Heart free web hosting and email to end

Had an email yesterday from Heart Internet advising that their free web hosting and email service will be discontinued on 31st May 2010.

They now offer what they call Starter Pro Package at £2.49p per month.

At least this offers 24/7 customer support plus increased web space and bandwidth.

Cheers!

In reply to a post by Ancient_Mariner:

Had an email yesterday from Heart Internet advising that their free web hosting and email service will be discontinued on 31st May 2010.

They now offer what they call Starter Pro Package at £2.49p per month.

At least this offers 24/7 customer support plus increased web space and bandwidth.

Cheers!

What was really funny for us was we had spam from heart (wasn't their fault) but somebody signed our old hosting email address to heart..

Comical to say the least

Interesting.

Not had such an email and I use their free email services with a personal domain registration.

I was using their free service to host my tiny site. I was on the point of upgrading anyway, so it just pushed me to do it a bit earlier than planned.
Beware though, something went wrong in the sign-up and instead of a bill for £35 (12 x £2.49 +VAT) I was billed £83, apparently for two versions of the same package.
I emailed them (on Saturday) and have already received a reassuring reply that they have issued a refund, which will be repaid in a few days.

Surprising decision from Heart in a way. A good percentage of the free hosting was used to 301 redirect sites rather than host them live, no resources involved. May be part of the reason, perhaps they felt (quite rightly) those sites would never grow into paid accounts.

Trouble is, Heart don't offer a 301 redirect for parked domains, only a relatively useless 302. So now everyone is moving those domains to another registrar to set up a site wide 301, not as ideal as page by page but with most links likely to be to the root of the sites, not a terrible decision.

Just moved a few myself, we didn't want to get involved in reseller hosting but always asked our clients to use Heart, easier to have everything in one place, where you are used to the set up yourself. Two of those clients have already requested that all their sites be moved, 15 in all under various accounts, just didn't like the way this was done.

That's going to cost Heart about £800 a year, no big deal but plenty more will feel the same plus others will be tempted away by offers form their new registrars, most of whom of course offer hosting.

I was chatting to one of the Heart guys about this earlier today and this one silly decision is going to seriously dent them, possibly as far as out of the game, hosting is a competitive, marginal business. Of course they will see an increase in revenue from those who upgrade but sounds like the numbers are mainly in the other direction.

All they had to do was the same as others have done in the past, stop new entries to free hosting, leave well alone and offer 301 redirects. Problem solved and happy customers, instead of that they have the opposite and may continue to slide. We're certainly looking at all our options at present, which was the point of discussion with them, not impossible they will lose over a hundred domains from our clients and many others will do the same.

One things for sure, until I see whether they survive this won't be putting any new accounts or sites there, only means moving them otherwise. Also made us look not wonderful, we have gone out of our to recommend Heart and then they pull this.

I was shocked and surprised at this move by Heart - pretty miffed at the cheeky tactics. My web sites are run only as a volunteer and we certainly can't afford £30 per year for them.

Found a few recommendations on twiter and checked reviews at reviewcentre.com and found this which is free like heart internet USED to be:

http://www.freevirtualservers.com/free-hosting-refug...

Won't be getting back the time it takes to move the sites but such is life!

Mike

>http://www.freevirtualservers.com

"Double" the cost for domain renewal however as they force you to transfer your domain to them.

I guess it is still cheaper than buying hosting from Heart but £10/year for hosting (with addon domains so you can host more than one site still for only £10/year) is not that uncommon nowadays and would allow you to keep domain and hosting separate.

In reply to a post by think26872:

>http://www.freevirtualservers.com

"Double" the cost for domain renewal however as they force you to transfer your domain to them.

I guess it is still cheaper than buying hosting from Heart but £10/year for hosting (with addon domains so you can host more than one site still for only £10/year) is not that uncommon nowadays and would allow you to keep domain and hosting separate.

That is very strange because when I signed up I managed to transfer my domain in for free and the setup fee was waived. I rang them after seeing your post to make sure there are no ongoing costs bar my domain renewal and was assured they are NONE.

Only been a few days but I''m very impressed with them. If anyone is looking for another free host go to http://www.freevirtualservers.com/free-hosting.htm

Edited by thinkbig (Sat 22-May-10 22:08:11)

>That is very strange because when I signed up
>my domain renewal and was assured they are NONE.

Nothing strange I only mentioned the domain renewal costs - that was my point!

£10 to renew domain at FreeVirtualServers and £6.50 at Heart to renew (for .co.uk domains anyway).

I am not saying it isn't a reasonable deal but if you have more than one domain you wish to host cheaply and/or you want to keep domain/hosting separate there are overall better and cheaper options in my opinion.