Customers RAGE after Webfusion goes TITSUP

Actually

I thought that Twitter was quite subdued considering the colossal size of the SNAFU.

Does 'Premier' mean something different in El Reg speak?

Webfusion are certainly big and have been around a long time so they're clearly giving clients what they want, but they're very much at the cheap and cheerful end of the market and so rapidly maxing out capacity on the network and then on support staff availability is a reasonable example of the 'you get what you pay for' maxim (which isn't always true all the time, but tends to broadly be true for companies who stick around for a while).

Same sort of price as Fasthosts, same sort of service as Fasthosts. Same 'does a reasonable job most of the time but very much not to be relied on if the cost of downtime is too high' principle as Fasthosts.

IME webfusion are alright really. You do get what you pay. Far too many people pay peanuts and expect rolls royce when stuff very occasionally goes wrong. Their (admin) customer service is crap, but the tech support seem to be well staffed (obv when the whole world isn't burning down) and knowledgeable.

On the other hand 123-reg are a conptemptable bunch of bastards, so maybe the whole of Host Europe is rotten and I've just been very lucky.

Inadequate planning

Sites like this are seriously remiss if they don't plan and design for "worst-case" senarios. I used to design seriously big systems that had to run 24x365. Six-sigma was not good enough! How? Redundancy in all aspects of the system (networks, servers, applications, w/ automatic re-routing around failure areas). I called this "failure resiliance". It was NOT fault tolerance. It was truly resiliant to failure of any single or multiple service - within limits. Failure was still a possibility (provided that WW3 occurred and all the data centers were nuked), but VERY unlikely. AWS has data center failures, but you can provide for automatic fail-over to other data centers and/or servers/services. My experience with Amazon was very positive in these regards, but again, pre-planning and design for such occurances is required. It doesn't happen auto-magically...

Not quite as bad as suggested?

I have 2 dedicated WF servers. My uptime monitoring service reported both, roughly simultaneously, offline several times over Friday and the weekend. In all cases service recovered within a few minutes and using the servers I didn't notice them being any less responsive than normal.

I started my relationship with WF because I was a customer of Donhost who, if I understand correctly, WF bought. Donhost support was very good, I could speak to a guy who knew what he was doing, could understand and fix the problem. With WF that's progressively got worse. Despite spending £thosands a year with them if something breaks I have to log a call online in writing (if I can work out how).

On occasions support has attempted to fob me off with responses that clearly indicate the guy is clueless and I have to prove them wrong to get the call escalated. If I was a "normal" website customer (i.e. not a bit of an IT teccie) at that point I'd have been completely stuck. Site doesn't work, tech support says "no problem at our end", what would you do?

As for this weekend, I did visit their system status page expecting to see at least some kind of "problem under investigation" notice. Nope.

Then there's 123reg, part of the same organisation. Again largely for historic reasons I have a few hundred registrations there. The admin interface is garbage, if you've just got a couple of domains to manage probably less of a problem but when you need to be in there most days, a serious PITA. Garbage? yes to the extent that on a couple of occasions they've not renewed names for which I've paid them the renewal fee but also a load of UI issues and slow performance.

Recently they instigated a fee for .uk domain transfer out. I'm slowly moving everything away but doing the transfer at Nominet who charge the same BUT only one charge per BATCH of names rather than one charge per name.