I moved my hosting to positive internet” because my previous hosts, fasthosts, are money-grabbing, censorous bullies. There’s a long story to this, but the advice you need to know is this:
If you have a fasthosts contract, cancel it immediately. Of course, you can always renew it as the expiry date approaches, but if you don’t cancel then you risk stupid fines if — like me — you lose you credit card and forget to update you details with them
There’s details about this which I won’t bore you with. Basically, I got a reminder email a week before they were due to take a year’s payment for hosting, and it took me a week to get round to answering it. By then, it was too late and they’d charged me an additional 30 quid for being late to paying them for the privilage of another year’s hosting. 30 quid for a week delay after a single reminder email is too much, and I complained bitterly but just met an immoveable wall. So I posted about it on my blog , including the advice to cancel any existing contracts, and that’s where the second take home message comes in:
Fasthosts retain the right to take down your site without warning, and without appeal, if you post anything that they don’t like. With me they refused to discuss the matter, refused to show how what I’d posted was against their terms of service, refused to discuss what part of my complaint post against them was ‘unsuitable’. Conclusion: fasthosts have no respect for freedom of expression, especially when it comes to criticism of them and possibly on other topics too
I had a long and futile email correspondence with them about this. I didn’t make a big fuss about it, partly because they had all the cards, and partly because I was busy with more important things, which I wanted my website to be operational for. Now fasthosts weren’t a bad host, technically, as far as these things go, but their complete lack of respect for me as a customer, and for some of the values I think hosting should be about (freedom of speech), mean that I couldn’t risk keeping my hosting with them. I knew that when the next thing went wrong I would meet exactly the same response from them: “lump it and shut up.”
I moved to Positive mostly because they offered free hosting to badscience, but so far I have found their service reliable and their support excellent — both competant and friendly.
21 replies on “Fasthosts are money-grabbing censorous bullies”
Hello,
I’m one of the Directors of Positive, and I’d like to thank you for your kind comments. This sort of feedback is really appreciated by the team; as corny as it might sound, we try to be the opposite of the call-centre droidery that infests the industry, and it makes us beam when people say nice things about us.
If we ever do give you anything less than good service, please send me a mail or call me immediately: I will personally make sure that the team works really hard to be worthy once again of your above kind words.
Thanks,
Nick
Fasthosts are a class A nightmare. Check out the blog at http://fasthostshell.blogspot.com/
I am trying to organise collective action against Fasthosts. Would anybody like to join in the fun?
Never be tempted to use Fasthosts.
They are rubbish in everything they do.
Whether it is just for one basic site, or like us a reseller with many, do not go near them.
They will be more trouble than they are worth, with slow servers, bad idiotic support and terrible attitude to customer retention. Don’t do it
FASTHOSTS URGENT ADVICE
Hello, I have been having some extensive discussions with the Office Of Fair Trading and Trading Standards who are looking at this company, however the OFT say that if enough people contact them about this company they will take it on as a case and quote –
Enterprise Act 2002 – Unfair Terms in Consumer Contract Regulations 1999 (the UTCCRs)
So if you really want to do something about this company then dont wait do it now, contact the Office of Fair Trading at http://www.oft.gov.uk/contactus and specify FASTHOSTS COMPLAINT in the subject line, copy yourself in on the email too. You can also contact Gloucestershire Trading Standards at http://www.tradingstandards.gov.uk/glos/
The ONLY way to bring this matter to a resolution is for everyone to complain directly.
Let BBC Watchdog know too: http://www.bbc.co.uk/watchdog/gotastory/
and YES class / group action tell me more…
All over the internet there are complaints about Fasthosts. I will be complaining to the above links. I will also be posting this all over the internet.
I will be contacting the authorities as well. This company’s business practices border on scandalous. AVOID
I have three areas of complaint for this company.
1. The first is their insistence on having up-to-date credit card details for your account (if they don’t have them, they lock you out of your account – this includes already paid for services!).
2. Their annual renewal system for their TrafficDriver service. Basically you cannot set the service not to renew for the following year without cancelling the current years’ service that you have already paid for!
3. Their contemptible customer support on these matters. Basically once they’ve got your money they refuse to give you a refund. And when you contact them, they either direct you to an offshore call-centre or give you bogus email addresses that just bounce back!!
email not provided, as FH are the kind of people to be more angry at bad comments than their own terrible service.
Any decent host is welcome to offer an easy way for a reseller with 50 to 100 sites and hundreds of domains to leave Fasthosts with the minimum amount of time and labour.
Almost every long term re-seller is with them as a prisoner of the effort to leave!
Sites go down consistently during a bad period of time, every few months and whilst the support is now fast, it is just as rubbish as it always was. Buck passing and the almost evil ability never to answer a straight question. They are cheap(ish) but truly awful, costing many times more in the end.
BEWARE BEWARE BEWARE!!!!! They will lie to you, steal from you, rude to you. If you sadly are reading this while having problems with them do not bother to call them, email simon.yeoman@fasthosts.co.uk he will email you back and if you demand your case as fraud – when taking money from you, he should refund you, he is the only guy there i have spoke to – who has helped – you also need to request from him an email stating your details have been removed from Fasthosts Ltd under The Data Protection Act failure to provide this request should be kept as your proof of request can be given to your bank and you can use to instruct your bank of fraud procedure to STOP any further payments made to this Scam company.
I have just read from another site…….. their direct telephone line 01452 541499….. save yourself 50p per min! after 20 mins this starts adding up !!!!
