So, I've now raised at least 10, maybe 15 support tickets with Fast Hosts, most of which are along the lines of: "our site says server is down" or "or our site says too many sql connections." to which the Fasthosts response is always "oops" then if you press a bit harder, "yeah, it's because you're on a shared server, buy a dedicated one if it bothers you."

So on a shared server expect maybe 75% uptime. Maybe. And the downtime is usually for at least an hour each time if not more.

I chose Fasthosts after almost going insane with BT, the main reason for the choice was that they don't sign you into a 12 month contract. The service has been good although not the best value for money by far. They recently reduced thier prices (which don't show VAT which is technically illegal if you are selling to the public) so I asked if I could run on the new price scheme which I could get if I signed up now. I was told I can change but it is subject to a £20 "administration" charge, making it totally pointless. They said I could get a new account but that would mean my internet would be cut off for a bit (I have a number of websites so this is not practical)
It seems they value potential customers much more than loyal paying customers. As I have to get a new account to get on the cheaper rate then there is no reason why I shouldn't go elsewhere.

I have been criticised by an ardent supporter of Streamlinenet for not writing a review of Fasthosts whilst reporting my absolute nightmare with Streamlinenet.

My site had been down for a week and I was trying to get Streamlinenet to do something. Support tickets were unanswered, there was no telephone contact, and I was beginning to despair.

I searched for alternative UK hosting companies and found Fasthosts.co.uk. I telephoned them, and within 4 minutes an account was up and running. I changed the DNS nameservers of my Domain to Fasthosts, and that was that - so I thought. A few hours later nothing had changed, so I again called their support line and was advised that Strteamlinenet had still not parked and deleted my domain from their records.

I submitted support ticket after support ticket to Streamlinenet with no result. Again I spoke to Fasthosts, and they advised me to download and fax a "Domain Name Transfer" form to them and scribble on the top - hosting. This would allow them to force a park and delete action. They also advised that in this situation they would waive the normal £10 fee. This I did, and within an hour my site was up and running.

If it wasn't for Strteamlinenets abysmal service my site would have been running even quicker, but thanks to the actual guys and young lady who spoke to me about 5 0'clock in the morning from Fasthosts, you have one very happy customer.

I'm in the process of setting up a new Internet Merchant/sales site. Nothing fancy (and I won't mention the URL here, as I'm not on a freebie trip), but I did need some method of accepting payment via credit card and debit card. The Fasthosts Ecommerce package looked excellent. Good pricing, and seemingly a professional outfit, if you believe the website.

I had a few queries, namely about shopping cart integration etc., so I picked up the phone and called the Fasthosts sales team. All I got was a vague suggestion that I use "Actinic" end of call. I thought that this was just the usual problem of talking to a salesman rather than to a techie, so I emailed them with my questions and a request for a site that uses their service. I'm still waiting for their reply. I suspect that I might terminate of old age before it ever arrives.

Feeling that this isn't the kind of treatment a potential new client expects I've taken my business elsewhere.

I've been a Fasthosts customer myself for about three years now and prior to this my employer was also a customer after my colleague and I did some research and recommended Fasthosts to him - so overall, I've been dealing with Fasthosts for about five years.

In their early days Fasthosts were terrible; my employer had a reseller account and he allowed my colleague and I to put our own sites onto his account. Some weekends my site used to go down about lunchtime on a Saturday and would be down for the rest of the weekend so in the early days there used to be no tech support over the weekend. These days however, things have improved a lot. They do offer a reliable service and tech support is always there if you need help. But there are a few things that you need to be aware of if you are thinking about hosting with Fasthosts:

Fasthosts make a big deal about their bandwidth but I've duplicated my own site with another hosting company and there's never been any noticeable difference. For example, before opening my own account with Fasthosts I opened one with Webfusion. I then had my site running on my employer's Fasthosts account and on the Webfusion account under a different url. I couldn't notice any difference in load times and that was over a period of at least three months - every time I went to my website I went to the alternative website on Webfusion because I was checking really to see if Webfusion was any better than Fasthosts but there was no difference; Fasthosts weren't any better than Webfusion when it came to load times.

I've had problems with the Fasthosts control panel on a number of occasions. For example, one of the packages that Fasthosts offers comes complete with SQL Server. So I took out the package, and then followed the procedure to create the SQL Server database. A notice then appeared saying that I was going to be charged £180 or so for the SQL Server database but I ignored it because my account included a SQL database. The charge went through though and I had to contact them and ask for a refund which was quite annoying. This has happened with something else too but I can't remember what it was.

Customer service is very poor in my opinion. Okay, most of the time this doesn't matter but if you ever receive an e-mail from Fasthosts concerning your account it's one of those no reply e-mails so you can't reply to it. At the bottom of the e-mail there's a list of links to hosting and broadband etc, but no link to customer services and there's no link to customer services on their website either as of 22/10/05. I find this really annoying - you have a web-based company that you can't even contact by e-mail. Their sales support isn't much better. I contacted sales recently to ask whether the 5Gig limit on my webspace was fixed or could I purchase more space. Quite a straightforward question but it took three weeks to get an answer and that was only because I contacted them about four times to repeat the question. Please don't confuse customer service with Tech support - I've never had any problems with tech support.

The other thing to watch is that Fasthosts tend to send out a lot of promotional e-mails and allegedly didn't respond as they should have when I asked them, on numerous occasions, not to process my personal data for marketing purposes. Having said that, I find that the majority of companies in the UK ignore data protection requests anyway until you threaten to submit a request for assessment to the Information Commissioner's office.

