2 years ago I blogged about my experiences with UK2.net, a hosting company here in the UK. The post Why not to use UK2.net has at the time of writing received 105 comments. Most of these are from people sharing their bad experience when dealing with UK2 support.
Recently Ditlev Bredahl the Managing Director of UK2 offered, via comments on Why not to use UK2.net, to help anyone out who is experiencing problems. From what I have heard he is sincere in this, so if you have a problem with UK2 then contact him via ditlev@uk2.net and hopefully he will help you out.
But it shouldn’t be necessary
The support staff, and support process, should be capable of handling customer problems without the need to resort to contacting the Managing Director. Yet, despite assurances from Ditlev Bredahl – … but we are turning it around, it is getting better and better – especially on the support side of things …
– comments are still being posted about how basic support queries are still unresolved or worse still getting ignored.
UK.net responds
Well not officially they haven’t, I’m still awaiting that. Recently Ditlev Bredahl contacted me by email and politely asked to be given the opportunity to respond. I have agreed. If and when he sends it I will add it to this post.
But whilst waiting for this we have exchanged a few emails. In one of them he jokingly offered to buy my domain. I told him it could be discussed but that it was likely to be out of his reach. I was offered £1500 pounds – which I have just refused. Obviously they don’t like my search rankings…
And now?
So 2 years on have things improved with UK2.net? or are things still as bad as they were? Feel free to share your experiences.
i have been dealing with this company now for the past two years and everytime there is a problem nobody replys to the tickets or no one calls back my business has now been suffering as a direct result of uk2net i cant receive emails from outlook through pop3 and cant access our emails through there webmail this has been happening now for the past 3 – 4 months. i have been trying to contact the company via phone but no one ever answers calls, i have been emailing them and surprise surprise no replys. i have finally spoke to someone after tryinmg numerous numbers today for the past 4 hours and surprise surprise they cant help, i asked if i could take my domain names and they said it should be fine but i have to pay them for transferring, why should i have to pay them when i have paid them for a service which i am not receiving. This company has no morals, total lack of respect to there customers, no customer service and do not provide what they say are going to provide anyone thinking of JOINING UK2 NET DO NOT JOIN THEY WILL GIVE YOU NOTHING BUT MISERY AND COST YOUR BUSINESS. My company relies on emails as our business is done through email communication and it is costing severley i just dont know what to do. NEVER USE UK2.NET
I was interested to find this… I have been with UK2 since the beginning, more through default and laziness than desire. They have constant problems with webmail, and my website has currently been down since Sunday night with no one able (or willing) to give me a time when normal service will be resumed.
The worst thing is that no one is accountable. The support line (50p a minute) rings off the hook with no one answering, and when they do answer their stock answer is that the ‘administrators won’t tell us anything’ about when the issue will be resolved.
In the meantime, I continue to lose revenue, as my online business lies forlornly on one of UK2’s busted servers, whilst no one there seems to care enough about their customers to actually resolve the problem.
wish I had seen all the complaints about this company before I registered my domain name with them. terrible, crooked, devious and greedy. DO NOT USE THIS FIRM !
the service is abysmal and their real intent is to deceive and rip off the customer.
I am interested in hearing from anyone who would like to take the matter to the UK Parliament, BBC complaints etc and look into having the law changed regarding copyright of domain name ownership.
Kevin Fitzmaurice-Brown
hi….
I purchased a years web hosting from UK2 for my sister… 21 days before the end of this contract( 22/6/10) they say they sent me a auto renewal e mail
if you do not reply to this e mail by clicking a link they assume you want another years hosting… I never recieved this e-mail or accidenntly deleted it.
On the 6/7/10 I recieved a vat invoice for another years hosting.. I then cancelled the contract.. which still had about 10 days to run…. their response was that if i did not answer the origonal e-mail they could take the money for the web hsting for another year.
I believe this is in conravention of distance selling regulations 2000 ie their terms and conditions are illegal.
I am currently taking this up with citizens advice with a view to taking acton in the small claims court.
Also they have a 3 stage greivance procedure which I found out about by looking at the terms and conditions….Something the lady I contacted at UK2 failed to even mention.
