Smart Web hosting and Krystal join forces

[Adam H]

Always interesting mergers when 2 company's with equally good reputation and support merge. Great acquisition on behalf of Krystal in my opinion.

Im sure if any of you are customers you would have had emails by now explaining it all .

We are delighted to announce that Smart has joined forces with Krystal! (as of the 1st of February 2017)

Why Merge?

Smart has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past 2.5 years, thanks to keen pricing and loyal clients. With such extraordinary growth comes additional challenges. The whole team here has been so focussed on supporting clients 24/7 that there has been little to no time to nurture and improve the business itself. Important projects have been postponed and we've experienced some capacity issues as a result.

We realised we needed assistance, and while there was no shortage of companies keen to buy us, we knew that most would destroy the brand we'd put our heart and soul into building. This was something we were not prepared to do.

A few months ago we received a call from Krystal, who like us were also worried about the mass consolidation occurring in our industry. A majority of larger hosting companies are now owned by the same parent group(s). Impressed with the quality of our customer reviews, they floated the idea of us joining forces to provide a viable, UK-based, and most importantly, human alternative to the soulless international mega-corps.

With a team twice the size of Smart's, 14 years in the industry, excellent reviews and an ethos that clearly matched our own, we knew we could trust Krystal to maintain the brand and look after our valued clients.

Smart will continue to operate as it's own brand. The website, your login details, how you obtain support and your affiliate earnings and links also remain unchanged.

 

[Sam]

I moved away from krystal because of loads of down time i wouldnt recommend them

 

[Adam H]

I moved away from krystal because of loads of down time i wouldnt recommend them

Oh really, Ive got a VPS with Smart but never really used it for anything significant as its only used as a redundant DNS server. I heard good things from Krystal from others though, no comparison to Linode, Digital Ocean for fast , self-managed VPS's

 

[Sam]

I've been with krystal for years now. No issues that were unreported.

There was some major issues in July 2015, where Krystal (@mrmason is from Krystal and is a user here, I believe) was being DDOS attacked really quite dramatically.
Whilst we would all like to think there should be safeguards against things like this before an event, Krystal certainly did step up and take this on the chin.

Hopefully, the hosting provider @wizard moved to has this protection in place, otherwise they may experience some deja vu.

Below is the email I received after said outage. Other than this incident, I have never had any issues that were not solved within a few hours. Their support team is top notch.

Yes i moved to webbuzzhosting which is now changed to jolt

Great team and had no issues since moving to them also support team is 24/7 which is great but when i had issues with Krystal they didnt have support at weekend which was a nightmare anyway maybe they have changed !

 

[dazc]

Krystal certainly did have issues a while back, as detailed above, but since then have been OK. I wouldn't trust a valuable site with them though as, like 99% of hosting companies out there, they just don't have the resources to deal with a major problem. From my own experience, the few sites I do have on there can go down intermittently for 10 minutes or so; which can be quite irritating when you know any ticket you raise is not going to get answered until the next day.

 

[timter51]

I've had a VPS with Smart for a while now, it has been decent without any major issues although they did have a serious f*ck up the other day of their own making (didn't effect me):

https://www.facebook.com/SmartHostingUK/posts/1820060528257759

Read the comments to realise the extent of the (I think ongoing) problem. They seem a like a good bunch of guys, good luck to them with the merge. I hope my service stays stable, as my site on there is an important one.

 

[TallBloke]

I'd give Krystal shared hosting a try if they accepted my PayPal payment or answered the phone after it ringing for ages (live chat unavailable too) to explain why the payment is being rejected.

First impressions and all that!

If I do manage to sign-up it'll be interesting to see page speed times as it looks from blurb that it could be half decent?