back to article Backup crack-up: Fasthosts locks people out of data storage for days amid WCry panic

Fasthosts left some customers without access to their backups for roughly six days – after it tore down systems it feared were vulnerable to the WannaCry malware. The Brit web hosting biz confirmed to The Register that it pulled the plug on gear hosting some of its customers' online storage service last Friday. These systems …

  1. Dwarf

    The joy of cloudy stuff

    Someone else's panic becomes your outage and you can do nothing but sit back and wait until they decide to provide service again.

    Perhaps a little planned maintenance wouldn't go amiss - rather than the unplanned / forced maintenance.

    1. Fatman
      FAIL

      Re: ... a little planned maintenance wouldn't go amiss ...

      Planned replacement of aging infrastructure???

      We can't afford it! Not enough money for the executive bonus pool.

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Trollface

    Brilliant attack

    Not only did WannaCrypt compromise outdated servers, it also knocked offline outdated servers that it didn't even touch.

    Now that is called success !

  3. batfastad

    Fasthosts

    ... still exist??!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Trollface

    I guess their customers...

    WannaCry right about now...

  5. 's water music

    to be fair to Farthosts

    ...who could have anticipated that anything might go wrong on a win2k3 platform based service? If I were them I would be sending the black spot to Microsoft for dropping me right in it by yanking support from my production platform without even letting me know in advance. They must be able to sue for the reputational damage shirley?

    1. southpacificpom
      Joke

      Re: to be fair to Farthosts

      Agreed. I'm serious and don't call me Shirley.

    2. graeme leggett Silver badge

      Re: to be fair to Farthosts

      were these 2003 systems that customers had specified when first putting their websites on Fasthosts but not updated? In which case the outage ought to be considered partly of the customers own making.

  6. Chris King

    So...

    How long would FastHosts have continued using their obsolete and unsupported platform if this hadn't happened ? And would they have even coughed up to running 2K3 ?

    1. Steve K

      Re: So...

      As we take the security of our systems extremely seriously, we are retiring the Windows 2003 platform with immediate effect,

      Their statement - nearly 2 years after W2K3 was de-supported - shows exactly how seriously they actually take security.....

      I wonder if they typed that with a straight face

      1. Captain Scarlet Silver badge

        Re: So...

        Probably a marketing lacky looking to try and prevent them looking foolish as they forgot to remove the fact that it was running Windows 2003.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    On site backups

    Are they a thing of the past in this cloudy world?

    I would think when you have critical applications that it is necessary to have an on site backup with maybe a parallel and older backup to the cloud - that is me as an engineer talking not a bean counter.

  8. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    You're not going to be able to blame Jeremy Hunt for this one.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fasthosts are hilariously bad

    I live nearby and have been plagued by recruiters over the last year or so, first the decent ones then more recently the bottom-feeders banging on about great DevOps roles in Gloucester. The clue is the on-call every other week, it's FastHosts.

    It's noticeable that the more desperate the pimp and the worse the job the more enthusiastic they are. Each time I point them to 'el Reg, tell them to search for FH and realise why it'd be CV suicide for me to work there. Each time they act as if i've just pointed out their aunt is Myra Hindley.

    FastHosts can rebrand their website, loads of Web 2.0 horsecack about how agile they are, but stuff like this shows why they're still rubbish. And asking for people who know everything under the sun for 35-40k, whilst pulling stunts like this, reaffirms why i'd rather set my mum on fire than work for them.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Fasthosts are hilariously bad

      I was at another large tech organisation in the vicinity*; we had a couple of FH refugees who were good, smart, hard working and very relieved to discover that not every technology organisation was like that.

      Mind you pay in the area's actually not that bad compared to the cost of living; I moved to a London job with a ~35% pay rise and took a significant cut in disposable income.

      * One from Ciren with a JFDI attitude, if that rings any bells

  10. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
    Boffin

    Backups

    "My client needs to access backups that are on their backup service to restore a critical application they are using," one customer told us earlier this week. "They have not been able to conduct their business during this unexplained outage – understandably, they are pretty pissed off."

    If your only backup is at the hosting company, you don't have a backup. Get that sorted out ASAP.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Backups

      "If your only backup is at the hosting company, you don't have a backup. "

      Maybe the suckers/customers thought they had an SLA?

      Now they understand the true value of a typical SLA. Less than zero.

      It seems like some organisations think the true value of on-site IT is less than zero too. Tricky, that.

  11. ScissorHands
    Devil

    "Some were IT consultants for small business"

    So, has Pottsy been affected? When is he going to give us the low-down on this?

  12. illiad

    So how 'fancy' is the word 'cloud' now??? Most intelligent people know that backup that relies in the internet is not that reliable... :)

    the safe way is onsite backup to removable disk (AND the internal HDD..), that goes home with you every night... then the whole building may collapse, but your data etc is safe...

    and of course that includes the incremental backups, too.. (to many places, depending on cash available...)

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