ONE.COM WEB HOSTING

If I were writing this review a couple of years ago, I would have nothing but praise for one.com. They kept their prices competitive and reasonable, and most packages were all-inclusive, with no need to purchase a certificate for SSL or unlimited email addresses. 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 has gone from competitive to 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 is that one.com decided to change all its hosting packages and pricing. Whereas you could have up to 5 domain addons on even the most basic beginner package and up to 25 domain addons for the medium semi-pro package, they decided that it would be better for customers if this were reduced to only one domain name for the first two packages they offer and only five on the medium package. This means that anyone with an existing subscription that has more than one domain (for the two 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 has not 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 hosting package I subscribed to was the Business Plus plan. It offered 25 addon domains, unlimited email addresses, and more. Still, after receiving a phone call from one.com about the changes, the equivalent package now only allows seven add-on 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 unhappy about. The most annoying thing is that I was only notified of the changes during the phone call from one.com. They didn’t call to inform me; they called to let me know they were automatically upgrading 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 for me to realise what was going on. I was only given 3 weeks’ notice of the changes before my automatic renewal. One.com requires 4 weeks (30 days) of notice to terminate the main subscription, which meant that if it wasn’t possible to trim down the addon domains, I would have lost everything or had to pay a massive 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 has 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, raise prices, and expect you to be happy about it.

One last thing: I’ve noticed that my site’s downtime (when servers at one.com fail) 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, which usually guarantees 99% uptime.

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