Is UK2 a Good Hosting Company in 2024?
UK2 is a web hosting provider. They also sell domains and provide more complicated cloud computing services such as VPS etc. But is UK2 a Good Hosting Company in 2024? No they are not.
Rewind . . . .
If someone had asked me "Is UK2 a Good Hosting Company" around 2 years ago I would have rated them excellent. Apart from a few domains registered with Google Domains, and a couple of older sties hosted on Firebase, I had all my websites with UK2. Probs about 10 in total.
The reason I was so please with UK2 up until a couple of years ago was that I thought they really understood what the customer wants, i.e reliability and expandability.
All was well. I had used UK2 for over 10 years, and it had been super reliable. THey obviously had it all figured out. . . .
UK2 . . . . THG
So around Jan - February 2024 I noticed the UK2 website was rebranded UK2 THG. No big deal I though companies get bought out all the time.
But around April 2024 one day all my websites went down, and when I contacted support no body answered the ticket, I waited for 36 hours before I got a reply. I'm not really sure how much I lost in leads, on a pro-rata basis it would be about £2000.
Here is the review I left on UK2 THG Google Maps Listing
So I will write the details of what happened (and reduce to 1 star - facepalm):
a- I had to wait 36 hours for a support ticket to be answered, I missed out on a day and a half of leads, goodness knows how many opportunities lost,
b - turns out this was because you changed from working system (CPanel) to StackCP
c - You didn't update nameservers automatically
d - You didn't even email me to say you were doing this!
e - After 24 hours of waiting I had to make a move and so very laboriously I have had to move my websites and domains to other servers.
Whatever possessed you to mess with a working system, not tell anyone about it, whilst blanking me on support for 36 hours. You couldn't make this stuff up.
Stack CP
But Stack CP is OK right?
No no no, its not OK. I spent 2 hours today trying to hook up filezilla, to FTP. I have to log in to Stack CP to unlock, and then the FTP client won't connect. I have tried dozens of different configs. No joy.
Well perhaps I can upload the files using file manger. No. In trying to upload about 8 files to the required director it results in files disappearing instead of being overwritten, and not all of them are over written. Its a right mess.
So from my limited experience Stack CP os absolute garbage. I wonder how much money they saved by switching.
Conclusion
I would have been a customer for life with UK2, I had no reason to change. I don't pay a lot say £240 a year of something like that. But I would have paid it for years to come. . . happily for a reliable service.
I wonder how many customers they lost.
FYI I went to Hostinger they do a specific Control Panel hosting package. It costs about a quarter of the price and works just as well.
If only I could get back the 50 hours or so it took me to migrate (nearly) everything.