Good support for Common Issues, but some uptime issues

My main problem with the company is that they don't make public reports of server uptime available (shared web hosting) - so they're not as accountable as they should be. Many of us don't visit our own or our clients' websites regularly throughout the day, and so many of Hearts customers will be carrying on regardless unaware that their website/s could have been suffering big downtime problems, or slow response times.

I had one website that had to be moved to 3 different Heart servers in the space of 12 months because of poor downtime - I had to ask for it to be moved. If I hadn't been monitoring the website with pingdommonitoring tools, then the website would have been suffering without anyone doing anything about it. Before a recent move it suffered 79% downtime during one short period and it took quite a lot of effort for them to take any proactive action. Over the last 30 days it now has an uptime of 99.58%, so things have improved.

In my own opinion the server response times could be quicker too, they seem to be slower than many of the web hosts that I move websites from.

I think they're afraid of giving uptime reports and alerts because of the resulting extra drain on support resources, but I think they should be more transparent in some way. They should be putting a lot more resources than they seem to be, into keeping their shared hosting at a high standard, it slips below too many times.

Having said all that, I am happy with the services offered by Heart Internet. I've been with them for a few years and their support is generally very good for all common issues and problems, but the single reason I use them is to keep my websites live, and they could do better at that on their shared/reseller hosting. I've given them 3 stars because there is definitely room to improve by 2 stars, especially on transparency. Also their complaints procedure doesn't really give me much confidence. Still I've heard some people say 'better the devil you know' when it comes to Heart.