Hi All,

We've a few sites hosted on Easyspace and have recently encountered some problems. Our primary site hosing and domain registration, a very important one to us is paid up until January 2006. In December we started receiving emails from Easyspace telling us that our package ends on 1st January 2005 and that it needed to be renewed. Despite many emails and attempts to call Easyspace, our hosting package has been cancelled, despite the fact we're paid up with an invoice to prove this. Due to the time of year, it's been impossible getting in touch with them to try and resolve this. After some trawling the net, we find we're not alone, and that Easyspace have been taken over in recent months and that a number of customers are having one problem or another.

We were looking to register another domain with a hosting package over the next few weeks, and are reluctant to go back to Easyspace as the parent company appears to have changed a lot of the control panel functions and has made things a lot harder. Also they're proving so hard to communicate with (we emailed them at the start of December initially), that we're reluctant to risk more problems.

We need a decent (UK based if possible) hosting package, nothing fancy, which would allow us around 50mb of space, basic html and graphics, unlimited site hits - with no penalities for extra traffic, catchall email, and re-direction from multiple domains to the main domain. We'd like a user friendly setup, basic ftp file upload, decent control panel functions and most importantly good customer service who are easy to contact. Has anyone any recommendations?

Sorry to make this such a long post.

well try http://broadiecarpark.net they don't have unlimited hits, but they have alot of bandwitch. Also, in late January they will be giving out 400MB and 25GB of free space along with ASP support. They already have 100 free e-mail accounts, DNS, PHP, 10 mySQL databases, CGI/PERL support and more. Check them out!

Hi,

I am currently hosting with StreamLine. You can get unrestricted bandwidth as well! Thier customer service is always prompt and useful and they are a generally good hosting company.

I Hope i can be of some help,

P.M me if you need help/have any questions,

Regards,

Sean

Thanks for that guys. I actually had streamlinenet top of my list of companies to try as they appear to be pretty straightforward looking from the outset, so I'm glad someone has backed this up.

Shiznit, I'll have a look at your recommendation and may well try it for another site in future.

but there is no such things as unlimited bandwidth

ZeebleHosting,

True yet wrong. You can have 'virtually' unlimited bandwidth, which means you use as much bandwidth as you need, and more or less, depending on your needs. Therefore, this is virtually unlimited bandwidth!

Hope i can shed some light on this issue, but please, i love to learn new things so tell me if i am corrected!

Regards,

Sean

I can see where your coming from sdc just seems like a bit of a dodgy area.

Stay away from anything 'unlimited'.

UK based if possible)

The servers in the UK or the company in the UK?

Why's that cjvj?

Because you will never get 'unlimited'. There is no such thing as 'unlimited'.

You would never get the service you would expect. Also, what would happen when if you uploaded a few 100GB movies, the disk space would eventully run out. The hosting company would not be able to afford to buy new hard drives and eventully they would say 'sorry we have run out of disk space'.

'Unlimited' offers are just there to bring in the customers.

There is a thread about this at WHT - http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...hreadid=349386

The site we'll be running will be very small, to be honest 50mb is just a safe limit, as we'll probably use well under 20mb. It'll basically just be an online brochure to compliment a local yellow pages listing. We'll not be hosting any movies at all or single graphic files above about 50kb. It'll be simple html at it's most basic.

We'll have other local and national advertising coming into affect over the next couple of months, hence why we asked about "unlimited" site hits. In reality this needn't be unlimited, but would need to be anywhere up to 1000 hits per day of a very simple site. Upgrading if needs be wouldn't be a problem, but we'd like a company who wouldn't just pull the plug if things got resource hungry, and would contact us nicely to arrange an upgrade first, keeping things ticking over while the process went ahead. We'd hate to be in the same boat like we have been with Easyspace where they told us to pay up or be cancelled and then weren't actually available for contact.

I currently run a site for myself, one for my business, and a couple for little projects. This one will be for a project with another artist and myself. I'm not really a web designer as such, more a graphic artist with a decent ability for page layouts and such, hence I'm not as clued up as you lot regards hosting and the more advanced aspects of web development.

I thank you all for your input.

Dont go for unlimited there is no such thing,and you should know that ,i am not a zeeble customer or anything ,but its a simple site userfriendly and the guy is always online so he can support you well anyways iseems like he is in uk as well.

Don't you just hate unlimited and unmetered. What's the point, it's just not needed or real.

Technically speaking, there is no such thing as "unlimited bandwidth." Someone has to pay for the traffic somewhere - and if you check the fine print of some service agreements from companies who claim to offer unlimited bandwidth, you'll probably find that they do charge for traffic over a certain amount or cut you off without warning under some getout clause in their TOS if you are hammering it!

Do you think this sort of crap is spoiling the hosting industy?

At the end of the day you get what you pay for. To be frank, I think that all these big boy hosting companies don't really don't give a toss and will try to wangle out of anything. Not their fault, they have employees that are so undermined that they couldn't care if they were at work or somewhere else, at the end of the day they are going home.

What you need is a host that cares or someone you feel you can build up a good relationship with. You know, the one that you can ring up at 3am and say, "Andrew, what are you playing at, my site is down, sort it!"

Don't always count on the big boys, at the end of the day they will stuff you, I've seen it time and time again and not just in the hosting industry.

Try Zeeble's web site out, Hosting Gorillas, mine or a few others on this board. At least you know we'll be around and look after you like a real client instead of a number like the big boys do.

Right, that's my new years rant over.

Good luck!

Andrew
www.hostyorkshire.com

I'd love to have someone small scale who is reliable, available to talk to and accountable....if you know anyone in the North East area, then please PM me and I'll consider using them for one or another project.

I know myself through experience of working in call centres myself years ago when between "proper"(ie in my area of expertise) jobs, that the majority of the staff are not valued too highly by their employees, and thus don't really give a toss. Ask me sometime about the time my boss told my colleague to pretend to be him while he had a coffee with his fancy bit.

I'd guess using the little guy has drawbacks as well though. I myself have struggled in the past to make ends meet, and if I had two jobs - one worth £100 to me, and one worth £1000 to me, I'd work through the night to try and get them both done, but at the end of the day if I was running out of time and had to prioritise, the £100 guy would be the one who waited an extra day. Thus is my tiny drop of business really going to buy good customer service?

Interesting stuff, any smallscale hosters on here feel free to PM me and "sell" me on the quality of your service. Even if I choose to go elsewhere on this project, I may well be tempted to transfer a less important site to you to see how well it works.

Dongle, PM me your number and I'll phone you now if everyones not in bed and you don't want anyone woke up! LOL . Yep, had new years day off and drew the short straw tonight for the night shift.

I have clients in the north east too.

I'm sure we would reach your expectations and more.

Try us for the month and if you don;t like it, I'll refund your money.

Andrew
www.hostyorkshire.com
0845 1080068

Kualo has a UK division. I've used them for a couple of months now and their service is awesome. They also host this forum, btw.

PM sent