No one mentioned Hostgator, though I'm still new with them after moving from a free host. Everything is fine and smooth with their support. I'll give them 8/10...

 

Many people dont really think of the big US based host's in that way, due to the overselling, low resource tolerance's (Due to the overselling), lag times to the US, outsourced live-chat support to india, SEO dis-advantages etc etc.... There ok if you just want to host static pages, nothing that would generally demand any "omffff" so to speak. Checkout vbseo.com for reviews of hostgator... People trying to run simple, non intense forums getting shut-down without warnings... Its purely due to the lack of any beathing space on oversold servers.

 

Also if you dont care about the SEO/Google rankings towards the UK..

(That applies to any non-uk host, not just hostgator)...

 

I'm not having a pop at HG, just saying, these conversations have been had many times over and the same things crop up time and time again.

For my personal sites I use Nearly Free Speech, essentially a pay-as-you-go host. My sites aren't high volume so spent about $10 12 months ago and have around $4 left, which includes bandwidth for two small sites, uploads to both and a MySQL DB running on one for a Wordpress blog. As for service, it's sometimes slow, but then they're US based, whereas I'm in the UK, otherwise very happy with them - 9/10.

I am looking for a new host at the end of this month and looking forward to escaping the clutches of 123 reg, they havent caused that many problems, bar a couple of occasions of bandwidth exceeding.

 

I need something with the ability to use php and possibly a reseller account.

 

I like the looks of clook, wesh and possibly peartree at present.

 

If half way through the year I decided to upgrade my account, would this be possible with the mentioned providers?

 

Thanks

If half way through the year I decided to upgrade my account, would this be possible with the mentioned providers?

 

Thanks

 

Hiya MG

 

Yes, all 3 of our companies use cpanel and upgrading is a breeze, anytime you like.

We dont provide any reseller accounts at all, purely due to the nature of the kind of customers that arise out of doing it, and also because its highly unfair to the end customers to introduce 1 single point of failiure for their website (the reseller) when the host has gone to great lengths to ensure redundancy.

 

Especially with resellers who go on holiday or wind up in hospital / uncontactable etc etc, it leaves their customers hanging, and so passes on that bad feeling to the host, so we steer well clear of any of those complications at all, we keep things strictly between us and the end customer.

 

Plus of course, there are some resellers out there too who know absolutely nothing about hosting at all and expect the host to do everything for them, thus they want more support for less money, like buying a set of spanners and asking the guy in halfords to service your car for you as well as drive it....

 

Buying the spanners and tools make us NOT a mechanic and taxi driver.

Hiya MG

 

Yes, all 3 of our companies use cpanel and upgrading is a breeze, anytime you like.

We dont provide any reseller accounts at all, purely due to the nature of the kind of customers that arise out of doing it, and also because its highly unfair to the end customers to introduce 1 single point of failiure for their website (the reseller) when the host has gone to great lengths to ensure redundancy.

 

Especially with resellers who go on holiday or wind up in hospital / uncontactable etc etc, it leaves their customers hanging, and so passes on that bad feeling to the host, so we steer well clear of any of those complications at all, we keep things strictly between us and the end customer.

 

Plus of course, there are some resellers out there too who know absolutely nothing about hosting at all and expect the host to do everything for them, thus they want more support for less money, like buying a set of spanners and asking the guy in halfords to service your car for you as well as drive it....

 

Buying the spanners and tools make us NOT a mechanic and taxi driver.

 

I love it. The big explanation makes you a winner - Good sales pitch

Has anyone had good experiences with Heart Internet? We use them at work and at first they seemed ok but their technical support (only via email) seems a bit weak when it comes to coding configuration issues. I would give them 3 or 4/10 at the moment. We are currently having problems with random wordpress plugins not working and crashing our blogs mainly due to the way Hearts servers seem to be configured. This is where our issues over their support come in. Until now I was considering setting up my own reseller account with them but now I'm not so sure.

 

I would be interested to hear from other people of their experiences with Heart. Good or Bad. Would you recommend them? What would be your score out of 10?

 

Our other host is fasthosts. Need I say more? 2/10. Slow servers, dodgy up/downtime, recent flakey email problems, pricey add ons and I heard the telephone support is now going out to romania or the phillipines ( and not to mention last years security hack).

We have had a few customers which have come to us from HI and have not looked back...

