Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but.........

I recently paid for an annual web hosting package and domain name through http:///www.fasthosts.co.uk, and our website has been online for approx 2 weeks. In this short space of time, the server that our website (and also our pop3 account) is hosted on has gone down for maintenance three times, for longer than 24 hours at a time. We cannot even check the system status to find out exactly what the problem is. As well as this, we also have a website hosted with www.easyspace.com, and they never seem to have any problems with their servers.
www.fasthosts.co.uk was recommended to us as an Intel Premier provider, and so far we haven't been very impressed with their services. Has anyone else had similar experiences with fasthosts.co.uk?, or are we just moaning over a trivial maintenance problem?



Aden
Trauma Trax Records
http://www.traumatrax.com

I'd suggest running a search for 'fasthosts' both here and on webhostingtalk, there is plenty of dirt-their name comes up fairly often, and most of the discussion regarding fasthosts seems to be negative, from end users and resellers alike.

Dear Fasthosts Customer

As you may be aware we have suffered a prolonged outage throughout Tuesday and Wednesday this week. During the outage, all services and hosted sites /
servers were unavailable for most of the time.

The problem was caused by a BT router failure. The exact reason for the failure is currently being investigated and is thought to be connected to a data flood
on the router. This could either have been caused by faulty equipment on BT's network, or it could have been caused by a denial of service attack. Once the
source of the problem was identified on Wednesday afternoon BT restored our service within the hour. We apologise for the length of time it took to actually
identify the problem and we are currently discussing our relationship with BT.

Frustratingly, the problem was outside of our control and we had no option but to wait for BT to sort out the issue. Several members of our network team were
onsite for over 36 hours throughout the outage trying to escalate the problem within BT and assist their engineers in sorting out the problem. We do have a
service level agreement with BT stating that any problems with their service will be fixed within 5 hours and we are currently talking to BT about why it took so
long to resolve the issue.

We are now discussing ways to ensure that this problem does not occur again in the future. We hope that the installation of some extra equipment in
Gloucester or at BT's end will eliminate the possibility of a repeat occurrence and are aiming to do this as soon as possible. If a similar problem occurs in the
interim we expect to be able to fix it within minutes and BT are continuing to monitor their equipment closely.

We would like to thank all of our customers for the patience they have shown throughout the outage and we apologise for the inconvenience this matter has
caused.
Everyone at Fasthosts has shown outstanding commitment throughout the problem - from our call centre staff who handled thousands of calls to our network
team who stayed onsite throughout. The many positive comments and support we have received from our customers has helped tremendously.

Best Regards

The Network Team
Fasthosts Internet Limited