Fasthosts goes titsup after storm-induced power outage

Could have been worse

Could have lost all the data.

I'm a fasthosts customer and was affected by this. The irritating thing for me was that I was able to get through to their status page which assured me that all systems were working normally. It was only when I rang them up that I found out they had issues.

Alan

Sounds like an ATS problem

Probably confused by the return of mains before the generators had come fully online and didn't switch from UPS to either supply. I've been caught by ATS issues before, no doubt nobody qualified (or knowledgeable) on site to manually switch the ATS before the batteries gave out.

Better get used to this

The current UK power generation system and distribution network are starting to creak at the edges due to many years of under investment. (However, it would appear that the UK is not alone in this.)

Many of the hosting companies are trying to cut their costs, so that they can offer the cheapest service. When that happens, something has to give and first thing is usually quality of service. I've seen a couple of these hosted places and I'm not convinced that they are serious about their business continuity and disaster recovery planning. They may talk a good game; but what you see and experience tells a different story.

I've recently had to deal with a number of organisations that have outsourced various parts of their IT provision; their senior managers seem to think that this removes the chance of loss of service and worse, they then don't check to make sure that the provider is doing their job.

As a result of this, we are probably going to see a lot more outages, reduced service levels, loss of business and almost certainly, companies going out of business.

Need an Eeyore icon!

dns was down

All 3 of their dns servers were down for a number of hours.

A lot of customer's kit/sites where up but with no dns they were no use. Similarly those who at some time registered a domain with Fasthosts and are still using their dns were affected.

Their dns strap line seems a little flawed just like their tecnology is:-

"Fasthosts provides a primary nameserver plus two extra backup nameservers, ensuring that

your domains won't be susceptible to failure."

Funny how a similar event (reported on the reg) happened in 2007 (this sort of flooding in that area is on a 7 year cycle from what was reported by one of the locals affected, strange his pub was still open for business!)

if its going to happen...

.... It will happen to FastHosts...

yeh...bloody fasthosts

I host my business on there too - I know I'm mental.

I spent the weekend wondering WTF was happening - I'd edit my website -adding new images, CSS pages, etc and it would look great for about an hour.. then I'd go back and check it and all the images had disappeared... checking the source - they no longer existed on the server.

I thought I'd done something wrong - spend another hour updating everything - same thing.

After the 3rd time this happened I gave up and decided to wait till monday to call support.

At no point did any part of the control panel tell me 'hey - all our systems are f&cked - best not waste your time making updates just now'.

Oh ... and don't get me started on the other quality decision I made - to use their built in website designer... I was taken in by the simplicity. I managed to put the whole site together in a few hours.

www.rocksolid-tech.com

great.

Until I realised cutting and pasting txt doesn't pick up the right fonts, there is no spell checking, etc.. so the only way of checking it all is now to copy and paste everything into an editor, and then when you find something to change - manually working through the changes on the website editor.

Also - no undo - so screw something up and yer f$cked.

No export html... and they html it creates is of course, utter crap.

sigh. u get what you pay for I suppose.

If anyone can recommend a friendly online editor plugin supported by fasthosts (im on linux just now) with themes, etc so I can use it quickly, then please do - I'd much rather be using open source stuff on my server than their in house mince.

Action Group due to Fasthosts Non-Contingency Plan??

I would imagine that a company of this size should have to have a responsible and assured contingency plan should their ever be a power out. I am personally not happy with the replies I have been given from Fasthosts, and feel that responsibility is being shrugged off. They have told me that my hard drive is corrupt and I can now not mount this drive to the server, in order to recover the data. This they are blaming on me, rather than their recent issues. It would be interesting to know what other peoples experiences are in light of this recent issue......

If I can ask everyone here, if it has an effect on their business and revenue, and if so, would anyone be interested in setting up an action group with the potential of legal action to be brought against them. If you would have interest in this, and have been affected in any way, then please do contact me at your earliest convenience.