Fasthosts Internet Ltd is a provider of

Internet access Internet access is the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet ...

and hosting services based in

Gloucester Gloucester ( ) is a cathedral city and the county town of Gloucestershire in the South West of England. Gloucester lies on the River Severn, between the Cotswolds to the east and the Forest of Dean to the west, east of Monmouth and east of t ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

. The company also operates the

domain name registration A domain name registry is a database of all domain names and the associated registrant information in the top level domains of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet that enables third party entities to request administrative control of a do ...

service UKreg. Fasthosts was originally started by Andrew Michael, then aged 17, as part of an

A-level The A-Level (Advanced Level) is a subject-based qualification conferred as part of the General Certificate of Education, as well as a school leaving qualification offered by the educational bodies in the United Kingdom and the educational aut ...

school project. It became a limited company in 1999, and launched UKreg in 2000. The company specialised in providing services for small businesses, and in 2002 was listed as the second fastest growing technology company in the United Kingdom by ''

The Sunday Times ''The Sunday Times'' is a British newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as ''The New Observer''. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK, wh ...

''. In 2005 the company had a turnover of £20 million and made £5 million profit. The company also became known for hosting lavish staff Christmas parties; an event in 2005 costing £600,000 featured appearances from

Jonathan Ross Jonathan Stephen Ross (born 17 November 1960) is an English broadcaster, film critic, comedian, actor, writer, and producer. He presented the BBC One chat show ''Friday Night with Jonathan Ross'' during the 2000s, hosted his own radio show on B ...

The Darkness Darkness is the absence of light. Darkness or The Darkness may also refer to: Film and television * ''Dark'' (TV series), a 2017 German-language TV series produced by Netflix * Darknss, a character from the film ''Legend'' (1985) * ''Darkne ...

and

Boney M. Boney M. was a German-Caribbean vocal group that specialized in disco and funk created by German record producer Frank Farian, who was the group's primary songwriter. Originally based in West Germany, the four original members of the group's o ...

In 2006 Fasthosts was sold to German Internet service provider

United Internet United Internet AG is a global Internet services company headquartered in Montabaur, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. The company is structured in two business areas, ''Access'' and ''Applications,'' and has a total of 16 brands and numerous subsid ...

for £61.5 million, netting Michael £46 million for his 75% stake. Michael remained as

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especiall ...

until 2009, when he left to found

Livedrive Livedrive is an online cloud backup and sync storage service owned by j2 Global. The company provides users with unlimited backup space and 2,000 GB or more of sync storage. Livedrive enables users to access their data from mobile phones and ...

. In September 2007, shortly after

Alisher Usmanov Alisher Burkhanovich Usmanov (russian: Алишер Бурханович Усманов; born 9 September 1953) is an Uzbek-born Russian businessman and oligarch. By 2022, Usmanov had an estimated net worth of $19.5 billion and was among the w ...

's investment in

Arsenal Football Club Arsenal Football Club, commonly referred to as Arsenal, is a professional football club based in Islington, London, England. Arsenal plays in the Premier League, the top flight of English football. The club has won 13 league titles (inc ...

Craig Murray Craig John Murray (born 17 October 1958) is a Scottish author, human rights campaigner, journalist, and former diplomat for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Between 2002 and 2004, he was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan during wh ...

blogged about the character of Usmanov, a Russian multi-billionaire ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also r ...

'' magazine had identified as the 142nd wealthiest person in the world. He said he named Usmanov, alleging corruption, in two of his "quite highly classified" telegrams to the Foreign Office London in 2002 and 2004 written while Murray was ambassador in Uzbekistan. Usmanov's solicitors,

Schillings Schillings (originally Schilling & Lom) is an international reputation and privacy consultancy staffed by reputation, privacy and family lawyers, risk consulting, cyber security and intelligence specialists. The company is an Alternative Busin ...

, requested that Fasthosts delete the material. As a result, the server that hosted Murray's blog was permanently closed by the hosting company on 20 September 2007, an action which resulted in unintended deletion of other sites, including a blog by

Boris Johnson Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (; born 19 June 1964) is a British politician, writer and journalist who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 2019 to 2022. He previously served as F ...

. A hacking incident in 2007 prompted Fasthosts to temporarily shut down customers' websites. The company noticed that its servers had been accessed in October and wrote to customers recommending that they change their

password A password, sometimes called a passcode (for example in Apple devices), is secret data, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm a user's identity. Traditionally, passwords were expected to be memorized, but the large number of ...

s; in December after noticing "unusual activity" on some sites it closed down those that had yet to change their passwords until new passwords could be issued by post. In 2008 Fasthosts acquired reseller Streamline.net, and also launched a reseller hosting service in the United States. Cloud infrastructure service Rise was launched in 2010. Fasthosts was the sponsor of The Great Exhibition 2012. In October 2014 Rise was quietly divested to

Outsourcery Outsourcery Plc, was a UK-based cloud services provider founded in 2007 by co-CEOs, Piers Linney and Simon Newton. They provided services primarily to small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The company went into administration in June 2016 ...

for an undisclosed sum As of 2017, Fasthosts has approximately 415,000 customer contracts spread over a variety of products from domain registrations to email, web hosting and server products.

References

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External links

Fasthosts
Internet service providers of the United Kingdom Telecommunications companies established in 1999 Companies based in Gloucester 1999 establishments in England