TsoHost Review

Above Average UK Host...

Brad Smith  —  · Read user reviews

TsoHost review

Tsohost was founded in 2003 by the Paragon Internet Group.

Today they host over 500,000 websites from their UK base.

Unlike some companies that have reached this same scale and sold out, Tsohost is largely led by the same founding team that’s operated it since its inception for almost 14 years.

Tsohost may not be one of the biggest or well-known hosting providers out there. But that steady growth and stable leadership point to a company that knows what it’s doing.

This review you’re reading has been almost a year in the making.

In November 2018, we signed up for their cloud hosting plan and have been closely monitoring performance statistics like uptime and page load speeds ever since.

Our goal is to compile a fair, unbiased review and let Tsohost’s data speak for itself based on the performance of our live test website.

Let’s see how Tsohost has done over the last few months.

Pros of Using TsoHost Hosting

Tsohost (the company) has grown steadily and kept its founding team intact. That points to a well-run organization that (should) deliver on the most important aspects like uptime and speed.

1. Nice ‘Bonus’ Plan Features

TsoHost price plan comparison
TsoHost price plan comparison

Like many of the web’s top hosts, Tsohost features a simple one-click installation of your favorite applications like WordPress, Drupal, and ZenCart. That means you can have a new site up within minutes, and possibly selling by the end of the day.

Each shared hosting plan also comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. (And unlike many other hosts, this money-back guarantee really is a good deal, with no hidden fees or other tricks to worry about.)

Their plans — even the most inexpensive and basic ones — come with a lot of extra features that are not very common with other hosts.  For example, all their plans offer a free domain name and website migrations.

2. Transparent Pricing

Many hosting providers have a ton of upsells at the last minute check-out. When you choose their chosen plans, it often comes with 2 or 3 years commitment with higher renewal prices.

We liked Tsohost’s pricing plans as you’ll find ALL THE FEATURES shown in their price plans and they also show you the different price commitment prices.

The shows prices are for 12 months (approximately 4$/mo for start-up plan) and for a monthly payment you’d be looking at a price increase of 1$ – approximately 5$/mo.

3. Fast, Responsive Support

Tsohost offers customer service on all major channels. Like many companies today, they enjoy mixed reviews.

What we appreciate though, is their quick response times and transparent communications on major social networks like Twitter.

TsoHost social media support
TsoHost Twitter support

We were also impressed by their live chat options. They connected immediately, were responsive and professional as well as showed a sincere interest in our needs. We connected on a Saturday, too, which was a pleasant advantage Tsohost comes with.

Tsohost also recently extended their phone support hours a few months back, from 7 am to midnight GMT. That’s both good and bad, as we’ll see in a second…

Cons of Using TsoHost Hosting

All in all, Tsohost has a lot of things to like.

Their uptime and speed are both solid. Their plans, even the cheapest ones, come with some nice features like daily backups and one-click installs.

And their customer support, while not perfect, at least responds quickly to try and address any outstanding issues.

However, there are a few drawbacks to their service you should be aware of.

1. 99.45% Uptime – Worse Than the Industry Average

Uptime is arguably the most important criteria a hosting company’s responsible for.

The reason is that even the slightest bit of downtime — like 99% — can add up to your site being offline for almost a full day each month.

Tsohost has posted weak uptime numbers within the period we’ve monitored them.

Last 12 months of monitoring: uptime

  • January 2020 average uptime:99.85%
  • December 2019 average uptime:99.83%
  • November 2019 average uptime:99.63%
  • October 2019 average uptime:99.69%
  • September 2019 average uptime:98.33%
  • August 2019 average uptime:99.61%
  • July 2019 average uptime:99.45%
  • June 2019 average uptime: 99.94%
  • May 2019 average uptime: 99.91%
  • April 2019 average uptime:99.60%
  • March 2019 average uptime: 98.28%
  • February 2019 average uptime:99.28%
TsoHost last 12-month statistics
TsoHost average uptime | See stats

Their average uptime is below the industry average.

There’s just way too many outages and a lot of downtime means lost traffic and potentially a lot of lost income.

You’d be much better off with some other providers (including our #1 choice, the HostGator Managed WordPress plan).

2. Page Loading Times Slower than Competition

The second major decision-making criteria you should use when evaluating a new hosting company is speed.

The reason? Three-fourths of your website traffic will leave if pages take longer than five seconds to load.

