CWCS www.cwcs.co.uk Review

Good Points
Not many, only cheap.

Bad Points
Too many to list, poor tech support, acknowledgeable and did not read generated tickets. See general comments.

General Comments
Compared to other reviews CWCS in my experience has been very poor. I have written an honest review on CWCS and hope you take the time to read it. As with all new suppliers, we give them a demo. As a test and the future potential hosting of 200 domains, we recently signed up for their reseller v2 option, we had problems from the start. We could not obtain any ftp access to any accounts we setup, we contacted tech support with the details and not going into too much detail, they were clueless. The name servers hadn't been changed for the domain in question, so knowing this; we gave them the IP of their server along with the user/pass. Unbelievably they said, you can't use the domain name and must use the IP! Being a computer engineer myself, this was quite worrying, and clearly showed they did not read my support ticket, which clearly stated the IP not domain name! Next, thinking it was just a glitch, and luckily using only test domains, we tried to remove the domain/hosting/dns etc. Yes, you guessed it, error! Another tech support ticket was raised! As we had just started using the plesk control panel and were still experimenting, we needed to change a ftp username on another domain. Yes, another error. As soon as we did this and the whole domain, web site preview, ftp root folder setup (that didn't work anyway) was all giving an error. If this site was live, we would have been in the deep waters! So we raised another ticket and eventually after confirming again, it was removed. We spoke to a support technician over the telephone about the ftp problem, he didn't really want to know and he asked for an error message/number and said he couldn't do anything otherwise. Being a computer engineer myself, I simply use winxp ie6 for ftp, purely for convenience and popularity throughout other systems. I said it displays no error just will not accept user & pass which I knew was permissions or some other problem. But that was not good enough and he struggled to understand why I still use IE! Yes, i know it's old, but whatever program you use, it should still work regardless! So i used the telnet command to ftp in. Sent the screen shot clearly displaying the user/pass (which was then asked for again! "are you spotting a trend here?") and a picture of a working example! We have paid £60 + VAT for currently, nothing but a waste of our time! I am left thinking "am I going to need to raise support tickets everytime I setup a new domain just to access the data via FTP! " CWCS need to remember a support team and a fully working infrastructure is the key to any hosting company, without that, you will have nothing! My whole experience with CWCS is shocking and I will be cancelling the account as soon as i return to my office. And as per a previous review from another member, if they ask for a fax confirmation, there will be an uproar! I will simply respond with "did you want to speak to my solicitor? ".

We currently use UKFAST on a reseller plus option hosting over 200 domains, there is not as many tech options and they don't use plesk on the reseller account, but when there are (very very rare) problems they are sorted efficiently, they also tell us what the problem was, which as computer engineers, we obviously appreciate as we know things do go wrong. We only ventured away from UKFAST as they were quite expensive for their virtual servers, but experiencing such shocking and unhelpful technical support from CWCS, we are now very lucky to have them serving our 200 hosting clients e-mail, web, smtp, database, mysql etc and will be willing to pay the extra! UKFAST did recently employ a few university leavers and we did notice with a few phone calls the un-experienced knowledge Umm's Arhhs etc. But, the normal fully trained and experienced engineers we usually dealt with were still looking over them and fixed the issue. Everyone has to start somewhere and since then, we've had no real issues. Once we have root access to our VS, we can sort any issues our self and the tech support is 24/7 if we can't.