Bad Experience with Heart Internet

I wanted to share my poor experience with Heart Internet in case anyone else is considering using them. I would advise against it.

My site was down for over a week with the dreaded message: Site offline The site is not currently available due to technical problems. Please try again later. . . which I could not understand as suddenly out of the blue I received that message. I checked and rechecked settings.php but saw no problem as I hadn't changed the file or the database, password, etc. Heart was duly contacted and denied any problems at their end.

I spent yesterday reading through 60 of the 125 results from a search for that error message. There seemed to be two main problems: either basic problem with the database name/password OR problem at the host with full disk(s), mysql server name change, apache needing restarting, etc, etc (things I had no control over). I sent that info to Heart and they said:

1. it was a PHP memory problem
(my php memory was 256M in .htaccess and php5.ini which I had prev set after memory probs so it definitely wasn't that unless on their side they didn't allow customers to set those AND none of the entries here that I read mention memory as a cause of this. I've had memory probs before and received different error messages)

2. they edited my php5.ini file
(I had previously told them NOT to edit my files but they continued to which is ofc totally inappropriate. Anyway they didn't make any changes although the date edited was updated)

3. magically the system started working again although they will not admit they did anything other than up the memory in my files (which already was 256M in both php5.ini and .htaccess)

Needless to say I will not be using Heart Internet in future for the following reasons:

1. Editing customer files, as they did, is absolutely verboten and I still can't believe they did it.

2. They will not admit what they did to the server to get my site working so I am still in the dark as far as the solution to this problem. I can't use a web hosting company that will not even communicate with me properly or admit if they had a problem at their end.

3. They have no support phone number. All support is done via tickets which most times will work fine but sometimes you just need to talk through something. And when I tried to deal with another (of my 4 sites with them) through a ticket on ano site they said they wouldn't communicate about that because of data protection. But they're all MY sites! That was just total BS.

I am going to move all my sites from Heart as soon as possible. I had moved them from Claranet as it was more expensive. Now I wish I hadn't. It's turned out to be a false economy :(

Any recommendations of decent hosting in the UK gratefully received.