Following some very irritating problems with 123-Reg and its parent company Pipex, which, it turns out stem from the company trying to consolidate and cut costs – I have started shifting my domains to another company.
Who’s the other company? Well, thanks to reader Andrew, it is Heart Internet. Heart Internet is set up by the same two blokes, Jonathan Brealey and Tim Beresford, that set up both WebFusion and 123-Reg and have sold both of them on.
There’s clearly an interesting story there but it looks as though Brealey and Beresford live for the entrepreneurial buzz and so have set up yet another company offering high-quality, simple, low-cost domain purchase and hosting. And my experience of the company so far has been good.
Money-saving spree
The good thing as well is that Heart is trying to attract new business by making some money-saving offers. So transfer across your .uk domains for free and they’ll renew it for a year for 9p. And shift your coms, orgs, infos etc for £5 and they renew it for a year. So I’m saving £5 on .uk domains and £1 on the other domains and I’m getting out of 123-Reg before it crashes and burns.
I’m taking it slow and in stages though. I didn’t realise how many domains I now have: 26 in fact. Not exactly a domainer, but a healthy total nonetheless. I shifted an as-yet unused .co.uk domain and it all worked smoothly. Then I shifted over three more unused domains – a .info, .org and .biz – which didn’t work because I realised I hadn’t lifted the domain lock and two of them actually had out-of-date contact info on. So I changed that, emailed Heart Internet and then ran it through straight away and the SRS emails arrived about two minutes later.
I’m waiting for that to still go through but so far it all looks fine. The big step will come in shifting a domain I’m using. I may have to play a bit more with what Heart offers but so far it looks good. Its hosting deals also look good but it doesn’t have cPanel so I can’t use my favourite Fantastico feature which lets you install a variety of open-source programs with just a click of a button (I *love* this tool – why on earth isn’t there an open-source version of it out there? It is so transparently the future for hosting companies).
Heart Internet’s hosting deals are also good and very cheap. In fact, they are better than the hyper-competitive US market in many ways. I may try them out. Certainly much better value that WebFusion – which I had my argument with Pipex over. And presumably Heart Internet won’t try to charge your credit card for a renewal before it sends you an invoice and several weeks before that invoice is even due. Pipex’s response btw has been to continue to send me occasional emails. I wonder how long this will go on before they bother to actually check their own records.
Downsides
What’s the downsides with Heart Internet? Well, it doesn’t feel as secure as 123-Reg to be honest. With 123-Reg, you log-in and there you are contained within your control panel area. Also 123-Reg won’t let you have anything but a very advanced password – a random mixture of numbers and letters – so you have to rely on a cookie to get in. The entry also comes in a pop-up window.
Now, normally on the Net these measures bother me, but when it comes to the control panel for more than 80 percent of the domains I own and run (not all the domains are mine, I run sites for a few people), I like the fact that it is slightly difficult to get in.
In comparison, with Heart Internet, you jump in and out of the secure site as you navigate the site, and the password is not as secure, and there’s isn’t a pop-up password entry box. Now I have put on my engineer’s hat and I can see that the security risk is only slightly greater with Heart’s approach, but even so, by jumping in and out of a secure site on simple clicks, the risk is greater. And, of course, the convenience of a password you can remember is one thing but when it comes to my domain names, I would prefer the inconvenience of a harder password.
Recommendation
I am getting over these concerns slowly but they are still playing on me and they are the reason I haven’t shifted more domains at this moment.
I think Heart Internet’s website is actually better and clearer than everyone else on the market. But even so, I would prefer to have to sense of logging into the site and entering into a site where I then have to step out of again.
That aside, so far, I can heartily recommend Heart Internet. It is simple, it works well, it is cheaper, customers service so far has been outstanding, and it has a good pedigree behind it. I am moving and Pipex only has itself to blame.
DD24 ( http://www.domaindiscount24.net/ ) is better,
and their upper management contributes, supports, and attends WSIS/IGF efforts.
All on top off providing affordable domain registrationa and hosting.
Thats the bottom line.
Cheers Yehuda, I will try them out.
I’ve decided to spread my domains over several companies. GoDaddy has some; Heart Internet has some; so I might use DD24 for the remainder. Although I find their site very distracting – far too much stuffed onto it.
I am a great fan of simplicity. I’ve never really understood the enforced pride that the Net community feels it has to have in poorly designed and info-packed websites.
Kieren
If you can use more recommendations, my hoster is LunarPages. My opinion on them is here.
I shifted all my domains to Heart last year and I’m very pleased. Good value and good customer service. They just do what I need without any fuss.
My god 123-reg are having some problems. The domain search grinds to a halt and support is almost non existent. It took them 6 days to respond to a query why their system stopped me from using my crediit card to buy a domains. Maybe all that money they paid the Hoff would have been better spend upgrading their systems / support.
