OC(UK) Host Review :-)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Adz
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Getting very irritated with Vidahost at the minute, and definitely feel support has gone seriously downhill.....

I've had my personal site with them for approx 8 years, and moved my father's business site to the cloud hosting approx 2 years ago. Never had any major problems until now :(

Current timeline:
Monday 1st- Complaint that emails weren't going through to a BTInternet email address. We decided to leave a few days in case it was a transitory problem.
Wednesday 3rd- Submit ticket. Mention BT's problems on Tuesday, and ask if they can check at their end.
Thursday 4th- After a couple of back and forth emails, they decide to install a SPF record. Reasonable, but it'd been working just fine for years without one.
Friday 5th- They ask us to use webmail, not the SMTP account (???).....
Saturday 6th- I now call them, and point out that the BT emails are coming back with an IP blocked response code. Promised to pass to second level support.

I then decide to do some proper digging on my own, and promptly discover that the outbound mailserver (Load balancer *I think*) is listed on 4 IP blacklists.

It shouldn't take 3 days for someone at their end to run some basic IP diagnostics.
Whether the blacklists are at the root of the problem, or whether BT has blocked on the same evidence I don't know, but I'm disappointed.

Edit:
Update for anyone reading. Fix applied on Sunday (Outgoing mailserver changed, and I'd hope the blacklist issue fixed) after getting through to second-level :)
The fix once through to someone understanding the concept of IP blacklists was quick, just a little painful getting there.....

-Leezer-
 
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Been thinking about setting up my own forum for a long time (Phpbb),Although im unsure which host to go for that are cheap,And that you can pay monthly for BUT not tied to a 12 month contact,So i can end it anytime i like.

Any suggestions?
 
thebennyboy said:
Having a truly horrendous experience so far with i3D. Took them nearly a week to setup a basic dedicated server, said server has now died and is non-responsive (even after attempting to connect through system rescue).
Click to expand...

I rented my BF4 server with these guys,And they are useless..I explained to them no matter what i change in the user control panel after applying the settings the server name & stuff would go back to default even though i selected "Debranded" server..they changed it on their end and told me its fine on their end,"Which yes it was,they could make changes" but i couldn't..they gave me a week free hosting but it was next to useless because i couldn't configure the server how i wanted it.

shall never use them again.
 
For anyone in the care...

Godaddy has agreed terms to buyout HEG for $1.81, this means that Godaddy now owns, 123reg, heart internet, webfusion, domainmonster, vidahost, tsohosts, daily internet, domainfactory, host europe, plusserver, server4you, and a multitude of smaller platforms..

HEG will effectively become Godaddy EU:

https://www.godaddy.com/garage/goda...s-to-help-more-people-get-their-ideas-online/
 
The1nonly1 said:
Vidahost still a good choice?
Click to expand...

No.

The support has totally gone down the pan, and dealings with them are painful these days. (I gave up the last time after spending a large part of a support thread explaining what a 403 error is...)
Servers are stable enough, but that's the only good thing I can say about them.

I really need to move my sites, but I just haven't got round to it yet for my sins....

-Leezer-
 
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Support is certainly much slower than it used to be, last few times I've had to request someone more senior to resolve issues which were essentially very basic (one was making a change to .htaccess!)
 
Vidahost seems to have offloaded their support to eastern Europe. When I contact support it's usually because my technical knowledge has run out and I'm getting differing google opinions to resolve issues, but trying to explain this to what I am assuming are only first line tech support with a basic grasp of working English it's quite frustrating.

They have been good at filling out basic requests, my site had issues when updating the software it caused a few memory spikes so they upgraded the ram for free, but trying to upgrade to a VPS (£50/mo instead of £6/mo) I need the ram upgrade there and support couldn't help unless I paid upfront. I'm looking elsewhere but it's hard to test servers before buying to see what actually works well, otherwise it all seems to be a race to the bottom.
 
So if TSO Host and Vidahost are going downhill and are soon to be under GoDaddy control, are there any decent cheap hosts?

I don't need much (~10GB space) but our school is closing soon (middle school and the area is going 2-tier) but we're going to be putting up a lot of memories and old media, and I'd like to keep the site going for a few years yet. Traffic will be very low.

As I'm intending to do this off my own back, are there any cheapish but solid hosting options that beat my £50pa TSO Host cloud account? Being able to purchase multiple years would be a great bonus.
 
Hey Guys,

I've posted here a few times before - usually the posts get deleted because some of the admins seem to think they are 'promotional' posts...

Anyway - I have been involved with Krystal Hosting for around 15 years, and there is a coupon 'OCUK' which has been active since 2010 that will give 50% off any new orders ( a few exclusions apply - such as not on 3 year plans - they are already heavily discounted - and not on dedicated servers ).

The entire reason Krystal exists is to offer better support. You'll find customer reviews ( old ones! ) on http://www.ochostreview.co.uk/ - and newer ones on https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/krystal.co.uk - everything is UK based.
 
Cheers. I'll give them a look. What are database connection times like? Currently, with 123-reg, there's about a 5 second delay in loading the site while the connection is made to the MySQL database.
 
I've been trying out Krystal with a view to moving from TSOHost after the recent takeover.

I'm very mixed at best. The server I am based on for my cloud hosting, Dionysus, was down for at least 30 minutes yesterday, which confused me no end, the documentation is scarce and conflicting, but worst of all the DNS on my .co.uk domain transfer 48 hours later is in a complete state.

I can reach my destination through http://www.domain.co.uk, however http://domain.co.uk gives nothing, unless it's in a subdirectory, but only then for some files until hours later. At the moment http://domain.co.uk is just giving a "Forbidden. You don't have permission to access / on this server" message.

Support has been limited to say the least. I posted a ticket last night at around 10pm, and received a response at 9am (fair enough, support will be scarce through the night for a UK-based host) but my follow up, replied to immediately, still hasn't been responded to.

The speed and navigation for the backend of the cloud system is good, but I've no idea what site speed is like as I'm unable to set it up due to the DNS issues.

I don't know if this is normal for Krystal, but I'm on the verge of moving back to TSOHost. If they've got problems at the moment then they should make it clear. If they don't have problems then I dread to think what they're like when something does go wrong.
 
It's only fair to give an update to the above.

After the 11 hours overnight initial response (above), the follow up came 8 hours later, at 4:50pm. Obviously still not great. However subsequent updates were relatively swift at 90 minutes and then 20 minutes.

My home internet is now loading my website fine (though still confused how DNS can give forbidden errors and 404s on files in the same directory to those that do load, but DNS has always been a pain). Mobile is still not showing but at least I now have confidence that it will follow soon. :)

I've not known a domain transfer to take this long after all parties did their bit, but I guess it must be possible!

My main grumble is at the poor and conflicting documentation, and I've emphasised this in my support discussions.

Now that the domain is working I can start to test what they're like as a host. If all is well over the next few months then I'll move my other sites there too.

Trying to find a good host at the moment is like walking through a minefield! Damn GoDaddy and their acquisition of TSOHost!
 
Well I knew what was coming at Tsohost and since my renewal was in Jan I jumped ship then (I need to host a few sites)

Nethosted have always been good but the the plans were odd - 1 site or loads. I did contact them but they were not interested

In the end went for a bit of a left field choice - Mechanic Web, Cpanel is great with loads of features, support has been good and they have an EU data centre

https://www.theseacpages.co.uk
 
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