Hosting - any experience of Freethought?

[Daniel James]

I have a small "vanity" domain that I don't spend more than beer money
on. This has been hosted for a dozen years of so with an outfit called
Falcoda. I'm not sure why I originally picked them, but the price was
right. They're a bit no-frills (no IPv6, no SSL (unless you pay or proxy
through Cloudflare), no DKIM authentication on EMail, etc.) but they're
cheap and UK-based. I don't really know who they are, but they seem to
be a reseller of Heart.

For years they were fine, but in the last few months they've had a few
significant outages -- website down and no EMail for several days at a
time -- and phrases involving "piss-up" and "brewery" spring unbidden to
mind. What really grates is that their status page keeps running and
saying that nothing is wrong, and they don't acknowledge the problem or
explain what has happened or how long it's likely to take to fix. They
still claim "99.9% Uptime (Verified)" on their site.

One could forgive them a lot if they were honest about it.

Anyhow, before just switching to Mythic Beasts, like everyone else seems
to, I thought I'd do a bit of reading around and came across
Freethought. They make all the same sorts of right noises as Mythic
Beasts, and have similarly high ratings, but have a slightly different
pricing structure and claim to be carbon-neutral (and who doesn't love
carbon-neutral?)

Now I'm torn. Does anyone have experience of these guys?

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Daniel James
For years they were fine, but in the last few months they've had a few
significant outages -- website down and no EMail for several days at a
time -- and phrases involving "piss-up" and "brewery" spring unbidden to
mind. What really grates is that their status page keeps running and
saying that nothing is wrong, and they don't acknowledge the problem or
explain what has happened or how long it's likely to take to fix. They
still claim "99.9% Uptime (Verified)" on their site.

That's exactly what happened with Heart.

[Daniel James]

Post by Jeff Gaines
That's exactly what happened with Heart.

Yeah, Falcoda seem to be resellers, so that would make sense.

Same network as Heart, same IPS TAG, considerably cheaper, but less good
support. In fact, NO support, nowadays, as far as I can tell. They used
to be OK.