Fasthosts Web Hosting

The Fasthosts Internet Ltd is a British Internet service provider (ISP) based in Gloucester. Founded in 1999, it is the largest reseller of web hosting products in the UK. Since 2006, the company has been part of the United Internet Group.

History:

Fasthosts was started in the late 1990s by Andrew Michael, initially as a development project in the context of his graduation. Because of the booming new economy was in October 1998, the Fasthosts Internet Ltd. founded which was to take over the continued operation of the web hosting platform.

In 2000, Fasthosts introduced a platform under the name UKreg, which focuses exclusively on the allocation of domains and the provision of e-mail mailboxes. The brand continues today.

At the beginning of May 2006, the German company United Internet AG announced that it had reached an agreement with the owners of Fasthosts. The company should serve in conjunction with the British branch of the web hosting provider 1&1 to strengthen its presence in the market. The purchase price was 61.5 million pounds paid in cash.

In 2008 Fasthosts bought the US reseller Streamline. The following year, a separate site in was Chesterbrook (United States) opened, there to supervise resident customers better. There, the subsidiary Fasthosts Internet, Inc. headquartered.

In March 2010, Fasthosts founded a dedicated platform called Rise to keep up with the emerging cloud hosting market. This was one of the first offerings based exclusively on Microsoft technologies and not operated by the Group itself. Rise was sold to the British company Outsourcery in October, 2014.

Products:

The offerings of the company are not aimed exclusively at commercial customers, as is the case for example with the German sister company InterNetX, but the business with end customers does not play a role according to own data. Fasthosts is one of the largest resellers of hosting plans in the UK, with some 5,500 active resellers. Together with 1&1 UK, Fasthosts achieves a dominant market share of 21 percent in the UK.

Fasthosts covers the full range of web hosting services under its own brand. In addition to shared hosting packages, in which several customers share a server, virtual and dedicated servers and managed exchange tariffs are also offered. In addition, the company is active as a provider of broadband Internet connections, which are technically realized via the backbone of British Telecom (BT).

As one of the few providers Fasthosts does not rely on the free operating system Linux, but on Windows Server. The company is one of Microsoft's largest hosting partners and was identified in February 2004 by Netcraft as the world's largest operator of active servers running Windows Server 2003.

Criticism:

Prior to the acquisition by United Internet, the company was repeatedly criticized because it handles too wastefully with its own funds. The Christmas party was heavily criticized in 2005, which has cost 600,000 pounds according to official figures. Among others, the artists Jonathan Ross, The Darkness and Boney M. appeared at the event.

In 2007, Fasthosts was in the criticism, as the company had to shut down numerous sites of its customers. The reason for this was a hacker attack that allowed unauthorized persons to gain access to the shared hosting package management system. As customers' passwords for services such as e-mail and FTP were stored in plain text, Fasthosts automatically had to generate and deliver a new password for several thousand customers. As many sites are operated by Fasthosts, the shutdown of many offers resulted in the loss of much of the UK's World Wide Web.