Fasthosts can’t cope with the volume.

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?

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?

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…

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.

The villagers are at the gates!

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.

Mass Email Change Tool Now Available – NOT!

UPDATE: The Mass Email Change Tool IS Now Available.  Read more if you fancy a grin. 

Hackers Delight

Oh what joy the hackers must be having this season with countless websites showing the location of files on the Fasthosts servers.

The Password Scramble and your Data Protection rights

What can you do to prevent Fasthosts re-setting your email passwords if you have already changed them? You might spend the next week changing passwords, only to find that another Fasthosts blunder forces you to do the whole thing again, this time with irate users/customers.  Is there anything we can do to inform Fasthosts that passwords have been changed and insist that your account is exempt from the great password scramble – well there might be:

The Data Protection Act gives you a limited right to prevent significant decisions being taken about you solely by automatic processing. This affects only those decisions made by a computer where there is no human involvement in the decision.

Password Change Emails, and a Password Generator

You have until December 13th to change the email passwords on your account, otherwise Fasthosts will scramble them.  If you have customers with email hosted with you, and their passwords are scrambled, you will receive a phone call for each email address, and will have to change these manually and talk your customers through changing the password in their email client.

Bear in mind that you won’t be able to send your customers an email after this time, because they can’t retrieve it without their passwords.

Four days to write a letter.

The letter was dated 3rd December, yes that means it was printed on Monday.

Now forgive me if I seem a little sceptical, but if I had just locked my customers out of the system on a Thursday evening, and promised them all passwords by snail mail, I would have every person back in the office as early as possible the next day, and have them all stuffing envelopes until the last post had gone.

This would seem to be the normal thing to do, just to make sure my customers interests were covered.  I mean can you think of any reasonable reason why you would not do this?