Be Excellent To Each Other

I have now been without email all day. Not for the first time have Fasthosts annoyed me. I should have moved after the password fiasco but had too many domains there. But no more.

What I need is some business grade web and email hosting. I want a UK call centre and a decent control panel.

I also need to know how to move the Wordpress part of my site. Can I just copy the entire lot and reupload it? Would it work?

Anyone know of an outfit that is good and isn't two blokes in a garage reselling someone elses hosting?

Cheers ears.

How many times have I told you that they're cunts and you should drop them?

At least twice.

You've only got yourself to blame for staying with the bastards despite all the evidence to the contrary.

They've always been great for me. But then I don't particularly care that I've not had mail today.

You have any idea how busy I am or just how many domains I have on there? There's approx 20 domains to move. It's not something you undertake lightly.

That can't be true as the official line is *some* customers are experiencing *intermittent* problems. You and the 20 other people I've read saying you've had nothing are obvious liars and WILL BE SHOT AT DAWN!

Of course, that's also a reason not to piss about with a lowest-bidder company like Fasthosts.

I don't know who is particularly good for hosting. I use http://cheapvps.co.uk/ who were that firm who got badly hacked last year (I lost all my data) and have changed owners twice since then. On the other hand, they are stupendously cheap. These are VPS hosting providers though and you don't want that.

Before them I used Memset who were excellent but a bit expensive. They do managed hosting. Check them out.

http://www.123reseller.co.uk are who we use, or their sister company http://www.ukdedicated.com for dedicated servers.

Oh, I've got no email service. I just don't care.

$120 dollars a month isn't justifiable for me. I'm happy to pay for good hosting but that is taking the mick for a simple site like I have.

This is why I hosts my owns. Then there is mostly me to blame if it stops working. Oh, or the cat, once.

That said, even if it does go off line, the email redirect still works because 123-reg do that stuff, for £1.99 a year or whatever.

A friend has reccomended this lot:

http://www.csnewmedia.co.uk/win-hosting.html

Anyone heard of them?

Yay I've been (anonymously) quoted:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/24/another_fasthosts_outage/

Take that Fasthosts you scumbags.

I was going to recommend Rackspace, but I don't think I'll bother now.
If you want reliable hosting, you have to pay for it - it's expensive to run, so it's expensive for you to buy.

If you want to save money just stay with Fasthosts, but get a reliable webmail host (Yahoo! is one of the more reliable ones) and have your emails delivered to both boxes.

Yes, but you'll need to move all the data from the database, too.
Your control panel might have a MySQL admin program (like SQLBuddy or PhpMyAdmin) that lets you export your database. I'm happy to help if you need it, just give me a shout.

Its not an ecommerce site. It's fairly simple and only shifts about 600 meg a month. It's a site and a blog. 75 quid a month would be a huge overhead and money that could be better spent on advertising and many other things. £900 a year is an awful lot of money.

I can't believe there isn't a competent company out there who charge more than Fasthosts but aren't mindless hateful morons who keep on cocking up. Flump do a good job on a couple of my minor domains but they are resellers and seem very small scale.

For a site like mine shared hosting is the only way. Stuff does go wrong but Fasthosts just keep on doing it and you can go to hell if you want support having to fart around with pin numbers and stuff

All I ask is for a reliable fairly component provider who don't pull the same kind of stunts Fasthosts do. Has your credit card gone out of date? Don't worry Fasthosts won't tell you that your details have expired but they will issue you with a 20 quid "fine" for late payment! Nice scam!

How much are you paying now? UKHosts4u are, despite the fucking atrocious name, quite good.

Once you factor in the fact they charge £25 for SQL (needed for Wordpress) about £85. Which is actually far from cheap all things considered.

What, a month?
£25 for a DATABASE?

You can get a dedicated fucking server from 1and1 for less than that a month!

Is it these guys:
http://www.ukhost4u.com/

Or these guys?

http://www.ukhosts4u.co.uk/

Because if it's the second then even though I live in a timewarp I refuse to use a webhost that hasn't updated its website since 2003.

A year. A year.

The first ones you linked to. The second looks like squatters.

See, £85 a year has taken my thinking in a completely different direction. For 23p a day, I'd imagine FastHosts are providing an excellent service.
I can't get a handle on how much you want to pay, though. UKHost4u are a teeny bit more expensive, and they always seem to respond quite fast to support queries. To be honest, you probably don't need the grunt their business plan provides. The basic one would be more than enough.

What Grim... said. Webhosting is cheap to do badly but expensive to do well. Which do you want?

Look at it this way, Chinny. Any moderately competent sysadmin is going to be costing his employer upwards of £25 per hour -- I think Grim... has mentioned before that his rate for ad-hoc work is around the £50-75/hr mark, as is my own. So your £100 a year, once overheads are paid for (server, racking, bandwidth) might buy you one or two hours of staff time, in total, each year, including any manual steps in the account setup, billing, and so forth. If you're thinking that doesn't sound like very much hand holding when shit goes wrong -- or the ability to answer a phone quickly -- well, you're right.

I'm with UKHost4u, and they charge £20 a year on my deal. This includes a wordpress installation.

