I’m tired of Gradwell’s slow performance, sloppy change management, undelivered promises and apparent change of direction. The final straw oddly though, was an unsolicited sales call, only days after total failures of their infrastructure. I may have stuck around longer if not for that call. In an attempt to not store my eggs in the same basket, I’m moving domain registrations to gandi.net and hosting to a virtual private server with 1and1. I’m sure their support is no better than Gradwell, and the net result is that it actually costs me a little bit more per month, but I get full control over the server where my sites are hosted, can host as many sites as I like and don’t have to put up with being told ‘things are fixed’ when they’re clearly not.
So far, www.bookthing.co.uk, www.onelinemoviereviews.co.uk and www.gemmellmania.co.uk have moved across. The .com’s are a little more annoying, for various reasons so they’ll be going more slowly. I’ll be moving darkstorm last because there’s a lot of mail forwarding happening on that domain and I don’t want to mess it up.
I’m really happy generally with gandi.net and 1and1 are ‘ok’.
Hi Tony
..sounds like I’m having similar problems to you with Gradwell.
(I found you by Google “gradwell” & “slow”)
-hosting performance generally poor and sporadically terrible.
Pity. They used to be good.
I get the impression they only care about their VOIP business these days.
I’ve more-or-less decided to sack them.
I’ll take a look at gandi.net
..good luck with your virtual move.
Hi Dan,
yeh I understand the need for them to grow the business, and you can’t deny there’s a thousand web hosting providers out there so it’s a pretty swamped market, but I used to enjoy Gradwell’s support and technical approach.
Now their support team is the same as everyone elses, and their product is no longer good enough to justify staying. Maybe if they’d come up with a working VPS solution at a reasonable price I would have tried it.
gandi.net is proving to be ok, had one or two queries and they’ve been answered clearly and knowledgeably.
1and1 – well their support drones are like everyones, the first response is usually taken from a script and often has nothing in common with the question, but you can get through in the end. The advantage of the vps is that I don’t need them for anything other than connectivity and server power. I’m doing all my mail / dns through gandi.