Company Profile:
Fasthosts has delivered market-leading online services to the home, office and SME markets since 1999. They have a successful track record in providing high value, award winning products and currently promote themselves as a one-stop-shop for internet services.
Year Established: 1999
Number of Employees: 100+
Number of Accounts: 1 Million+
Awards:
Fasthosts regularly receive prestigious industry plaudits - most recently being rated Number 1 for budget hosting by the leading industry news portal, Web Host Directory. Their dedicated servers have been ranked in the PC Plus magazine Hotlist, for unbeatable value for money. They were also twice listed in the Sunday Times Tech-Track 100 Fastest Growing Technology Companies, and have also been named as the No.1 choice for ecommerce hosting, three times.
Products and Services:
As one of the UK's largest web hosting providers, Fasthosts offers a comprehensive range of web solutions including domain name registrations, email solutions (including mobile email services), shared web hosting, dedicated servers, online payment services, reseller web hosting and feature-rich broadband packages.
Web Hosting:
Fasthosts Web Hosting packages cater for beginners and experienced users alike. They currently offer three main solutions;
Plans:
 | - | £3.99 pm + VAT | / 1.5GB web space | / 200 Mailboxes / Websites Statistics | |
 | - | £7.99 pm + VAT | / 4GB web space | / 600 Mailboxes / Websites Statistics | |
 | - | £15.99 pm + VAT | / 10GB web space | / Unlimited Mailboxes | / Websites Statistics | |
The Home package poses amazing value, offering you the use of the Fasthosts site-builder tool (more on that later), 1.5GB of web space, graphical visitor statistics and virus, spam protection and 200 standard mail boxes, 5 of which offer advanced features.
The Developer package offers all of the above plus a rise to 4GB of web space and 600 mail boxes, 10 of which offer advanced features. Many other technical advances are included or available as add-ons, but unfortunately some can be quite pricey.
Also offering superb value for money, the Business pack, which provides all of the above plus a rise to 10GB of web space, unlimited mail boxes including 15 with advanced features. As with the Developer package there are a variety of additional technical add-ons available.
As mentioned above, Fasthosts offer a free site-builder tool, aptly named Sitebuilder. This is offered with every hosting package, albeit only a 10-page version. If required you can upgrade instantly using your online control panel, to either a 25 page version costing a very reasonable £2 extra per month or to the unlimited version, which will cost you an extra £3.75 p/m.
Sitebuilder allows you to build a website using templates and a whole host of tools, without the need for any HTML knowledge. Initially Sitebuilder can prove a little tricky, but with a little perseverance it doesn’t take long to create a great looking layout and design for your website. There are few limitations, and everything can be amended should you change your mind. When you really get the hang of what you are doing it is possible to add virtually anything. It is even possible to add your own HTML code and/or alter any code that is already in place. This lets you add such things as buy-it-now buttons, enabling you to take credit card payments or, with the setting up of an account, make use of Pay-pal.
Domains:
Fasthosts is fantastic for Domain Registration, enabling easy registration for both UK and International domains alike. All domains are registered through an associated service UKreg - www.ukreg.com
The general registration process is efficient, professional and very fast, especially in comparison to other providers.
The pricing is also fairly competitive - expect to pay £5.90 for a .co.uk (2 year registration), and £8.89 for a .com (1 year registration).
One thing worth mentioning are the regular special offers – at the time of writing this article Fasthosts were offering a FREE .co.uk domain for 2 years with every .com domain purchased – not bad!
Servers:
Fasthosts Dedicated Servers are unique in combining the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors with unlimited bandwidth. The solutions are extremely attractive for users who need to upgrade their dedicated server affordably, or for businesses seeking to reduce investment costs by outsourcing their server solution.
Fasthosts Dedicated Server packages are ideal solutions for hosting data such as websites or business application software. They provide a secure environment for data which is stored on its own dedicated server unit. Users enjoy the full power of the hardware and dedicated access to bandwidth, as well as root access and independent remote management of the server at all times.
Fasthosts Dedicated Servers are an extremely cost effective choice as they are supplied with unlimited traffic which can be a costly extra and risk factor with many other providers. Coupled with Fasthosts’ high-speed internet connectivity, via 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) channels, users have peace of mind that there are no limits on the data that they can exchange. Fasthosts Servers are also guaranteed to be maintained with the latest security and operating system updates.
Fasthosts' latest range of Dedicated Server packages comprises the DS250 (80GB disk space), priced from £49/month+VAT, DS450 (250GB disk space), priced from £69/month+VAT, the DS650 (500GB disk space), priced from £99/month+VAT and the DS850 (500GB disk space), priced from £189/month+VAT. With no set up fees and prices comparable to high-end hosting packages, Fasthosts Dedicated Servers offer top-spec server technology with minimal upfront investment and a remarkably low total cost of ownership. Fasthosts’ 1 Month Free offer is the company’s latest move to help demanding users upgrade to the best server technologies affordably and with ease.
 | - | £49 pm + VAT | / 2 x 1.8 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo | / 512 MB RAM | / 80GB HD |
 | - | £69 pm + VAT | 2 x 2.13 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo | / 1GB RAM | / 250GB HD |
 | - | £99 pm + VAT | / 2 x 2.4 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo | / 2GB RAM | / 500GB HD |
 | - | £89 pm + VAT | / 2 x 2.66 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo | / 3GB RAM | / 500GB HD |
Significantly, all Fasthosts servers are housed in a superior data centre environment in the UK. All service and technical support is provided 24/7 from the UK by email or phone.
