back to article 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 …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The cause was ...

    The cause was probably a Windows group policy bug trying to install Win 10 on all of the servers.

    /s

  2. MrKrotos
    FAIL

    Had to laugh looking at their FB page "Don’t be put off migrating your data to the cloud" LMFAO!

    Cloud is great till it goes wrong, then all you have is your backup (what do you mean you dont have a backup?)

    1. Doctor_Wibble
      Facepalm

      Of course we have a backup! We were very sensible and kept it separate... on a cloud service...

  3. Alister

    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,

    1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      That was my first thought, followed by "what penalties does the SLA have?". The answer, I suspect, will be "what's an SLA?"

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      £60 LOL

      At least more business for us to mop up. Cheers FH for your "cloudy" skills!

      AC 'cause my boss gets mad if he gets calls saying I was flapping on-line again about "buy cheap buy twice".

    3. Chris Evans

      Depends on their size!

      To some small businesses £60 a month is a lot.

      1. Paul

        Re: Depends on their size!

        if £60 is a lot, then they're probably not running a business, but a hobby that pays for itself.

  4. Halcin

    Although it has only impacted a very small proportion of our Virtual Cloud Server customers..

    The effing arrogance! Does he really think this condensing comment is the best way to appease customers?

    If I have a problem, I don't give a fly *$% what percentage of customers are effected.

    1. Dan Wilkie

      I think it could have been more condensing though if he'd just said something like "It has only affected a few users" as what he wrote is still a bit wordy.

      That might have come over as too condescending though...

      1. LewisRage

        If its in the cloud AND it's condensing you might be in trouble when it all rains down on you...

        1. Lee D Silver badge

          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...

        2. Fatman
          Joke

          When the cloud bursts....

          <quote>If its in the cloud AND it's condensing you might be in trouble when it all rains down on you...</quote>

          Just hope that rain isn't BROWN!!!!!

      2. Peter X
        FAIL

        very small proportion of our (former) customers

        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?

  5. TheresaJayne

    Ok £60 a month for a server - not very expensive,

    You can end up paying over £200 for high memory servers for running minecraft.

  6. DJV Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Same ole, same ole...

    Given my past experience of FastHosts it's a wonder they are still in business. I've steered many an unwary soul away from their incompetent clutches over the years.

    1. batfastad

      Re: Same ole, same ole...

      ^ ctrl-c ctrl-v

    2. alcopops

      Re: Same ole, same ole...

      They are a dire company, I've had various issues with clients who have used them.

      1. DJV Silver badge
        Happy

        @alcopops

        You mean you've damaged your hands trying to beat some sense into your clients until they finally saw sense and stopped using Fasthosts?

  7. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

    sincere apologies to any of our customers that have been affected

    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.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Cloud...

    Other people's computers you have no control over

  9. batfastad

    DaaS

    123-reg & Farthosts. Downtime as a service.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Now lying about service being restored...

    They're now claiming "All products and services are online."

    Except they're not.

    My VPS isn't. 5 days have now passed.

    Why oh why oh why did I try and save a few quid migrating off IBM/SoftLayer :'(.

    (AC as I want my 'effing server back first!)

  11. GrumpyOldGit

    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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