Low Cost Names www.lowcostnames.co.uk

My website was hosted with Lowcostnames (LCN) for 10 years, during that time I found their help desk to consist of a few arrogant MALE staff towards me the when handling my WP issues and payments. They can handle email issues ok pop settings etc, but anything that involves getting under the hood to help with your WP they are pretty clueless and unhelpful. My website never reached page 1 on Google in all that time so if your thinking of getting them to host on their shared servers don'. I suspect they are hosting many spam website that effect rankings and i spent lots of time on SEO, copy on my blog, alt tags etc.

I was paying originally paying yearly, then went to quarterly every 4 months then when i missed a payment they insisted i pay yearly and because I couldn't afford to the website I had spent 15 years making, has gone off-line.

Some very rude staff work there and I would at all costs look elsewhere if your hosting a Wordpress site. Really bad customer service from these people have made me very upset having to loose all that work because they decided to change the payment structure overnight. Seems they are not managed but are allowed to decide in real time how they play god with customers lives.

LCN are rubbish. I pay a lot of money every month for a dedicated VPS and its allways going down, usually on Thursdays when I do all my deals so it costs me a fortune in lost revenue. They are total crap

I have constanly been trying to get through to speak to someone as they have e-mailed my documents for my holiday half in the wrong name i just keep getting cut off the phone and my e-mails just dont get opened i have also sent 2 recorded delivery letters and still nothing has been done, i can see that when i get to the airport there will be no holiday. i will never book with this company again and would not recommend themm to any one unless you want to have heart attach with the stress and frustration.

I normally didn't have any problems with LCN for several years, i just used them for domain registering, that is until now.

I have just noticed that LCN have started charging in EUROs, this is probably due to the fact that the pound has been falling in recent months dramatically. But did LCN bother to annouce this? No. For years, all my invoices were in pounds but now they are being issued in Euros without no notification whatsoever.

What does this mean for me? It means extra cost as their Payment Provider in now charging in Euros, so if you use your normal UK Credit Card, once you get your Card Statement, you will notice your Card Company has also charged you an exchange fee. This is why they didn't announce this. Their website implies they are a UK company, so I can't understand why they won't let me pay in the currency of this country. If they are not a UK company, then why can't I enter my VAT number to be exempt from VAT?!!

Another thing, their Bulk Rates for multiple domain names may seem very attractive, but it isn't, there is small print, or should I say, "there isn't even small print!" On their website they clearly state levels of discounts depending on the number of domains you have, i.e "20+domains", "50+domains" etc. However, when I informed them I had "50+domains" and wanted the discount shown for this, they told me NO. Then then said i 'misinterpreted' this as for this you need '50+ domains' of the SAME domain type. i.e 50+ .co.uk's or 50+.com's etc. !!

But is DOESN'T say this anywhere. I informed them, that it doesn't state this anywhere so I couldn't 'misinterpreted' this. You can check this on their website yourself.

I had signed up to LowCostNames (LCN)'s dynamic hosting plans after having a new website built.Following the launch of my new site on LCN ' s servers, I emailed all my clients. About a quarter, if not a third, of all emails: mainly BT, AOL, Hotmail and others (approx 300 emails in total) bounced back and could not be delivered.On advice, I immediately changed hosts!Having later on enquired about LCN, I found out that LCN hosting is used by spammers, hence LCN's servers are black listed and the emails bounce back. This would also have affected the search engine crawling of my site. I do not recommend lowcostnames.co.uk.

"Low Cost Names" dont appear to have a 24/7 helpline, and yet I assume that their clients would need this from time to time. Our email is down for the second time in 4 weeks. I assume that they are carrying out routine maintenance and have 'forgotten' to inform their customers.

I have just renewed with them. I think I will be taking my business elsewhere unless things improve dramatically i.e. both my website and e-mail function 24/7 365 or 366 in a leap year, days a week - this is what I pay for.

I tried to change the domain's name servers via their control panel. The change remained "in progress" for several days so I contacted support. Support took a couple of days to respond and said it had failed because I had entered IP addresses instead of server names. They could do the change manually if I sent them my security details. I called up and said I would like to be in a position to update my name servers via the control panel so they backed out the change and I then put in the server names as suggested rather than IP addresses. Still didn't work. In the end they had to make the change manually but were very vague about when they might get around to it, citing the fact that they had no SLA to adhere to.

When I first registered the domain with LCN in 2004 support were very helpful and responsive. The comments here are based on observations over a one week period, so I don't know whether this is a glitch or a more general malaise in the company. However I am not prepared to take any chances with something as important as my domain name.