Finally, Fasthosts are expensive! Their broadband prices are a joke and they charge quite a bit for My SQL databases compared to other companies that I've looked at. Their reseller account is really expensive and it's all based on this claim that they have the fastest pipe whatever in the country. In practice it doesn't make that much difference if any as I've already said - it's just a bit of hype to justify their prices in my opinion.

The trouble with Fasthosts is that they have automated their service too much and there are problems with the automated system. So, if you don't need to contact customer services often and if you're happy paying their prices, and if you don't need to make any changes to your account then their hosting service is very reliable. Just be warned though that things will go wrong, it is virtually impossible to contact customer service by e-mail and you're paying a premium price; for example, the cost of their reseller package has hardly changed from five years ago but the technology has become a lot cheaper.

I'm not just having a go at them, this is a fair report based on my five years experience. I used to recommend Fasthosts to friends and colleagues but not any more. It's not one thing in particular but there must be companies offering a similar service with better customer service and cheaper prices.

We use Fasthosts as a re-seller account and it has proved to be an excellent service. Our own control panel listing all domains held, then click through and manage all sites with ease. Send clients links to view stats, set up domains and email accounts through UK Reg etc. All very easy and thus far excellent.

Whilst FastHosts (www.fasthosts.co.uk) offer a great array of products and services at what seem to be very reasonable prices any serious developers or e-business sites should be very warey of their shared hosting plans.

I must admit I love the control panel and the list of features I think they are fantastic but they really need to focus more on the quality of the existing services rather than adding bells and whistles.

Server response is usually sluggish and at worst it didn't even respond.

SMTP thoughput is seriously restricted. You can't run any kind of subscription service or discussion forum on it without exceeding the limits. (We are not talking mass mailing here just emailing people who have asked to be notified when a thread is updated)

Their technical support come across as idiots sometimes and give contradictory advice which is probably down to lack of product knowledge.

In summary if you are looking to run a very small business site or personal site or just a development playground fasthosts are ideal however if you want to do any serious e-business don't put all your eggs in the fasthosts basket.

Our site has been down for a week FastHosts (www.fasthosts.co.uk) and they say it will be days until they will renew the domain after it expired.

I am the official contacts but because we don't have the username and password for the UK Reg account it is in, they will not renew the domain.

I want to give them money for crying out loud!

Never use this company!

Our Business websites have been with FastHosts (www.fasthosts.co.uk) for about 6 months. In that period we have had frequent problems with lack of resources and mail servers going down. They are cheap and should not be used if you are planning to host busy dynamic (ASP, PHP etc..) sites.
Some advice for anybody that is experiencing slow performance on fasthosts - Backup your site and park the domain in the control panel. Then setup the server again and upload the site. It will be moved to a lesser shared server. Its a pain having set up the mailboxes etc... but once done it solves the slowdown issues.

FastHosts (www.fasthosts.co.uk) company is simply terrible! I was with them using their Reseller Account for just under a year in 2003/2004. In short, I found their prices to be extortionate as they charge you extra for all features (even to activate ASP on a Windows Reseller plan! Come on!) on top of the Reseller fee. Plus, downtime was common, speed of websites very slow and their customer service is non-existant! This company cares nothing for the customer and only about how much they can make from you. Don't believe me, try creating a hosting plan using their reseller account and costing it up. I guarantee they are selling the same plan directly for less! Steer clear!

We have moved our site to Fasthosts.co.uk as they were the only hosting solution offering 2Gb of disk space for reasonable price. We currently store over 200,000 static html pages.

We have installed various forums on the site, but they all fail as FastHosts servers are all on various load balancers.

Only one one occasion have I had to wait more than 15 mins to get through on the phone to Fasthosts. On each and every occasion that I have contacted Fasthosts their staff have been more than knowledgable on every aspect. I dont work for them I just feel they have obviously received some bad press on here. I have been with Fasthosts for over 4 years and never has there been a time when I felt their customer service was below average in fact it is above average in comparison to other companies I have delt with. With over 1 Million Domains hosted they must be doing something right.

I moved to Fasthosts (www.fasthosts.co.uk) from BT as my domain was hosted by their sister company and the hosting was being offered within the broadband fee.

When they took a duplicate payment out of my account and didn't respond to my customer service emails about it, I started looking for a better service provider.

It turns out that Fasthosts will make it as inconvenient as possible to move away from, as they have not got a migration out agreement with BT. That means you have to cancel, pay a cancellation fee, wait two weeks, then sign up with another company (another 2-3 week wait), leaving you without broadband for 1-2 months. Just to make it even worse, I have waited the two weeks and they still haven't informed BT, so I have another two weeks wait on top of this.

I have rung customer services a number of times, and my average queue time is 20-30 minutes. They don't seem to want to answer emails as they would rather direct you to a phone queue.

I am quite happy with the domain registration service provided by their sister company, ukreg.com, and I have moved my domain back to their servers for free.

I would strongly recommend avoiding companies that do not offer a migration out service, and go for a 12-month contract service instead, as I would rather have paid a few months cancellation fees than be left without broadband for so long.

We decided to switch all our customer hosting packages over to fasthosts so that we could reduce costs and have all our hosting under one roof.

The web servers were constantly down, the message "waiting for server" on our screens. The email servers would also only allow our clients machines to download their emails around 50% of the time.

Despite these obvious serious problems, no-one at fasthosts (even when they eventually answered the phone) was able to at least admit there was a problem. We were always told that everything worked fine when they tried it, and we just had to deal with it.

After much hassle and expense, we as annoyed customers moved all of our sites away to a different host that cost more but actually delivers a service. I won't mention who they are as it will look like I'm plugging them.

In my opinion, fasthosts should really be called farcehosts...