Poor crisis management/customer service
I've been with Fasthosts for over 15 years migrating from the shared platform to VPS and have therefore suffered from the latest outage.
In fairness during that time I have been very pleased with the service/pricing whilst acknowledging the firm has its critics. Until 19 June our VPS had run perfectly for nearly three years.
We were amongst the last customers migrated after the crash and it was clear that there was an issue with the new installation and we couldn't access the control panel or import/export databases.
Fasthosts now want £75 plus VAT to try a fix which may not be successful - after a hardware crash on their system! I am assuming that this outage has seriously affected many customers and many migrations have been similarly flawed. I assume also that their second/third level staff are pulled from pillar to post but to charge for THEIR cock-up is appalling.
To their credit they offered an upgraded temporary solution for a month without cost but we just want to get back to normal with our original set-up
I have not seen any statement from management which offers some explanation (and contrition) to customers and they seem to be still in fire-fighting mode (after nearly 2 weeks).
This compares with Heart Internet who also experienced a major infrastructure issue a few years ago but at least they came clean, provided a high level explanation, and gave the impression they were learning from the experience.
It begs the question - what exactly was the nature of the hardware failure and why - on an older VPS platform - risk wasn't mitigated especially if it relates to hard drives?
I think Fasthosts see this as an opportunity to migrate all affected customers to their Cloud NX platform but that comes at a price premium.
To counter earlier comments, Fasthosts Support IS patchy - some of the guys are very good, knowledgeable and helpful. Others seem to follow a company script and won't go the extra mile. This also applies to the account managers who seem now to be tied to corporate protocol rather than resolving things quickly.
After 15 years, sadly perhaps, this has made me contact another major provider to discuss alternative options going forward.
I will provide an update if anything with Fasthosts changes (for the better or worse)