Heart sound good but my main concern is that the owners will just sell up and the same thing will happen again 🙁
Ive the same and shifted to Heart. Initially very impressed but their uptime ? well im struggling to see how its 99.9% It seems to die for 1-2 out of every 48 hours at the moment. Just hope things improve, im getting fed up of changing hosts.
Nice site btw.
Heart Internet are overpriced for domains; you should be able to do much better.
Great article. I am considering opening a Heart account as my my current host does not support mod_rewrite and ftp_login.
I was a bit worried that I didn’t know much about Heart so I was pleasd to read you are satisfied by them so far.
This was a good post to discover.
I was so impressed with Heart Internet that I now re-sell hosting for them, giving all of their goodness with whatever silly price I choose to pass on.
I’ve been more than happy with them and glad to read that you are too.
Test. This is a test because I have been losing blog comments and I can’t figure out why.
I used to be a customer of Heart Internet, and found things to be pretty good. Until it was time for me to leave.
3 months on, I am STILL battling with them to get my account cancelled!! Their Support Database says to cancel you need to email Sales, but they ALWAYS reply by saying you need to raise a support ticket (which I have done 3 times!)
They continue to charge my card, and continue to say they cannot find the Support Tickets raised!
I would not recommend them to anyone, as it seems they attract customers with the low prices, then keep them by refusing to let them cancel!
Hope you lot have better luck than I did!!
Whilst I’m disheartened by 2007-06-20 remarks by Deb, after two years happy experience with Rackspace my server budget collapsed so I went with a Dell box from Easyspace early May.
PHP and .cgi configs are very limited, and ticket systems and general support is poor *
So I signed up to 123-reg virtual servers two weeks ago which echoes the above * shortfalls .. not to mention I find there are dedicated hate sites about 123-reg when I went off to look for help forums.
On one of them, Heart Internet was flagged and, for £300 a year, I signed up on Friday and I’ve thrashed MySQL, PHP, Ajax, mailbox manoeuvres, config’d Squirrelmail and a control panel.
It’s not Rackspace but it’s a joy after the other two.
It is seven weeks after buying into Heart Internet’s reseller plan (above).
Customers adore it.
Users click install features and Nucleus, RoundCube, Gallery, phpBB, WordPress and so on, are auto installed (!) That means no PHP manual install or config either by users or by me.
One concern is security: control panel customers can see others’ mail account passwords. That means after users have changed allocated passwords online anyone with customer control panel access can plainly see the new password.
Overall points out of ten? It has to be a niner when $budget is taken into account.
I am having similar problems with heart Internet. We have a customer who has signed up for Norman online protect, similar to message labs but a lot cheaper and very liable. The problem is that Heart don’t seem to understand the basic’s of changing MX records. We set them up on Norman then asked Heart to change the MX record to point to Norman, which they said they did, but after the change anyone sending an email to the customer got an email back saying that the mailbox no longer exists. We contacted Heart to ask they what they had done and they said that we needed to setup new mail boxes as we had changed ISP. I have been trying to talk to their so called experts who cannot grasp the fact that all we are doing is sending the email through an antispam and virus protection service and the email is then forwarded onto their existing mail boxes at Heart. Still on going and have now asked Norman to sort this out as they do this for a living and are world wide. The biggest problem that Heart have is that you cannot talk to anyone other than using the ticketing system. If this isn’t resolved soon I will advise the customer to move to a larger ISP.
I see that Heart Internet are now offering a WhoIs Protection product to protect domain owners from identity theft.
http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/domainprivacy-d.shtml
Is Heart still going?
Their site is down at the moment
My sites wer hosted with neptune and when I did a whois found that heart was the registrar
As Neptune is in danger of collapse and all my sites are down I thought I’d contact Heart to find out the status of my domains
Now I’m not sure what do to 🙁
Mike; Yes, Heart Internet is down. I am a reseller and general user with over 100 sites hosted with them and a large volume of domains.
This is very poor.
For a company with such great backing they should be able to stay up even when performing upgrades or maintenance. It makes me question whether they are paying decent money for the use of a powerful datacentre.
Furthermore, I have been with them for over 1 year now and have constantly been disappointed with their speed. Must be their DNS servers or something similar because some sites can take an age to load or respond.
Price means nothing without stability and this is definitely not right!
One last thing…..
All my sites are down. Which I might not mind for a minute or two here and there, but when heart internet’s own site is ALSO down this means VERY poor infrastructure.
It’s cheap for a reason.
This is not the first time the servers have gone down, of which there are plenty. It must be a large but cheap setup.
I do however love the service and Control Panels and great options, but all these faults need to be amended or I’m gone, very very soon.
Can anyone recommend a great Reseller Package?
/out
Hiya Kieren, good choice to move to Heart, I did just that, and 123-reg are history. I have 14 domains with Heart, and to be honest today is the first time I’ve seen a major outage – no emails, nothing for over 6 hours, hope its a one-off!