Last 12 months of monitoring:

TsoHost last 12-month detailed statistics
TsoHost average speed | See stats

We’re very worried about the first months when we started monitoring them. With 2sec of load time, it means that almost half of your traffic will leave the site and visit someone else, who has much better loading time, at least under 1sec.

However, in the last months, they have shown improved loading times, so there’s hope that they will continue improving their speed.

For now, they’re not good enough with their average 813ms to get the thumbs up from us.

3. UK-based servers

It’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, if your site is mainly for the US market and customer base, you’d be better off with your servers located in the US not overseas.

Overseas servers often slow your site down as data transfers take longer.

4. Strict Payment Terms

The long and dreadfully boring Terms of Service is usually where all the bodies are buried.

And Tsohost’s terms were no exception.

First up, is their strict terms around how and when renewals are paid.

Here’s the problem: how often do you get a new credit or debit card throughout the year, only for the old one to be still linked to many online accounts (like hosting providers)?

If overdue invoices aren’t taken care of within a few days, Tsohost will automatically suspend your account (which means your site goes down). So keep a watchful eye on those reminder emails!

When other products purchased through them, like a domain name, expire (again, unfortunately, common when they try to run a card with an old number and the payment doesn’t go through — even though you just assume it does), that product will immediately expire the next day.

After you do make the payment right, you’ll still have to notify them by email to get your domain or site back online within the next 24 hours. So you could be looking inadvertently at a lengthy downtime period if something common, like your card details changing, happens and payment doesn’t go through.

Another potential downside is that all payments received must be in UK Pounds sterling. That means you’re on the hook for any possible exchange rate charges.

Last but not least, they reserve the right to change or adjust pricing at any point in time. That means even though your next renewal period won’t cost you more right now… it doesn’t mean that will be the case in the near future.

5. Limited Phone Support

A small final critique.

Yes, it’s great that Tsohost phone support has been extended to 7 am to midnight GMT.

However, if you’re located in the U.S. (or anywhere else other than the UK and Western Europe) that might post a few problems.

For example, what if you’re sitting in California at 5:30 pm and your site has issues? Too bad, as midnight GMT is 5 pm PST, which means you won’t be able to reach anyone on the phone for another six or seven hours.

That, combined with the fact that you’re on the hook for exchange rates, might make it kinda tough to deal with outside if you’re living outside the UK.

TsoHost Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts

TsoHost offers four different shared hosting plans. All prices shown are with a 12-month commitment.

Here’s what’s included in each:

Economy Plan Deluxe Plan Ultimate Plan Maximum Plan
Pricing £3.99/month £5.99/month £8.99/month £14.99/month
Websites 1 5 10 200
Bandwidth Unmetered Unmetered Unmetered Unmetered
Storage 100GB Unmetered Unmetered Unmetered
Email Accounts 100 500 Unlimited Unlimited
Other Features • 1 Basic Migration • 3 Basic Migrations • 3 Basic Migrations
• 2 eCommerce Migrations		 • 5 Basic Migrations
• 3 eCommerce Migration

Quick Facts

  • Ease of Signup: Signup process is relatively quick and painless
  • Payment Methods: You can pay by credit card or PayPal.
  • Money-Back: 30-day money-back guarantee.
  • Hidden Fees and Clauses: No domain names on some plans. Be careful about renewals.
  • Upsells: There are a few upsells along the way.
  • Account Activation: Usually instant, however, can take up to a day in some cases.
  • Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
  • Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Extremely easy, one-click installation process of the most popular apps available.

Do We Recommend Tsohost?

Unfortunately, no.

We like their relatively inexpensive plans that offer great features. We also appreciate that their pricing, although it comes with strict terms, is transparent and honest on their website. However, the prices are shown without VAT, which is determined by your country for billing details.

We’re not impressed by their uptime and too-average speeds.

We’re happy with their support. However, when other important features are this bad, you should really be signing up with someone else.

You’d be better off with some of our top hosting providers.

Do you have any experience with TsoHost? If so, we’d love to hear a transparent and honest review below — positive or negative!

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38 user reviews for TsoHost

Kyle

1 — 

Sad deterioration of a once-excellent Company

It's with sadness that today, after nearly 8 years as a customer of TSOHost (and its former incarnations), I have made the decision to migrate all of my numerous business and websites away from them after the unacceptable dip in quality of service (in terms of performance but also customer and technical) over the past 12 months in particular.

