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.
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Signed up to one of their Dedicated servers. No email confirmation.
Credit card has been debited.
Had a “Live Support” window open now for 2 hours 12 minutes.
Still getting “There are no operators available at the moment. If you would like to leave a message, please type it in the input field below and click “Send” button”
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Oh yeah! I do like your site! 🙂
Thanks to uk2.net our website cannot be accessed!!!
Just to say we made the mistake of hosting our e-business on UK2.net, and now cannot access it, because of a fault beyond their control!!! They blamed their subcontractor Above.net and BT , both of whom denied any problems. Subsequently they are not intersted in helping us!!! Have sent email to MD and hoping he can get us back on – line, before we go broke!!!!
I have 3 sites on UK2 and none of which are able to be accessed, support replied to my query saying”There seems to be a network problem connecting our network to your ISP. Please be patient for the time being. All servers are up and running. Due to the network issue some parts of the world are not able to connect” I use orange for my broad band connection, I can get to other non UK2 site through it. I am also losing money as most of my customer enquiries come through the internet.
Our site has been down on UK2 for eight hours so far and a website that gets over 800 views per day and around 40 + sales.
There support is the worst on the market, having no feelings for you or your business. Congratulations UK2 i would say the worst website hosting company in the UK and by the look of this blog i’m not the only one.
Please do yourself a major favour by staying away from them.
Oh Dear
I should have come here first. Just signed my club for two years webhosting – and service has failed within the week.
Any ideas on how I can get my money back?
our (3) uk2 sites are down..i got he same lame excuses on a ticket…BT hub ETC..AND WE DON’T USE BT…we use karoo isp.
I would be happier if they where just honest..and admit they have a fault.
the ultra servers seem to be down for maintaince.
as ftp connects to the ip addresses..and then just gets ignored..no hub or routing problems.
we get hits from all over the planet..and our logfile shows zero hits from 11.44 this moring..and you would have thought uk2 techies would have had a look in response to the ticket.
if you get a ticket response from 1st level helpdesk..its a fob off.
heres the answer i got..what a joke.
Hello,
The current problem viewing websites is not a problem on our servers, all systems are currently working properly. However it appears that a major network hub between our systems and your ISP is down. You would have better luck resolving this by contacting your ISP. Although as mentioned the problem is between our networks and therefore not with them either, they will most likely have more weight behind them when it comes to getting problems such as this resolved.
I would once again like to stress that this is not a problem at our end, please do not send multiple emails to us regarding this problem as there is nothing we ourselves can do (given that its off our network).
Regards,
—
Adam
1st Line Customer Support
I’ve had a reply from the MD Ditlev Bredhal: 20.15pm
~~~
‘I am writing in response to your email about the downtime experienced this afternoon.
First of all may I apologise for this inconvenience and re-assure that the UK2 team have been working extremely hard to identify and rectify this problem. I would like to inform you that we expect all services to be fully operational and back to normal within the next hour.
I would like to share with you what has happened this afternoon. The UK2 ISP identity was “hijacked” by an Indonesian ISP. Although it took a short while we successfully contacted the uplink provider of this ISP who immediately fixed the situation by implementing a filter. We will be taking immediate steps to prevent this form ever happening again.
I would like to re-iterate that everything is now under control and we expect all services to be fully operational and back to normal within the next hour.
I apologise for any inconvenience.
Kind regards
Ditlev Bredahl
Managing Director / CEO, UK2’
~~~
Lets hope this is the case, I’m losing a lot of money.
I have been with UK2 for many years and this is the first (and hopefully the last) major problem I’ve had.
The uk2 support was poor today and has left me concerned.
Cross your fingers folks.
It’s back – it was within the hour as the MD said.
Excellent!
I’ve set up a support site for UK2 users..
We ARE looking for technical people that use UK” server etc to help run the site!
I know have a UK2 server. 🙂
Hi,
After reading the UK2net comments I had to give you my current problems with them.
We have 143 domains on one of their Dedicated Servers, I reported our server was down and had Input/Output errors on Wednesday 24th January 2006. The Server is still down 1 Week later and this is the response I received:
“Please accept our apologise in this situation. After our network upgrade over the weekend, some servers suffered some major hardware errors. We tried to fix them as quick and efficiently as possible, therefore were probably not able to reply to any of the tickets you raised.”
