Review: FastHosting (London Data Centre)

with the unfortunate loss of the last few months there's a need for reviews of hosts given that many things can happen, good hosts turn to bad and fortunately vice versa (ie the positive LeaseWeb thread that was posted the other day in Dedicated, I believe. It's great to hear those stories.)

So, for anyone expecting anything other than the standard 'FastHosting have been great for me' tale, then prepare to be disappointed. This is, as of today, a 1 month review for a London based 2x c2quad 2.00ghz VPS, with 1.5gb SLM RAM, 50gb HDD, 1.5tb transfer at $46/mo. Whilst this isn't my first host, it's my first VPS.

Background - I originally hosted my site on a server owned by the main admin of a site I moderated, free space for doing the work. I decided I wanted to put up a fair chunk of multimedia work, and it was 2001 so I moved to an unmanaged box at managed.com (now EV1 I believe?) Bad mistake. I wasn't ready for that kind of freedom, and a few months later I moved over to a small reseller account with cPanel which I got used to easily enough (having used Plesk originally on the 1st box). Against, constraints meant I decided to move my personal site to DreamHost whilst I resold the reseller space to pay for my overall costs. The DreamHost space simply isn't of high enough quality to resell, and the $200 a year I was paying felt like a decent enough deal as I was lucky enough to not suffer huge amounts.

Roll on to 09, my DH site is acting poorly over the space of a few weeks, users are moaning and my Reseller deal hasn't improved since I took it out about 4 years ago. I browsed WHM for a few days to find 'the right host' and nearly settled on one.. I did more research and found out whilst they offered what seemed a good service in general, a few major problems occurred late last year and I simply couldn't put my money down based on that. I shant name them as I'm sure it was a one-off, and unfair for someone who is not a customer to tarnish their reputation.

FH seemed to combine the specs I wanted, I was very eager to move hosting to the UK where virtually all my users are, and see if geographical location was all it cracked up to be. It works in online gaming afterall. Whilst I could beat the promises of space elsewhere, the enthusiasm that FH customers posted with convinced me that if I had a problem, these guys would sort it.

I had a bit of confusion with their signup process (it looks as if you can register a domain with them, but then it denies you when you try. This might be different now.) so I passed on a ticket enquiring about the process, as live chat was down due to the time (about 11pm GMT). A few minutes later I had a reply telling me what I needed to do, and an apology for the confusion. Whilst I can understand tech support being 24/7, I was pleasantly surprised that the sales team were still around to respond to requests.

I signed up and went to bed, hoping to hear something in the morning as they didn't make promises about set up times when using vouchers. This was fine. I woke up about 7am, to find emails in my inbox at around 4am welcoming me to the service and providing me with all the URLs I needed. I logged in to Virtuozzo, everything looked good and it was nice to see the overall panel for the first time. Now to log into WHM for the first time.. access denied. Argh! It was late when I did signup and I must've typed something incorrect into the root password field.. so amateur! I fired off an apology to tech support around midday hoping they could reset. They verified my details, escalated it to a senior (fantastic! I was kinda expecting a phone call at this point to prove I wasn't a scammer! I'm glad they take security seriously) and then I had my password reset within the space of about 30 minutes or so.

WHM VPS was a real eye opener, on a reseller box it's pretty limited, but on a VPS it's such a fantastic tool as you really feel like you're in control over the operating system without the complexity of command line if you're not used to setting things up.

Ping rates from Cardiff to London have been constantly good (<30ms, and pingdom's London box gives me between 2 and 5ms on the IP), and I'm able to pretty much max out my 10mbit port on my 20mbit Cable line. Perfect. With Dreamhost I was getting maybe 200k/sec, and my reseller account (who were hosted at LiquidWeb) I got about 350-400 at most. Ping rates for both were 100-200ms.

I installed my Invision PowerBoard, which has 3,500 members, 400k posts, about 60 users online and about 3gb or so in content minus any mp3/video links I uploaded separately.

The thing *SNAPS*. I've rarely seen anyones forum load so smoothly, let alone mine.

During the issues at DH, I was used to seeing page gen times of 15secs, this whole month I've barely seen it over 0.05 to 0.08.

Early on, I had a few problems.. I wasn't getting any joy with the nameservers resolving and I had noticed syslogd was down, and I couldn't bring it back up. I fired off a support ticket covering both elements at approximately 12pm GMT (so between 4am and 7am US, depending on the coast). I wasn't expecting this issue to be resolved for a few hours. By 12.30GMT I hadn't had just an email confirming received, I'd had 5. Each email told me who was dealing with the issues (it'd been passed to 2 engineers, 1 for each element) and they kept me informed as to what was going on. The 5th email confirmed my nameservers were running fine and that syslogd was back up and running. I was truly impressed. The only other ticket I've logged has been to sort out the RDNS entries, which I believe cannot be dealt with by myself anyway.

I filled in a questionnaire, because I was truly pleased with the way every query I had asked, regardless of how trivial. I don't know if it's a particular 'gimmick' of the ticket system they used, but the lowest I could flag my tickets was 'Important'. Even that speaks volumes to me. When I filled the questionnaire in, I thought it would be nice to mention by name each person who had helped me. I think I put about 10 names down in total. It's tricky to describe, because my server doesn't cost much in comparison to others, but I feel like my query is critical to their upkeep, and I get treated as if it's a local mom-n-pop store.

Over the last few weeks, I've read a lot of WHM threads, particularly the VPS section to see how other peoples experiences are, not just with my host but in general. A lot of the time people are told that they can't expect the specs they want in their budget, or that VPS can be a tricky scale up to reseller, even when managed. There's a lot of negativity in places, and that's a shame because it means that a lot of customers haven't had the experiences that I have.

Because there has to be some criticism, because the world is not perfect.. I'd just say as polite, speedy and effective the responses to my tickets have been.. they lacked letting me know what they did to fix any problems. I'm still a bit wet behind the ears, and whilst I don't mind playing with options, am wary of breaking things.. I'd like to know 'is this something I should've known how to do, and if so.. how'. But that's not their job, their job is to keep my box running and that's the priority.

It's a clear 5/5 from me, I think that much is obvious. I paid my 2nd months hosting last night despite money being tough... I'm happier with my (small, but important to me) customers and my own site on quality hardware with excellent support and having to eat cheap supermarket noodles for a few weeks, than eat well and suffer the consequences of the $5 'unlimited' hosts out there.