In my old IT company, I used to host our stuff with the UK hosting company Fasthosts. They were very expensive and didn’t keep up with new developments in web technology. When they belatedly adopted some of the technologies we wanted, like Microsoft’s .NET, they were too expensive. They didn’t really know what they were doing with it all either. So, for reasons of better technology hosted more competently, I moved all my web sites to the rather ambitiously named WebHost4Life , based in the good old USA.

WH4L were ok for a while but they started to get annoying. They would blame crashes and slowdowns and things on the customer when all the customer was doing was to run standard, unmodified code that WH4L’s own server had installed. At one point they took our entire account down, saying that our sites had caused the servers to crash. They cited some possible recent changes as having caused it. So we lost all our web sites for days until we persuaded them that it was probably in their best interests to stop behaving like idiots and avoid court action by reinstating them. So after a couple of years I decided that it was now high time to find yet another host.

IHostASP is our current host. They’re very good, so much faster, and markedly cheaper than WH4L. Just £13 per month; reliable, helpful, with the right blend of technologies available to keep any webmaster happy. But once again they’re in the USA and we’re here in the UK. That shouldn’t cause too many issues except for the fact that most of our customers are also in the UK, and UK-hosted sites will always perform better for them and be listed higher up the search engine results. So, I thought… let’s find a host that looks like IHostASP but is based in the UK.

So I tried WebFusion. They appeared to offer an identical offering to IHostASP, but hosted in the UK, for £20 per month, an offering they call “Fusion Developer”. Well, that sounds like me anyway. So I decided to enquire further. Their sales chap Gary told me I’d need their VPS Pro offering for a whopping £46 per month. “The Fusion Developer package only allows one domain” he explained. So, would I get any help transferring over my databases and content for my £46 per month investment? “No“, Gary helpfully explained, “that would be entirely down to you”. I get it now… WebFusion – that’s an amalgamation of “web”, as in “world wide web” and “fusion” as in “confusion as to what the hell we’re here for”.

Tell you what, I think I’ll just stay with the Yanks. IHostASP’s £13 per month goes a very long way. Back in good old Blighty, Rip-off Britain is alive and well and threatening to leave this country isolated and unloved even by its own citizens… sorry, subjects. Roll on the revolution…