I then email back asking if they could fix the server problem or not and the response I got was:
“Your server is online and your websites should be working.”
I then checked and guess what the site is still down with the same errors are there. I replied by sending them the following:
“Last login: Wed Jan 31 11:47:22 2007 from 88-96-73-54.dsl.zen.co.uk
[root@server30192 root]# mail
-bash: /bin/mail: Input/output error
[root@server30192 root]#”
As you can see the server is not working.
I received another email that says:
” 24/7 support is only for tickets not hard ware replacements. As far as I can see, your server30192 is online.”
I have since sent an email to UK2net and UK2net’s MD requesting a more reliable server as the one they have my domains on is not functioning properly, I have also sent copies of emails to PC Pro magazine’s watchdog department. I will let you know how I get on.
The server is now up and running at last after Ditlev Bredahl(UK2net Managing Director) intervened.
Worth remembering his name for the future.
I have more than one e-mail account (and also not under same domain) and notice that I get more spam to my @uk2.net (infact I get aboiut 250 a day) and most of them are undelivered mails in nature.
Is there a way to stop this as more people are getting hold of my @uk2.net address very suspiciously than
Do we have a legal case here? (i.e. somebody selling my uk2.net mail address that i don’t use???
Its also very suspicious that uk2.net are also not filtering off spam from these sources that should be obvious to an ISP!!!
Or is this a marketting ploy to get people with domain on uk2.net to pay more for spam filtering. If email accounts don’t get protection with “extreme” settings, then its useless to BUY their spam protection offered to domain owners.
Thanks
Sundar
My problems are the same as Sundar’s writing on March 14th 2007. I complained to UK2 about a sudden surge of spam emails (reaching up to almost 1000) a day a few months ago. At first they said anybody can spoof and then on my 2nd complaint although they did not reply the spam reduced considerably. I presumed they had used the ‘catch all forwarding’ passively into their trashcan without informing me. Their latest email received today says they intend to charge approx £5.00 a month for this service whether used actively or passively although apparently it was free before.
Like Sundar I received spam mail also from a domain that I have but do not use. Obviously the leak of names has occured from UK2 and surely they are liable. The whole thing seems very suspicious to me ….put someone in trouble and then make him pay to get him out.
Can anyone advise whether I can transfer these domains of mine to another ISP like 1&1 or someone recommended who provide this facility free together with a better service …!!.
Thanks in anticipation.
Hey,
Just thought I would add that I’m having similar problems with their support system. I’ve raised two tickets now, and I did actually have a response to one as to why I was transferring my domain names away from them (becoming expensive and charging for what should be standard features).
A week latter with still no response and I’ve just sent an email to Ditlev, so thank you for your website, otherwise I would’ve still been stuck!
Cheers
Mike
Hello,
I have used UK2 quite a lot and have never had a problem with them, this may be as I have never needed to contact tech support, but they have telephone numbers now that are 0800 , wow.
Hello everyone.
Are any of you currently having trouble with your UK2 e-mail account?
I got their recent e-mail saying that there was a problem and that they were sorting it out. Since then I have been getting hardly any e-mails at all. E-mails that I know have been sent to me haven’t been arriving and it also appears that e-mails I have sent to friends haven’t arrived at their destination.
I have sent test e-mails to myself from other non-UK2 e-mail accounts and received most but not all of them. I have just done another test and haven’t received any e-mails at all.
I have e-mailed UK2 about it, but didn’t get a reply. Now, I don’t know whether that is because they can’t be bothered to reply, or they didn’t get the e-mail!
🙁
In response to Mike. Yes! I am having serious email problems: emails being delayed (up to 10 days), perhaps disappearing altogether, I don’t know. This started happening some time before the total metldown 23rd/24th of May. I eventually got a response saying something about BT having black-listed them but I didn’t understand if that was an explanation or not. In any case, if anything I think it’s got worse since then (about 4 or 5 days ago). It seems to my untrained eye from looking at email headers that the message gets to something called mailfirewall.uk2.net immediately but then gets stuck there. I really dont; want to change my email address: hundreds of people and all of my business contacfts have it. But I don’t know how much longer I can wait. I have had responses from support, but the problem is just getting worse.
