RIP Burton Hosting
Two years ago, I decided to take the plunge and move my website from my university's "users" server to a new home out in the world of shared hosting.
My sister, who trades as whitefire-designs.co.uk, had been using Burton Hosting for a while and I decided they would be a good choice for my first hosting provider. Without an extravagant public image to maintain, my needs were meagre, and the basic "personal" package was chosen.
I began with a simple self-built CMS, serving from the provided MySQL database. The design came courtesy of my sister who provided me with an elegant design of curves and pastel-esque shades which I implemented using DIV elements and as little HTML markup as possible. Despite its clunky "/?articleid=[number]" addresses, it became the first result for a Google-search for my name.
In July 2008, after some extra content and minor code tweaks, I started developing a new CMS for my site using PHP5 and the Zend engine. Initial test of my server found it not to have PHP5 installed properly, if at all. I submitted a support ticket to the support system branded "24/7" on Burton's homepage, and loaded XAMPP onto my home PC.
It took five weeks to eventually have my site hosted on a server where PHP5 worked. I started learning how to use Zend and put together a first basic system which would serve articles using nice visitor and search-engine friendly URLs such as "/keyword". This system used the same database structure as the original system, so I used my "live" database to whilst building it. A month after the closing of the PHP5 ticket, I was forced to submit another ticket: The PDO/MySQL driver was missing, meaning a Zend-based site would be unable to access the database.
I received a reply the next day, which completely missed the point of the ticket, in which I had included specific error messages which identified the missing driver as the culprit. Silence ensued for the next month and a half until I got the next reply, a form-letter claiming there had been a problem with the support system and that my ticket had not been filed properly.
At this point, I probably should have given up on Burton Hosting, but foolishly when the renewal invoice for my domain name appeared at the end of 2008, I renewed. However, despite paying the invoice on January 8th 2009, the domain was not renewed before its expiry date, January 16th.
On February 10th, I gave up on Burton Hosting. The support server was gone, redirecting to a "site unavailable" page. The community forum returned an "undergoing maintenance" message. The 0870 "24/7" support number was out of service, as were the US support numbers.
I transferred my domain using Nominet's £10+VAT "forced" mechanism thanks to Burton's lack of working contact mechanisms, and eventually got my renewal fee back, thanks to the fact that I paid using PayPal.
Burton Hosting are still listed as a Nominet Registrar, however little more than a shell remains. It transpires that service levels experienced by other Burton customers had been slipping drastically over my final few months, and hopefully with the power of words and hyperlinks we can bring this sorry state of affairs to the attention of the other Burton Hosting customers.
To quote my last email, which remains unanswered, I deem the company an EPIC FAIL.
