Burton Web Hosting - my (poor) experience
When it comes to choosing a new product or service I always prefer to go with a recommendation from somebody who has used the product/service and has had a positive experience. So when I was looking for a new web host last week Patrick Altoft recommended Burton Web Hosting. That was good enough for me as Patrick has had a lot of sites and articles that have done well in Digg, so when he posted the following on my blog I was sold.
I pay £10 a month for unmetered bandwidth on a host that stands up to the digg effect without caching or crashing. Try Burton Hosting in Scarborough.
So I go to sign up to Burton Hosting and it all seems straightforward until I get to the actual page where I have to enter my address and credit card details. Its quite a long page but after about 5 minutes I completed it and hit “enter”. I then get this message:
An error has occurred and your order cannot be processed at this time. Please try again later.
(3049 : The StartDate format is invalid. The value was 03/08.)
Oh dear. So I hit “try again” and after another 5 minutes of filling in all of my details I hit “enter” and get exactly the same error message! This time I double checked my credit card information really carefully and am 100% sure that I get everything right.
But at this point I can’t be bothered to fill in the bloody form again so I decide to ring their support desk. Its 5.30pm, and I get an answerphone message saying that there is nobody there to speak to so leave a message. Not good. I look around the site and find a few other numbers for the switchboard and for named personnel contacts and I try them but find they are disconnected!!
Its at this point that I give up on Burton Hosting and head off to find another web host that is reasonable and has unlimited monthly transfers. Any suggestions?
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has commented so far. I already have some of my major sites with Rackspace, and I agree they are great, but not cheap. My other less important sites are with 1&1 on a shared server. However for this particular project I wanted a new host that is cheap and cheerful and can handle lots of bandwidth. So since I wrote this original post I have decided to go with Servage as per Ray’s recommendation. I’m pleased to say the sign up process was easy and I only paid £63 for 14 months of web hosting that included a .com domain, 510GB of space and 5010GB of monthly data transfer, that should do the job 
And they have a pretty good affiliate scheme whereby if you use the voucher code ukoffer when signing up, you will get 25GB of extra storage. And I get two months of credit toward my hosting balance plus 25GB of extra web space.
What I’m listening to right now: R Kelly – “I’m A Beast”
Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 12:02 pm and is filed under General Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
March 16th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
You might try uk2.net, ive used them for a while and good so far. Just a cpanel host based out of the UK.
March 16th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
check out http://www.find-host.co.uk/?q=php-personal-hosts-review
some good uk sites compared on one page
March 16th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
“Wakes up in the morning and realizes I have payed 8 times”. Lol
Unlucky mate, I would never have a host that isn’t 24 hours.
Good Luck
March 16th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
My suggestion? Check your credit card definitely hasn’t been debited.
March 16th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
The state of customer service generally in the web hosting business is bad. Im currently having a NIGHTMARE with WebFusion, trying to cancel after my sites were down for 72 hours.
Registration forms should be bulletproof. Ive just had a battle to sign up to affiliate network linkshare. Please cut down on the validation, or at least make sure every form field is saved after each submit. Real PITA.
March 16th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Sorry, their hosting is clearly better than their support…
March 16th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
If you want the best, check out Rackspace - 24 hour support, has offices in the US and UK. I wrote a post re: moving my sites over to a dedicated server last week:
http://www.myeggnoodles.com/working-server-side.html
There not cheap, but as the saying goes: “you get what you pay for” is defiantly true with hosting providers.
Good luck in your search… it’s a horrible task.
March 16th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
I use Clook Internet £25 per month for as many domains as you want and never had any problems. Support is great as well
March 16th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
I’ve recently started using the hosting services of http://cyberprog.net and it’s been a painless experience moving sites over. Support is personal and prompt too.