 

There network can be a bit slow at times - its not as bad as some bu it can lag... Technical support over email only works if more than one person is manning that email address at any one time... I thought you got a ticketing system to use?

 

I HATE their control panel as in my opinion its poorly made and can be rather restrictive at times. Do you know what config they use on their servers to make them interfere with your wordpress configs?

 

Fasthosts it really depends on whether they liek you or not... There main market is for users who are just starting out on the web... People who want a family website etc or your local hairdressers If you want to host anything dynamic then FORGET about it... Like HI we also have a fair few users who migrated away from fasthosts - our domain used to be with them and DNS updates took forever!

I'd echo what Rob says.

 

We have had a LOT of customers come from HI and FH who have seriously noticed the difference both in server performance, far better control panel (Cpanel) and customer service all round.

 

I've logged into HI and FH control panels myself many times for customers to help them migrate to us and the control panels are just a nightmare.

 

We recently migrated a very large online retailer away from a Fasthosts dedicated server and the server didnt even have any MySQL config / phpmyadmin or anything at all to access the database's with whatsoever, all you could do was view the servers stats, and even those were wayyyy wrong..

 

When the Fasthosts server tells you an account is 250mb out of its 400mb allocation and you grab a copy of it to find its actually 2GB+ and downloads at 6Kbps over FTP, you suddenly realise WHY those servers cost peanuts.

I have found using wget when transferring from Fasthosts faster than ftp.

Peartree without a doubt, 10/10 every time, I have been with HostNine, FastHosts and 1and1 in the past on various packages also eUKhost, but peartree is far the better one for speed of the server and speed of the support!!!

Register365

 

8/10

 

I'm only with them a month but they seem pretty good, reliable and always sort out any problems I have quickly. Only problem is getting through to them, phone support is impossible to get through to and email replies are somtimes slow.

 

 

Anyone have any experience with Justhost?

Its another host with those unlimited drives and unlimited transit

 

Use 25% or more of system resources for longer than 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.

 

We reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to discontinue service to any customer with a website or other hosted data that takes up more than 10% of the server resources and/or 10% of the server's CPU. This means that if your website is found to be utilizing more than 10% of the CPU and memory of the service, we reserve the right to take your site offline.

 

You are not going to be able to run anything such as a forum, ecommerce site, busy site without you being suspended every 5 seconds!

 

If they are putting lots of accounts on one server... A typical Quad Core machine with 4GB ram can take at best a max of 500 accounts before it becoming very overloaded... Many overselling hosts cram more than that on one server so the service aint gonna be to great either!

from all the hosts you mentioned http://Speedhosting.co.uk looks promising price- and servicewise. Has anyone else had any experience with them ?

from all the hosts you mentioned http://Speedhosting.co.uk looks promising price- and servicewise. Has anyone else had any experience with them ?

 

Overselling with US based servers @ The planet. Wouldnt touch that with a bargepole..

What sort of tolerances would you expect when sharing a server with other "150GB a month" customers all paying £3.50? (Minus the cost of your free domain @ £10/yr ??

 

Those "unlimited addon and parked domains / DB's, mailing list's etc etc" are also unwise too...

 

So how exactly do you come to the conclusion that they look promising on service?

They dont pay for branding removal on their billing system, only have a 1 yr SSL certificate...

 

Doesnt show any signs serious investment or wanting to stick around for long..

Buy cheap, buy twice...

Im with wesh on what he has said... Again its another one of these budget hosts

 

Just straying off topic for a sec

 

Erm Wesh... you cannot say that because they don't have branding removal on their billing system or a 1 year SSL certificate reflects on the amount of capital they have invested... We don't have branding removal on WHMCS and our SSL certificates are on yearly contracts... Why pay more for something such as branding removal when its not 100% vital? If its not stopping the customer from buying the service then why pay an additional cost?

 

 

 

Back on topic

It's arbitrary points wesh has picked up on there, sure it can be interesting but the points on the SSL and WHMCS are irrelevant to their business and how they perform.

 

On the other hand using US servers for UK hosting with such blatant overselling isn't a recipe for reliable good value hosting.

i actually wand to find a good uk based hosting. how much more expensive they are, comparing to those US hosting resellers?

That really depends on who you host with but you can get a decent UK hosting package for between £30 - £50 a year. The UK will always be more expensive than the USA unless your going to host with a company such as 1&1 and Fasthosts (I would strongly recommend against)...

