Followers of this blog, Twitter or Google+ can’t help but have noticed me moaning about my hosting provider (Fasthosts). My site was moved on to a new server (by accident) in December:
Since then I’ve been having assorted rants on G+ and Twitter because the site has been up and down a lot.
I started looking at new (UK-based) hosting providers, but the reviews of all of them are pretty terrible. Part of this is because they are all pretty dodgy, having to cut so many corners to make a profit, and part of it is because people (like me) only tend to review things when they are really bad. So here I was, caught between a rock and a hard place. Stick with Fasthosts (who I’ve been with for 11 years), or make a move?
Whilst looking for a new hosting company, I continued to hassle Fasthosts, opening tickets for every failure and providing all sorts of tracing, screen shots. Eventually, they offered to switch me to another server. On Thursday night (about midnight UK time), the server move was initiated. I spent until 03:45 snagging the move, then went to bed. I woke up to a message from Arjen Visser from Dbvisit.com saying there was an issue with the site. By the time I picked up the message things were working again, so I filed this as a “bedding in” issue. 🙂 Later that day, there was one 15 minute downtime, which I logged and was given a proper explanation for by the support team (the first so far!!). Since then, as far as I know, the site has bee working fine. Fingers crossed.
I pay yearly, so I’m paid up until December, but I’m going to continue to investigate other hosting options, just in case this all kicks off again. If anyone has any long-term experience of a UK-based hosting provider I am interested to know. One of my friends recently moved to 1and1.co.uk, who have pretty terrible reviews, but so far he’s having a good experience. I’ve done a bit of system admin for him and so far there has been no drama.
Cheers
Tim…
Website Server Move (wrap-up)… | The ORACLE-BASE Blog http://t.co/oUmId7Iq
Just curious – any reason why you want UK-based?
Hi.
I live in the UK and I “mostly” do business in the UK, so I kinda like that my site is hosted in the UK and governed by UK law, not that it means much these days. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
I use ICDSOFT.COM and have been incredibly impressed with both hosting and support. Support is absolutely fantastic – first response in under 10 minutes, plus, these guys actually know what they are doing, and they are professional. They now have SSD’s in their servers so they are usually pretty quick (though they are shared servers so mileage sometimes varies). The downside for you is that they only have 3 data centres and your nearest is Germany.