Many of the issues are well-storied already here, so I shan't go into any indulgence with them, but essentially load times and uptime have all been steadily getting worse, and the overall experience has seen me spend far too many hours than is reasonable or fair engaged in live chats repeating the same issues and problems to agents who have to then 'pass it on' (never a problem previously) or on support tickets, my latest which I am on over 2 days and counting since a reply... despite them knowing the urgency of the situation.

And that doesn't even begin to cover all of the unnecessary and often unheralded back-end changes, movement of files and sometimes even account information and a myriad of other needless headaches, changes and problems that you are lucky to get resolved in anything approaching a sensible time frame.

It's a sad departure from a company that I've used in its various forms for so many years, but the quality of service and performance has just gotten so dire I had no choice but to move away.

I would very much recommend steering clear until at the very least the collective consensus improves considerably.

David

1 — 

Appalling

I was moved across to TSO by an unhelpful web developer - she turned out to be almost as bad they are. I have had appalling up time in the last two years, they have repeatedly moved my data around altering locations and usernames and even passwords. The multiple domains we had with them were all co-hosted poorly under a single directory and when one was infected they all were, an external cleaning company sorted through mess out and we ported the two main sites to separate hosting. The sites that remain are in an appalling state, I do not have ftp or mail access to them currently waiting for a higher level of support to respond to open tickets after nearly three hours of chat with their support team this morning.

More than happy for anyone to contact me to discuss but if your business depends on the web, this cannot be a recommendation from me at this time.

Rob C

2 — 

Customer Service Getting Worse

TSOHost of today is nothing like Vidahost when it started, and has become noticeably worse since the more recent takeover by GoDaddy. The packages they provide are competitive and of a reasonable standard, but downtime seems to be a more frequent occurrence. However, the aspect that is now really disappointing is customer service. Clearly, the tech support is under-resourced. The answers are usually thorough and competent, but it's taking a few days to get any sort of response, which is making TSOHost pretty much unviable from a commercial perspective.

I've been a client for over 10 years and I think it's time to move everything to another host. I wouldn't recommend TSOHost in its current form.

Thomas

1 — 

Cannot cancel - Removed support

I was unable to cancel my services auto-renewal. It required me to submit a support ticket to cancel. I did this and it wasn't actioned.

I tried to contact support via live chat. It's no longer available. Temporary issue? Not sure, but it's forced me to contact Tsohost support via phone. The wait time is 25+ minutes.

Vidahost always offered excellent service. I was treated well and would recommend them to anyone looking for hosting services. I would not recommend Tsohost to anyone and I will not be using their services again.

Alex

1 — 

Not the same company it was 5 years ago

For the first few years we used TSO I used to tell everyone about them. Amazing UK based support that was professional and knowledgeable. Then around 3 years ago, tech support was outsourced to Eastern Europe (in itself not an issue) and wait times suddenly appeared. Tickets remained unanswered for over 24 hours.

Also most issues needed to be 'passed to next level of technical' - whereas before you were speaking to technical staff right from the off - no bul**** time wasting tactics that are then claimed to be for your benefit.

....And now outages to the control panel, now today no access to webmail. I'm starting to think the money's all being withdrawn and the company is about to go to the wall.

OR the owners just dont give a **** and are now just bleeding a once great company of all its assets at the expense of its customers.

Jon E

1 — 

Gone to the dogs....

Been with Vidahost for some years, but service has declined steadily since TSO took over, and after a totally unannounced disastrous server transfer a couple of months ago down times have been totally unacceptable, and their email servers have been blocked on occasions by the likes of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.

I am not looking forward to the hassle of changing ISPs - I have better things to do with my time, but the service I am getting at the moment coupled with the standard support response of 'Buy more/Upgrade to make it better' is simply not acceptable.

Support used to be very snappy, accessible and helpful... It is helpful, but much slower now... and much less accessible - You can't send them a document without raising a ticket.... but you go to raise a ticket and they suggest everything else to try before you raise a ticket....

Sorry TSO.. unless something miraculous happens in the next few months I'm joining those loyal customers looking for a new ISP.

michelle d

1 — 

Awful to deal with

I've had two websites with Mr. Site who were then bought out by a TSO host. No problems with the websites as they're both very simple BUT i had an email from TSO host at the beginning of the month saying they were deactivating all Mr Site websites on the 30th June. Not much notice. And not much help either. I contacted them the same day I had the email to find out what we can do. So far i've had a phone conversation with a girl who did not understand what my problem was and two standard emails which were no help at all. I'm still no further forward and face losing both my sites and the associated email which runs from the domain name and without which I'm utterly stuffed. And this at a time when self employed businesses like mine are really struggling due to Covid 19 restrictions. I struggle to think of a worse time they could have chosen to do this. Really really unhappy. Very unimpressed with TSO host. especially as this comes about a month after i renewed both sites, they happily took the money then chucked my custom in a ditch. Cheers guys.

