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Poor site speed, reliability issues and intermittent bugs on Fasthosts hosting
Question
My site server seems to crash all the time. When it is running it is slow or generates erratic errors. What's up?
Answer
The vast majority of cases that have reported this are UK-based customers hosting on Fasthosts Internet.
Fasthosts has a reseller programme that allows a fixed yearly fee for users to host unlimited sites. On paper, this looks like a great deal but in practice it virtually guarantees problems.
The only way it can even approach economic viability is to load servers with extremely high levels of sites and traffic. Imagine an 'eat as much as you like' restaurant. The limit is your appetite. Now imagine the restaurant says you can bring as many friends as you like along for one fixed price. No limit. The restaurant would quickly be overwhelmed and go bankrupt if the food they offered was anything other than the cheapest they could find, and so unpalettable that people ended up not eating very much. And so it is with web hosting...
Fasthosts appears to be a lottery. Some servers are not too bad. Others will regularly experience constant outages, meaning frequent periods when your site is unavailable. We saw one site average 20% down time over a period of several weeks.
Upgrading sites to supposedly 'higher-grade' Fasthosts servers in our experience has been no better. In reality, those with more complex, higher-traffic sites all do that, so you end up on a server with fewer sites which are getting a hammering rather than many quieter sites.
Fasthosts tech support is a masterclass in frustration. While offering 24 hour telephone and email support, in reality you will get through to someone who appears to simply be unqualified, inexperienced and unknowledgeable about hosting on Windows servers. They are equipped with only one tool, a big 'restart' button which is the solution to all problems (for a few minutes or hours if you're lucky). A restart is normally followed by a comment or email reply "I have restarted the server and everything appears to be running correctly". You can never speak to the tech guys who actually run the servers.
While not shifting the blame to Fasthosts entirely (of course users on Fasthosts can still experience the same tech issues with CactuShop as anyone else), the sheer volume of problems from users on Fasthosts mean we've simply had to put this in the knowledgebase.
More recently, some customers have been persuaded that their site should be moved to Fasthosts 'load balanced' servers to improve reliability. This does not address the fundamental problem. Imagine you have an old banger of a car from manufacturer 'X' that keeps breaking down. Do you:
a) replace it with a more reliable car even though it will cost a little more
b) purchase a similar old banger from manufacturer 'X' to complement the first in the hope that at least one of them might be working at any one time
Hopefully this doesn't sound like a hard sell for our own hosting. There are thousands of other hosts who do a great job of hosting ASP web sites, most would be preferable to Fasthosts. We would advise all those looking for hosting to research the prospective host in Google and Google Groups. Ultimately there are good deals around, but if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is.