On Thursday 24th May after receiving returned ‘spam’ emails to my UK2 hosted domain I contacted UK2 and they still had my 3 domain names on ‘catchall’ and obviously someone (presumably in their employ?) is getting a nice backhanded on using fake names to send spam. That has ben changed now BUT
Since then I have received NO emails at all that were sent to the UK2 domain address, only those that used my bt address. BT sent a test email to my domain addy and it was bounced immediately – not by BT as reported to me by UK2 but by another – presumably one hosted or owned by UK2?
I am trying to run a business and no emails for nearly two weeks is starting to really hurt. Their tech phone number just rings out and their freephone number just says they have problems which are being sorted out – this is not anyhelp at all. Now I need to contact them to get my domain name changed over to be hosted by BT – and from what I read this is going to be another drama!
I would send ditlev an email but presumably he is not getting either!
I have the same problems as poster 20. Come Monday June 4th, the five forwarding addresses on my domain name started to just bounce mail. It’s as if not only has someone flicked the catch all switch to OFF, but also the legitimately added 5 forwarding addresses to OFF also. This is occuring in all 7 of my domains that I have with UK2, I’m not happy whatsoever. I can’t get hold of anyone and have no idea if this new issue will be confused with their old issu of a week ago. Aargh!
Same here email broken yet again. June 5 2007. none of my mail names are recognised, all of them bounce. ARGGGGG
cant anyone provide a reliable email service?
Today, mails to the legitimate (non-catchall) forwarding addresses on three of my uk2 domains are bouncing. I’m receiving hardly any mails and even the spam (typically 50 /day is barely trickling in) When I tried logging into my account to check settings, that failed too (timed out). So I guess lots of upset customers are trying to do the same thing all at once. This is pretty poor, so soon after last weeks fiasco.
Yep same here 2 domains, hardly receiving any mail yet I can log into my webmail on a pop mailbox I just setup and all my mail is sitting there. I’m not happy at all at the moment I have a website that is just going to go live and I’ve been plagued with mail problems for over a week which just is not good enough. I am one very unhappy customer at the moment.
Yep, me too, 2 legitimate domains bounce back with 550 unroutable address errors for mail forwarding to a BT account. Never had any problems with UK2 until today, been with them for 4+ years . . .
Hi All –
On a whim, I emailed Ditlev (UK2’s M.D.) personally to describe the problem this morning. Ten minutes ago, he responded personally, asking if it was now OK? For an M.D., I’d say that’s very impressive! Anyway,it seems fixed now.
– Dave
From where I’m sitting, it’s definitely not fixed!
I can use the webmail to see my mail building up, but can I get at it through pop3? No!
I’ve not long bought my domain, so I haven’t told all my contacts to use the new e-mail address yet. If push comes to shove, I could just abandon it, but would rather not. Do I stand any chance of transferring it out of UK2? Has anyone else succeeded in doing so?
Cheers,
Geoff
I have been a customer of UK2 for at least 10 years and they host three domain sites for my company.
I used to get excellent service with no problems but this year there has been a monthly problem with emails not getting through and being lost. Now it is a weekly problem!
On 24 May I was unable to get emails for 1.5 days and I eventually got some of the lost emails several days later.
Also on 04 June I noticed that emails were coming through many hours later. Today 05 June no emails are coming through again.
I have emailed the MD Ditlev Bredhal to let him know that his poor service is making my company give poor service.
I am seriously looking elswhere to host my sites.
I hope he gets the email!
Hi again
This is the response I had from uk2 this morning from a support ticket.
Hi there,
Please accept our sincere apologies for the problems with email, our technical team are still busy repairing the outage that began during the course of last week. They have made progress though and are now at a point were your Webmail works, however we’ve had to isolate a few of the servers handling the POPing/Downloading of emails so that these servers can be dedicated to repairing the rest of the mail system. Please use the webmail interface at mail.uk2.net for collecting and using emails in the mean time rather than an email client (such as microsoft outlook or eudora). Although the pop service is working, it is intermittent whereas webmail is currently working correctly and all your emails can be accessed using it.
And for customers trying to use email diversion to direct their domain email to BT connect, we’re still awaiting BT to remove us from their blacklist. They have had the necessary information since last friday and have yet to take action on it, we are still in contact with them regarding this and are trying to push it through asap.
