Fasthosts

The Fasthosts Internet Ltd. ( abbreviated Fasthosts ) is a British Internet service provider ( ISP ) based in Gloucester. It was founded in 1999 and is the largest reseller of web hosting products in the UK. Since 2006, the company is part of United Internet Group.

History

Fasthosts was started in the late 1990s by Andrew Michael, first as a development project as part of his Baccalaureate. Because of the booming New Economy was the Fasthosts Internet Ltd founded in October 1998, which was to take over the further operation of the web hosting platform.

In 2000, Fasthosts presented under the name UKreg before a platform that focuses solely on the allocation of domains and the provision of e- mail mailboxes. The brand continues to this day.

In early May 2006, the German United Internet AG announced that it has reached agreement with the owners of Fasthosts on a takeover. The company should serve to strengthen its presence in the market in conjunction with the UK branch of a Reseller 1 & 1. The purchase price was 61.5 million pounds were agreed, which were paid in cash.

In 2008, Fasthosts bought the U.S. Reseller Streamline. The following year a separate location in Chesterbrook (United States) was opened to serve customers in these areas better. There, the subsidiary Fasthosts Internet, Inc. has its headquarters

To compete in the emerging market for cloud hosting, Fasthosts founded in March 2010 under the name Rise a specially designated platform. This was one of the first offerings, which was based solely on Microsoft technologies and has not been operated by the Group itself.

Products

The company's offerings are not directed exclusively to commercial customers, as is the case for example with the German sister company InterNetX, but the business with end customers hardly plays a role by its own account. Fasthosts is one of about 5,500 active resellers of the largest resellers of hosting rates in the UK. Together with 1 & 1 UK Fasthosts achieved a dominant market share of 21 percent in the UK.

Fasthosts covers under its own brand to the entire range of services in the field of web hosting. In addition to shared hosting packages, in which several customers share a server, virtual and dedicated servers, Managed Exchange Rates are also available. In addition, the company is a provider of broadband Internet connections that are realized technically over 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 the largest hosting partner of Microsoft and was found in February 2004 by Netcraft as the world's largest operator of active servers running Windows Server 2003.

Criticism

Before its acquisition by United Internet, the company was repeatedly criticized because it is too wasteful Jump around with their own resources. Was particularly criticized the Christmas party in 2005, which cost 600,000 pounds according to official figures. Among other things, the artist Jonathan Ross, The Darkness and Boney M. have occurred at the event.

In 2007, Fasthosts was criticized because the company had to shut down numerous websites of its customers. This was due to a hacker attack, were able to get on the management system of shared hosting packages through which unauthorized persons have access. Since the passwords of customers have been stored for services such as email and FTP in plain text, Fasthosts had to automatically generate a new password and sending them this for several thousand customers. Since many websites are maintained at Fasthosts, had the shutdown of numerous offers a failure of large parts of the British World Wide Web consequence.