Hi El Reg

Just to say that we use fasthosts to host webvisitor.info, a webstats and visitor tracking package, and I wouldn't want to defend a company unnecessarily but fasthosts dedicated servers are pretty fantastic.

I’ll let then have this one, issues don’t come along often from fasthosts, and they’re pretty good at explaining themselves when they do. If only BT was be a bit more like that!

Gerry

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/15/bofh_episode_21/

Appreciate they may be better than some, but service was still not great and in fact for us some of our sites have been up and down all week. statistical information was also down and still not working and then when the site did come up the email wasn't working properly.

Overall not a good week for fasthosts and they did try to keep quiet. I've been told I can email escalations@fastshosts.co.uk for a refund! lol

Hopefully it's just a blip in their record and not a larger change since they got taken over. Was it by a french company? I forget?

Anyway if it's website statistical information you're after you should have a look at WebVisitor.Info then. All the webstats you could want, for free!

Taken over by United Internet who own 1&1 and are German. FH seem to have a major issue with their redundancy every now and then - The other year two fiber cuts at Telewest took them down, so much for a redundant network with multiple providers. Everyone has problems at some stage though.

..."Mark Jeffries, CTO of Fasthosts Internet Ltd said, “British businesses really need to sit up and pay attention to their response rate for customer emails, or risk losing their customer base to competitor brands."

The smug overload of that 'survey' regarding customer service probably led to the distribution panel blowing...!

I don't mind the outage - problems happen - but I'm annoyed that they didn't post an update on their customer support status page until 8:36pm, more than four hours (by their own admission) after the problems began. That is what the status page is for, after all, and it's a PITA to sit there trying to work out if it's a local issue, a routing problem or, as it turned out to be, a host issue. Thumbs down, there, Fasthosts...

All services were NOT back by 21:00. I could finally log on to webmail just before midnight and shortly after POP access was working again... However I could not send any e-mails (either through the webmail interface or SMTP mail client) in the early hours of the morning before I went to bed. It was working the next morning. I too find it rather slack that they didn't post regarding the problems sooner.

This is however the first real issue I've had with Fastmail in the year I've been with them.