Matt

1 — 

Has got completely rubbish

I read all the reviews about them being awful - but I've maintained some products with them for 8 years, the legacy cloud hosting - this platform is good but they no longer offer it.

Cpanel hosting is crap. CRAP. I read all the reviews saying it was and I still bought it as I had faith everyone had been unlucky - but that's not the case. I am currently trying to build a new website on the cpanel hosting, which I bought on the 3/6/2020 - all day today I've been fighting against wordpress timing out, and now I cannot access my site at all.

Trying to get in touch with support and I'm number 39 in the queue, so I'm guessing a lot of sites are down at the moment.

save your money and go to literally any other hosting provider.

Steve

1 — 

Terrible

TSO has become really awful in the last 12 months or so. I host about 100 sites with them and they keep going down, email gets blocked, support has become terrible (they keep asking for more money rather than fix the issue).

Support often have no idea - they just paste in the same replies over and over into the live chat.

They used to be good - I've been with them for about 6 years.

They are now truly appalling. Avoid!

Any G

1 — 

Awful service, shocking in fact

It's time to move on. Originally vidahost, then TSOhost, service has been on the decline for a while. 2 hours wait to be told we can't guarantee uptime on shared servers with the only solution to pay a fortune for a dedicated server is atrocious. I've spent thousands with this company, wish I'd stayed with Netcetera now.

I'm done with being fobbed off and fed BS. My advice is find anyone else to host your site if you want it to be up and running that is. If you like shocking support and your website down, for hours on end, this is the company to go with !

Andreas

1 — 

Rubbish

Tsohost is quite possibly the worst host I have used in my 20 years as a web developer. I was originally with Vidahost, who were great, they were bought out by Tsohost, who have now been bought out by GoDaddy. I have their Cloud hosting, which is constantly going down, slow performance, and which they are now not selling anymore, so there is no maintenance and my websites are left to rot. Every week I have to move sites to Siteground, who I thoroughly recommend. Forget Tsohost, another GoDaddu buy out disgrace.

Brian

1 — 

Dreadful downtime issues - Avoid

I look after many websites and so have quite a lot of different experiences with different hosting companies. The website that uses TSO host has been one that I have looked after since 2010 so I know it well and I also know the website structure well, as I built it.

I happen to also have another identical build website with identical structure / plugins / but just different text and images HOWEVER hosted by another company, so I can compare the two different services.

TSO hosts took over from Vida Host and before that the website was originally hosted with Domain Express. However once TSO hosts took over the hosting the number of periods of downtime shot through the roof, I have an uptime monitor on all my websites and this alerts me whenever a site goes down and when it comes back up. I began noticing very significant down periods in late 2018 and this continued into early 2019 when I asked TSO hosts to explain what was going on. They gave all sorts of excuses and offered to move the site onto a newer server. This took them until August 2019 and then for a while things improved. However things have taken a nose dive in the last few months and today May 8th 2020 I reported to them that in the last 24 hours there were 24 periods of down time, some up to 20 minutes,

I am about to move the hosting to another host.

I hope that if anyone is wondering about using TSO hosts ... they decide to go elsewhere.

Avoid

Frederick

4 — 

Can't understand all the negative comments

I really can't understand all the negative comments. I have been with them since they were Vidahost and found them to be extremely good and pleasant to deal with. They are all based either in the UK or somewhere in Eastern Europe, perhaps Bulgaria, and their English is excellent. I can certainly build a very good rapport with them than with someone with a sing-song accent somewhere in South Asia, who I generally have difficulty understanding - both linguistically and culturally.

Admittedly, my site is still in the development phase so I don't know what my experience will be once it becomes operational

John

1 — 

Used to be good, now terrible

I joined back in the day when Vidahost ran things - they were excellent. Things took a nose dive when tso took over. Site performance is very poor and their attitude to customer service is too, I am actively seeking alternatives and will not renew my contracts with them again

They appeared to program a major server migration ahead of the covid 19 pandemic, obviously prior to any knowledge about the problems about to hit the world. What i could not understand is that they went ahead with the migration while the world was shutting down and support teams were severely impacted.

