FastHosts Review

Fasthosts.co.uk Reviewed

Fasthosts bill themselves as a ‘one stop shop’ for everyone’s web hosting needs – and use their clout as the UK’s biggest online services company for home, home office and SME customers since 1999.

Based in Gloucester, Fasthosts has two up-to-the-minute data centres housing thousands of web and mail servers, maintained 24×7.

Products and Services

As one of the leading UK web services providers, Fasthosts has a huge menu of products and services to choose from.

Shared Hosting and Dedicated Hosting are offered to personal, developer and businesses.

Every hosting package comes with these basics:

• Unlimited bandwidth
• Windows or Linux operating systems
• 24/7 customer service and technical support
• SiteBuilder web design software
• £105 of online advertising vouchers

Fasthosts is also one of the few UK web hosts to provide a broadband service with unlimited downloads and no time limits for surfing. The company also advertises that customers can run their broadband connection how they want – by installing their own games server or making unlimited online voice calls.

Benefits of Choosing FastHosts

Fasthosts servers are configured for blogging, scripts and e-commerce with SSL for handling credit card transactions. Shared servers have load balancing, MS Access, and MySQL database at the back end and can run PHP or ASP.net sites.

Customers configure their own sites through an online Plesk control panel that can be badged by resellers.

For resellers, Fasthosts have a business partnership scheme aimed to give added marketing and sales support to businesses that can bring more customers to the company.

Fasthosts consistently offer 2-for-1 deals, discounts, vouchers and free trial offers across their selection of products and services.

Reliability and Performance

Fasthosts claims to have the ultimate in security. Data centre access has secure access, guards and CCTV monitoring. Climate control keeps servers at optimum working temperatures and should the worst happen, the secure rooms are fitted with gas fire suppression systems.

APC X UPS give uninterruptible power to all servers. If an outage strikes, power is switched instantly with no interruption to a diesel generator capable of running for 30 days.

Customer Service and Support

Fasthosts boasts online customer service is so good that 10% of users never contact the company by telephone.

The company has a sophisticated and efficient customer service department giving:

• Customer service and first-tier technical support manning a 24/7 call centre. Second-tier technical support is a little patchier, but in general, technical advisors are friendly and helpful.
• Email ticket support
• An online knowledge base with a library of FAQs, articles, white papers, manuals and guides
• An online customer forum

Web Hosting Features

At the heart of the Fasthosts service is a super fast connection to the UK internet backbone. The company offers Linux and Windows OS with unlimited bandwidth across three plans to home users, developers and business. The business plan has unlimited storage, and email boxes. The home and business accounts have less storage and email boxes. Depending on the operating system, Perl, PHP, Python ASP and ASP.net are available as scripting technologies.