 

If your userbase is in the UK then for SEO purposes you would want to have your hosting in the UK because it will be faster and you will appear higher on search engines.

 

I have sent you a message regarding hosting as well

You can get good value UK shared hosting from £20 - £100 a year, depending on your needs.

Im with wesh on what he has said... Again its another one of these budget hosts

 

Just straying off topic for a sec

 

Erm Wesh... you cannot say that because they don't have branding removal on their billing system or a 1 year SSL certificate reflects on the amount of capital they have invested... We don't have branding removal on WHMCS and our SSL certificates are on yearly contracts... Why pay more for something such as branding removal when its not 100% vital? If its not stopping the customer from buying the service then why pay an additional cost?

 

Back on topic

 

It's arbitrary points wesh has picked up on there, sure it can be interesting but the points on the SSL and WHMCS are irrelevant to their business and how they perform.

 

On the other hand using US servers for UK hosting with such blatant overselling isn't a recipe for reliable good value hosting.

 

Hiya Rob / Tim

 

Indeed, im not saying that branding removals on billing systems or length of time your SSL certificates has any affect on performance, nor does it stop the customer purchasing the hosting, but to me personally, and of course, this is just my opinion here, it shows lack of investment, or maybe to put it another way, lack of "intention" to continue doing business.

 

If your a host and you know your in it for the long haul, why would you pay more for your SSL certificate, and keep renewing it every 12 months, when say a 5 year certificate is immensely cheaper, and demonstrates very visibly to customers your long term intentions if they want to check your SSL cert..

 

I'm not saying those who have short certs are bad, what I'm trying to say is that to me, I dont "get it", it doesnt make financial sense, it doesnt make business sense, and doesnt show me the customer why I should invest in you if you wont either... if that makes sense... (This all sounds VERY different in actual spoken words rather than plain text )

 

Tim, my points on the SSL are very relevant in the financial aspect because your going to buy your SSL anyway, regardless, so why pay more for it and keep buying it in 12 month hops when you can get a sweet discount for buying the 5 year ones?

 

As for branding removal, thats more of an additional thing rather than any major thing, so like, if point A is present(short SSL), AND point B (No investment to remove branding) then to me, it just shows a company isnt investing in themselves long-term, regardless of whats going on behind the scenes, thats how it looks, although I do analyse stuff too much, I do look for signs like this to go hand in hand with other signs, like the overselling, servers in other countries and other such things, so while its not the be all and end all, its part and parcel of the overall feel for what a company is doing, regardless of product or service.

 

Now, to figure out how to get all those "Ford" badges off my car and buy a 5 year tax disk

 

damn it, this sounded so much better in my head

it doesnt make business sense, and doesnt show me the customer why I should invest in you if you wont either.

If so then why not invest in a £400 EV SSL certificate as opposed to a £100 SSL certificate?

 

It should not cause you to make your mind up over whether to do business with another business / individual...

 

However your entitled to your own opinion as much as myself and Tim are and I will respect it

If so then why not invest in a £400 EV SSL certificate as opposed to a £100 SSL certificate?

 

It should not cause you to make your mind up over whether to do business with another business / individual...

 

However your entitled to your own opinion as much as myself and Tim are and I will respect it

 

lol, if only, those things cost a damn bomb

Its not the level of cert I'm banging on about, its the length, but hey, I should keep banging on and on, I mean you no offence, and dont want to be seen to be "avin a go" guv'nor.

 

Rob, as with everything, there will always be exceptions to everything, so only apply what I said to those I said it about, oversellers and the such like... Doesnt apply to you guys..

 

As long as were all doing our jobs better than those double page spread freaks then life is good I say...

If your a host and you know your in it for the long haul, why would you pay more for your SSL certificate, and keep renewing it every 12 months, when say a 5 year certificate is immensely cheaper, and demonstrates very visibly to customers your long term intentions if they want to check your SSL cert..

 

 

As for branding removal, thats more of an additional thing rather than any major thing, so like, if point A is present(short SSL), AND point B (No investment to remove branding) then to me, it just shows a company isnt investing in themselves long-term, regardless of whats going on behind the scenes, thats how it looks, although I do analyse stuff too much, I do look for signs like this to go hand in hand with other signs, like the overselling, servers in other countries and other such things, so while its not the be all and end all, its part and parcel of the overall feel for what a company is doing, regardless of product or service.