Required changes to email configurations were issued via email that were clearly written for people who knew what they meant: DNS Propagation, SPF record changes etc. hardly customer focused.

Their live chat was completely shut down and response times via email were about 2 to 3 days.

I raised the issue of going ahead with the migration during such a volatile time but it went unanswered.

When your site slows to an unusable speed (quite regularly), when you can get a response from them, its generally a glib, sorry for the inconvenience, we were experiencing high demand - all ok now

My advice based on my experiences, stay clear

Jonathan H

1 — 

The worst ever host - I kid you not!!!

I signed up years ago when they were Vidahost. Everything was great for a few years. then I was persuaded to move everything to their "Cloud" platform as it was going to be even better with backups and load sharing and a brilliant new control panel etc.

The control panel was ok, appeared to be loosely based on cPanel but all the useful stuff had been removed. Impossible to migrate anything to another server as the panel is completely different to anything else.

Since becoming TSOHost everything has become 100% abysmal! The Cloud service regularly fails, emails don't get through or addresses are blacklisted, site response times are pathetic and asking the server to parse a simple php script - well suffice to say don't even try.

All in all I have wasted weeks with this company over the years phoning, emailing, complaining and guess what.. the only thing that changes is that it just gets worse.

My advice, take it or leave it is steer well clear if you value your sanity!!!

Commander Z

3 — 

Over 3 years a client and not impressed...

I'm a Reseller...paying over £100 a month currently on a legacy package price.

Support Analysis

Having seen the gradual decline in the standard of customer support (not to be confused with the availability of support channels) over the past 3 years, it's been sad to identify a trend both in TSO's and the wider industry's case - that of out-sourcing and 'refining' the way support is provided.

We all know that out-sourcing is one way to solve financial problems, but it creates a whole new set of problems too. Not only do you suddenly have far-away call-centers but a degree of disconnect between the support person and the core of the business, and in many cases, the client.

You begin to notice the focus is on stream-lining and cost-reduction, rather than high quality training and inclusive employee support...

Result? You get support staff not paying enough attention to the detail of what's being said and no real interest in pursuing, advocating or defending your interests as a client.

I know this transition has happened because the previous company I was hosted with, was bought out by TSOHost (5Quidhost) - and they offered an exceptional 1 hour support response by email (which was handy but not so secure) or ticket, or you could get on the blower (albeit wait times very variable). TSOHost came in and slowly extracted the useful parts of that support system and replaced it slowly with the very recognisable, generic approach to customer service.

This meant the friends I had made with those great support guys over years just pretty much disappeared overnight.

That's not to say that TSO's support doesn't function - the tech team in Latvia or Belarus, or somewhere out that direction, are pretty legit at english, both spoken and written and on presenting my case to one particular support staff member, we did hold quite a good discussion, where he put up some good arguments about the ailing tech - but ultimately, it still felt more like a fight to be heard and respected as a "valued" customer.

They can get stuff sorted relatively quickly over phone, which is my preferred method, but wait times on chat and phone have all seen recent increases in wait time including 35+ mins, in my own experience.

TECH

That wasn't the end of it, where the relatively high monthly price I paid at 5Quid (carried on by TSO on the same tech and price ever since) came with the only limitation of disk quota, when problems started to crop up about 6 months ago due to technical obsolescence that was occurring as a result of the take-over. The old machines just can't quite cut the mustard anymore and TSO have invested in brand spanky-new machinery but to migrate my package to a new server and retain my current services, they wanted over £180 a month - a rise of nearly £80 compared to the current price I paid.

I saw this as a bit of a kick in the teeth to be honest - they hadn't 'warned' me of this impending problem of obsolescence in their server stock, they admitted the older 5Quid servers were harder to handle from a support aspect, but kind of refuted the fact that this ailing tech is really THEIR problem to handle and not mine.

As it happened, it did become my problem when SQL versions moved on, and the 2011 version wasn't cutting it and couldn't be updated (or some such similar technical quandary) and loads of my clients various websites started complaining about it (thanks wordpress et al)

However, they've promised a migration to newer servers in March 2020, which will hopefully put an end to performance problems and updating issues. We'll see....

I've been looking for better support from a host provider for months and months, and was nearly tempted to migrate fully to 20i, but the grass wasn't much greener on the other side either.

