I have recently closed my Linux Developer account with fasthosts due to intermittant latency problems, and rubbish support query turn around, always over 48hours if replied to at all (most of my support queries were never answered unless I actually phoned in about them!)
So is mine an isolated incident or are others out there having the same problem?
One of their servers was compromised, and as a result EVERY password for every customer's accounts must be changed including email, ftp, etc.
I am posting because as of Monday last week my database users in MYSQL were deleted and the Database owner account I have does not have priviledges to grant permissions to new users. As a result my website is now at a standstill and as I write I am at queue position 35 on the phone, starting at 39, 5 minutes ago....
All emails to them remain without a response and they have taken their own forums down.
This raises a good question at a good time as my site is not live yet. Fasthosts has always been quite reputable, and as such I believe this could happen to any hosting company...
How can I mitigate risks relating to my host when my site is live (without going down the dedicated server route as well)?
As I have a .co.uk and a .com for the same name should I split out the hosting to two seperate companies?
If you are looking for a host I would advise to think carefully about Fasthosts at this time.
I ordered a server from fasthosts.co.uk in May after speaking to their sales over the phone. Once I had worked out that it was something that we could try I said that’s fine I will order it online. NO NO I was told I can order it for you here and set everything up for you. Great... I gave the girl I think her name was Flik or Flic from fasthosts all my details and she set everything up in a few hours. GREAT
Now here is the bad part...
Tried to cancel the server and have been told that it's a minimum term of 12 month. I have also been charged since then another £79.00. Called my credit card company to try and stop the transactions for now as you can't delete the details on the fasthost control panel.
I have email support so many times and also spoken to them on the phone. I have tried to speak to other managers but they keep saying that there is no ones available to talk to.
My main post is I was not told that this was a minimum of 12 months and would have never agreed to this. I did check when you sign up online and they do place the T&C's deep in their small print. I now know why the girl from Fasthosts wanted to take the order over the phone.
Here is my letter I send to them. Next step is ofcom but if you have any ideas please let me know.
Dear Fast Hosts
I am writing to you in regards to a server that I ordered over the phone with one of your sales people in April. As I recall her name was Flick and her contact number is 01452 561831.
I ordered this server to use as a back up for some of our company files and discussed this with your sales staff. We agreed that getting a Windows server was the best option for what we needed and the server was ordered over the phone.
We were not too sure if the server was what we needed but we thought that we would give it a go and see.
After a week or so I released that we didn’t really need the server as we could use our public folders with the exchange email service that we have with you and if we ran out of space I could always buy some more.
I sent an email to you on 30th May requesting cancellation and received an email back 2 days later advising me that it was a minimum one year’s contact. I have since sent several emails to your support and sales explaining that I was never told that this was a year contact as I ordered on the phone. I was not even told the price.
It's simple... How can I agree to those terms and conditions when I was not made aware of them? I would have never agreed or signed up for a year's contract. I have not used this server and only wanted to try it out. When I ordered over the phone I was never told that it was for a year. Your calls must be recorded and you can check.
I am a consultant for a large mobile operators call centre in ******* and this is poor service.
Please cancel this server and review your sales policies as they are against trading standards.
I also notified you about the cancellation on 30th May and was charged for another month on 4th June. Please arrange a refund for that month to avoid charge back. I am happy to pay the first months payment.
I have other services with Fast Host that I have had for several years. We are a web company and do recommend Fasthosts for UK hosting as we have had a great experience with you in the past.
The credit can be applied to our exchange hosting account domain gsynetwork.com and I believe that the username is ********
Regards
This is the type of reply you get back…… What a joke……
Further to your mail ,
All of our servers are subject to a 12 month minimum term , part of using this server is the acceptance of the terms of service which we operate subject to the normal cooling off periods associated with purchasing products and services over the phone or online. As you have gone beyond this period I cannot authorise the removal of this machine from contract.
At 6pm last night - more than 28 hours ago - my Dedicated Fasthosts server went down.
It's still down.
Despite more than 15 phone calls and several emails, they seem utterly incapable of fixing the problem.
The system drive apparently failed and was replaced today with a new drive. I then rebuilt the Linux Fedora Core and Fasthosts proceeded to add the faulty drive to the server - at my request.
However, after confirming that the drives had been installed and that the server was ready for use, guess what?
It's still down.
So not only do I currently not have a website, but my developer cannot access the failed drive in order to see what can be recovered.
I'm at the point of telling Fasthosts to stick it, but I'm not going to do that because it's their responsibility to fix their hardware and provide the service I've been paying for since 2006.
