Disclaimer: I'm very reluctant to rubbish a company in public like this, but I think in this case the service has been so awful I feel a duty to warn others about them.
For the last few months I've been hosting a personal web site at webhosting.uk.com. I chose them after a friend recommended them for being relatively cheap and flexible. It sounded like a good deal, you could have as many sites as you liked within certain limits of disk space and bandwidth.
One morning I noticed the web site was down, but since it's not business related I didn't follow it up until later in the day. They provide an online technical support chat, so I fired it up and was soon told that there was a problem with some files being corrupted on the server but service would be resumed in six hours, i.e. later than night. The next morning the site was still unavailable. Once again I was given a figure of six hours and told not to worry because my data was safe. That evening the site was still unavailable. They continually failed to provide honest information about the state of the server. It took a further two days before they finally admitted that they had lost the drive and had no backups:
"1.The Windows OS got corrupt. That was the reason we decided to reinstall it. 2.This was a RAID server. To ensure that there is no data loss, we had multiple drives on the server wherein the web-date, MySQL & MS-SQL were backed up separately. This was done on the same server but on different drives. 3.While we were checking the server during OS re-installation, we also found that the primary hard-drive had faults on it and was not responding. Further evaluations and investigations revealed that the drive itself was faulty. Since this was a part of the RAID array, we had to deal with it very carefully. One single error would have resulted in the data getting wiped out. Inspite of all efforts, the data on the drive was not getting retrieved. That was the reason for the delays."
It's really hard to understand what happened from this garbled explanation. On the one hand they say they were using a RAID array, but then they contradict this by implying that different things were stored on different disks: "we had multiple drives on the server wherein the web-data, MySQL & MS-SQL were backed up separately. This was done on the same server but on different drives". That doesn't sound like my understanding of RAID.
But in any case, simply backing stuff up on a separate disk in the same box is a pretty crap strategy. Also simply doing database backups isn't sufficient. My site allowed my users to upload photos and these have all been lost. I've also lost the (somewhat ancient) code for the site since it was developed a long time ago on a long dead machine. Maybe I was naive to expect a host to back things up.
Since then the only compensation they've offered has been three month's of free hosting, even though I've probably lost at least £1000 in development time (to rewrite the software) plus the hours I wasted chasing them up plus the irretrievable loss of my user's photos. Free hosting is completely worthless from a company I've lost all trust with.
So, I'm now looking for a good hosting company. I'm quite interested in getting a dedicated server that I can look after myself. Any recommendations?
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