Most of my client sites run on Fasthosts servers (not by my choice) and let me just say – their email servers are the most awful things known to man – they make the Tasmanian Devil look stable.
Case in point – earlier this week they went down at about lunch time on Tuesday (25th August) – I know this as I was working a half day and as I went to go out I got a call letting me know a client had been on the dog and bone asking what was going on.
This outage effected several other email users and I spent Wednesday trying to keep them informed about what was going on – but here’s the problem – Fasthosts don’t tell you anything. Their engineers are always working on the problem as “a first priority” and if asked what the problem is the question is either tiptoed around or you are told that it is being investigated. This is pretty unhelpful when I have people phoning me asking what is going on.
It took until 18:00 on the Wednesday (a downtime of at least 36 hours) before the problem was fixed after which I received an email from Fasthosts which I post here for you to enjoy:
I am writing to update you on an issue that occurred intermittently for some of our POP Mail customers this week. Whilst this issue only affected a small percentage of our customers I note that your email account was on the infrastructure concerned and therefore wish to update you.
Upfront I would also wish to apologise unreservedly if you or your business was in anyway affected by this incident.
We are at an advanced stage in the process of implementing an improved and more resilient email platform, and unfortunately we encountered some unusual issues with balancing user access to the service which caused a temporary disruption. This led to a proportion of our email clients only having intermittent access, and a small number of customers having problems over a more prolonged period. Our operations team restored the service for affected customers as quickly as possible, and all mailboxes were fully restored by 6:00pm yesterday.
Please note, no emails were lost through this service disruption as all emails sent during the issues were queued and subsequently delivered when the issue was resolved.
We are fully committed to ensuring an effective service for our customers and are making significant investments to ensure our services are market leading and regret on this occasion a small number of our customers were impacted during our infrastructure upgrade.
Apologies again if you were impacted and thanks for your continued business.
OK, let’s examine this shall we?
“…this issue affected a small percentage of our customers” – it affected all of mine.
“…a small number of our customers having problems over a prolonged period” – again, all of mine had problems over a prolonged period.
“…no emails were lost” – no, but some were delayed by 36 hours. That could lose as much business as not receiving them at all.
This isn’t an isolated event – a month or 2 again the same thing happened, and it’s happened before that as well. For no apparent reason every now and then the email servers just stop functioning and I am given no information to then relay to my customers.
I’ve always been upfront with the people who’s sites I host – they know that I am reselling them space on a Fasthosts server and it’s gotten to the stage that even they are asking to be moved to a new host.
What this means is I will be migrating every site we have with Fasthosts onto a nice shiny dedicated with 1&1 – a company I have used personally for sometime and have had no problems with. This isn’t going to be a small job but it’s got to be done.
I’ve used many hosting providers in my time and every single one is miles ahead of Fasthosts. Even their name is a joke.
