ONE.COM WEB HOSTING

If I was writing this review a couple of years ago I would have nothing but praise for one.com. They kept their prices at a competitive and reasonable level and most packages were all-inclusive, with no need to purchase a certificate for SSL, unlimited email addresses etc. There were of course the odd niggles, it was sometimes difficult to contact them, and server downtimes were and still are a little too frequent.

In 2020 all that changed. One.com have gone from being competitive to being greedy and the greed comes at the expense of their customers, which they seem oblivious to. One week ago (20/05/2020), I received a call from one.com informing me that my current subscription was up for renewal and that renewal would cost an extra £160 per year on top of the current £140 per year, £300 per year in total, not including the cost of each domain. The reason for the 100% + price increase, one.com decided that they would change all of their hosting packages and pricing. Whereas you could have upto 5 domain addons on even the most basic beginner package and upto 25 domain addons for the medium semi-pro package, they decided that it would be better for customers if this was reduced to only 1 domain name for the first two packages they offer and only 5 on the medium package. This means that anyone with an existing subscription that has more than one domain (for the 2 cheapest hosting plans) would have to go to the medium plan (Enthusiast), which is a leap from £3.49 per month to £7.49 per month, and the worst part is; one.com haven’t informed anyone about the changes, they have renewed existing subscriptions and anyone with between 2 and 5 domain addons has automatically been bumped to the much higher price bracket. Most customers only become aware of this when they check their bank statements…it all smacks of a con.

The particular hosting package that I subscribed to was the Business Plus package. It allowed for 25 addon domains, unlimited email addresses and more but after receiving the phone call from one.com informing me of the changes, the equivalent package would now only allow for 7 addon domains and 750 email addresses. To accommodate the 22 domains that I had, yep, past tense, I would have to go on the highest plan, one that isn’t even listed on the one.com website, because the highest plan listed on the website only allows up to 10 addon domains. As a result, I have had to terminate 12 addon domains, which I am very unhappy about. The most annoying thing is I was only notified and alerted to the changes during the phone call from one.com. They didn’t call to inform me they called to let me know that they were automatically going to upgrade my package and that the price would go up from £140 to just short of £300 per year. It took a while during the conversation until I realised what was going on. I was only given 3 weeks’ notification of the changes before my automatic renewal, one.com require 4 weeks (30 days) notification in advance to terminate the main subscription which meant if it wasn’t possible to trim down the addon domains I would have lost everything or had to pay a huge increase in annual payments.

In the past I have recommended one.com’s web-hosting services to many of my customers, nearly all of whom have purchased the initial .co.uk domain along with the .com domain (this stops anybody else trying to benefit from your hard work promoting your site) and slowly but surely they have started to contact me wondering why their subscription with one.com have gone up by more than one hundred percent.

My advice would be to look elsewhere for web hosting, you can’t trust a company that can randomly downgrade packages, bump up the prices and expect you to be happy about it.

One last thing; I’ve noticed that my site’s downtime (when servers fail at one.com) has increased dramatically. When I enquired about this I was informed that “one.com does not guarantee up-time”, unlike nearly every other web-hosting service provider who usually guarantees 99% up-time.

If you have had problems similar to those mentioned in this blog, I urge you to leave feedback on Trustpilot, one.com need to know that their customers are very unhappy about the changes.