Fasthosts Review
Fasthosts supports WordPress hosting, and their web hosting packages start at £3.49 a month when you sign up for 6 months. Fasthosts’ web hosting plans include unlimited bandwidth, raw log files, free FTP software, website statistics, and roaming SMTP.
2:34 pm on February 5th, 2010
I have been with Fasthosts for a couple of years and have always found them to be helpful, at least until recently.
I have found when comparing them to other hosts, the con’s of being a Fasthost reseller are rising.
I have the reseller package and host all my websites FROM £57 per month. I say FROM because unlike a lot of competing hosts like heart internet who offer everything for £39.99, Fasthosts charge resellers for a bundle of extras, such as an advanced mailbox for £11 which just allows you spam protection and use of their SMTP servers, you only get 5 free 150mb MySQL databases – then it’s £25ish per database plus other extras. It ends up costing you or your clients a lot of money, so it’s hard to be price competitive in the market.
I have also been annoyed at the deals Fasthosts themselves offer as standard packages. As a reseller I cannot even compete with them in terms of pricing, as I have to pay for most extras.
A lot of hosts now offer 1-click installs from their reseller control panel for a huge range of applications and scripts, such as Wordpress, drupal, OsCommerce and many more, a developers dream. Now Fasthost offer reliable and reasonable value hosting for your regular customers, I feel the resellers are being over charged for basic features and they offer no extra applications, just some free reseller images and email templates plus a couple more bits.
Apart from building one of their data centres near a river that is prone to flooding, and I am correct in saying this data centres has flooded before in 2007, I should now concentrate on the positive.
Fasthosts have taken a lot of steps to A. Stop things like data centres flooding. B. Improve on denial of service attacks and, C. Improve Their servers.
So… if you want a no thrills host, who as far as I’m concerned has extremely reliable servers (now), then Fasthosts are for you. Personally if you’re a developer, stay well clear.
4:52 pm on February 5th, 2010
very poor customer service, support pages rely on raising tickets which they either close with out response, close with their response or get closed by you adding more information.. so in essence you can’t have a conversation and you can’t get anything resolved. the service they offer for the price is a rip off. you can find cheaper elsewhere that offers more, with no hassle, i signed up here and am still trying to cancel and get a refund.. within 3 days. signed up elsewhere for around half the price.. already have the site up and running.
go elsewhere!!!!
3:26 am on February 8th, 2010
I was with Fasthosts for 6 years and I was unhappy for most of them. I have finally managed to migrate all my hosting and domains to MediaTemple. I would have done that sooner within the 6 years but their cancellation process is so long winded and unnecessary tedious that I admit I was put off leaving them. That is their strategy for keeping customers.
Their customer service is awful and so is their product and control centre.
Be warned.
4:37 pm on March 8th, 2010
We have just move all our clients, own hosting and email away from Fasthosts after our latest dealings with them. We even offered all our previous clients free support to move them away from Fasthosts too we feel that strongly about it.
They are designed to lure you in, get your tied into them then punish you with un-connected customer support (you have to give you user id to each of the 5 odd people you always get bounced to for instance), advanced billing (they bill you first then send an invoice, no advance warning or “still interested” email), they use their terms and conditions like a club to beat you into submission, you can’t get refunds full stop, everything is an extra.
Steer clear, well clear. There are much better smaller hosts out their who actually give a damn, go support those instead.
11:32 pm on March 8th, 2010
PROS
Very reliable servers – don’t think they’ve ever been down in the 4 years or so I’ve been using them. Adding a WP databse to my account was fairly straight forward – it must’ve been, it’s the first time I’ve ever done it!
CONS
I agree with much of what’s been said above: they’re very expensive -everything seems to be an add-on cost (including the database); their billing system is appalling: initially they take your credit/debit card details and then a year later they tell you 2 days before they’re going to take the money from your account again. And they don’t appear to offer a direct debit payment scheme, where you know exactly when and how much they’re going to fleece you for this time. I haven’t used the support service for some time, but last time I did, once I’d actually got through to someone, they were very helpful – and I’ve found their on-line guides to be very good.
If I had a recommendation for another host from someone I know and trust, I’d move provider in the blink of an eye.