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April 15, 2008
Fasthosts still have customers?
It never ceases to amaze me that Fasthosts still have customers. I'll admit to being more than slightly biased against them, given my experiences last year, but their catalog of calamities just keeps growing:
17 July 2007 - Electrical Outage. I escaped this one and at the time it didn't seem too significant.
23/24 July 2007 - Hit by floods. Again, I had a couple of servers affected, but other servers hosted at a different provider were unaffected. Now remind me again why you shouldn't build a data center by docks next to a river prone to flooding?
August 2007 - The Usmanov Affair. Words will never be enough, but the link at the top gives a detailed timeline of incompetant and less than honest service.
October 2007 - Fasthosts accidentally trash numbers of email. This had no impact on me, as I no longer used Fasthosts for hosting.
October 2007 - The infamous "intruder" incident where plain text passwords were compromised. A painful incident further compounded by Fasthosts insisting on posting changed passwords via snail mail! This farce rumbled on through October and November before finally reaching a conclusion just before Christmas.
April 2008 - They're at it again.
The Register - Fasthosts' dedicated servers go titsup
Gaffe-prone web hosting outfit Fasthosts has suffered another major outage today, this time taking down many of its customers' dedicated servers.Some dedicated server customers may currently find their servers are unavailable at present. Affected customers may not be able to access their server, eRIC or Backup spaces and may also affect the rebuild of deployed servers and the deployment of new servers. Engineers are continuing their investigations as a priority.
An update posted at 11am said the problems were continuing, and that fixing it is the firm's top priority.
As I said at the start, I'm amazed people are prepared to put up with this level of service. I bet 1&1 Internet are really pleased with their investment in "The UK's Number 1 web host. Home to more websites than any other provider."
Posted by Clive on April 15, 2008 12:28 PM in the category
Comments
My company uses Fasthosts to house a number of websites. The one good thing that came out of the outage is that I got to spend 4 hours working on some personal projects while they "looked into the problem"!
Then after they came back online, I got another hour to myself soon after when service died again!
I love Fasthosts. Their incompetence, to me, is basically an extra day off work once a month.
Posted by: Chris at April 16, 2008 7:05 PM
Aye, that could be the only plus point to using Fasthosts. But as someone who hosts commercial websites, it is a real pain when Fasthosts keep you in the dark and clients are breathing down your neck.
Posted by: Clive at April 16, 2008 8:31 PM
Fasthosts strike again!
In their wisdom Fasthost have now upgraded their shared hosting servers to run PHP5 without any consultation or notification to their long suffering customers (mugs like me). I found out when my ecommerce server stopped working and only after my developers told me that was the problem, Fasthosts customer service had denied on three occassions that anything changed.
OK, enough is enough, can someone please let me have the name of a company that can actualy do the job properly.
Ken
Posted by: ken pickering at June 9, 2008 9:00 PM
Never be tempted to use Fasthosts.
They are rubbish in everything they do.
Whether it is just for one basic site, or like us a reseller trapped with many, do not go near them.
They will be more trouble than they are worth, with slow servers, bad idiotic support and terrible attitude to customer retention. Don't do it
Posted by: Peter at June 25, 2008 5:58 PM
bad at everything
Posted by: Steve at August 22, 2008 1:32 AM
Guys, been through this hell and knowing very well your pain i'd like to recommend you this one.
Rackspace
You can even host your mail and all that we peace of mind..
Joe
Posted by: Hosted Exchange at October 29, 2008 4:20 PM
Fasthosts are absolutely rubbish
You will be lucky if your website works in their limited environment. With almost everything banned. And if it does work it wont for long.
They keep changing PHP settings, bringing sites down and wrecking what works within them
Then they refuse to accept responsibility, however clear it is their changes, and simply do not care about their customers or keeping them.
Their support are nice but useless, sending even the most patient person mad, at their ignorance and inability to keep aware of what is happening. It is as if they do not read tickets when they keep changing the person dealing.
Those in the business of websites have been brought to tears, over their choice, as it is hard for them to get away once they have set up many sites.
Choosing Fasthosts would be the worst mistake you can possibly make. Never choose Fasthosts, we hate them.
Posted by: Lesley at December 7, 2008 7:55 PM