Closure

I wrote this letter while I was still fuming at FastHosts for cocking up my website, I've calmed down a bit now and decided that it's probably not worth the hassle to send it. But I need closure, and Fasthosts deserve a bit of bad publicity for messing me about, so I'm putting it here instead.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to complain about the mishandling of my hosting account and poor quality customer service I received from your company on 16 August 2005.

On the morning of that day I noticed that my web site was reporting lots of errors apparently caused by missing files, and when I looked on the site I noticed that a lot of files were missing from the file structure. I phoned your technical support department and was informed that the only way this could have occurred was that someone (or something) had accessed my site via FTP and deleted the files. I was offered no other option as to the cause and as I had no proof that this had not happened I was left with no option but to investigate further myself. The call lasted no more than a couple of minutes.

I was worried that someone had hacked into my account so I immediately changed my FTP password, and then I manually re-uploaded all of my website content from a backup. I then noticed that there were other problems. The ODBC databases and the ASP.NET content I was using was no longer working.

Also, I received emails from site visitors saying that the site was still showing as not available at their location, even though I was able to see it. After a lot more investigation I realised that my website had been moved to a whole new server on the Fasthosts system, from FASTHOSTS74 to FASTHOSTS15. External users were unable to access my site as the I.P. of the site had also changed, and this change had yet to propagate across the DNS servers.

I then investigated further in the Fasthosts control panel and found that my ODBC connection settings had been deleted and my ASP.NET service appeared to have been turned off. I contacted technical support again, and after some investigation they confirmed that my site had indeed been moved to a different server due to “resource issues”. I was told that this move should have been seamless and all my relevant data and settings should have been transferred to the new server. In this case it had not happened, and the support representative arranged to make my site content from the old server available to me in a private folder on my new server. He also agreed to turn on ASP.NET again.

Later in the evening I phoned up a third time as my ASP.NET service still seemed to be out of action. Shortly after that it was turned on and I my site was returned to normal.

I understand the necessity to move content from one server to another from time to time, and that I am not paying for a totally resilient service. This is not the nature of my complaint. I do feel however that your company failed in several areas on this occasion:

• If the work to move my site was planned by your engineers, I should have been informed before the work so that I could have expected the DNS problems, etc. If the work was unforeseen, an email shortly after it had occurred would have been appreciated.
  
  
• When I phoned technical support initially, I should not have been “fobbed off” with the answer that someone had deleted my files via FTP. The support engineer should have investigated a little further and seen that my site had moved and that there could be issues arising from that.
  
  
• When the engineer(s) moved my content to the new server they apparently failed to copy all my data. They also failed to copy across my ODBC settings, and failed to re-enable my ASP.NET access. This is not an acceptable level of IT “workmanship”, in my opinion.

This is my first major problem with your service since I joined, but it has left me with grave reservations about the ability of your technical staff and the quality of your technical support. I will be considering my future hosting needs carefully.

I would be interested in hearing your opinions on this matter.