 

Quite simply SSL prices and security can change dramatically in 5 years. How many people are still using the 128 encryption certs that they paid for upfront when the 256 and above is cheaper than they originally purchased?

 

Branding removal is worthless. Let's face there are two factors:

 

1. you remove the branding in the hope that the customer doesn't know you are using 3rd party software

2. you keep it so that clients know you are using a respected and popular package to manage your business.

 

In the case of 1) most people can spot awbs, whmcs, clientexec, modernbill and more very easily - branding removed.

In the case of 2) this makes more sense that you have invested in software to work for your business.

Quite simply SSL prices and security can change dramatically in 5 years. How many people are still using the 128 encryption certs that they paid for upfront when the 256 and above is cheaper than they originally purchased?

 

Branding removal is worthless. Let's face there are two factors:

 

1. you remove the branding in the hope that the customer doesn't know you are using 3rd party software

2. you keep it so that clients know you are using a respected and popular package to manage your business.

 

In the case of 1) most people can spot awbs, whmcs, clientexec, modernbill and more very easily - branding removed.

In the case of 2) this makes more sense that you have invested in software to work for your business.

 

2 totally fantastic points indeed Wise, but like I said, all part of a bigger picture... not "the entire picture"

the entire picture varys from person to person, firm to firm etc etc etc - if there was a magic formula we would be richer than the richest rich person in rich town!

I currently use x10hosting for their free service but I have to sign in every 2 weeks or the site gets pulled down until reactivated. Also over the last 2 weeks, webmail has been disabled. Apart from that they are great.

 

I think it is time to buy hosting. I am in the UK and want to host about 3 - 5 Sites. They aren't huge sites. A couple of portfolios and a couple of sites for a mates business.

 

I have seen prices from £20 - 80 a year.

 

I have not a clue how much space nor bandwidth I need.

 

I like the idea of having a free domain but then again domains are cheap anyway.

 

Can some one point me in the right direction?

 

I should also add I like to have full control over my domains and websites. I love the control pannel that x10Hosting uses.

 

Cheers, Jamie

 

P.s. GoDaddy.com - Deluxe Plan looks good. Any ideas?

Hiya JaYUK

 

Were completely UK based (All servers are @ London Docklands) and we also use cpanel just as 10x do.

If some of your websites are business websites then you would be better off hosting them in the UK too for SEO reasons.

 

One any of our hosting plans you can host up to 11 websites, and if your not sure how much bandwidth you need, you can upgrade anytime you need, you do get email warnings in advance if your running out of monthly bandwidth.

 

You also have complate control over your domain names directly via our website too.

 

If your considering anything @ godaddy, check out www.nodaddy.com

 

As for 10xhosting.com, they dont advertise any free hosting????? In fact, they advertise hosting for another company!!

I'd go with wesh, i've been meaning to get an account with them, just not got any spare money. I've suggested them to a few people, and everyone who's gone with them has nothing but praise for them, so they must be better than good

 

Alternatively

 

http://www.purplecloud.com/

 

are good, they were my first host (because they accepted splashplastic ) and also in the london dockland area (i think?).

 

oh BTW, AVOID GODADDY. My friend had some valuable domains taken from him for some pathetic reason.

I know its american based, but I <3 MediaTemple.

 

Its fast, and because it runs on a grid its never down.

www.siteground.com

 

A solid 10 for me, ive had no problems with them. 750gb storage space (apparently its unlimited now), unlimited bandwidth and has cPanel installed at /cpanel. Its only $5, so about £3 a month. Love it.

Go Daddy is a no then lol

 

Wesh looks good but way out of my price range. One of my sites is very media rich. Its over 300MB alone. My fathers business site will eventually be transferred over to my new host to and it is a photography company. As you can imagine its full of high res pics and videos!

 

www.siteground.com seems well priced but not sure as its over-seas

I know its american based, but I <3 MediaTemple.

 

Its fast, and because it runs on a grid its never down.

 

How do you find performance on their grid platform?