That being the case, can anyone recommend what steps I should take next in order to hold Fasthosts to account.
Wondered if anyone has managed to install SSL on fasthosts dedicated server?. I have bought an SSL certificate from goDaddy, but it just won't install. Fasthosts support is OK until you tell them that you're dedicated then they just say they can't help technical questions on that, but an engineer can help @ £60 per ½ hour. goDaddy tech support keep sending me the same instructions, and I've now tried 3 times & just not recognised
I ideally want to use Fasthosts as the hosting provider, on a shared hosting account. Are there any CMS's that install and work well in such an environment?
I dont need a CMS with bells and whistles, just one that is template driven, and has 'friendly' URLs.
I'm doing some work for a client, they have a linux developer package with Fasthosts for an existing website.
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what I can't seem to work out from the Fasthosts website is whether I could register another domain with this package to save having to buy further hosting. Both websites are pretty small.
on a .eu hosting company with good routing/peering around europe. I have customers all over europe but still wanna save money and centralize to one hosting company.
I am looking for a gigabit uplink but nessesarily i dont need flatrate traffic since we only hit peaks a few times a day..
What are your thoughts on companies providing this kind of service at a fair price?
i have moved my hosting to a new provider and i was wondering what is the quickest way to upload my 500MB files to the new server? Is there anyway i can speed this up like have a dedicated uplink port to my server, or via VPN or something, cos at the moment i have an upload speed of around 10KB/s,
Is there a webhost fast enough for providing large files (2.5GB +, going up to 10GB + larger) on my website to users worldwide?
At the moment my website is hosted in the UK and it seems to deliver download speeds of around 650kbps if only one person is downloading at a time. I have tried other web hosts, and their download speeds are never advertised, but have turned out to be even less in practise (e.g. 150kbps)
As I'm hosting large files (e.g. 1GB - 2.5GB - 8.5GB or more) on my website, I need something with unlimited speed. i.e. so that the download speed is limited only by the end user's connection.
Is there anything like this out there? I realise the files are very large in size, but I'd rather keep the process electronic than mail out hundreds of DVDs all the time.
I'm planning to host about 10 websites, most of them will be developed on Dotnetnuke (latest version). The most important issue is the speed of the web sites. The pages need to be opened fast. The target audience is located in Istanbul/Turkey, therefore I think the EU-based companies will be better for my requirements.
I run lighttpd as my webserver, and 5.2.1 worked perfectly. I upgraded to 5.2.4 but when I checked my version, it said "cli". I ran the exact same configure command that I did with 5.2.1, but for some reason it says "cli". I then just ran this config:
I need to provide an 8gb file download (split into 1gb parts) that will be downloaded by 80+ people worldwide, simultaneously. I'm talking for example, they will be each downloading at 1.2megabytes per second each (this is the average speed of their home connections), simultaneously. What are the specs or things I should be looking out for in a website hosting provider? One service I'm looking at is advertised as 0.5Mbps in bandwidth and 100Mbps in transit, for £40 a month. The service I'm looking at is sensical.net's colo business service (http://www.sensical.net/). What does this mean and is it fast enough? What is the difference between these two figures - 0.5Mbps bandwidth and 100Mbps transit?
I'm in the process of switching my host provider and Im leaning towards Surpass Hosting.
I've already contacted them for a few question and their support seems expectational as they respond my tickets thoroughly in less then 20 minutes.
Just a few questions to those that do use surpass or have used them. How fast are their servers for PHP like Wordpress and Invision Power Board and are are your sites stable (always fast, or are they slow at times and then fast) with them.
The server I have running has LAMP and some other related services running. It's on a 100Mbit shared port. Whenever the server has been running for 30-90mins, the pings start to become very high (+2000ms). Problem exists with ftp, ssh, http etc, and restarting named, httpd, mysqld doesn't affect anything. The only thing that gets the pings back down and the speeds up again is to reboot the system, which takes about a minute. The MRTG graphs show that there isn't any significant traffic which cause the pings go down, in fact, the traffic goes close to 0 when the pings start sky rocketing. CPU load is < 0.1 and memory usage low as well.
anyone know of any company with fast response time? (5-30minute no matter what time of the day it is, and maybe even guaranteed in some way?)
i have 3 different server at 3 different provider for redundancy and backup purpose and on top of that have also try 3 other hosting company but seem like support is hit and miss depending on time sometime waiting 4-8+ hours for a response.
Im trying to compare the speed of my website and others and I do know of this function ping but I was wondering how do you know weather its fast or slow like example 200+ ms etc. can someone enlighten me on speed and performance,