Eight reasons why Fasthosts suck

If you’re a regular reader of Political Scrapbook it’s more than likely you’ve seen an “Internal Server Error” on here at some point in the last year. After an absolutely exasperating 12 months trying to resolve issues with their so-called “support”, we have finally left Fastshosts, the hosting company that couldn’t run a bath:

1. Their brand name is a contradiction in terms. According to monitoring service Pingdom, the average server response time for our site was 1,963 milliseconds. This dropped by more than 50% to 868 milliseconds when we moved to another (cheaper) host.
2. Fasthosts boast that their service is “reliable” – it is anything but. From November 2009 to August 2010 we had 244 separate instances of downtime, including one week in April where the site worked just 84% of the time! It’s no shock that they don’t offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for shared hosting.
3. Repeated complaints about the same error were not addressed.  We filed numerous support tickets pleading along the lines of “This is exactly the same recurring problem as we’ve had before”. Their support team simply close tickets when your site resurfaces only for it to disappear again hours (or minutes) later.

Leaving Fasthosts for a (cheaper) host dramatically improved our server performance

4. The company use three-month discount offers to hook customers into year long contracts. By the time we realised their service was a joke it was too late for us to leave.
5. Their technical support deleted (without informing us) the crucial .htaccess file. This completely crippled our WordPress installation, requiring us to restore the file from our backups.
6. Their custom-built user interface is appalling. Enjoy the hassle of being logged out every ten minutes? Then Fasthosts is for you!
7. Their internal systems are so poor that the support team can’t even access your account. Nearly every request for assistance elicits the response “Please send us your FTP username and password”.
8. For a significant period, their billing system couldn’t deal with bank verification for certain cards. They couldn’t take payment from you can pulled your site. The only way to resolve this was to pay the bill over the phone.

In conjunction with a number of other blogs, including Liberal Conspiracy, we plan to move to a new cloud server shortly. Site owners will be charged fees commensurate with their level of traffic, which is a good way to bring high-end hosting to smaller blogs, leveraging economies of scale so everyone benefits.

If you’re interested in this initiative then get in touch.