I normally try to be pretty positive here. Most reviews you’ll find here are of products that I’ve bought with my own money and that I’m broadly happy with.

That makes this post the exception.

You may remember that ZX81.org.uk went off-line for over twenty-four hours last month. Shortly afterwards I switched away from Adept Hosting, but it’s not only, as you might expect, because of the reliability.

I posted the following review at Review Centre:

When their systems are up and running everything was fine. Technical support tended to be accurate when a response was received.

That’s the good. But there’s way more “bad” to note. Their servers were not terribly reliable and tended to go down for extended periods of time without warning and with no mention on their support website. Worse, getting through to their technical support team was almost impossible. I have sent four messages so far about my domain name transfer and have not received any response or action so far. I may have to force through the change through Nominet which wipes out any savings that I obtained by using Adept in the first place.

In short: not recommended.

In Adepts favour they were cheap. Plus some of the things they were bad at — billing for example — worked in my favour.

Maybe that’s their problem, perhaps they’re too cheap. They should be able to support their customers. Their suggested response times are not great and they have, in my experience, consistently missed even those.

But whatever their excuse and however cheap they are it’s no longer good enough and I’ve gone elsewhere.