Let's see what the upgrade brings with it, and whether TSO will continue its trend on the support front.

Iain

1 — 

Terrible email, slow sites and bad customer service

We're slowly transitioning away from this company. We have a reseller account with them with over 100 websites.

They used to offer a good service, but over the last few years it's deteriorated badly: There are constant email problems with their servers appearing on blacklists, failures to connect to FTP servers and databases, slow DNS lookups and response times.

Their support is at times shocking, with sometimes "stock" responses to tickets taking over 24 hours. The latest example for their entire system being blacklisted for days against Microsoft servers was this disgusting response:

"As a workaround, we can place an order for a dedicated email relay addon under your account, which will allow you not only to send [sic] to Hotmail/Microsoft accounts but will also allow you to send [sic] unlimited emails to unlimited recipients. The relay will cost only £8.33 +VAT and can be applied to up to 10 domain names."

What more can I say? I'd like to give them 0/5, but this rating system won't let me.

Stuart

1 — 

Somehow the service gets worse with each passing week

I used to be a DAILY web hosting customer, for many years I experienced high uptime, great customer service and very little in terms of me having to do anything relating to having a reseller account. Then TSO Host bought Daily and everything went downhill. Servers failed (with no redundancy), email blacklisting from hotmail and others, staff who clearly have very little idea how to fix issues. To show the gravity of how much I want to get away from TSO Host, I've just re-seated all my customers with new hosting companies and I've binned off every single service I have with them. It should always raise concern when you are asked to perform security testing against a customer website and TSO Host categorically forbid you from doing so. No surprise really as their systems are out of date and because they don't have the staff to support the 'Legacy' DAILY servers, they just don't bother patching them. Also, what kind of hosting company does not apply and enforce SSL certificates to login portals despite repeated requests. In short, take your business elsewhere, somewhere that you will be able to email from, have websites stary operational and not be tied to insecure services.

John H

5 — 

Destroyed by GoDaddy takeover

They were great and very cheap, now I am moving away from all 50 sites because they are useless. The worst thing is that they randomly fail to renew the Let'sEncrypt certificates - effectively taking my sites offline. I used to get immediate support now I am sitting 13th in the queue to chat. I have to keep disabling and re-enabling SSH to make it work. Many of my sites are incredibly slow to load although one or two seem quick - why?

oksana

1 — 

not a provider for me

I have been using them for around 3 months and definitely will not be renewing my contract, and will probably move my site before the contract expires. C-panel is never available, which is ridiculous. i'm always getting the same templated response from their support team, i.e. 'intermittent load spikes on the server'. I have been unable to log in since mid-December 2019. Amateurs. Don't waste your time with them.

Trevor B

1 — 

All-round poor service

Like a previous reviewer, I've had three domains with the previous company that TSOHost took over. I never had any problems and everything was straightforward. Not now though with TSOHost. Their interface is awful. The site is slow and outages are all too common. In this day and age with competition making or breaking a company, this company will not survive long at the current rates. I am deeply disappointed with them.

K B

1 — 

Shoddy and unreliable, bad customer service

They migrated without telling me and my whole website and the back end was down (my business) and their customer support impossible to reach, I had to pay an IT company to fix. Their eventual response was a copy paste nothing email. Following that, around 1 in 4 emails I sent would bounce back as my emails were now considered spam, finally got through to customer service who were borderline rude, and certainly unhelpful and contemptuous. I now have to call IT guy again to try to fix and also move to another host.

Gregory

1 — 

Avoid, avoid, avoid

I run a sole trader business. When it was on dataflame I had no problems whatsoever. Since Tsohost took over I have had nothing but problems with emails and , more importantly, sending invoice attachments. Have to wait an age for any response from them whether by live chat or phone. Given up on emailing them. Totally unimpressed with their whole service both technical and personal. If I provided service like this, my reputation would be shot in a month. AVOID!

William

1 — 

TSOHOST Web Hosting Is A NIGHTMARE

I have a number of websites hosted by TSOHOST, they actually took over the company I was with for years so inherited my web hosting accounts and I have had nothing but problems ranging from extremely slow website speed, forums not working and over the past couple of weeks intermittently I have been unable to upload or download from my sites using FTP and I have been unable to send or receive email. After almost 2 weeks of not being able to update my site or send and receive email I have had enough. Customer service is a joke, handled by either Bulgarian or Russian call centre, and is it a coincidence that my sites and email when I can get it is plagued by spam originating in Bulgaria and Russia.

