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Problems with Fasthosts Please Advise
| Posted by cabalstudios, 05-01-2001, 03:49 PM |
| Unfortunately, I have been a VICTIM of www.fasthosts.co.uk 's reseller plan, and would like to advise other members out there, to be aware there are not as good as you think they are.
I have been with Fasthosts for over 2 years now. Recently I have been having problems with my websites, were as all files within the cgi-bin directory were available to the public to view and download, I contacted Fasthosts and advised of the problem, it took them 2 weeks to make changes to one of my domains.
That I was ok with, now the other problem was it wasn't just my domain, all my customers were having the same problem, I came down to the point that, it depended on which NT server you were on, that would stop public access to the cgi-bin directory.
Your probably thinking, well that's not a big deal, put a index.html file in the cgi-bin directory. Which I eventually had to do, not just on my domain but on all the 136 domains that I was hosting (i can assure you it's not fun).
These are things you shouldn't have to worry about when using a reseller, I would have rather spent my time promoting my business rather than doing the job that the Fasthosts support should have been doing.
But.... the story goes on.
A couple of weeks ago, Fasthosts sent me an invoice for my monthly payment, which was dedited from my account the same day.
5 Days later I receive an email saying my account has been disabled due to non-payment. I ignored this as I new they would retry in 1/2 days, they then sent me an email on the 24th asking for £45.82, to SSL. I wrote them an email the same day saying that I don't need this service.
They then send me an email saying, they have removed the SSL.
I sent them another email asking for when the refund was due, they sent an email saying that "NO REFUND" will be issued on this account, and that I own them £5+VAT for removing this service.
Reading this email, had me blowing my top.
Continued next thread....
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| Posted by cabalstudios, 05-01-2001, 03:57 PM |
| The same day, I received 15 calls from my clients saying they can't access there FTP. I then tried to access the ftp via my own account and kept getting chucked out.
I rang fasthosts up, and asked what's going on, they told me my account has been disabled due to non-payment, I took there advice and contacted my credit card company.
My credit card company advised, that fasthosts in total since the 17th April had taken £217.23 out of my account. You can imagine how I felt when I heard this.
I then contacted Fasthosts, who said they won't enable my account until i pay the £5+VAT service charge, I advised them under no circumstances will i pay that £5+VAT. Since the last two weeks I have lost 90% of my customers, and am paying out of my own pocket, to get my customer sites hosted on a dedicated server I had to purchase.
Still upto this date Fasthosts have not enabled my account, and will not release my domains, also they won't allow me to ftp into my ftp to transfer my webpages to another server.
I sent them a form asking for closure of account and a refund for the services I have not used, the £217.23 but they are refusing to pay that.
Can anyone advise as to what I can do about this...
Any help with be appreciated....
Regards
Imran
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| Posted by -Edward-, 05-01-2001, 05:37 PM |
| Just an idea but report them to telewest the people who give them the finaces to put them annoying add's up in ever darn pc mag on the market. Since its telewest who really own the noc where they are based.
Then report them to trading standards. They seem to be good at getting peoples money back. I did this with Webnetics who recently went bust and got refunded.
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| Posted by MattM, 05-03-2001, 04:31 AM |
| Right, here's some info on my MANY troubles with Fasthosts. From the outset, they look like a very good deal - do not be fooled people. Here's a list of just SOME of the problems I've had.
Account disabled due to non-payment, when the funds were in my account.
CGI Bins not functioning, the only way to re-enable them is to entirely remove the domain and re-add it (losing all services paid for on the domain, as well as e-mail accounts)...
Being told I would be telephoned back for 4 days running, without being contacted.
Domains going offline for more than 24 hours at a time.
Domains becoming in-accessible from the Control Panel.
All e-mail accounts on a domain becoming corrupted.
Domains 'losing synchronisation' from the server.
CGI time-outs.
Applications (CGI, ASP, iHTML) suddenly not working and having to be re-installed.
particular servers on the NT account being FAR worse than others for hosting files.
FTP servers becoming in-accessible for long periods at a time.
Domains being disapbled for 'bandwidth abuse', with NO warning whatsoever (you can imagine the situation this created with my client).
Being quoted amounts of bandwidth I can use on the account, and this quota not being utilised.
Being HUGELY overcharged for bandwidth (£1000 for 2GB a month!!!).
Web pages taking hours to reflect changes on the FTP server.
Extremely bad techinical support, the majority of the time the support staff being unable and unwilling to help me.
The manager basically not wanting to help at all, telling me to 'take my business elsewhere'.
A total disregard for customer satisfaction.
A breech of their' own terms and conditions! In the terms and conditions it states that if a SITE 'monopolises resources' ie. bandwidth and processing power, that SITE will be disabled. My ACCOUNT was disabled with no warning, I ws lead to believe the situation would be easily resolved, but then my account was closed - early.
Their' resources manager claiming to have talked at length with me and my colleague on the telephone - when this had never occrued.
Receiving e-mail claiming we had turned down a bandwidth agreement in a 'recent telephone conversation', which NEVER occured!
Then I was later told I had agreed to a contract i a discussed in a telephone conversation via e-mail, and e-mailed a copy of the contract, when these events NEVER took place! Basically being accused of lying by technical support staff!
The list goes on...!
Last edited by MattM; 05-03-2001 at 04:49 AM.
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| Posted by MattM, 05-03-2001, 04:39 AM |
| Fasthosts are so disorganised, they can't even spell the word 'closed'. I was greeted by a message stating "Your account has been closd.". They are also so disorganised that the FTP server that they 'closd' was active for a month following my account removal.
