Stuff by Sarah

FastHosts Tech Support?

Sat, 18 March, 2006 – 2:36 pm

UPDATE: I've noticed whenever Fasthosts servers go down (and it's quite often) this page gets a major influx of visitors looking for answers and help. So here's a couple
1. Leave Fasthosts! I've seen more people have problems with them than ever! I wholeheartedly recommend SiteHQ, which virtually all of my client sites are hosted on.

2. If you really want to contact Fasthosts then try their Sales helpline on 0870 888 3600, their support section may work at https://www.fasthosts.co.uk/support/ (but I'm guessing their site is down if you're reading this!). Unfortunately I can't login to get their technical support number as I don't have an account with them! (Thank God!!).

— Original Post —

I've heard mixed reviews over Fast Hosts in the past off various forums. I'm usually a person that won't fully make their mind up until they experience something for theirselves. Two clients of mine have accounts with two of the biggest UK hosting providers, 1 & 1 and Fast Hosts. So I figured this opportunity will give me a little experience to see how things move when I transfer their hosting to my own.

Earlier in the week I mentioned a client called me to say his web site was down and their emails weren't working. I checked the site and the nameservers and couldn't get a response from either. I checked the ex-developer's and his site worked fine. Now usually with resellers when they have an account all of their sites are on the same server together, so if one works and another doesn't it's either a DNS issue or the site has been removed. My client hasn't been able to contact the previous developer for over 6 months now so we have been half waiting for this to happen whereby his site was removed. We were hoping to have his new site finished and up and running before the old site went down but various design changes and site changes have delayed us.

So I decided to call Fast Hosts first, just to check to see if it wasn't the server. Perhaps my client's site was on a different server to the developer's site. The first person I spoke to remarked that the site wasn't with Fast Hosts. That would be because the domain is with 123-reg, but still points to Fast Hosts (am a little concerned that their staff presume that the domain must be on the Fast Hosts IPSTAG to have a site with them). So I gave up with her and phoned back and got into the Technical support queue. I knew I was clutching at straws as it's not my site, I don't have an account number with them and to be fair they didn't have to tell me anything. But saying if a server is down or not isn't too hard is it? I chatted to a nice friendly guy who appreciated my position and told me what he could. But when I asked him if the site was down for any reason his response was that the site didn't have any files, it had been removed from the server. With that remark I had to get the nameservers on the domain changed to my reseller account, a holding page up and their MX records updated for their email. Luckily it propogated for them within a couple of hours but of course they'd lost a lot of emails.

The following day I decided to check to see if the domain had propogated for me. Lo and behold the old site appears. I forced refreshes and ran through the site, it was all there. At that point I realised that the technical support had misinformed me saying the site didn't exist when it was just on a server that was offline for whatever reason for 36 hours.

So my experience of Fasts Hosts is that their own technical support can't check or tell if there is a server down. I can't see me recommending them in the future. I'll be transferring from 1&1 this afternoon, we'll see how easy that goes!

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