Update 1810: Its only control panel and emails that are affected, websites are still working.
Re: Comment by Rob Luff 2007-11-03 18:10:59
My notes from Saturday 11th read:
8:15 AM 11/3/2007
customer.heartinternet.co.uk/manage/
“Server not found”
“Firefox can’t find the server at http://www.heartinternet.co.uk.”
All okay 9:40 AM 11/3/2007
2:00 PM and 4:07 PM 11/3/2007
“Server not found” no email | control panel | ftp etc
– – – –
Our websites were down, as well, and at least three users told us their email was down.
Heart remains v. good value particularly given the pre-installed/configured php features.
correction should has said “Saturday 3rd”
I actually have been using HeartInternet’s reseller package for over a year and have had hardly any problems.
In the year I think my server went down once and it was only for about an hour and I was kept informed throughout.
Moved over after reading your reviews here. Having problems with the websync feature. Emailed for support 5 days ago and still no reply.
Anyone care to explain what settings need to be entered into the outlook websync software.
I followed the online guide and I always get an invalid server response. If I click the webmail link in outlook it gets to a URl with two // side by side.
Can’t sort it out and Heart don’t reply.
Interesting to read all the comments. We were searching for info on Heart because of problems the last few days, with the lack of useful support.
Having tried them out for a while with a few sites, they seemed fine, a slightly high outage rate but not horrendous. The reason for the trial was that we have been asked to take a wider role in helping small businesses establish a web presence and would prefer one host, where we are familiar with their procedure.
As some of you will appreciate, canonical domain issues are as prevalent at Heart as many others. There should be no problem taking care of this via 301 redirects but that can cause glitches, control panel problems etc. So we tried to seek information from Heart on how they normally handle these, along with a few other technical issues.
Have had no problem getting responses but with one exception, these have been hopeless, a litle like the one issue we contacted them over in the past. I believe Heart have the chance of being a successful company but not without improving support. Or at least providing a route to second level support, when the first tier do not understand the questions.
Above all, a website is only useful to a business if this gives them value and in most cases, that means good configuration for search engine ranking. As pleasant as Heart are, I can not help feeling they have no awareness of this at all. Their business to date strikes me as sufficiently developed for hobby sites, or a small business website of the type that seeks little more than having the URL on a business card. Unless they get a grip of their support function, I doubt they will corner the market, even though this is there for the taking.
Every single time I have contacted their support department they have more often than not replied to me within the hour, I think the longest I have had to wait is about 24 hours, which is still a far sight better than other companies.
Well I moved to Heart Internet after the 123-reg meltdown this weekend.
I have to say although the responses have usually come within the hour, I have had to send more than 30 messages to get the transfer restarted on my 6 domains. When the support person actually did as I asked, the transfer request email would come through straight away.
Some of the support contacts seemed to understand little of what I was saying and requesting, and were just blindly pushing a button on the tucows service page.
Now that all my domains are with heartinternet, I’m wondering if this was really such a good idea in the first place.
Similar problems, cannot find ‘tickets’, tried emailing to cancel they reply saying you have to have ‘ticket’ – load of rubbish.
Then recieve the following email: –
Despite previous warnings an attempt to renew the following product has failed:-
package (Starter Professional Renewal) = £31.88+VAT
Reason:You appear to have no stored card details
The product has now been disabled. Please log into your control panel and update the payment details:-
https://customer.heartinternet.co.uk/manage/renewals.cgi
If payment is not received within 7 days this matter will be passed to a debt collection agency. If the debt remains unpaid we reserve the right to pass these details to a credit reference agency.
Best Wishes,
Heart Internet Sales
Tel: 0845 644 7750
Fax: 0845 644 7740
E-mail: sales@heartinternet.co.uk
Web: http://www.heartinternet.co.uk
This is clearly harresment so has been foewarded to our solicitors.
I am a new member of Heart Internet, but can get any info on how to create my first webpage. Can you help, i have sent them emails but as of yet recieved no answers. Did you find the site very confusing to operate?
Hi, i used to use heart but moved to simple servers, they are a smaller company but their support seems better.
i have tried to cancel a domain with them and they are impossible to deal with, they keep bouncing me between depts and i have followed to the letter their instructions seems like their right hand doesn’t talk to their left :o(
Hi.
We have used heart for several months.
We are also an ISP in our own right, with our own servers, infrastructure etc, so we are quite “experienced!
However – i have had several issues with them, mail servers not working, domains not being “added” (by domain association) properly so you can’t edit DNS, etc.
My simple complaint is you CANT TALK to anyone.
Ticket support os OK until it goes really pearshaped, and then you NEED TO TALK.
I don;t think we will stay with them.
For the record, I MADE SURE that all domains were bought elsewhere, and not through heart. This gives you CONTROL !!
A word to those thinking of joining Heart Internet – DON’T.
They are no better, if not worse, than the company they first set up 123-reg.