Phastnet is my Third host review of 4 hosts for December 2010 webhostingstuff.com’s top 25. When I was going over the top 25 list for December 2010 I found this host in the 22 spot. Intrestingly enough they had only 1 review. A review that was done September 3, 2008 by seo-writer.com. The best part of that review is that whois info indicates they changed their dns October 24th, 2008 to caratnetworks.com. Without any other customer feed back this host with a traffic popularity of 4,849 out of 12,785 hosts gives no valid reason for being in the top 25. I guess it pays to buy “advertising” from webhostingstuff.com.
Phastnet.com has a retro design?
If you read enough of my posts you will know that I will comment on bad design. Asides for a limited terms of service then has no mention of remedies for down time other then:
Customer agrees that it shall defend, indemnify, save and hold PhastNet harmless from any and all demands, liabilities, losses, costs and claims, including reasonable attorney’s fees asserted against PhastNet, its agents, its customers, officers and employees, that may arise or result from any service provided or performed or agreed to be performed or any product sold by customer, it’s agents, employees or assigns.
I am not sure buying service means you need to defend them. But the designdesign on this site belongs in the 90’s. It looks like the first third of the site is a different design then the bottom part. I would like to say the first third of the site would be ok by itself, but that first third is pretty cluttered. The other two thirds of the site belong in a blog post. On the other two thirds its asks “How can you tell a reliable web hosting provider from an unreliable one?” However it does not answer the question, just uses a real estate analogy that tells you nothing. Curiously I had to look to see if the site has changed much since it reported to be online since 1999.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/phastnet.com
Going through the Way Back Machine it appears this host acted as a Web Mall. Web Malls served as a a local search engine, and were very popular in the 90’s, but by started dying out in the early part of the last decade. Its not hard to see why they discontinued this service on their site and went straight to webhosting.
The part I find troubling is the adding of those webhostingstuff.com approval graphics.
In regards to Phastnet.com having 99.94% up time
The funny thing about that uptime is that it does not take into account that is the uptime for phastnet.com. In order for you to have the same amount of uptime as this hosting company you would have to be on the same server. I say this because its a good idea not to keep your customers on the same server as your main site. One of my hosting operations actually had 4 servers for different aspects of the company. None of these servers housed customer websites. There are a lot of good reasons for isolating yourself from your customers especially when it comes to a server getting hacked. Not all of the hosts that I have looked at have more then one server. So there is no telling what the actual uptime will be for the server they will house you on. The host may or may not monitor on a frequent basis.
Phastnet.com’s domain pricing
Never mind that the hosting packages seem a slim in their offerings. Their domain pricing is over the top, some of which are almost triple the cost of other providers such as the .tv domains. $15 seems to pay for a .com. The free domains they offer are all that are $15.00 a year. A .info domain at 15 is almost 8 times what I have at times paid for them. If you only choose to have one domain I suppose it would be ok, but when you have as many domains I do you want to keep things cheap and simple. Its always been my advice to keep your domain names and your hosting provider separate, especially if you end up on bad terms with your host.
If you have to have hosting from phastnet, I recommend getting your domain elsewhere.
