back to article Fasthosts martyrs relive email FAIL (again and again)

Fasthosts email customers endured (yet another) outage this morning, thanks to a glitch in the company's BlueArc storage system. The UK webhost - which has made a habit of such outages in recent months - says its network was plagued by a "performance issue" between 8:15am and 10:10am GMT. One customer tells The Reg his email …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    How is this company still in business?

    I mean come on people - wtf?!

  2. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. Anonymous Cowherd 3

    Re: How is this company still in business?

    It's a variation on the principle of natural selection.

    Fasthosts have screwed up so many times, on so many important issues, across so many years that the only people still left as customers aren't really hosting anything important.

    They shout and scream when things are down but don't move because if it were really business critical they'd already have shifted the hosting or gone out of business.

    If I were hosting stuff that wasn't very important, I wouldn't spend more than they charge either.

  4. Jamie Jones Silver badge
    FAIL

    But do you trust it when it's back?

    I once worked as a system admin at a different company, and if there were corruptions in mail queues etc. the other admins would just delete the lot - they'd not try and repair mail, or let users know that there was a mail message for them that had got corrupted.. They'd just silently delete everything.

    For a company that has so much trouble, I wouldn't trust them even when they are working.

    Actually, from what I've seen in the industry generally, I wouldn't trust anyone else with my mail, so run my own mailservers, and my users know everything will work and they'll be told of any errors if any do crop up.

  5. Anonymous Hero
    Grenade

    I'm going to defend FastHosts....

    Jeez......! If email is so vital to your business that a two or four hour outage leaves you dead in the water then your business continuity planning is up shit creek.

    I'm sorry, but when I hear this kind of whining and moaning about lack of reliability of mail services that are part of some 10 quid a month hosting plan (with say 10 or 20 pop3 maildrops included) then you're an idiot and a cheapskate

    In fact, even if you're paying for a dedicated server and a few managed exchange mailboxes, then you're still idiots if you haven't planned for failure.

    Stuff breaks, shit happens, YOU should have a plan, why have you put all your eggs in one basket?

    If email, or any service, is so important that just a few hours of downtime kills your business, then you should be paying for a failover provider/service and have a continuity plan to get you switched over within 60 minutes or less.

    Hosting and email has never been so inexpensive so why not double up? I bet most of the moaning minnies here will probably shell out more in paper clips and xmas beer this year than they'll be willing to pay for their hosting.

    FastHosts may not be the company they once were years ago, but ultimately all service providers are fallible, and unless you've planned and paid for resilience then I'm sorry you can't complain.

    1. Mr Ian
      Paris Hilton

      Woah

      That was the most epic rant of all.

      Paris, because I bet she's a moaning minnie as well.

    2. N2

      Couldnt agree more

      These days it seems a lot of people want to pay fuck all for a Rolls Royce service. Try offering a mail failover service & some customers will stare at you like youve just spat in their face.

      Like you say 2 hours really isnt that long & there should be a fallback plan if mail really is that vital & in fairness to FH at the last outage the mail was queued for delivery so it was just delayed as opposed to being deleted.

  6. ScottXJ6
    Heart

    poor show...

    it might cost the reseller peanuts, but i bet he re-sells it onto these small businesses (just a few mail boxes and simple static site), at a much higher 'management' price, then has an awful sticky few days when he says he 'cant' fix it, because he is just reselling ofcourse, but they dont know that.

    Still, a poor show from fasthosts for continued outages.

    Heart image = clue to solution to problem, vote with your feet lol

  7. Spudders
    WTF?

    Surely

    If fasthosts are having so many problems with there Storage software then they need to move supplier, or at least have a failover???

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