I'm not reading 23 posts. I always use 123-reg, Chinny - initially because I used to work for them, but after the horror stories I've heard from places like Fasthosts et al, I'm very glad.

http://www.123-reg.co.uk

I've got all my domains with 123-Reg (but no hosting). I dislike the new email forwarding setup, but other than that they are fine.

But like I say, that is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I don't need 100% uptime, it's not an ecommerce site. I don't need a dedicated server. What I do need is email that is more reliable than Fasthosts. In terms of webhosting, Fasthosts are OK if a little slow. They have had their moments, but not for a long time.

Email is more important and Fasthosts aren't very good at it. Every year, same time, it goes down. Coincidently the same time of year that Demon used to have capacity issues in the days of dial up. You can only assume the operation is run quite close to capacity to keep costs down.

Things can and do go wrong. The problem is that time and time again Fasthosts can't cope when they go wrong.

You want 123-reg. SRSLY.

Email is hard, Chinny. It's complicated to run and it goes wrong by itself when you suddenly consume, say, 100k emails in a spam run. And at that exact moment, if you don't have a Big Brain on board, it takes ages to fix. And Big Brains don't come cheap.

I reiterate: you're paying peanuts here. If you want more reliability you're going to have to pay. Even Google can't run low-cost email[1] without significant downtime. Why would you expect anyone else to be better at it?

[1] Recall that people pay for Google Apps, including the hosted email service; it's not all free like Gmail.

Ahem

Surely email isn't that difficult? Set up forwarding to two addresses - gmail and yahoo or something else as a backup.

I've been using that kind of thing (just singly with gmail) for years. What's to go wrong?

Have you ever sysadminned a high-throughput exim/qmail/etc instance, Kalmar? With integrated AV and spam scanning? It's bloody hard work. Even on my teeny tiny instance, I binned it off and moved my users to Gmail as soon as I could.

If reliability is important, you should probably avoid Gmail.

Although the chances of them both being down at the same time are surely slim.

I have administrated a dozen email boxes for a charity once, and did exactly the same thing (switched everyone to gmail after getting fed up with it filling up with spam and randomly breaking).

So, I now use business email forwarded to gmail myself and suggest Chinny does the same, with Grim...'s additional proviso of yahoo as backup.

Pfsht. Not if you architect it properly.

What if you cobble it together from half a dozen free Linux programs with poor documentation?

I believe that is referred to as being 'hoist by your own petard'.

When your budget is £0, you really don't have an awful lot of choice. Particularly when it's 2003/4 when I set this up.

All I'm saying is, you require bloody good SAs who work hard to support a high volume email environment that's been thrown together on a shoestring. A properly constructed environment can be run by three baboons and a jar of jam.

Thinking about it, you might want to actually try this.

Do you have an office with broadband as well as at home? If so, set up an old mac to be your webserver (which is pretty easy), and you can run as many sites and wordpresses and whatever else as you like, all for £0 a year (well, plus the electricity).

Keep a backup on your machine at home, and if the office broadband goes down or the machine dies, just fire up the dynamic IP client at home, and you're back online.

I think in the year I've been running mine like that (with no second site), it's had fewer outages than when I had a paid provider, which was costing me up to 100 quid a year with various different sites, and had all sorts of annoying problems.

We need to pitch that to Fox as a reality TV show. We each have a budget of, say, £50,000. I spend mine on SAs and use free software. You spend yours on software licences and we'll give you the baboons and jam for free. Winner is the person who delivers the most emails. Weeky challenges will include responding to a DDoS, spam runs, and open relay compromises.

Ahahaha! £50,000 wouldn't cover my design fee, let alone get you any tin.

Ah, qmail*, how I was confused by thee.

* And daemontools, and djb-dns.

Oh - it's not a free vs licensed thing. Probably just under half of the last mail environment I designed uses free software.

In my experience you either find one or the other, not both.

Ooops, clicked this thread thinking it was about the next Vin Diesel film.

Can I spend the £50,000 on coke and hookers and just set up a Google Apps account and be done with it?

(I used to run my own - admittedly small scale - mail server, but in the end just got pissed off with the drama of the whole thing and moved over to Google Apps for my domains. It's, like, a billion times easier to manage, and doing a whole mailbox search no longer requires me to go and make a cup of tea whilst it finishes. It also has less downtime, but that's more because Topper's Dodgy Unreliable VM Hosting Services Inc. aren't great when it comes to random inexplicable crashes and unexpected machine reboots with zero notice, but that's what you get for the princely sum of a bottle of whisky a year)

Do you mean, like, Google Sites?

I would heartily reccomend MEMSET!
Not the full dedicated, go for a virtual dedicated:

http://www.memset.com/dedicated-servers/virtual.php
from £10 a month

Based in the UK, should pack enough oomph to do what you need, and as its a virtual dedicated server, you can fiddle with the OS, install pretty much what you want - including your own mail server.

Been using them for 6 years now, and apart from the occasional hiccup (probably about 2 days over 6 years downtime so far) they are most excellent.

I've only just noticed that Memset's VMs are a lot cheaper now. HMMMM. I might move back to them.