FastHosts - SiteTalkZone

Kyle · 12-17-2008, 08:36 AM

What have you experienced/heard.
I've heard that like many large hosting providers they have virtually no customer service and seem to have problems securing their customer's personal information.

Basically lets bitch about them here...

BoneIdol · 12-17-2008, 10:02 AM

Fasthosts should be renamed Farcehosts. I had to deal with them all the time at my old job and they were terrible beyond words.

For ages and ages you had to pay for Linux hosting but Windows hosting was free. On the Linux servers they would randomly do shit like set your file permissions to 0000 and the SSH login would randomly just refuse to accept you (so that's your website update delayed for a few hours).

The Windows servers weren't much better. Once you set up a website you had to move it to another server just to get access to GD in PHP and ASP.net, which would take about a day. PHP scripts would randomly freeze (even on their special scripting boxes), even if it was just a .php file with no php scripts inside it.

You also had to pay £25 per annum for a 25 meg mysql database. Since my boss was such a tightarse I ended up running about half a dozen sites on one mysql database.

The customer service was simply diabolical. Even for something as simple as not being able to SSH into a site I was on hold for 45 minutes and got passed around sabout 3 different people.

But, what really takes the piss, was when they got hacked. Like utter morons, they stored everyone's passwords as plain text and apparently had their credit card database accesible from the website. So not only did my boss have to cancel his credit card, they sent out an email demanding everyone change their passwords.

So I had a fun week changing about 40 websites' ftp and mysql passwords, several hundred email passwords and assorted other bits and pieces.

People who hadn't changed their control panel passwords after about a week had them changed for them... then they sent them the new password in the post. IIRC this was just before christmas. Hilarity ensued.

While the register has really gone down hill recently, they covered quite a lot of Fasthosts' various fuck ups. See http://search.theregister.co.uk/?q=fasthosts for some more details about them.

To summarise: Fuck Fasthosts. They're really, really cheap but you still don't get what you pay for.

Kyle · 12-17-2008, 10:58 AM

I posted this thread expecting a few words from BoneIdol, looks like I expected correctly. :P

BoneIdol · 12-17-2008, 01:14 PM

Heh, you know how to goad me on so well.

Serious protip though; Fasthosts = Epic Fail.

Wong · 12-17-2008, 11:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BoneIdol

Fasthosts should be renamed Farcehosts. I had to deal with them all the time at my old job and they were terrible beyond words.

For ages and ages you had to pay for Linux hosting but Windows hosting was free. On the Linux servers they would randomly do shit like set your file permissions to 0000 and the SSH login would randomly just refuse to accept you (so that's your website update delayed for a few hours).

The Windows servers weren't much better. Once you set up a website you had to move it to another server just to get access to GD in PHP and ASP.net, which would take about a day. PHP scripts would randomly freeze (even on their special scripting boxes), even if it was just a .php file with no php scripts inside it.

You also had to pay £25 per annum for a 25 meg mysql database. Since my boss was such a tightarse I ended up running about half a dozen sites on one mysql database.

The customer service was simply diabolical. Even for something as simple as not being able to SSH into a site I was on hold for 45 minutes and got passed around sabout 3 different people.

But, what really takes the piss, was when they got hacked. Like utter morons, they stored everyone's passwords as plain text and apparently had their credit card database accesible from the website. So not only did my boss have to cancel his credit card, they sent out an email demanding everyone change their passwords.

So I had a fun week changing about 40 websites' ftp and mysql passwords, several hundred email passwords and assorted other bits and pieces.

People who hadn't changed their control panel passwords after about a week had them changed for them... then they sent them the new password in the post. IIRC this was just before christmas. Hilarity ensued.

While the register has really gone down hill recently, they covered quite a lot of Fasthosts' various fuck ups. See http://search.theregister.co.uk/?q=fasthosts for some more details about them.

To summarise: Fuck Fasthosts. They're really, really cheap but you still don't get what you pay for.

Ouch, it sounds like you had a really terrible experience with them which I cannot begin to imagine. That must've sucked.

Just before Christmas? How ironic.

The way you describe their customer support kinda reminds me of Dell's customer support.

Kyle · 12-18-2008, 07:40 AM

Yeah dell FTL