If you believe your problem is not regarding either of these issues, please reply to this message and we will get back to you as soon as possible. However we must ask that you be patient and send in only 1 support ticket as our support team are understandably extremely busy at this time and there will be a delay in replying to you.
We’re sorry for having to send a standard reply in response to your query, however we’re having to respond to an much higher percentage of tickets than usual. If you feel we have not answered all of your questions, please reply once to the same ticket number (please do not create
a new ticket or you may receive this message again). We apologise for any problems that this situation is causing you and thank you for your ongoing patience with this.
Regards,
—
Mat Taylor
2nd Line Customer Support
UK-2 Ltd
Getting fed up with the excuses to be honest!
Maybe I spoke too soon. My email forwarding is working again, but where I have set up pop mailboxes they are filling up but still not downloading (to gmail).
30 of may I send this ticket.
“All my email forwards are failing see example below .
I just found out this has been happening at least since friday.
Im not happy I’ve been using you for at about 8 years, and since you have change form forwarding all, I have had no end of problems with emails.
and as I have had this domain for at least 8 years, I use this email a lot.”
And did not get a reply until the 5th of June, saying they are very busy.
Posted On: 05 Jun 2007 03:07 PM
——————————————————————————–
Hi there,
We apologise for the delay in replying to your ticket, we are currently experiencing a far higher load than usual in our ticket system and this has unfortunately created a backlog of tickets that we are working through as quickly as possible. We appreciate your patience in this matter.
Please also remember when replying to keep the subject line the same, otherwise you will create another seperate ticket which will not be linked to your original and will therefore slow down any resolution to your problem/question. Please also do not try and create another ticket if you’ve not received a reply yet, one will be sent.
Regards,
—
Mat Taylor
2nd Line Customer Support
UK-2 Ltd
all of my mail forwarding has stopped ! no reponse to ticket yet !
Jim
We have been having issues for 2 weeks with emails which is really annoying our customers who are finding it very hard to contact us!
The reply last week to the ticket I had was “The systems were fixed last night and then it went belly up again”
Very professional! Our emails are still not working and now this morning uk2.net whole site isn’t working!!
I have just read on that you can get pop mail ….
“As of this morning downloading e-mails through Outlook etc with the mail accounts set to mail.uk2.net still does not work. Change the setting to pop.uk2.net. Leave everything else the same, and you should find that you can collect your e-mail.”
I have changed our server and am now downloading several thousand emails …..
I should have said I read this here : http://uk2forum.co.uk
Robert King is a STAR.
I have changed my Outlook Account settings for Incoming mail server to pop.uk2.net and my emails are coming through after 3 days.
Me too, and it works – but couldn’t uk2 have told us?
My emails are still not being forwarded to my BT business address as apparently BT still have UK2 blacklisted and are bouncing their emails! I am going to be bankrupt soon.
I haven’t had emails forwarded from UK2 to my BT Connect account since 24 May!! Nothing, zilch, zip. Every email is bounced with the 550 error. I accept problems happen every once in a while but this is absurd.
When I’ve tried to post tickets they take ages to reply and even when they do reply they don’t answer the question but post a FAQ relating to a different problem.
Is it a coincidence that they introduced their premium support telephone line just before this happens….
On the subject of BT, I believe I’m unable to receive mail at my UK2 account sent from BT accounts; I only know two people with such accounts, so it’s hard to verify, but both have their mail bounced back.
Maybe worth checking your own UK2 accounts for such a problem.
UK2 are no more than a bunch of incompetent idiots!
I moved my domain names away from UK2 a year or so ago. I have asked for my details to be removed from their database (which the law says they should do anyway, as I am no longer a customer) and a guy called “Andy” in sales told me it had been done.
Liar.
I have recently had 3 emails from their robots, telling me that, when they tried to charge my emails for domain name renewal, it failed (luckily my CC recently expired!!!). This is for domains which (a) are no longer under their control; (b) which they promised they had deleted info on.
I have just emailed Mr Bredahl, I wonder if he can help.
I also intend to contact the Data Protection Registrar, or whoever the relevant person now is.
Paul
Paul,
I was still receiving emails up to a year after I had left them – good luck with things.
It is a real shame that these things are still happening at UK2 – they are aware of these comments (or at least used to be…) so why on earth aren’t they trying to do something about these things!!!
Hello all
I have been with UK2.net for several years now and what was a good service with never any issues has become a total pain in the arris.
