I know that this isn't really software related but I want to share my very negative experience of dealing with Fasthosts.co.uk
As a HTC touch pro owner I am regularly reflashing my phone using roms cooked by NRG at the xda-developers.com site.
As a sign of my appreciation of his hard work i decided to open a new hosting account to host his roms in order to take some of the load off his servers.
I noticed that Fasthosts very offering 20% off for the first 3 months. They are a large firm with adverts all over the place so I decided to try them out. After all if I was unhappy I would just cancel the account and walk away.
I additionally registered a domain name with them. I normally use 123-reg but as they are part of the same company I thought I would do it via Fasthosts.
I generally register domains as trade rather than personal incase I want to use them commercially in the future- this was a grave error. The Fasthosts checkout doesn't allow you to register the domain as trade and the space as personal.
Within minutes of the account being activated I noticed that their backend control panel is very flaky- I tried to add a user to a newly created MYSQL database, it kept failing so I opened a support ticket.
After 13 hours I had not had a reply so I sent a new ticket asking for my account to be terminated- 24 hours later I got a reply telling me to phone customer services. This is a rather expensive process from my mobile (0870=20p/m)- I hung up after 10 minutes and sent another support request to cancel the account, again same response.
A number of months passed an I sent yet another ticket- this time I was told that I was locked into a 12 month contract.
It seems that I have waived my rights to a cooling off period under the distance selling act by registering as a business user- I explained that this was an error on my behalf.
By taking the slightly discounted option I also lost any rights to cancel before the 12 months (they claim that there is a box that you can tick if you want to pay the full price and have a cooling off period).
I have also noticed that if there are insufficient funds on my card they will hit me with a £20 charge each time they represent the transaction- this strikes me as being punitive.
Then to top things off I notice that I have a window of a week or so before the end of the 12 months to terminate the account otherwise I am locked in for longer.
Yeah I know that the onus is on the consumer to read the Terms and Conditions but given the size of Fasthosts I didn't think for one minute that they would make money in such an underhand way.
I have accounts with reg-domains, Bluehosts, Total Choice Hosting and Vpsville- I would recommend all of them, none of them would ever use the tactics employed by Fasthosts.
I am luckier than many other Fasthost customers though- I have heard of customers in the same boat paying hundreds per month for dedicated servers that don't even work.
Who ever you go with read the T&Cs and ask what the typical support response times are!!!
As a HTC touch pro owner I am regularly reflashing my phone using roms cooked by NRG at the xda-developers.com site.
As a sign of my appreciation of his hard work i decided to open a new hosting account to host his roms in order to take some of the load off his servers.
I noticed that Fasthosts very offering 20% off for the first 3 months. They are a large firm with adverts all over the place so I decided to try them out. After all if I was unhappy I would just cancel the account and walk away.
I additionally registered a domain name with them. I normally use 123-reg but as they are part of the same company I thought I would do it via Fasthosts.
I generally register domains as trade rather than personal incase I want to use them commercially in the future- this was a grave error. The Fasthosts checkout doesn't allow you to register the domain as trade and the space as personal.
Within minutes of the account being activated I noticed that their backend control panel is very flaky- I tried to add a user to a newly created MYSQL database, it kept failing so I opened a support ticket.
After 13 hours I had not had a reply so I sent a new ticket asking for my account to be terminated- 24 hours later I got a reply telling me to phone customer services. This is a rather expensive process from my mobile (0870=20p/m)- I hung up after 10 minutes and sent another support request to cancel the account, again same response.
A number of months passed an I sent yet another ticket- this time I was told that I was locked into a 12 month contract.
It seems that I have waived my rights to a cooling off period under the distance selling act by registering as a business user- I explained that this was an error on my behalf.
By taking the slightly discounted option I also lost any rights to cancel before the 12 months (they claim that there is a box that you can tick if you want to pay the full price and have a cooling off period).
I have also noticed that if there are insufficient funds on my card they will hit me with a £20 charge each time they represent the transaction- this strikes me as being punitive.
Then to top things off I notice that I have a window of a week or so before the end of the 12 months to terminate the account otherwise I am locked in for longer.
Yeah I know that the onus is on the consumer to read the Terms and Conditions but given the size of Fasthosts I didn't think for one minute that they would make money in such an underhand way.
I have accounts with reg-domains, Bluehosts, Total Choice Hosting and Vpsville- I would recommend all of them, none of them would ever use the tactics employed by Fasthosts.
I am luckier than many other Fasthost customers though- I have heard of customers in the same boat paying hundreds per month for dedicated servers that don't even work.
Who ever you go with read the T&Cs and ask what the typical support response times are!!!
