Fasthosts

Fasthosts (Fasthosts Internet Limited, Gloucester; founded 1999 by Andrew Michael; sold to United Internet AG in May 2006 for £61.5 million; today one of ten IONOS Group SE brands, sharing IONOS's Gloucester address, its privacy-policy wording and its £90 restoration fee) is a UK staple with 1.1 million domains and two UK data centres, and it is not, strictly, a registrar: the registrar of record for its gTLDs is IONOS SE (with Tucows and CentralNic for some extensions), and Fasthosts is a Nominet tag holder for .uk. Support is UK-based and 24/7 by phone on 0333 0142 700, with chat and tickets; transfer-out is free and self-service; DNS control, anycast DNS, unlimited email forwarding and web forwarding are included.

The pricing is the IONOS playbook at a higher renewal. On 5 September 2026: .com £1 for the first year (the pricing-page footnote says "Multi-year registrations only", but a test checkout on 7 September applied the £1 to a one-year registration and quoted the renewal at £16.92 ex VAT, £20.30 inc; several other TLDs are sold on a two-year minimum). That checkout also pre-ticked Domain Guard (£1 for the first year, then £5.99 a year), so a single "Add to basket" click puts two items in the basket, and a mandatory add-ons page (email, website builder, hosting, the last marked "recommended") sits between the search and the basket. .co.uk £1 then £12.83 ex VAT; .uk £1 then £4.99; .io "from just £40" with no renewal shown. WHOIS privacy is a paid add-on (price not published on any page we could read, and it did not appear anywhere in the checkout), DNSSEC is not mentioned anywhere on the site, there is no API, and SSL and email are sold separately: "everything is an addon", as a 20 August 2026 reviewer put it. Services run on a 12-month minimum term that renews for the same term; renewals are charged 30 days before expiry; the money-back guarantee excludes domains. Trustpilot is 4.8 on 21,048 invited reviews with 7% one-star, and the one-star pages from June to August 2026 are about cancellation ("no online cancellation option; tickets ignored; lengthy phone process"), £1 trials converting to £20-plus a month, a domain lapsing and three months of email lost, and one ICANN complaint over a withheld EPP code. Fasthosts runs an affiliate programme; Saaskly has chosen not to join it.

First-party: Fasthosts' sales team is the reason we left. Doing ordinary agency work (renewing a service, cancelling a domain a client no longer needs) brought repeated sales calls and emails, and asking to be removed did not stop them. Fasthosts' privacy notice lists "telephonic contact for advertising purposes" among the things it does with your data, and reviewers describe the same experience: "Constant phone calls… trying to upgrade you… Block one number, another one calls!!" (14 July 2026), and daily calls for two weeks after asking to be removed (13 August 2026). We do not use Fasthosts and would not recommend it.