I have just had the same. Having been with FasHosts for 10 years now they have just totally scammed me.
Over the years i purchased some 40 or so domain names via UKReg all against a single login. Later i purchased web hosting for 1 (ONE!) of these domains which meant a trip via the FH website. FH were never the best and because i was hosting several websites eventually i used another supplier to facilitate multiple domain hosting as FH never allowed this. I redirected DNS via UKReg until recently when FH took control of redirects and consolidated the UI. I kept the original domain hosting mostly just because. It kept a separation between work and personal so i didn’t begrudge paying extra.
Recently it came to renewal time. My card details had changed so they couldn’t automagically renew my account. I left it and eventually decided they were too expensive and this year i would not renew. However, and this is the killer. Because i didnt do anything my contract rolled over… right… and because i was paying yearly in advance i now owe a full year (in advance) just to cancel the service. On top of this i thought i could just redirect my dns to a new host, move files and services and that would be an end. But… They have now blocked access to all my domains because i have what is called ‘contractually obliged arrears’ (in advance!!!). So i cannot move anything. All my current 28 domains are down period, unless i pay the £120.00 charge for this years hosting package. I have no access to the DNS for any of the domain names i own… 🙁
Can you imagine…
I had the same wonderful experience, I was lucky because I changed my paypal account to another email address so nothing will be paid again. AND..I don’t care about the domains I have there because I don’t use them anymore.
So, see what happens, they are almost a maffia dance club but I don’t like their style.
I rather dance with normal ones.
Fasthosts charged approx. £8.25 to my wife’s account to keep her web contract operational even though she’d asked them to close the account. They were rude and confrontational saying they had no record of her asking to close the account and wouldn’t refund her.
It’s true what people say about this company. Last year FH offered a special price around £23.00 per month for a re-seller package expiring December 12. Instead of making contact with me notifying the current package was coming to an end they just grabbed £59.00 from my credit card I queried with them. They confirmed the above stating my contract had rolled over onto the standard package. After complaining FH offered as a good will gesture continuing the special offer for the next 12 months but at the same time stating they would not pay back the over payment they snatched from my account but agreed to credit my account with the difference. I wish I had never began dealing with this shady organisation but feel trapped as leaving may effect my customers significantly.
Regards
Steve
Director of CRS Group costreduction@hotmail.com
Try to go legal with this shower ! The just screw you if they get the chance do not be bullied by them and set the trading standards people on to them.
I really do not like to slag anyone off but they really live up to their bad reputation. I’ve been with them for more than a year and never gave them
a bad review, even though all the bad stuff I read about them on forums, was kind of making sense. I had never hosted any website before I took upon
their services, so I simply thought..what can you expect for 8 £ a month, maybe that’s how it has to be…my site was quite slow, and on average 2-3
times a week down, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for 5 minutes.
But they are not just bad hosts, they are idiots too, bunch of scams that care only about your credit card number and can’t even pull their dirty
tricks. Right now they offer 6 months 40% discount on their website for Business Gold package. When I emailed support staff and asked them to upgrade
my package from Silver to Business Gold, they clearly refused me an advertised discount, ready to upgrade me straight away but not at the discount.
They simply thought that I was tied to a one year contract.
When I complained and It turned out that I can raise a closure request because my contract came to an end, and only service continues to renew, they
told me that only sales team may be able to grant me a discount, but this is no guarantee, they said. So why they advertise a discount if they do
not guarantee it? It should say :”you might get 40% off for 6 months” or rather they should specify that the discount is only for new customers,
which would no make sense anyway, I would think you should look after your existing customers and offer discounts especially to them.
I don’t know what they smoke, but they should put this stuff away. Stay away from them, unless you don’t mind slow, oversold, overpriced servers with
lying support telling you all the time that everything is OK on their end, when you complain about your website being down all the time. The response
is very good, I can’t take it away from them, they usually email back quite quickly and 24/h.
Wish I had read here first. Went traveling this winter and hadn’t renewed my credit card details with them. On my return I was faced with fines and debt collection companies. They withheld the domain hosting until payment and threatening action by these collection companies for a product at best was slow. Quite honestly I would have been fine with just the loss of hosting but they said in so many words pay up for the next year or else. I haven’t come across such arm twisting policy of a hosting company before. Don’t go anywhere near them.
I had a reseller account with Fasthosts on an introductory offer of £20 a month. Because their services were unreliable my customers left because of the constant downtime. I continued to pay for the reseller account to see out the year. It then went up to £60 a month, I contacted Fasthosts to see if they could come to any deal to lower the price however they couldn’t, so after several calls I informed them that I wanted to cancel.
I contacted their support several times and each time they said the account would be cancelled however they kept charging me. So eventually I removed my payment type so that they couldn’t keep charging me. They have now sent my account to a collections agency. So despite me trying to cancel my account several times they still took 3 successful payments and are trying to say I owe another £180.
The collections agency are saying that I was supposed to email them however no one at Fasthosts mentioned this in any of our conversations.
There are plenty of hosting companies out there, stay away from fasthosts, they are crooks.
Their prices are misleading – standard hosting costs are 5 times what I expected.
They are evasive when asked about cost projections.
Reseller costs end up being over twice what I expected.
They do NOT honor their money-back guarantee.
had similar problems many years ago with them but they have improved alot in the 11 years since this post, they have a closures team who you can call and they will close your account over the phone , they remind you 30 – 60 days before every renewal to give you time to cancel it . Check your account and before the 12 month ring and speak to them , if you just forget about it you will be charged