TSOHOST Web Hosting Is A NIGHTMARE, as another reviewer said, avoid it like the plague. 1/5 is way too high a rating for this lot.

Michaela

1 — 

Migration Hell

Was with Dataflame who were taken over by Tsohost.

Just been through a migration to new servers and without any warning, found they removed the Parallels Presence Website Builder. At no point was ANY prior notice given to this removal.

I have 3 sites that have been built with this tool but now I am unable to edit my websites. One site is approx 28 pages, another is approx 70. I am not even able to create a builder backup of my sites I could use to upload to a new hosting company with the same builder.

Their response is a waste of time. It was a "business" decision to migrate. I know this will affect a great number of others. I pity any business who hasn't found out yet. Absolutely abysmal customer service

On top of that, noticed since the takeover, many times my site would not load. Downtime was starting to be an issue I never noticed with Dataflame. Totally devastated

Matthew

1 — 

Dreadful unreliable company with poor support

I am practically in tears due to the damage being done to my business by TSO Host.

I was having major issues with the website not loading, emails going missing and so forth. After being given multiple excuses over and over again, they then (6 months later) suggested migrating to one of their other servers which doesn't suffer from the kind of problems I was having. Guess what? That's right, problems....

I now have a corrupt mailbox that I cannot access. I've sent an urgent email to TSO Host, so I should expect a reply in 24 hours +. Because let's face it, who needs emails when running a business right?!!!

This company used to be good, with good support, but now..... awful. I wouldn't in a million years recommend TSO Host to anyone.

Jerry

3 — 

Mostly good but cron is a nightmare

Started using them in May 2017 for 10 websites. Really like their support chat facility. Very good experience using this.

We use cloud hosting rather than cPanel.

We run a lot of overnight processes, which are scheduled by cron. We also do monitoring every 10 minutes and other background activities.

Since 22 October 2018 anything run using cron is a nightmare. Every day one of our processes fails in some way (e.g. being killed, or file system in read-only mode, or cannot connect to MySQL database). Seems to have very limited number of processes so we had to re-code scripts not to pipe into Linux commands, for example, as that is another process.

We find that some scripts work from the Linux command line but not from cron.

Currently have an issue whereby mysqldump does not work on cron because they updated the database to MySQL 5.7 (without telling us) but did not alter the binaries on the cron server.

If they could only sort out corn (and some performance issues) we would be much happier.

We also have issues with emails being rejected by recipients because the IP address is not trusted.

Robert

2 — 

Downtime - You can't get nothing done

I migrated 6 sites over to them about 3 years ago because of their customer service.

Now customer service is still good, but you can wait on instant messaging or phone for far too long. Last month I waited on two occasions for over 20 mins for instant chat!!

It looks like i'm going to have to leave them. I don't mind little outages here and there, however i've been working on a website that is taking me 4 times as long to develop because of outages. I lose my work, i'm sitting around refreshing all day and it's so frustrating.

Their response is to move out of shared hosting to VPN.

They simply can't deliver the service they are offering and then try to upsell to get a stable service.

It's a shame because they are UK based and I wanted to support them.

Bridget J

1 — 

Email problems

Having real trouble with this hosting organisation.DKIM and SPF records for email have stopped working more than once meaning my emails don’t get to recipients in boxes. Although they respond via online support I seem to be going round in circles. They set something up for me and it doesn’t work or it works for that domain and another stops working. I am pulling my hair out and will transfer out when I have the energy to do so.

Dave

2 — 

Very slow hosting which goes down a lot

TSO support is pretty good in my experience. The problem is the hosting speed and the site availability. I have a few sites on TSO all of which have terrible performance (time to first byte). TSO have tried to help but unfortunately the load on their systems seems to be uncontrollably high.

What’s worse is that the sites frequently go down (!!!). They wont notify customers when they go down and worse still, they don’t even bother to post most outages on their status pages. I frequently get the excuse "Oh, they’ve only been down for a morning". WTF?

We're moving our sites to AWS Lightsail as soon as we can so we can control the performance.

Private C

2 — 

Terrible Support, Awful Downtime

TsoHost support is appalling, they credit you with no knowledge at all. Even after pointing out a simple error in their DNS configuration, they said it couldn't be fixed. They've had numerous outages over the last few months, and intermittent problems on a regular basis affecting their 'shared cloud hosting' customers.