If you know of any one else in a similar positionto me I would be gratefull if you could contact me…
All the best
Brian C
I currently rent 3 dedicated servers from UK2, customer services is highly mixed ranging from great free advice through to crazy behaviour consisting of making changes randomly without thinking of the consequences or asking what the downstream impacts are.
I get the impression that some of the support staff are blissfully unaware of the real world and that some of their servers are doing £1000s of pounds a day of mission critical business. Ermmmm…. its not OK that my DNS settings have been randomly changed and my business grinds to a halt with 30 staff sitting around getting paid…. but no customers as nobody can access my sites.
Sorry to hear about your auto-renewal issue. Be REALLY careful of auto-renews. Lets face it pretty much all hosting companies that I know of rely on this to make money. Its a ridiculous approach, as it just pisses everyone off and its straight up a shameful way to do business.
UK2 insist that you raise a support ticket 14 days before the renewal, EVEN IF you have put the item on non-auto-renew. CLEARLY they do this to make it ambiguious. Its so obvious its patronising.
Having just been ripped off by this company, I can say without any qualms that this is a criminally based operation and will be reporting them to ‘Tower Hamlets trading standards’. Do not go near this company because like me you will lose your money.
I too have unfortunately been caught by this scam UK2.net company that trick people into their auto renewal “service”. They stopped sending warning emails advising their customers of pending auto renewal – a deliberate act of deception.
It makes me sick that so many companies regard screwing their customers as an acceptable business practice and income stream.
Don’t touch UK2.net with a bargepole.
I too have been conned. I have (or rather, had) a Windows 2003 VPS paying almost GBP 600 a year for the privilege. The VPS was constantly having issues with the NIC drivers, until it eventually stopped booting (BSOD INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE).
I contacted support and I was told that switching to a Windows 2008 license would eliminate the NIC driver issues. After days of trying -and failing- to boot the server in safe mode to back up a few files, I simply deleted the VPS (losing all my data) and asked them to switch my license to a Windows 2008 license at no extra cost, since I didn’t need the Win2k8 features and this was a problem created by their platform.
They didn’t object, so I thought it was a simple fix. I was wrong. The idiots removed my *purchased* Windows 2003 license but did not assign a Windows 2008 license. Like the blog post and all other commenters, contacting support led to nothing. I keep getting clueless replies from their ‘support’. I cannot call any of their support phone numbers because I’m outside the UK. Their ‘international’ number goes straight to voicemail (left message, no reply), their support chat is ‘not for VPS customers’.
After spending so much money with these guys I would expect much more prompt service. Clearly even after 7 years of complaints they haven’t got their act together.
Happy Customer!
Well mostly. The auto renew feature is low, but other than that I’ve been happily hosted by them for nearly 10 years.
I had a problem with my email today and they got back to me within 10 minutes.
My site has never knowingly been down, and my email (webmail too) has always worked when I’ve needed it.
My only complaint is that sometimes the instructions aren’t explicit. For instance it isn’t obvious that the email supports IMAP as well as POP3, but it does.
Also I’ve been paying for DNS management because I didn’t realise you could get this for free. I’m a bit clueless of such things, and will be looking in to it come renewal time.
All in all though they serve me well.
I have multiple accounts with UK2 and 7 sites. I recently started tracking the down time – every 2 minutes and the results are shocking. They frequently fail to respond to “site down” support tickets and frequently fail to report when the problem has been fixed. They even go as far as saying that there isn’t a problem when a site has been down for a period of time. I have at least 8 reported instances of sites being down in that last few months. This ranges from a few minutes to hours.
iv been trying to move a domain to godaddy it should be simple but no its a hastle iv sent 3 tickets and got now where now they want id , they never wanted id when i buet the domains. i moved to another web host two years ago after my uk2net hosted site was down for 4 days when i complained the told me they would suspend my account if i didnt stop contacting them. so i moved my hosting to another company but my domains are still with them . i also have noticed that no matter how maney time you set renumal to manual it always reverts back to auto renewal i had a domain for 3 years i didnt want becose it kept auto renewing but becose its only a few quid you just shrug it off.
i will be contacting trading standards enough is enough , im glad i found this page
iain
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