Established in 1999 by Andrew Michael, Fasthosts started life as a sixth form project on the internet. Eleven years on and the company has grown rapidly in size and strength to become a dominate player in the budget UK web hosting market. In 2006 Michael sold his 75% stake in the company to the German technology giant United Internet (which also owns 1and1 Internet) for a cool £61.5 million.
Company and Services
Based in Gloucester, UK, Fasthosts currently has around 100 staff members at its headquarters. It has a sure footing in the UK web hosting market with just under 10% of the market share – making it the third largest just behind its sister company, 1and1 Internet. Fasthosts’ parent company, United Internet, has seen a rise in pre-tax profits for 2007 of around 39.6%, with sales up by a healthy 26.7%.
As one stop shop for websites, you can get a domain name, email, broadband connection and web-hosting all from Fasthosts. Its web hosting service comes in two flavours: firstly, there is the general web hosting option offering unlimited traffic, email and site building software.It comes with a suite of more advanced features from which you can pick and choose depending upon your needs. Secondly, for those with a more demanding palate, Fasthosts has its dedicated server hosting. With this you get unlimited data transfer and root administration access (so you can install the applications you want). Both Microsoft and Linux platforms are supported. Customer support is available 24/7.
Fasthosts has experienced several high profile failures causing major disruption to its customers over the years. Best known of these was in October 2007 when the Company’s servers where hacked into. After the attack, Fasthosts was forced to ask its customers to change their passwords. A few weeks later it unilaterally changed the passwords of customers who hadn’t heeded their warning. This meant that many were locked the out of their website control panels for quite some time while the issue was being resolved.
On the plus side, Fasthosts has had several accolades, including being listed as the ‘Number 1 choice’ for e-commerce by Web Host Directory three times. Netcraft (the internet research company) ranked Fasthosts as the world’s top provider of Windows web hosting and the Sunday Times has twice listed Fasthosts as one of the top 100 fastest growing companies. UKReg, Fasthosts’ domain name division, is the UK’s largest domain name company.
Server Location
All of Fasthosts dedicated servers are based in the UK.
Related Links
Official FastHosts Blog
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Fasthosts host a number of my domains and websites. I now have a dedicated server.
The uptime would appear to be very good. There has been limited downtime to my knowledge.
They appear to offer most of the common options that are available with most other hosts. In terms of cost they are fairly competitive, I don’t think they are either the most expesive nor the cheapest.
However my main problem is with the support. You have very long waits on the automated phone system to get through to support however when you get through they are fairly helpful. Their new payment process cannot seam to handle Mastercard’s fraud prevention process.
They are very quick to suspend your account if this does happen which is not great when it is their fault the payment wasn’t taken in the first place. I think they have a good selection of packages which would appear to cater for most needs.
I just think that their support and customer service lets them down. I would have no problem recommending them to others with that caveat.