Steve

5 — 

Good guys

TSO's hosting has always been pretty reliable and their support has been prompt and helpful. With their competitive fees, they've been one of my first choices for hosting for a few years. There are some annoying features in their interface (e.g. you can't assign a domain name or label to a hosting package on your control panel when you purchase it - you have to contact them to arrange it), but generally it's very good.

Now the bad news – they are, it would seem, now owned by GoDaddy, which can only be a BAD thing, given their business practices. Time will tell if the new owners destroy a trusted brand...

Igor O

1 — 

Avoid like a plague

If you have your own website the only way to host it with these 'providers' is to connect it manually via so-called 'Customer support'. After opening of an account I called them the whole day with telephone waiting time up to 25 minutes: probably they were sure that I have nothing else to do. Live chat response time was 18-20 minutes! Can you imagine: ' Hello!' 20 minutes after 'What can I do for you?' again in the next 18 minutes 'You have a problem, is that correct?' etc etc. On the second day of that circus I fed up, closed the account and asked for the full refund. No reply at all. When I opened a PayPal dispute, two days later they replied and refused on the ground that I have opened a PayPal dispute.

Hope that my experience will save your time not to participate in this circus.

Tony

3 — 

Too many outages for me

I've been using TSO Host for a few years now and agree that their support is friendly and helpful, although I've only needed a basic level of assistance at the beginning of my service. My issues with them arise from the amount of downtime I have experienced over the past 12 months or so. There are good periods and bad. Recently I've been getting regular notifications that my WP hosted site is down. When checking I often get 'Internal Server Errors' message - a very no-specific error. The past 24 hours have been particular bad and I have now started to look for an alternative host.

Dave W

1 — 

More like 90% uptime these days

I moved to Tsohost 4 years ago, at the time I was reasonably happy. Last year they moved their first line support to a team in Bulgaria, who struggle with English and are unable to fix anything other then the most basic of problems. In the past 6 months I’ve had 2 separate days where a simple unresolved problem means my website has been down. Can’t see anything improving soon so I will have to go through the pain of moving again. Suggest you avoid for now.

Sam M

5 — 

Used TSO for 4 years in the UK and still happy

They may not be the fastest, they may not be the cheapest.

But they are very honest and reliable.

1. I’ve tried many hosts and used many hosts throughout my time as a web developer: Web Fusion, Pipex, HostingUK, Rackspace, 1and1, Mediatemple, goDaddy, Azure… to name a few.

I find myself today with just two: Rackspace for my Windows Sites. TSO for my Linux sites

2. Great Support Staff – at the end of the phone (in the UK) I have found TSO support staff to be very helpful… for a start they are English speaking and I mean native, so there’s never been any confusion explaining things back n fourth. They’re certainly never reading scripts to you either… and they KNOW WordPress, and I mean know it well. Their support staff are able to explain the intricacies to you if you’re getting lost and guide you what you need to do as well as explain why WordPress does and needs certain things.

3. Their pricing is what it is, no hidden structures or setups. I’ve also never been hassled by any sales hard sells unlike many other hosts have done.

4. Uptime
Of all the hosts I’ve ever used my sites have been up the most with these guys, either I’m on a quiet VPS or its just well managed but either way I can’t complain

5. User Interface
A little credit should be sent the way of their UX design that has made things super simple to find.

I honestly don’t really have any criticism, as the saying goes…
you get what you pay for and with TSO I think I fair better than I would with others.

Jason

4 — 

Decent Host

TSO Host is one of the best hosting providers out there for UK based clients. In my personal experience, the support staff have always been responsive and helpful. Whilst not perfect, site performance is generally good and better than other overloaded cPanel shared hosting providers. The costs are quite transparent too. Whereas I have been charged quite significant amounts for services that are done by TSO HOST for free – e.g migrations. I hope they continue to build and invest in their resources! So far, so good. If you can’t afford managed WordPress hosting and are based in the UK – I’d reccomend using TSO.

Dedubya

5 — 

TSOhosting

I’ve used TSOhosting for several years after having some of the issues you mention with other hosts, yearly increases that are very high and unexpected. I’m not a professional web creator or service provider, so only have small requirements – however whenever I’ve contacted TSO support they’ve responded within a few mins, once I messaged them at just about midnight (UK time) and was amazed at getting a response a few mins later. I’ve never had to call them as their ticketing system has always been so responsive day or night. I don’t know if they respond 24/7/365, but my own experience has been excellent with almost instant replies on the few occasions I’ve queried something.