I'd also like to add that all of these events I have detailed occured on an NT4 account. Another friend of mine has a Win2K account, and is also experiencing LOTS of problems. Most of which Fasthosts are showing no intention of repairing. After highly recommending them to him (when I first joined - before I saw the reality) you can understand how responsible I feel for his own trials and tribulations.
I would REALLY like to take this further, is there anyone who is interested in forming an organisation to seek such results? Fasthosts should not be allowed to continue such disgraceful activites and total disregard for their' customers.
On a final note, I'm sure there are others being kicked off their' NT4 accounts simply because they are cheaper than their' Win2K accounts, a friend of mine was removed form their' NT4 account for very weak reasons. Fasthosts also recently launched a dedicated server service (http://dedicated.fasthosts.co.uk) and it seems very clear that in order to promote these new servers, they are reducing what is on offer in the reseller situation. I was shocked finding they Win2K Control Panel was a lot less feature filled than the NT4 account. Looking forward to your replies.
Last edited by MattM; 05-03-2001 at 05:28 AM.
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| Posted by MorphStar, 05-03-2001, 05:41 AM |
| Nice, so I'm not the only one who hates them.
I've been on their "feature rich" win2k Reseller account, which really sucked.
Let me list it up for you:
- CGI\ASP script didn't work properly, meaning they had time outs when the scripts weren't processed in 10 seconds, if they'd exceed that time, the script was being terminated.
This is a huge bummer when you want to run a Bulletin Board like this one.
- The total disability to add any domains, they said it was a problem in the control panel and it would be solved soon enough.
2 months later and still nothing.
- 10 GB of Bandwidth on the account, yea right they start complaining at 1 gb.
- fasthosts, what the? it's on of the slowest servers I've ever been on!
- Lack of support (at least good support) , all I was getting were emails that simply redirected me to http://dedicated.fasthosts.co.uk ... *******s.
- Down times, damn they're more offline then online.
- General server and security problems, tiny stuff.
That seems to be it, any additional problems I forgot about?
Advice for you kids: don't take Fasthosts, if you know whats good for you. (and your stress lvl)
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| Posted by cabalstudios, 05-03-2001, 12:22 PM |
| I see that Fasthosts is gonna be having a hella lot of problems. I suggest we all contact the trading standards, and newspapers and see how they like that. I sent them an email recently as they invoice me again for £10.28 for transfer of a domain to another service.
I then sent them an email warning them I would contact the trading standards, newspapers and Telewest. They sent a reply that they had not received my email stating that I wanted my account closing.
These guys wanna make you laugh as well as cry.
Luckily I had a contract in the US with a NOC, that has provided me with a series of cobalt servers, and dedicated servers. I will now be representing them in the UK, and promoting there services.
If anyone wants to seriously take Fasthosts events further then please drop me an email. As we can discuss over the phone, and even have meetings to get our moneys worth out of Fasthosts. We are legally aslo liable to damages, and we could sue them for loss of earnings.
Regards
Imran
Cabal Studios IS.
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| Posted by AussieHosts, 05-03-2001, 01:03 PM |
| Wow...well I for one, am a bit surprised at this.
We have used Fasthosts for quite a while, and have never had any such problems. Their support has always been prompt and courteous, and on the physical side of things we would consider their uptime to be on par with almost any other provider we have used.
We had one problem with being locked out of our admin panel for a short period whilst we resolved an issue with our bank. The problem was at our end, in that our bank was having some glitches with their card services systems. But whilst we couldn't effectively manage these services for this time, none of our websites were taken down. FH accounts department persevered and kept putting the transaction through whenever we asked them to (which was usually 5 minutes after us being assured again by the bank that all was well), and finally we got it through. No other such problems before or after that one.
We're on the other side of the world...so we could understand FH's wanting to protect their own interests, and receive the due payment.
We hear the occasional bad FH report, the same as many different hosts receive from time to time, but this thread does seem a little odd. Admittedly we're not chewing through heaps of bandwidth, so I can't comment on what would happen if we exceeded some magical "limit", but right now we're happy to report that FH are delivering on their promises to us.
Gary
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| Posted by KingNimby, 05-03-2001, 01:27 PM |
| A friend just referred me to this page because he knows I've had problems with Fasthosts. In my case, I was subject to outrageous bandwidth charges. They didn't warn me, the automatic bandwidth usage email system had been disabled several months earlier, and when speaking to them over the phone was given the solid impression that I was going to be charged for extra use, not what had occurred already. I'm not even going into the fact that they don't have a solid bandwidth limit, so how they can charge an exact figure etc, etc...
More troubling is the fact that two other Fasthosts user that I know, were kicked off for the same reason, and were equally stunned. Not surprisingly we all use the old reseller accounts, being long time customers and not seeing any reason to move up to the Win2k account, no matter how long they extended the offer period for.
Adding to what MattM said, even after the account was closed, all my FTP accounts were still active for several weeks, and getting the last few domains transfered is becoming extremely troublesome.
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| Posted by MattM, 05-04-2001, 07:35 AM |
| when speaking to them over the phone was given the solid impression that I was going to be charged for extra use, not what had occurred already. I'm not even going into the fact that they don't have a solid bandwidth limit, so how they can charge an exact figure"
This is EXACTLY what happened with me. Also on the note of transfering domains while the FTP was still open, I've had that problem too.
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