMAND you keep an active Credit Card on record with them and then debit your card a FULL MONTH before the renewal is due. No current credit card on file and you can’t access your control panel until your credit card is ‘up to date’. Oh and for get any sort of refunds for lousy service. Do yourself a favour, use another company

Fasthosts are very poor

Fasthosts represent the worst of underhand online business practice. The hosting is outdated but performs consistently. The customer service seems to be deliberately bad and even misleading. I have been trying to move domains my away from them for a month and they keep failing to do it and continue to draw money from my account. They are very good at signing you up and taking your money. The problem is that they continue to take it long after you have asked them to stop!

Fasthosts

Rubbish company with poor customer service in my experience. I have been suffering hours of downtime over the last few weeks, with no pro-active communication whatsoever. Don’t waste your time on the poor souls on their so-called “technical support” number. Save on the phonebill, and try asking the family pet instead; you’ll definitely get a more considered response. If I hear “have you tried rebooting it?” one more time, I think I may explode.

FASTHOSTS are the worst I’ve come across

FASTHOSTS are the worst hosts I have ever come across. Email down half the time, foreign call centres where the standard of English is not high enough to understand a simple problem and technical knowledge poor. Sometimes you have to wait for thirty minutes or more to get through to support and their control panel is very poor compared to most competitors. Worse still, when you try and cancel a service make sure you do it in triplicate. I had a number of hosting packages with them, and when I wanted to cancel one sent an email using their support pages. However, they denied having ever had the email, took the money anyway and refused point blank to refund the YEARS payment, despite the fact that had I chosen to change my annual payment to monthly (assuming I had wanted to keep the domain) I would have been entitled to give 30 days notice! I strongly recommend staying away from FASTHOSTS – there are so many better alternatives out there, and many of them a lot cheaper too.

Fasthosts/Streamline

No compalints with the hosting, uptime and speed, what i do have a problem with is their customer service and attitute towards their customers. They re-new hosting contracts with no prior warning and when you query it they point blank refuse to budge even if you only want to change the type of package you signed up for. I have paid for additional services such as an email junk filter, but the filter was never activated despite several requests! AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE IF YOU WANT CONTROL OF WHAT YOU PAY FOR!

NEVER USE FASTHOSTS

FASTHOSTS are not only the worst provider I have ever had the misfortune to come across; their support desk is a collection of incompetent, poorly trained, unhelpfull shambles. They are very are very polite and “understand the frustration”, they are more than happy to “escalate the problem”, to maintain “continual monitoring” and most of all “very apologetic” I think they are an excellent call centre. they must be used to irate customers; but they could all be replaced with an answer machine and an electronic message saying “Sorry, we know you’re waiting and have escalated your problem” I foolishly moved my businesses domain, email, web hosting to them… FASTHOSTS took so long to do the transfer and propagation it was a joke (10 days). That’s two weeks trading without email or a website! Their last comment/apology/insult (to my intelligence) was to suggest that I should check my emails more frequently and I would see they have been updating me with progress!!! YES MY PROBLEM WAS YOUR EMAIL SERVER! Was my response. They really are appalling. It is all working now (occassionally) but I’m not sure why they use the word “FAST” in their company name. They’re not. They’re slow. They’re useless. An absolute disgrace. I understand that their business model appears to be “cheap and low quality”. They’re actually not that cheap.. It’s a trick. There are alsorts of add ons. Their low quality is also a trick; if they improved 10 fold they might reach the giddy heights of low quality. As for the support desk… forget it! By the way, the only way I got my problem fixed was when I showed them a copy of the letter I was sending to the head office in the UK and the individual letters I was sending to their Directors, to their addresses held by companies house. I will publish these if anyone is interested and would like to write to the muppets that run this shambles… It’s what I WILL be doing!! DO NOT EVER USE FASTHOSTS is my recommendation! FASTHOSTS are a disgrace. Of course, the cost to get any

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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! 🙁

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.

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.

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! 🙁

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!!

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.

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.

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

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…

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.

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

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.”

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.

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!

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.

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!

Dissapointed

Currently migrating away from them to eUK… Very poor support as with other comments telephone, email and general customer care is shocking

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!

Logins down

Fasthosts login system has not been working since Friday. Not a happy customer.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.