E-Commerce Solutions:
Fasthosts were previously voted as the leading eCommerce web host. Easy to set up and ready for all types of business - when combining any of Fasthosts' web hosting or server solutions with the professional payment gateway eMerchant, your site will instantly have the facilities to compete with the very best eCommerce websites out there.
eMerchant is priced at only £20 a month, with a one off set-up fee of £100. eMerchant is one of the most affordable payment solutions on the market which can be seamlessly integrated with new or existing websites.
eMerchant allows acceptance of credit and debit card payments directly through your website with a full internet merchant account, in association with the Bank of Ireland.
Email:
All Fasthosts email hosting packages include a range of mailboxes with features to suit your needs. From POP3 to business-class Microsoft Exchange, all Fasthosts mailboxes are designed to work on your own domain name, providing a highly professional email service.
Setting up mail accounts is a relatively painless process through, as is using them. Access to mail accounts is made available through your personal control panel.
 | - | £1.25 pm + VAT | / 2 Advanced POP3 Boxes | / 5 Standard Boxes | / Webmail | |
 | - | £9.99 pm + VAT | / 5 Standard POP3 Boxes | / 1 Exchange 03 | / Webmail | / Mobile Mail |
 | - | £19.99 pm + VAT | / Unlimited Standard POP3 | / 2 Advanced Boxes | / 3 Exchange | / Web/Mobile Mail |
Fasthosts' powerful email infrastructure enables you to "mix & match" different types of mailbox on the same domain name, for complete flexibility. Start by signing up for a Fasthosts email package, and then add extra mailboxes instantly when you need them.
Reliability:
One thing you can rely on with Fasthosts is reliability of service. This is ensured by way of multiple Tier 1 connections with redundant server disks, firewall protected servers, and raw log files.
Fasthosts have invested millions in making their data centre the most reliable and secure anywhere, and it is certainly evident. Their data centre offers the ultimate in security, uninterrupted power, climate controls, and state of the art server hardware and software.
Fasthosts corporate website was monitored for 909 days, ending up with an overall uptime of 99.99%.
By providing the uptime percentage for Fasthosts corporate website, we hope to help you in your research on their past uptime performance.
At 99.99% overall uptime, Fasthosts uptime is considered excellent.
Control Panel:
Fasthosts control panel is segmented between its different offerings, with additional features as you move to more expensive packages. The reseller tab enables management of customer details, and allows for creation of multiple FTP accounts, user control panels and so on.
The general interface has several main icons including; configuration, Web building, Webmail and statistics and Fasthosts dial, a free local rate access service. The web building icon takes you to an HTML creation system – as mentioned above - called Sitebuilder.
When you select the configuration menu, you are presented with an overview of your sites settings with navigation links that take you to more detailed options. You can analyse your sites bandwidth between specific dates, configure POP3 accounts and auto-responders, and add virus protection and spam filtering.
The entry level account is fairly basic, but more powerful packages give you the ability to create secured directories, multiple logins and so on. There are also sections to configure MSSQL and MySQL databases and to add streaming media to your site.
Fasthosts uses their Matrix Stats system for its statistical reporting which provides stacks of information, including hits, hits per session duration, average hits per session duration, average hits per session and so on. You also get detailed referrer information including search engine referrals, and a “whos on” feature that shows the site visitors currently accessing your site.
Fasthosts control panel is simple enough for beginners, but provides lots of features for power users.
Customer Support:
Customer support is all UK based, and currently available by phone or e-mail, both methods requiring pin/account numbers for security reasons.
Phone support is the quickest, as you would expect. The call centre is UK-based and operates any time of the day or night. Our calls where answered and dealt with promptly. If the person who answered our call couldn’t assist, we were quickly passed on to a more experienced member of the team.
Email support took a little longer, but when the response arrived it was succinct, to the point and solved my problem.
As a side note, Fasthosts also offer a thorough FAQ, searchable how-to articles, whitepapers on using all the included technologies, setup guides, user manuals, and customer discussion forums.
Price and Value:
Fasthosts offer a good range of plans to meet the various needs of their customers, all offering good value. The best value is clearly evident in the mid-range and above levels of shared hosting plans. The benefits to these packages are clearly worth the investment.
In terms of price, Fasthosts is very reasonable in comparison to many other web hosting companies. The one down-side is the extra charges extra for additional features, which can be a little pricey. We feel your primary factor when searching for a good web host should not be price. Yes, price is one factor but you need to take into consideration other factors before deciding, including reliability and customer service, 2 areas in which Fasthosts excel.
Source:hostinggeek.co
