Fasthosts

Fasthosts offers a range of services to suit almost everyone. The pricing structure is different to many other ISPs: instead of bundling features together in a larger package, it charges separately for items. This means you pay for what you want, but you or your client could end up paying more than you initially budgeted for.

Its control panel is easy to follow. For example, it gives the URLs of the web, FTP and email servers as you set them up. Another advantage is that it supports Microsoft streaming media mount points, so media can stream from multiple locations.

The SiteBuilder tool offers a simple way to build a website - a bonus if you want to offer web hosting to smaller customers. Fasthosts will also enable you to sell ADSL broadband or dial-up to your customers, thus making you a one-stop shop for your clients' online needs.

As for e-commerce, Fasthosts offers a credit card-brokering system, so your company doesn't have to apply for a Merchant number. This makes online processing much easier, producing less paperwork. There's a monthly £20 charge, £100 setup fee, plus a 3.5% charge per transaction, but you can be up and running within 48 hours.

Fasthosts offers a completely UK-based 24/7 support service, with engineers available on its reseller packages, and also offers a customised RSS feed on the status of "your" network. If your web server is affecting server performance, which is usually because of poor scripting on the website, then it may be moved to a development server for two weeks to allow the problems to be dealt with - but your site will remain live during this time.

Bandwidth is governed by the usual fair-use policy. Fasthosts also boasts of its "virtual data pipe", which means that, within reason, bandwidth considerations can be forgotten. This, and the ability to create a secure private network, means that if you have multiple servers that need to communicate between each other they can do so at 100Mb/sec.

What hinders Fasthosts is its real-world performance in our tests: 57 minutes of downtime is more than we'd hope for. However, if you want a wide range of products and a flexible pricing structure, Fasthosts remains a good choice.

Author: Mark Newton