Does anyone know where I can get customer reviews or complaints about UK hosting companies? I just spent the last few hours searching and did not have much luck at all.

I guess I could take each UK host name and search for it in this forum, but what a pain in the %^&. It would be nice if I could just see 10 companies to consider and 10 to avoid or something like that. Then all I need to do is to match hosting plans with my client's needs.

So tired...and so little time left to get this done

:eek3:

hi there,

I couldnt help notice that you are seeking information on UK based webhosters.

Basically all i can say is that i too have searched high and low for webreviews and found very little, so what i can tell you is a about a modest sized company, which comes highly recommended, and has had some good reviews.

You may find it useful,

http://www.firestorm-services.net - i use them myself

and a few reviews can be found at www.funky-flirters.co.uk

see what you think, but in my opinnion there service is good, and is good value.

Hope you find what your looking for :P

Cow

hi,

http://www.webhostingguide.co.uk

They have a list of a range of uk hosts, plus their forum contains good and bad things about potential hosts

hope this is useful

Unfortunately the WebHostingGuide forums are a little sparse since they had to delete every post as their forum software was being a pain. If you do find a host you could always try search for reviews that have been made on this site, there is a link at the top of the home page for reading reviews.

i can highly recommend dsvr.co.uk
i am not affilated with them, but i use them for a management reporting system (which does not handle downtime very well)
they are very good & very reliable... not the cheapest though...

Thanks guys.

I will check out webhostingguide.co.uk, see what they have to say. Just out of curiousity, how do you guys compare UK or other european webhosts with American ones? I mean I am familiar with services offered by the US companies. But recently I had to start looking into the European market and it has not been easy gathering information, especially when you know you can't count on most of the index sites. With the US hosts, at least I can just call them up and see if their sales and suppot staff are competent...:D

rongz

Ahh, and please keep the recommendations coming if you have any. It will be helpful to the next poor guy who is looking for a UK webhost.

rongz

Hi,

The features that you get from a UK/European host are always as good as US hosts, the main differences tend to appear with bandwidth limits, IMO you will find the gig per month will be less than the US as the costs are more, as UK prices tend to be higher.

That said, a normal personal website shouldnt need much more than 500meg per month, and the higher bandwidth users tend to be able to pay for their site with advertising or something else.

If anyone feels that what i have said is wrong then feel free to correct me.

Hi rmartin,

Thanks for the input. Just to clarify, I was more referring to the aptitude of the webhost, rather than the features associated with its hosting plans. Some of the offerings I saw are so attractive that they make me wonder if the service behind the hosting plan sucks...

You are right that UK and US hosts offer pretty much the same features. Actually in a few cases I think the UK hosts are offering more. ( I always wondered why Verio charges that much for their service, when they are offering very little.) As for bandwidth, most companies are overselling them anyways. Besides, I know I won't mind paying some extra $$ if I get 20 gig of traffic a month on my site.

rongz

Have a look at www.bigbytes.co.uk They have a good section on UK hosts. Budget, Pro, Resellers, Ecommerce....etc

Just FYI BigBytes is now Web Hosting Guide which was mentioned above.

Yep, juect checked it. too bad that their forum is messed up and has little information to offer at the moment. The webhost list is nice, but once again it just compares features and not really about customer service.

In any case, it is still a good place to go to for basic info.

What I used to do with US hosts was I opened an account with a lot of them, tested their services, made note of those who sucked and cancelled those. But it would be too much trouble to apply that method to the UK companies. It does not sound like a lot of fun to play phone tags with them if I live in the US :D

rongz

I understand what you mean,

I would say, and this is purely based on my own opinion and could be absolute rubbish and use it at your risk, but to define between quality of support you could speculate with the following

I would define the following categories

1 - No Telephone Support number

2 - 0870 (national rate) prefix number - free to get, and generates income

3 - 0845 (lo-call rate) - costs the company to run it, but only about 4/5 pence per minute

4 - 0800 (freephone) - costs the company to run it, costs them about 8-10 pence per minute

5 - Other Numbers - Usually regional numbers, don't have the same appeal but i would compare with category 2


This is not a scientific guide but the category 3 & 4's have invested more into their support and it costs them to leave you on hold, therefore they should be quicker to respond as the category 2 number actually gives them money for leaving you on hold


Hope this makes sense, and is useful

Not really fair to compare #5 with #2 as #5 doesn't earn anyone anything except the telco. Really #5 doesn't earn anyone that much, about 1p per minute I believe so it wouldn't be worth upsetting customers by leaving them on hold to earn an extra penny or two.

Interesting perspective. I have to keep that in mind from now on.


rongz

Originally posted by KDAWebServices
Not really fair to compare #5 with #2 as #5 doesn't earn anyone anything except the telco. Really #5 doesn't earn anyone that much, about 1p per minute I believe so it wouldn't be worth upsetting customers by leaving them on hold to earn an extra penny or two.

I think i was trying to say that

#5 being standard phone numbers dont require any additional outlay and do not neccessarily convey to the customer that they are keen to talk to customers via telephone

an 0800 does convey that the company is keen on telephone support.

There are always going to be exceptions to this and this list was not meant to be the most accurate.

example) our company would fit into category #5 as we would prefer to respond to customers via email/ticketing software, but that should not affect the quality of our products, but shows that we want to focus on a different form of communication