Like wesh we do UK based hosting in London - Global Switch 2 Data Centre to be precise

 

Our plans start from £25 a year for 500MB space and 5GB Bandwidth We also host many members of this forum already and have many positive reviews about the service we provide

 

http://www.hosting.peartreeuk.com/hosting.html

 

That will tell you all you need to know Also if you have any questions feel free to shoot me a message

Go Daddy is a no then lol

 

Wesh looks good but way out of my price range. One of my sites is very media rich. Its over 300MB alone. My fathers business site will eventually be transferred over to my new host to and it is a photography company. As you can imagine its full of high res pics and videos!

 

www.siteground.com seems well priced but not sure as its over-seas

 

It is, I live in Northern Ireland and I have it.

Overselling with US based servers @ The planet. Wouldnt touch that with a bargepole..

What sort of tolerances would you expect when sharing a server with other "150GB a month" customers all paying £3.50? (Minus the cost of your free domain @ £10/yr ??

 

Those "unlimited addon and parked domains / DB's, mailing list's etc etc" are also unwise too...

 

So how exactly do you come to the conclusion that they look promising on service?

They dont pay for branding removal on their billing system, only have a 1 yr SSL certificate...

 

Doesnt show any signs serious investment or wanting to stick around for long..

Buy cheap, buy twice...

 

Hi there,

 

I represent Speed Technologies LTD, who own and operate speedhosting.co.uk. We are proactive in listening to our customers, and tracking where our new business comes from, and in doing so, stumbled across this post. We don't usually reply to such comments, but unfortunately, we do not want anyone to be misinformed as to how we operate.

 

To clarify, we host our services from the BlueSquare data centre in Maidenhead. We recently made this transition, and the website has not been appropriately updated. I can only apologise for that, and it is something that we'll be updating within the next few hours.

 

Your package comparisons are slightly confusing. We sell our base package at £3.49/month, £9.99/quarter or £34.99/year. Our monthly package does not include a free domain name, and we have priced appropriately to cover the cost of the free domain name (which isn't £10/year). We feel that initial cost of the domain is outweighed by having a satisfied customer, and we more than recoup the money throughout the term of their hosting, in keeping them with us.

 

While I agree that "unlimited" is usually a poor choice, in terms of account addons such as databases or parked domains, we feel that these are no longer differentiating factors in both choosing a web host, or in turn, choosing a package. Setting an arbitrary upper limit is of course an option, but that doesn't really make any difference. If we had it set to say, 5 databases, and our customer wanted a 6th, well, we would be happy in adding it. We're removing that need, and we have absolutely no reason to think that a customer would use an excessive amount of addon resources - and if they chose to, we would hold our end of the bargain, and honor our package.

 

I don't think that it is very fair to judge the service we provide based on our SSL certificate purchases, or our branded billing panel. Essentially, a tagline within a billing panel makes absolutely no difference to the service. We have worked hard to ensure that our billing panel is tightly integrated with our website. I am sure our customers would appreciate a small saving on their hosting bill, rather than the removal of three words. As for SSL certificates, we renew these on a yearly basis, and as of yet, have no reason to purchase a 5-year certificate. It's not really something our customers are concerned about, and has nothing to do with our commitment to serving them.

 

We've been around for just under 4 years, and we intend to serve our customers for years to come. We are open to customer feedback, and as a small company are more robust in dealing with it than larger web hosts. I hope that you don't view this post as a quipped retort: I can appreciate that with so many web hosts that do oversell and operate a "sell 'em cheap, stack 'em high" policy, it is difficult to discern those which don't. In conclusion, we're a small hosting provider, but we are certainly not here to waste our customers' time, and we are committed to providing them with excellent services. I hope that you can appreciate that.

 

Thank you,

 

Stephen

Speed Technologies LTD

My first host was Netrillium.com

 

They were great at first for how cheap they were but soon the servers become unbearably unstable and often had outages. Poor level of Customer Service too. Was with them for about 12 months before things deteriorated; gave them the benefit of the doubt at first but after 3 months enough was enough.

 

They have since closed down.

What does clook support? I am also intresting in a host as i want to move from my free host. I take it clook supports all languages? does it use php myadmin? Where do you recommend i buy my domain from?

Ask clook, but they use identical setups to us in terms of server languages, OS and control panels.

We support PHP/HTML/CSS/flash/JS etc etc... but not the microsoft languages like .asp

Same for us as well in terms of base offerings they use a standard cPanel setup...

I have been using PowWeb (9/10) for a while now and I'm happy with their service. LunarPages (8/10) and GoDaddy (8/10) are good too, but PowWeb costs less money.