They refuse to act on problems and refuse to accept a change their end, however strong your case.

Then they say… “oh fixed that, all OK now”, and ignore the stress, costs and bad rep caused to you and your business.

Do not use Fasthosts ever, especially do not get stuck with a 100 sites with them before they take you to the edge of sanity.

Never use Fasthosts, at any cost.

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

try streamline.net

I use Movable Type. We’ve all heard of MT’s spam problems, but version 3.2 keeps nearly all of it from appearing on the blog itself. Yesterday, the zombies hit my blog (www.blogistan.co.uk, currently offline) with a load of TB pings, and when the admin people noticed that it was causing their servers to crawl, they isolated my ENTIRE MT INSTALLATION rather than just the script that was causing the problems.

I sent them a note, saying the following:

My apologies; this is a Movable Type (weblogging application) trackback script which appears to have been targeted in a spam attack - as such scripts commonly are. This morning I deleted a large number of rogue TB pings from the database.

I have been unable to edit anything from the SSH or FTP interfaces because the contents of my CGI directory are invisible. I would appreciate it if you would return the contents to their normal home, minus the script you mentioned. It’s not essential to the running of the website.

This was sent at 11:17 this morning, in reply to an earlier email received at 10:57. Still no reply. I know it’s Saturday, but people browse the web 7 days a week. People have more time to read and write blogs when they’re not working.

I intend to move hosts this weekend (probably to Bluehost) and that the first post I make will tell the world about Fasthosts’ incompetence. Don’t touch them with a barge pole.

Slowly word is spreading - I’d be surprised if they don’t change their wording over the next few months as more people pick them up on it.

Dear Fasthosts,

I wonder whether you give me some more information on your Fasthosts programme.

In the email I received from you, it reads: “By linking to fasthosts.co.uk, which is a known “authoritative site”, your search engine ranking will increase as you will be seen as a knowledgeable website in your own right.”

Now as far as I knew, linking to a site - “authoritative” or not (what exactly do you mean by that term anyway?*) - doesn’t boost my search engine ranking, it boosts yours (and therefore increases your sales). As far as I can see, there’s nothing in it for me.

I may be wrong about this, and I would love to learn where you found the information confirming that linking to an authoritative site will boost my search engine ranking. I hope you will, otherwise I may have to conclude that I was wrong, and that you are not an authoritative site* after all.

Forgive me for saying this, but if I’m right, one might think that your powered programme is misleading and a lie.

With kind regards,

Iwein

and got an answer (after a reminder follow up email)

Dear Sir

Thank you for your mail. In order to resolve your issue, please contact
our Xtreme Support Team directly, by emailing
mailto:support@fasthosts.co.uk including your account number and
PIN. You may also find the answer to your question in one of our
knowledge base articles available at http://xtreme.fasthosts.co.uk

If you are unable to remember you username and PIN number, please use
the reminder service, located at
http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/login/#loginreminder

So i said I’m not a customer any more, and therefore don’t have a username and PIN number.

Dear Shaun,

Thanks for your reply. I’m in fact not a customer of FastHosts anymore,
so don’t have a username and PIN. Does this mean I can not get an
answer to my query?

Thanks,

Iwein

And Shaun answered.

Dear Sir

Thankyou for your recent enquiry, this service if for Fasthosts
customers only.

Well, that was certainly enough for me to decide not to use Fasthosts ever again.

As Fasthosts doesn’t actually link back to me (unless I am chosen in their weekly draw), this is of not much benefit to me at all.

I see what you are saying about linking to the likes of Google and the BBC. However, unless this link is topical I think that is spamming. To me, search engine optimisation is all about creating a good quality site. Linking to the likes of Google and the BBC just because this might add more gravitas to your site to me is not ethical SEO.

Still, this was the information I was looking for, thank you. It looks like I might be wrong, and that my wording may be a bit strong.

I did write to Fasthosts though, to ask if they were willing to explain what you have, and have not yet received a reply.

On the other hand, re-reading the wording of their page, I still think that - assuming Google uses Hilltop - their wording is misleading:

Watch the visits to your site dramatically increase by gaining higher search engine rankings for free, with our all new ‘Fasthosts powered’ programme.

Dramatically increase? By linking to one site that has PR6? Don’t think so. Not even if your site gets chosen to be linked back to.

To be fair, I think they’re technically correct on that point (if you allow that something like Hilltop is being used).

Whether it helps your search engine rankings is a different story? My own take is that it probably does. If you check out lots of professionally optimised sites you often find links to the likes of Google and BBC and I reckon they’re just there to give the site more gravitas. It’s also a common sense call, I reckon, sites which link to trash are more likely to be trash, sites which take part in the qualityWeb are more likely to be part of the qualityWeb.

Mind you, I do admit it’s just basically a link exchange deal where the most likely case is that you have more chance of being an “expert site”. You have to hope that they link back to you.