Posts by Vic Johnston

Fasthosts customers blindsided by emergency password reset

Already left a sinking ship

After the last fiasco, I took my 300+ domains and moved them away. It was a huge undertaking, monumental amounts of work involved, which I am so glad I undertook now as this weekend I have not had to apologise to each and every one of my customers and explain to them once again how to change all of their passwords. I am with 1 & 1 using dedicated servers (don't touch the shared hosting), and we are OK (never want to tempt fate). To you guys saying how you will move, and to the guy think 100 domains is a lot to shift, to the guys talking of moving, move, you will be glad you did, to the guy with 100 domains, move, you will be glad you did, it will save you a lot of ball ache in the future, and to be honest, even without all of these fiascos, fasthosts really is quite crap all of the time with slow conenctions, poor technical support and no interest in their customers. We have spent more than £15,000 with fasthosts during our time with them, and we were treated completely unsympathetically. We were told that we should change passwords as a matter of course, and that they were essentially doing us a favour with the last fiasco, and then that we should bear the cost of doing all of this and include this in our costs as a reseller. Well I have left, and I am glad that I did not lose this weekend out of my life, and instead managed to have a few beers, see some friends, get to the cinema, play at home on the Xbox, spend some time with my family, and even find the time to type out this message and check in on your poor long suffering fools still with Fasthosts. Take my advice, no matter how much work is involved in leaving, it will be worth it (if you go the right place). Good luck to you all

Fasthosts customer? Change your password now

Fasthosts suggest they are doing me a favour!

Fasthosts have replied to my request for compensation by suggesting that changing passwords frequenly is a useful security measure. Thanks Fashosts, really appreciate having to change somewhere upward of 500 passwords. Read below for a giggle

From FH

While we understand that the changing of passwords can present an organisational problem for our customers we would like to stress that this is a precautionary measure that we recommend, not a requirement that we are imposing.

Where a significant amount of work is required to update all passwords we recommend that this work is carried out as soon as possible but in a way that doesn't necessarily have an impact on the everyday operation of their business. We assess that the risk to our customers is very small in this instance.

On the basis of this recommendation, which we are confident is sensible and does not harm our customer's interests, we do not feel that this incident justifies compensation.