UK Hosting Companies

After 5 weeks of trials and analysis, I’ve moved the lonelyplanetexchange to a new, and optimum UK hosting solution.

For those of you who are in the market for a UK host, here are my experiences with a number of the top UK hosting companies.

Fasthosts UK
Was going to switch to fasthosts. Found out that they charged for individual MySQL databases.
They like many other large companies give you 30 days grace in dove-tailing your operations, so canceling with them was no problem.
I still run one of my sites with them.

Virtual Names
LPX was hosted with them for a number of years. Ran out of bandwidth.
Based in Somerset. Cheap and fast, simple and effective.

Christian technology
Nothing Christian about their service, no-one was prepared to deal with me sensibly.
Tested their service on this dns report, where you enter you domain name and it queries your server with a load of pertinent questions.
Christian technology failed on about 8. Quite serious ones as well.

I get the impression that once you get yourself high up in webperf you can forget about service. This is not the case.
Avoid.

DJango
Cliff, the owner runs a monitor repair service in his spare time and it took him over 3 days to manage a DNS handover leading to a large loss of traffic.
I need say no more.

Positive Internet
Featuring large gawnless giraffee character.
Not sure if he was in the office, dealt with my request or what his role is.
Other than that, they have kept the site up and running for the last two weeks. T
he service is cheap and good, although perhaps a little sparse.

Here’s a picture.