the richest man in atherstone

Hey Guys,

Just a quick post to tell you all about a bad experience I had with one of my hosting companies UK2.NET.

Well, actually, I'm still having problems with them and a number of my sites have been down for three days now (fortunately, my websites are split between a number of webhosts, so not all my websites are affected).

I first noticed the websites were down on Monday night and logged a support call on their system to tell them about the problem and ask how long it would be before they sorted it.

The next day I received a reply saying they were aware of the problem and were sorting but didn't give me an estimated fix time, so I asked them again.

The day went on with no reply from them. I logged another call to ask them to talk to me - still no joy. Meanwhile my websites were still down.

The next day, my websites were working but unbearably slow - too slow to use - so I logged another call. After another long wait, they informed me that the RAID was rebuilding so response times would be slow for a while. The next day they were still running slow.

Then they went down again. Another support call logged. No reply as of yet. And that's where I am at the moment.

I should also add that I called their "freephone" support number but it's not really freephone as displayed on their support pages. When you call it, they tell you to redial an expensive 0900 number, the crafty buggers!

About a month ago, I had a similar problem with them - 4 days my websites were down - so, it's perhaps my fault for moving to another when I had the chance!

The upshot is, I've lost lots of revenue and I've just found my websites have lost the awesome ranking I worked for in Google. I'm hoping Google will reposition my sites when they're up again (and with a new webhost) but this is not guaranteed.

When I moved to UK2.NET, I was happy to pay the more expensive costs because I thought I would be receiving a better customer service and support. It turns out this is not the case. In my opinion, their support are rubbish and their customer service representatives are either vague or unresponsive.

I can't wait for my websites to be back up, so that I can move them away from UK2.NET forever.

And so concludes my brief UK2 hosting review. I'll be writing a more thorough account on one of my other blogs soon.

Update: 13/10/2011 - Here's the full UK2.NET Review

Arkad