Help! Want to move from Freeparking.co.uk

Richtradition

Having had no problems with Freeparking for years today I cannot access any of my email accounts either via pop3 or via webmail. I cannot get access to any of the Freeparking sites to even log an issue

Anyone else having problems

Pete

U've_been_framed

I packed in Freeparking a couple of years ago, and transferred to Fasthosts. I've never had any problems with them. I now have all my pop3 mail transferred into Gmail.
Incidently, Freeparking tried to get me to pay to renew my domains even though I had transferred them elsewhere. Needless to say they did not respond to my query about this.

Cricquick

Can anyone tell me what's happened to the FreeParking email service? I recommended the service to my Dad a year ago... Now, it's giving him problems and I'm getting it in the neck!

Epirb

Hi All,

Looking today for information on Freeparking and this lonely little thread is all I can find, I wonder if anyone else is having ongoing problems.

I used Freeparking initially just to register my domains but then set up one with a POP3 server. The others just forward to the pop3 servers and we have only one account to download on each of our PCs at home.

The pop3 server has been pretty good for the last 18 months but on occasions I would get timeouts. I think I had problems about a year in when they did their server upgrades.

For the last 3 weeks or so the service has been getting worse, email only downloading once or twice a day. Now I haven't had any email for 24 hours.

The web mail is working but not well, I had to drop down the security settings to get it to work at all but hitting reply, forward or new mail is frequently causing it to crash.

Anyone shouting about this anywhere? any information kicking around? Anyone with similar problems?

Cheers,

Barney.

Cricquick

Barney - that's bad luck! How annoying it must be...

What frustrates my Dad is that he can't speak to anyone at Freeparking to find out what the problem is. I remember last year when there was a problem, they put a message out on their support site. Is there nothing - or any way to get through to them to ascertain the problem(s)?

Epirb

And then they all arrive this afternoon.

This is clearly just bad service, I wish that they had a service status headline so I could see if there are any known problems.

I am hoping that the weight of complaints coming in will make them do something about it, I am just about in as deep as I want to get with the tech side and moving my pop3 server is not something I relish.

Would still like to hear from anyone else who has had issues so we know what magnitude of problem we have,

Cricquick, I guess the reason that there is no personal or telephone support is because of the price we pay, ie in my case, nothing! Hope your Dad gets himself sorted.

All the best,

Barney.

carcuscrae

Epirb wrote: »

And then they all arrive this afternoon.

This is clearly just bad service, I wish that they had a service status headline so I could see if there are any known problems.

I am hoping that the weight of complaints coming in will make them do something about it, I am just about in as deep as I want to get with the tech side and moving my pop3 server is not something I relish.

Would still like to hear from anyone else who has had issues so we know what magnitude of problem we have,

Cricquick, I guess the reason that there is no personal or telephone support is because of the price we pay, ie in my case, nothing! Hope your Dad gets himself sorted.

All the best,

Barney.

Same as you Barney, nothing for 2 days then bang they all come flooding through. I have managed to get onto the webmail ok in the last day or so, although that was also a bit flaky, I just couldn't download them to Outlook.

Freeparking has always been like this though, whenever they get a problem they never let their customers know. I for one have had enough I am currently looking to move my email service to 1&1 £0.69 + Vat a month, plus you get 2GB of mail storage and 5 IMAP/POP3 email addresses. Much better than the 10MB you get from freeparking.

Anyone have any experience of 1&1 or can recommend anything better?

Thanks

Cricquick

Dad now confirmed emails arrived so Freeparking working correctly again "until the next time"! Actually, I saw a support ticket he had raised and he got a prompt response (on 2nd December):
Hi,
We are, I am afraid, still having problems with the POP server system. We are working on this and feeding the mail through, though will be some delays. Many apologies,
Mark
FP Support

It's a good service when it works, I guess...

Epirb

Just to keep you up to date, after the problem seemed solved last night I received the following at 1451 today:

Hi,

The issue with the POP server system has been found. It has been repaired
(and in the next couple of weeks a complete overhaul and new storage
arrays will be implemented).

The queues are dropping and we have moved the webmail servers behind the
load-balancers which should make webmail more stable.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience hitherto caused.

Many apologies,
Mark
FP Support
Hopefully that that then, as I said I would prefer a bit of warning that potential problems were about!

Cheers all,

Barney

carcuscrae

Epirb wrote: »

Just to keep you up to date, after the problem seemed solved last night I received the following at 1451 today:

Hi,

The issue with the POP server system has been found. It has been repaired
(and in the next couple of weeks a complete overhaul and new storage
arrays will be implemented).

The queues are dropping and we have moved the webmail servers behind the
load-balancers which should make webmail more stable.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience hitherto caused.

Many apologies,
Mark
FP Support
Hopefully that that then, as I said I would prefer a bit of warning that potential problems were about!

Cheers all,

Barney

If anyone is interested I just moved my email from freeparking to 1AND1 today. I was fed up with the intermittent email issues with freeparking and never knowing whats going on.

The process is fairly starightforward and doesn't involve having to move your domain, you just have to point the nameservers to 1AND1 and let it propogate around the internet. They say it takes about 24-48 hrs but I requested the change at 2pm today and it was all completed by 10.30pm. There is a slight downtime for email, about 2-3 hrs but now I am on 1AND1 the email is lightening fast.

The cost for the Instant Email service is £8.28 + vat a year. You also get a choice of POP3 or IMAP email service. There are also other options if you want to upgrade to an exchange server and have push email.

Personally I wish I had done this a long time ago, now just to transfer my domain registrar to 1AND1 from Freeparking, I need them to answer my support ticket which they never seem to do :-(