As valued customers of Fasthosts their team would often contact me with new deals, in July 2011 one of there sales guys called me to tell me all about there new VPS systems. He explained they have a system in place that is very unique in that there is no downtime!
He went on to explain how this system worked, saying that there is always a full backup of your entire account on another cluster, meaning if any hardware goes down we wouldn't even know anything about it as it would automatically be switched to another cluster seamlessly.
On top of that the system was scalable, I could add more ram and hard drive space as and when and better still the spec I required worked out cheaper than my dedicated servers.
It all sounded great, I bought a VPS, set it up and went live. At the start everything seemed great. The VPS cpu showed less load than the dedicated server and overall it worked brilliantly.
31/10/2011 07.57 AM - I sent a ticket to Fasthosts saying my VPS had gone offline, 6 hours later 31/10/2011 01.57 PM their support team got back to me saying 'I can confirm that your VPS is now back up and running.' However, it took more than 30 hours downtime before our server came back online. It wasn't fixed Fasthosts had simply found a workaround to get it back online!
Since 31/10/2011the server has been sluggish hitting massive cpu spikes and crashing regularly, on a daily basis bringing the vps down. It then takes up to 4 hours to get the server restarted from Fasthosts.
No one takes any notice of the ticketing system, you have to call and speak to someone before they agree to even look at the problem. The guys on the phone support have very little knowledge so must just endure abuse on a daily basis.
They pass your information through to a second line of support who have console access to the servers. These guys eventually get the server(s) restarted.
You normally get a ticket back telling you there is nothing wrong at Fasthosts end and the problem is your end!
The trouble is at the same time our VPS is down, Twitter tells us hundreds of others are down too! So we know its nothing our end, rather their problem.
On 20/11/2011 03.59 AM - I was the first person to alert Fasthosts to the fact their VPS system had had another major crash and was experiencing a big problem. Again Fasthosts tried feeding me lies saying it was just me, no one else and must be something on my system.
They took 16 hours to recognise the problem before releasing a System Issue that read:
- We have identified and are investigating an issue affecting some of our VPS customers. A small number of our VPS customers will be experiencing intermittent issues connecting their servers.
I had already been searching Twitter in the daytime and found hundreds of others all complaining by this point with similar issues.
Its now 28 hours after me reporting the second major outage at Fasthosts data centre within two weeks, its still down, there are hundreds of people now tweeting bad press about Fasthosts.
Today I will close all my accounts with them, if they try stop me breaking the contract I will enforce legal action against them.
We use a company called http://basicstate.com/ to monitor our servers and know minute by minute when something is up or down. If the server or vps is down I get a sms personally sent to my iphone within 3 mintes of the server falling over. I have all of these sms saved as backups for evidence against Fasthosts. We also have all of the Fasthsts T&C saved and backed up.
