Offshore Support
April 4, 2009
We were discussing FH’s current move to offshore their support responsibilities.
Now, over the last few years, we’ve had so many conversations with the existing UK team where we’ve been patronised, ignored, abused, treated like we are scum etc., that to be honest:
WE DONT THINK IT CAN BE ANY WORSE
However, we’re interested in what you think…
What DO you think about the prospect of Fasthosts support being hosted offshore?
Know your rights? Get Fasthosts to cancel YOU.
October 22, 2008
Would YOU do business with a company like this?
(Poll at the end of this post)
Fasthosts have updated their Terms & Conditions. Amongst other things, they have clarified their cancellation policy. If you are considering opening an account with Fasthosts, take care to read the policy, and decide for yourself if this is the sort of company you want to do business with:
Fasthosts pull a ‘Gordon’ with new webmail
June 24, 2008
Gordon Brown has famously ripped a few Conservative policies in his brief time as our benevolent leader, but we expect that of the politicians don’t we. Of course we have the right to vote them out….
Taking this leadership to heart (sic), Fasthosts have pulled a classic ‘Gordon’ by launching a new webmail service today (in Beta) that bears remarkable similarity to that being presented by one of their competitors ‘Heart Internet’.
Status? What Status? (don’t risk your business with FH)
April 3, 2008
Your website is down, you can’t get email, staff and customers are complaining.
You know that a support call is going to cost you money and take a very long time and there is a >50% chance that Fasthosts Technical support will tell you that it’s a known issue, that it was reported on the status page and is now ‘resolved’ so they can’t help you.
Rather than suffer that indignity unknowingly, you decide that before placing that call, you may as well check the fasthosts status page as published on their support site at: http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/rss/status.rss After all, the technical support contact is going to make you feel like an idiot for not looking there first, so why not get it out of the way to begin with.
The problem is, the status page is blank. There is nothing there, nada, and when we say nothing, we mean nothing – here is the code for the page:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content=”text/html; charset=windows-1252″></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY></HTML>
So, genuinely nothing. No information on system status, no history of recent events, not even page formatting.
Don’t bother calling to complain about it, because we have and technical support always seem surprised. (Two phone calls on the same day a couple of weeks ago and the same contact feigned surprise and said that he didn’t know and had never heard of it being offline)
If Fasthosts can’t keep a simple status page alive and working, what chance have they with your business website?
Steer clear.
This issue is resolved – yeah right!
January 30, 2008
Consider this scenario. Your car is having gearbox problems, so you phone the garage to tow the car in for an emergency repair. You need your car to work, and are delighted when the garage tells you there is a known problem and they’ll will fix it right away. You call in sometime later and are told that the problem is resolved. On collecting your car, the problem with your gearbox is still there. Stunned, you ask the mechanic what is going on but all they can tell you is that the know problem is resolved and that’s all they know. Would you accept this service?
Well if you are a customer of Fasthosts, this is normal practise. Sign up for Fasthosts today and you will soon begin to form the opinion that this is the preferred approach to technical support on all network wide issues.
Fasthosts can’t cope with the volume.
December 12, 2007
The Fasthosts control panel login was recently augmented with a captcha widget. While this is a great idea for security, and we support it’s use, it may also be demonstrating Fasthosts ability to cope with the number of login attempts that are expected the night before the ‘big password scramble’.
Industry Leading Technical Support?
December 10, 2007
All Fasthosts Customers affected by the password change received an email this morning thanking them for patience and understanding during this ‘very difficult time’.
While we mull over the content of this letter, there was one statement that stood out, claiming that Fasthosts would “return to providing industry leading technical support as quickly as humanly possible”.
If you have been a customer with Fasthosts for any length of time, this statement is just completely wrong, and more like the sort of statement we expect from a politician, and not from a supplier we are paying to provide a service.
The truth is that Fasthosts support is appalling, and always has been. With very rare exceptions, support staff talk to you like you are an irritation, or a moron, and always with an underlying sense of ‘Fasthosts Word Is Final’. Let’s make that absolutely clear – there is no ‘Help’ from Fasthosts Help Desk.
Faked Recommendations – Giffin or Griffin?
December 8, 2007
This story has been knocking about for some time, with no comment from Fasthosts on the subject. We wanted to record it here for posterity in case the story drops of The Registers radar someday.
Are Fasthosts faking the customer quotes and recommendations on their website?
Read More at The UK Small Business Directory
..and note that this quote still appears on the page at the time of writing.
Technical Support Please…
December 7, 2007
If you are one of the lucky customers able to access their control panel over the last few days, you may have noticed that your Technical Support is pretty much unavailable unless you are willing to suffer more than 2 hours on the holding queue being assumed at by the repetitive statements of their Primary Objective.
OK, so leave the phones to the poor souls who can’t even get in, let’s send an email. Just as a simple test, we submitted 10 support requests 7 days ago (Friday), almost all from different accounts we have access to or through resellers we know.
The response was pretty damning. As far as we know, this is because email support is handled by the same people who are on the telephone lines, and lets face it they just don’t have the time. Read the rest of this entry »
The villagers are at the gates!
December 7, 2007
Someone commented here that there has been small groups of angry customers outside the doors of Fasthosts. Possibly even a notice on the door. If this is true and accurate, please comment on this article with links to any photo’s you might have – can’t wait to see them if this is true.
