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There is nothing quite like a poor supplier to shorten your life expectancy. GoldFigure started using Streamline.net for hosting over 4 years ago. At the time they offered really good value hosting. The world has moved on however and Streamline have stood still.

Streamline.net have the RyanAir revenue model of hosting packages that on the face of it look good value but when you look into them the extras soon pile up. In the current climate you would think that a business which charged a premium for a standard service would ensure that it's customer services were outstanding. Streamline by comparison kept me on hold for 21 minutes today just to cancel our bulk hosting accounts. I just don't have time to waste managing my suppliers like this!

Most of our clients now use ASP.net and a SQL database in the back end... let's take a look at a typical hosting package then:

Streamline.net power user: £39.99 in year 1 (not the best but far from expensive)

Includes:

• The domain name registration (for a .co.uk)
• 1 website
• 1.5Gb storage (who needs that much anyway? Porn barons?)
• Backup (naturally)
• Perl / PHP
• MySQL database
• phpMyAdmin
• ODBC support

So we want to add:

• Password protection: £15
• 'Domain privacy' (a single tick box when registering domains via Freeparking): £5
• ASP.net 2.0: £30
• MS SQL database: £199
• Frontpage extensions (occasionally added - makes authoring easier): £25

Hmmm, our £39.99 hosting package now looks a lot like it's £315 per year! Are you crazy Streamline? By comparison CapitalServ - IIS hosting with the same spec would be £15 per year.

Streamline were good in the past but that's firmly in the past... time to move on.