OK I’m a small fish, I have one domain, I’m not hosting anything on it, I use it purely for email forwarding only. I had a system whereby I always knew where mail originated from as I’d use the identifier before the @mydomain to tell me who I’d given the mail addy to (e.g. tesco@mydomain).
This has worked wonderfully until they told me I had to pay for the privilege or just have 5 addresses. I contacted them and amazingly they have agreed to let me have 100 addresses for free for a year.
Since then, I’ve disabled catch all forwarding. I also now forward my mails to 2 gmail accounts instead of UK2 pop3 as I’ve got so sick to death of the mail being delayed or disappearing over the last couple of years and yes, it’s making me look stupid as I feel I’m forever giving my clients excuses.
And now, suddenly, on my MAIN business addresss, I have suddenly started getting viagra and related spam which I’ve never had before (this is in the last month at most). Also, with reference to BT, I have had mails sent to me bounce – of course I knew nothing until someone wrote to me snail mail and told me mails were bouncing – again these are sent to my domain and forwarded to gmail, not UK2.
I am fed up of it and if anyone can suggest where to go instead of these bunch of monkeys, I’d appreciate it…..only the damage re the spam is done now as the other bunch of internet idiots have now got my main address *sigh*.
What the hell is going on? Email forwarding for all of my domains is not working since they introduced this seemingly money grabbing initiative of ‘catch all forwarding’- Ie. pay more for a service that was free to begin with. I wouldn’t mind if I was properly notified that this shit was going to go down but I have not been receiving mails to any of my domains for some time including an important business website.
It hasn’t been working for several months apparently. I have been to the UK2 website and it is not allowing me to set it up. It looks like I have set up forwarding with specific emails outlined but when I send test emails to the UK2 hosted addresses they are undeliverable still? Does anyone know if its a 24hr thing? I can’t find out because they don’t have 24hr support which is poor in my opinion also.
I am heartily pissed off with UK2.net. Can anyone recommend a viable alternative please. I am transferring my many domains if this isn’t sorted out in a couple of days. I have been a customer with them for 8yrs!
Can you please advise ASAP. I thinking of cancelling all my accounts with UK2. net if this is not corrected ASAP.
I think that you’re going to be submitting another blog update at the end of the next two year period. I have to say that when I addressed Mr Bredahl directly (thanks for the e-mail address btw) he did do something about my problems. (Hosting service just didn’t appear despite having paid for it)but they are usually unresponsive and I amd not just using them as a re-direction service. I have asked them when they are going to make PHP5 live, and they have no plans, despite php.net telling the world that PHP4 is going at the end of the year.
Being a non-technical person I am completely at a loss. All I want to do is see my emails in Outlook. Followed the instructions from FAQ’s without success. Rang the help line and after 20 minutes of rekeying the information into Outlook and Outlook Express (just to make sure) the recommendation was to get a technical person involved and ring them back (I pointed out that I thought that’s what I’d done). 10 well spent!
Surely they must receive problems of this sort all the time, so it would just as easy to spend 20 minutes in constructive conversation rather than using obvious delaying tactics. Can anybody out there help me? I’ve tried the pop.uk2.net but it doesn’t work, I keep getting an interrupt message. I use virgin.net – does this matter? Everytime I try something I lose my internet connection and have to reboot my machine. Surely life must be easier than this.
I would switch to another supplier but having read of other peoples experiences and being non-technical this fills me with dread. I have a business to run and I cannot afford to dedicate my life to solving UK2 problems. I am wrong in thinking that this should be easy?
Darryl, I’ve just helped someone else out with OE and found that it sometimes didn’t change things correctly or rather store the changes properly. So change the settings to what you think they should be, save and close OE, Then try restarting OE and see if the settings held.
Other than that I can’t help remotely, sorry.
If anyone actually wants UK2 to take notice of your complaints and how terrible their support are post here with a review of how bad theyve treated you. They will take notice if their reputation is at stake on the most popular webhosting forum on the internet:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1
I encourage as many of you as possible to do so.
Wah,
believe me UK2.net have taken notice of the comments on here.
I registered with the company several months ago and have had numerous problems, many of which remain unresolved. It would seem to me that the company should provide basic support for new users who wish to set up their own site. They provide the servers but do not provide any material on how to use them.