4-day Fasthosts outage: Customers' sites go TITSUP Hosting provider Fasthosts has been hit with an outage lasting four days, which has knocked some customers' sites offline due a number of its cloudy services being out of action. According to the Gloucester-based provider's service update page: "Over the weekend one of our platform specialists, in conjunction with Dell and …
I seriously lol'd at this comment:
"It's amazing that it is still down, particularly as this is not a cheap service we are using. All they are offering is a day's free hosting for every hour outage - but only up to a month free - so that’s £60."
Mate, if you think that's expensive, then maybe you shouldn't be running "online booking systems", for god's sake invest in a proper hosting facility,
I don't want to rain on your parade but weather or not you hide behind a clever pun, you're just precipitating the opportunity for cloud services to be seen as only a fair-weather solution.
I mean, come on, it's not all sun and rainbows in IT, I know, but coping with the floods of information coming into a business isn't easy...
It's been noted here previously, how frequently this turn of phrase appears particularly with not-particularly-clueful-vendors. TalkTalk springs immediately to mind!
Given that these "customers" are likely to be leaving anyway, I think they should have some fun with it... say something like "only customers with very small proportions are affected" or something. It'd be funny!! :D
On a related note, it's *all* their customers then, yes?
That almost sounds like he's not sorry at all and maybe no one was actually affected. It most certainly doesn't doesn't sincere.
Sincere would be "I apologise to those who have been affected". Corporate apology statements should be banned from using words such as "may", "might", "any" or "small number" on pain of being thrown into an arena full of those customers who actually *were* affected.
We all know IT can go wrong.
I have used Fasthosts in past and not had an issue but I was using a dedicated server with them. I did however later change to a different company but not due to the service. I still use Fasthost for all my domain registrations. The thing is most people forget that they need to take some responsibility for themselves as well. Regular backups and IF something is mission critical don't have it all in one place, that way if a service is affected one place its not in another and a business can still run.
The cloud is not some mythical ethereal plane of IT existence, its servers run by others, it is hardware, technology, is computers made of components and components break.
Lot of people also think hey I'll use a windows server or have their data hosted on one, well windows is as buggy as hell and has more holes in its code than Swiss cheese. Even Bill gates admitted some time ago that to go through every line of windows code and make it safe would require and entire rewrite and cost more than the product has ever made the company. DO NOT RELY ON WINDOWS.
And for those who complain about costs, look around, you can get VPN's for 5 euros or 5 US dollars a month, usually with about a 100gig ssd drive so they will be fast, often un-metered and with at least a 100mbs pipe. Get a few of those cluster them and then you have a fully redundant system if one stops others take up the slack and because they are in separate locations an outage in one place doesn't stop the others. So lets see if you had 6 at say $5.00 each a month .. thats a lot less than £60.00 a month.
If you use IT make sure you know what you are doing and MAKE BACKUPS.
Technology does go wrong so have alternative plans in place if it does. Its called being professional. Businesses used to run fine without computers at one time, so it can be done.
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