Ages ago, we took out a server rental with Fasthosts. Generally we recommend Fasthosts to someone who wants a basic hosting service – if it’s not business critical it tends to be good enough. Our experience of the uptime on the server has been comparable to Rackspace (the provider we pitch if you absolutely, positively have to know the server will be up), and, anyway, Fasthosts are pretty cheap.
However one thing they do not give you is a total blank server. They insist on installing all manner of crap on the thing that you have to scrape off when you get it.
One of the things they install is a bunch of tools called Matrix (probably has a proper name, but I am so unimpressed with this piece of software I cannot be bothered to look up what it is called). Matrix gives you a POP/SMTP server, FTP, etc. What it also gives you is a global ISAPI filter that grabs any authentication request and wrecks it. So if you setup integrated authentication in IIS, there is a good chance that Matrix Whatever (TM) will screw up the operation.
Keywords for this post are therefore “iis http 401.2″ and “fasthosts”.
Trick is to remember to remove this filter…
This thread was a big help:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/conversation.aspx?messageid=31046052&threadid=31015921
Incidentally we have recently been running on RackSRV (http://www.racksrv.com/). A little cheaper than Fasthosts, good uptime and good support.